Well, It’s been an exciting few days since my last post. I am still playing around with the camera and got to take a few portrait/snapshots with it courtesy of Bedford’s Camera and Video. They put on a photo-walk where they get a model for you to photograph and let you try out new camera gear. The only thing is, they didn’t have anything for my Sony and said that demand has been too high and they keep selling out of stuff. It may sound like an excuse but, in fact, the Sony a7III has actually been a strong leader in photography gear sales for a year or more. The camera did what I expected it to do, and I got sidetracked with messing with the camera instead of taking photographs. Now that I think of it, I should have used my flash and really got some interesting shots. Never-the-less, the shots were, and I got to see what this camera can do in this type of situation. Not too bad.

I did use a mix of lenses though. The deep woods photos were taken with the Tamron 70-300 while the rest were a mix of the Sony 50mm and the Rokinon 35mm Cine-lens.

If you are interested in Modeling, you can volunteer with Bedford’s as well. They are always looking for new faces.

I have been working with my new Sony a7III for a while now, trying to learn its quirks and proclivities. It behaves much different than my old a77, that’s for sure. While I have gotten a few good shots with the camera, I really haven’t found myself in a position to make that one grand photo or video, but I got really damned close on Saturday. My screenwriter and I were going to walk Mount Kessler in Fayetteville Arkansas to see if we might find an elusive view of the city or a spectacular spot that overlooks to the west.

When we got the park, we looked at the hills, studied the trails, and some topographical maps and this thing looked brutal. Maybe not for the guy or gal that walks or runs ten miles a day, but for two guys that spend ninety percent of their time sitting in front of a computer screen, yeah… we weren’t going to do that. I mean, what if we get lost and miss dinner!? We then decided the better thing was to go downtown and enjoy the Fayetteville Spring-fest.  Yeah, they have food trucks there, and it’s only about two blocks long. See, now that is much better. While not overly exciting, it was unusual for a dull Saturday afternoon.

Since it wasn’t that big of a thing, we broke for lunch and headed our separate ways for a while. I had some lunch while my buddy found himself moving some more of his stuff into a new apartment, even though he hasn’t signed a lease yet. They gave him the key, so I guess its not a problem.

About five o’clock I called him up and told him the sky should be pretty good for a sunset that night. I figured I might as well try to see what I can get. Being that I was being kinda lazy this weekend, I knew exactly where I wanted to go. Lake Fayetteville has a secret place you can go (maybe your not supposed to go?) and get a dead shot of the sunset against the Dam. It’s not hard to get to, but it’s not that easy either. It’s easy enough for even a lazy photog to get to, but I must say, I wasn’t disappointed. I actually thought I wasn’t going to get out of there with anything usable or exciting. But Six Hundred and Forty-Seven Photographs, you are bound to find something.

Ok, yes, I took way too many photos. But in reality, I didn’t. I was planning on making a time lapse out of all the RAW files, so I set it to take a photo every 1 second. I also wanted to see the range and depth of the camera when bracketing (taking multiple images and stacking them in Lightroom/Photoshop to get perfect exposure on every pixel). Between the two, I ended up with 35 gigs of photos and video. Most of which I will never use. If only I could bring myself to delete stuff. I am a terrible Data hoarder.