Chang² Studios » rich

Dine Around the Market

rich — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 21:08:10 +0000

We were at the Chicago French Market during lunchtime this week for a new event called “Dine Around the Market.” It is going to be a monthly cooking demonstration using ingredients found at the French Market. This week, chefs from the Blackstone Hotel made three courses: a sweet potato soup with bacon and sourdough croutons, a salmon sandwich with Taleggio cheese, and bananas with custard. And the best part: free samples afterwards!

John & Katrina’s Wedding

rich — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 19:13:15 +0000

John and Katrina had met each other when they were very young, still in elementary school. They had lost touch over the years, but they were recently reconnected over Facebook!

We had fun shooting their engagement session at the beach with John and Katrina (and their dogs last June, so we were looking forward to the wedding day all summer!

The guys and girls got ready separately:

The ceremony was in a gorgeous old church

Dinner started with prayer and ended with cake

Instead of a garter, a frog was thrown…

But it kept going all night with a live band and lots of dancing!

Congratulations!

Jacob & Whitney

rich — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 00:25:03 +0000

Whitney grew up on the same street as Leeann in Lake in the Hills, but they didn’t meet until high school. The University of Michigan is where she met Jacob, but they waited until after graduation to get married. They are kind and generous people; after their wedding, they are leaving the country to serve on the Peace Corps! We were happy to capture some memories from their special day.

How cute is it, that the bride and flower girl have the same shoes! They are from Hydra Heart on Etsy.

We discovered that morning that the bow tie wouldn’t fasten! Luckily, Jacob finished getting ready much more quickly than the girls, and we made a run to Men’s Warehouse, where a kind tailor fixed the tie.

Exchanging gifts:

Signing the Ketubah, a Jewish tradition:

A beautiful ceremony:

The new couple:

Details:

And finishing the night with some dancing!

Lychee

rich — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 18:30:12 +0000

One of my favorite fruits is the lychee. I first discovered them during a study abroad trip in Taiwan.
Like many other things in life, the unattractive outer shell belies a treasure within.

I’ve photographed these with the 100mm macro lens. It’s an underutilized lens, only making the briefest of appearances to greet the rings after a wedding. But I have no better tool with which I can examine small details. I love the layers of texture here. I’m thinking of magnifying it a bit and then converting it into a layer texture for a photograph.

Back to the fruit… I think I actually enjoy peeling the unfriendly shell. There is a little work, but it’s reasonable. Along the way, little drops of temptation ooze out the cracks. It all makes the reward just that much sweeter.

And, oh, what a reward it is. A fragrant, exotic, sweet flesh.

Lychees are only in season for a short time. There are canned varieties, but the limp, mild remnants found within cannot compare to fresh. I think this contributes to my love of the lychee. The scarcity elevates it from pedestrian staple to seasonal treat. I think there are many things we could apply this principle to, if only we were more disciplined.

Eric & Alexandra

rich — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 23:00:42 +0000

Just a few from a recent model shoot. I use model shoots to practice lighting and posing without trying clients’ patience Lighting for this set was a simple monolight shot through a white umbrella.

Camera Color Profiles

rich — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 04:01:38 +0000

Colors are important in photography. But with digital photography, it is a long path from the light of this world to the computer. At the heart of the digital camera is the image sensor which records the image. Almost all digital cameras actually record image data with a complicated array of colored filters over tiny light-sensitive photosensors (more detailed information on Bayer filters is on wikipedia. Foveon sensors use a different technology but they have their own set of issues). At this point, more advanced models of cameras allow this image to be recorded in this “raw” format (we recommend always shooting in raw format over jpeg, but that’s another discussion).

Now, in its raw format, a photo would be unrecognizable. Complicated algorithms can process—the digital equivalent of darkroom developing—the raw file to create a jpeg file which is viewable by web browsers and printers alike. Part of the raw processing is determining the colors of individual pixels, or points, in the picture. Although engineers at companies such as Adobe have camera color profiles for most models of cameras, each specific camera may handle colors a little differently due to manufacturing tolerances. To ensure the best accuracy in the colors coming out of the camera, a standard color chart can be used. A popular color chart is the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport, which a friend generously let me use on a recent shoot. This contains a number of colors which are very accurately printed.

After taking a picture of this chart, you have to tell the computer to analyze these colors. In the past, people used slow, complicated Photoshop scripts. I found that Adobe now provides a DNG Profile editor which will create a camera profile. I followed the directions on their tutorial, though I had to convert my Canon raw file to a DNG file (Adobe also provides a free converter program but you can also do this when importing photos with Lightroom). This quickly and easily created a profile for my camera. The last step was to move this profile into a location for Adobe programs to use, which on a mac is /Library/Application Support/Adobe/CameraRaw/CameraProfiles . That’s it! Now you can use the new profile in Lightroom or Photoshop as a starting point for your editing.

Shalom Center

rich — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 17:00:36 +0000

I recently volunteered at the Shalom Center, a non-profit social service organization in Kenosha, Wisconsin. They were in the process of renovating an old building to become their new food pantry. This building was much larger than what they had currently, and when it would be completed, it could serve over 700 households per month by supplying a total of 20 – 25 tons of donated food per month to these households! We painted the outside, removed some old tile, and seal coated the driveway. It’s a good feeling to see the results of your labor at the end of the day and know that it is impacting others.

WordPress 3.0

rich — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 18:40:02 +0000

We recently moved our website to a new hosting company StableHost (fyi, that’s an affiliate link) because we found a good deal. We were at nearlyfreespeech.net before, which was affordable, but the performance was sometimes a little slow. Hopefully you’ll notice a speedup in browsing our site! Also, I had problems with updating the WordPress software and the plugins

Speaking of updates, we updated this blog to WordPress 3.0 (Theolonius) as well. There are a host of nice improvements, though I’m not sure what we’ll implement yet. I think we might do something with custom menus, depending which theme we go with. And the bulk updating of plugins will be nice too.

Also, I’ve been playing around with Facebook connect. If you’re logged into Facebook, you can “Like” any of our posts now! I might add Facebook commenting, but then it doesn’t work for those few people not on Facebook As always, stop by our Facebook page sometime!