The Sun-Sentinel, a Florida newspaper, not only has a great staff of photojournalists but a fun, educational blog. It’s latest entry is by Jim Rassol, who after 21 months of covering the election deserves a break — any kind of break — and one of his first was sports. It was Halloween night and Rookie Michael Beasley was having a little fun wearing a Batman mouthpiece during the Heat’s home opener against the Sacramento Kings. Jim used the ubiquitous PocketWizard, taped with his strobe to a courtside seat, to get an awesome shot of Dwayne Wade. You can find out more about Jim and his colleagues here.
Every once and a while a photographer comes along who boggles the mind in terms of artistic ability, commercial success and industry accomplishments. Vincent Laforet is one of them, and if you go to Vincent LaForet’s blog you’ll see what we’re talking about. No grass growing under his feet, as mom used to say.
Vincent recently traipsed off to Beijing, along with a few thousand other photographers, to cover the Olympics. If you think any shooter snuck off to a unique viewpoint, take a look at the results. How did we do it before PocketWizard? Or, imagine if photographers were like those of yesteryear and didn’t play well with others. Thankfully, times have changed.
Finally, in case you haven’t seen it yet: Vincent Laforet takes a video stroll through Pocket Wizard heaven at the finish line of the 100m sprint at the Olympics. (Patrick Smith, if you are reading this from a public computer, you might want to put a pillow over your lap before you watch it…)
It’s bad enough when a photographer lives in Hawaii. It’s even worse when that photographer gets to photograph beautiful people in beautiful settings. Heck, most of us would pay good money to be in his shoes, especially when he’s taking surfing pictures with an underwater camera, an assistant holding waterproof strobes and waterproofed PocketWizards!
Well, enough suspense. Who are we talking about, and why are we talking about him? The name of the company is MangoTree Photography, founded by owner Mike Mijangos. (Is that Hawaiian for Mango?). He is a wedding and portrait photographer based on the beautiful island of Maui, Hawaii. Mike and his beautiful wife Me-Shell have worked with some of the most creative and fun couples from around the world. Check out Mike and Me-Shell’s work at http://mangotreephoto.typepad.com/mangotreephotography/2008/07/more-new-camera-gear.html
If you want to be a snowboard photographer, there is no better place in the world then High Cascades Photo Workshop, held on the slopes of Mt. Hood July 28th to August 2nd.
This year PocketWizard teamed up with the camp to hold the first ever PocketWizard/High Cascades Photo Competition where students submitted their best shot from the weeks photo sessions. The top two images won a pair of PocketWizards.
By now you all must know that David Hobby over at Strobist is not only a talented photographer, but also a generous educator. We’re excited to join forces with David to offer this exciting contest! Here’s the deets:
Once a month, one free pair of PW Plus II Transceivers will be awarded to the best video on YouTube of a photo shoot detailing creative use of wireless triggering. Video can be live video or, a series of still photos with voiceover and clear explanation of how wireless triggering was used.
Creativity with wireless triggering is key to this contest. Show us your best, most creative use of going wireless with radio triggering. And detail, detail, detail! Explain your setup well so everyone can understand what it took to make your vision come alive.
All videos must be tagged “pocketwizardstrobist” to qualify. The judging panel will be David Hobby of Strobist and Phil Bradon from PocketWizard.
In addition, photos may also uploaded to Flickr tagged “pocketwizardstrobist” with link to the YouTube video in the description.
The contest runs mid-July through end of November. Winners will be announced on the 15th of each month, beginning in August.
EDIT: Feel free to leave a link to your video as a comment to this post. Also, we’ve seen great use of YouTube’s video annotations to point out gear use and positioning – great idea! Don’t forget you can always rent wireless gear if you don’t own it yet.
Good luck! Let’s her those shutters clicking. Go wireless! Read more at Strobist.blogspot.com
Photographer Randall Grant photographed Jessica Gomez on location using PocketWizard at the Dead Sea in Israel for Sports Illustrated’s 2008 Swimsuit Edition.
Setting up a remote camera is old hat to seasoned PocketWizard shooters, but newcomers often have a lot of questions. Like, how do you get the correct angle? What about turning on the camera so it stays ready? And, what happens if a player is about to fall crashing down on your $8,000 digital camera as he’s being shoved out of bounds? Well, bunkies, fear no more. Max Simbron comes to our rescue, complete with an excellent explanatory blog and even a video he produced on the same subject! Way to go, Max! Link
Columbia, SC-based photojournalist Brett Flashnick (Brett, tell us you didn’t make that name up!) knows you can’t get too close to a horse during a race, lest the thoroughbred take a chunk out of your head with his hooves. So, like many photographers, Brett uses Pocket Wizards to trigger the cameras from a safe distance. “When the race began,” says Brett, “I decided to shoot from down the track with my 300mm f/2.8 and 1.4x converter, with the PocketWizard on the hot shoe of the camera, so I could have two angles of the shot, in case the remote didn’t work for some reason. Once the event is done with, you can go back to your remote, and collect your images and hope you got what you envisioned.” Nice work, indeed.
One of the great perks of selling a professional photo tool like PocketWizard is that you get to meet photographers from all walks of life, in all aspects of the profession and with different ways of solving lighting and shooting problems. One of our recent encounters (at WPPI) was with Jacksonville, FL-based Scarlett Lillian, wedding photographer extraordinaire. Scarlett works witha Canon 5D and Canon 580EXII flash, getting it off-camera with the help of the ubiquitous PocketWizard Plus II. Take a look at her work on www.scarlettlillian.com and read more on her blog at www.scarlettlillian.net. Beautiful, elegant work, Scarlett!
Flickr is a truly amazing photo-sharing site. A friend of ours sent a link to this tool from hivemind that shows the tag cloud for all images on Flickr tagged with “PocketWizard”.
