Here’s another sport to add to the collection. Via our local “Photographers Adventure Group“, I was fortunate enough to get hold of a media pass to a recent Texas Roller Derby match at the Palmer Event Center and had a blast shooting during the Rhinestone Cowgirls/Cherry Bombs match. Roller Derby is an interesting sport involving two teams racing around an oval track with points scored based on the number of opposing team players that a team’s “Jammer” passes during each “jam” (or individual race). It’s all action and rather good entertainment.

Photographically, it was also quite a challenge since the lighting inside the hall is pretty awful – a mix of fluorescent and tungsten with an overall light level that was rather too low to get the shutter speed where you would want it to really freeze the action. I was shooting with f/2.8 lenses pretty much wide open all evening and was dealing with shutter speeds in the 1/180 to 1/250 range even with the ISO bumped up to 3200. Nevertheless, I’m happy with quite a few of the images I captured so here are a few of my favourites. You can find all the picks I sent to the TXRD folks in this gallery on SmugMug.

A fisheye shot of the arena taken with the camera on top of a fully extended monopod and held overhead. A 5 second self timer setting game me enough time to get the camera as high as possible before the shutter released.

Each team member has a roller derby name. This is Sacrilicious of the Cherry Bombs bombing around the track.

Rocky Casbah of the Cherry Bombs.

Eric seems to be a mascot or somesuch. Think if him as a guy dressed as Elvis dressed as an angel.

A couple of players await news of their fate after a penalty was granted. They ended up having to pillow fight in the middle of the track.

The matches can get pretty heated at times.

With an author wife whose first book is scheduled to hit the shelves in August next year, our family attends a lot of book signings and launch parties but tonight was rather different since, for the first time in ages, the boys and I attended a signing without Nikki and for a book aimed at adults.

Local screenwriter and author Ernie Cline (he wrote the screenplay for “Fanboys“. If you haven’t seen it and are even vaguely interested in Star Wars geekdom, you should) was hosting his book launch and signing event for “Ready Player One” at Book People this evening. The book, a dystopian sci-fi, is promoted as a jam-packed geekfest of 1980′s cultural references so the evening started off well when we discovered 80s era video games available for people to play while waiting. Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters were flowing or, for those who don’t like having their brains smashed out with a slice of lemon tied round a large gold brick, Tab and Pepsi (in old-style cans). The mechanical highlight of the evening, however, was definitely Ernie’s DeLorean, complete with flux capacitor, KIT-style oscillating LEDs and Ghostbusters paraphernalia. This cunning tax write-off is to be Ernie’s transport all around the country on his book tour which started yesterday in Houston and continues through Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio and California. It was also open for young (and not so young) boys to sit in.

I’m looking forward to getting into the book since I have it on good authority that it’s a great read (thanks Mike).

If you like to get together with other photographers, geek out, get a bit of exercise and take part in a world-wide photographic phenomenon, head on over to Scott Kelby’s World Wide Photo Walk site and sign up to take part in one of the 570+ photo walks arranged for the weekend of October 1st and 2nd this year.

I’m signed up for the Austin walk, led by the wonderful Simi Shonowo. Simi has led walks in Austin for the last 3 years and does a lovely job of arranging a route and helping folks out on the walk. There are still 20 places open on the walk but these are very likely to fill so get your name on the list quickly.

I hope to see you on Saturday, October 1st. In the meantime, here are a few shots I’ve taken on the last 2 WWPW events in Austin.

Justin Balog recently asked me if I would contribute a guest post to his “Light as Magic” blog to be part of the “Outside Their Front Door” series. The idea here is that photographers provide a set of images taken within easy striking distance of their home so I did my bit for Austin tourism and joined in. You can see the results here.

I’ll be giving a talk on HDR photography this coming Thursday evening at the Austin CapMac Advanced Photography SIG meeting. Come along to the parish hall of the Episcopal Church of the Resurrection at 6:30pm and join the fun.

My plan was to revamp the talk and update it so that anyone who had previously heard it at Hill Country Photography Club or Austin Shutterbugs would find new material to listen to and new pictures to see but my laptop hard disk decided to die yesterday so I may be dragging pictures from Flickr and winging it if Dell doesn’t come through on their “next business day” service promise or I don’t manage to get my backup restored in time. My fingers are crossed!

As another upshot of this failure, the photoblog is going to be quiet for the next few days. The failure occurred as I was exporting a batch of images for the next week’s posts so, unfortunately, they will be delayed until I get everything back up and running too.

I can’t help noticing the irony of me having a catastrophic PC hardware failure (in a 1 year old drive – I’ve never had a hard disk fail in less than 5 years before) the very week I’m supposed to be speaking to a Mac user group. Oh well…

A couple of months ago, I mentioned that David Nightingale of Chromasia fame was looking into coming to Austin to give a couple of workshops early next year. I’m delighted to report that the planning is now complete and the workshops are definitely on.

David will be teaching a 1 day “HDR Crash Course” on Friday, February 4th followed by a 2 day “Creating Dramatic Images” on Saturday & Sunday, February 5th and 6th. Both classes are at Dragonfly Gallery at Rosedale.

For more details, check out my workshops page. The classes are both filling very fast so please let me know as soon as possible if you want to take part.

I just wanted to give a shout out to some local HDR photographer buddies after a very enjoyable lunch at Chuy’s on Barton Springs Road yesterday. Austin has a thriving community of HDR enthusiasts and we manage to get together reasonably often to shoot (though I think it’s true to say that we’ve never managed to get all the “core crowd” together in one place yet – maybe this year?). Yesterday, though, it was purely social as Jim Nix invited us to get together for a lunch and geekfest. It was a great success and I’m sure we’ll do it again soon.

Yesterday’s attendees were:

• Andy M. – ATMTX Photo
• Jim Nix – Nomadic Pursuits
• Alex Suarez – Alex Suarez Photography & Technology Blog
• Pete Talke – Places2Explore
• Mike Tuuk – Michael Tuuk Photography

You will find these guys and many others in my newly revamped blogroll over on the photoblog. By the way, if you’re new here, you may not realise that I post different material here and on the photoblog. The photoblog is strictly for image posting but I tend to include random articles and news here which I don’t have over there. Just to make life really difficult for myself, I also post different pictures to Flickr too so you may also want to take a look over there every now and then.

I’ve been a fan of David Nightingale’s work and his inspirational Chromasia photoblog for years so am very excited at the possibility of having him come to Austin to give a workshop on advanced post-processing techniques some time in early 2011. This would likely be a a couple of classes – a 1 day intro to HDR on a Friday followed by a 2 day class on advanced post processing. The class would be limited to 16-20 photographers. The numbers suggest we can do this for somewhere in the region of $350 per person for the 2 day class and $180 or so for the one day workshop.

Although nothing is finalised yet,I’m keen to gauge the level of interest to get an idea of how feasible this is. Would you be interested and do you feel this price is reasonable? I’m not asking for a commitment just now, merely an idea of how popular such a workshop would be.

If you’ve not seen David’s work, I strongly encourage you to take a look at his blog and portfolio. His post-processing techniques are the stuff of legend in the digital photography community and his use of HDR is superb. He is the author of “Practical HDR” and winner of many international awards.

Image (c) Rusty Jackson. Used by permission.

The first part of my exhibition at Dragonfly Gallery at Rosedale is almost over. On Monday, part of the show will be taken down to be replaced by student photos from April’s workshop led by Raul Touzon. This was my first serious, themed show in a “real” gallery and it was a great pleasure and honour to hang my pictures in such a wonderful space. Thanks to owner Nina Mihm for the opportunity!

The top image here was taken by local photographer friend Rusty Jackson who arrived with a camera and kindly took a few shots. I also had my camera there so I grabbed an image of Rusty in return but this was one of only about 4 exposures I took that evening since I was rather busy talking to guests instead. By the way, if you have not seen Rusty’s work, I would strongly recommend a trip to his site where you will find some of the best examples of travel photography you are likely to find anywhere.

To all who came to see the show over the last couple of weeks, many thanks. If you’ve not seen it yet, please drop by the gallery between now and July 8th since you will still be able to view the best images along with a collection of other outstanding pictures from the workshop.

After a last minute call on the Austin Photography Group message board a couple of days ago, a group of about a dozen photographers gathered at the Stevie Ray Vaughan statue on Lady Bird Lake for a photowalk in downtown Austin yesterday evening. We spent a very enjoyable 3 hours wandering up Congress Avenue to the Capitol then back down to the lake in time to shoot some dusk skylines.

I spent more time chatting than shooting though I did manage to take both the shots I was looking for – panoramas of the Capitol rotunda interior and the downtown skyline with reflections in the lake.

One of the best aspect of the evening for me was a chance to meet three photographers I’ve known from various online groups but never actually met in person. Evan Gearing is an Austin photographer whose HDR images are among the best around. Brian Matiash is another well known HDR photographer based in Boston but, coincidentally, was in Austin for the weekend. Brian was shooting with Jack Hollingsworth, known to most photographers who use Twitter as @photojack. It was great to meet these guys and I’m very interested to see what they post as a result of the evening.

Given the success of the jaunt, I suspect there will be more of these gatherings in future. Would anyone like to suggest possible routes?