The party was a blast, and the scrapbook came out great. I was really happy with the way the printer performed, but not everything went as smooth as I hoped. Some thoughts after the jump.

The Printer

First, let’s tackle how the printer performed. Awesome.

I printed about 100 prints throughout the night. Although we got backed up at a few points, it wasn’t due to the printer – it was due to other problems in the workflow (more on that later).

The prints came out great, and only one image had a problem with the ribbon. The picture came out with a handful of colorful streaks, which I’m guessing was caused by a scratch or rip in one of the ribbons. A 1% failure rate isn’t too bad, and at $0.26/print I can afford to throw away a picture.

The printer ran in spurts. I’d work through a handful of pictures in Lightroom, and then send 18 of them to the printer. The printer would then work continuously to spit out the 18 pictures (at which point I needed to stop to change the paper anyway). I never had a problem with the printer over-heating, jamming, or causing any problems. Everybody loved the quality of the pictures, and I’d definitely recommend the Selphy CP800 to anyone looking to print pictures at a party in a similar way.

The Problems

There were a few problems we encountered though. First, I hadn’t really considered how to deal with taking pictures and ingesting them into Lightroom so that they could be printed. Early on, when there were only a few people there, it wasn’t a problem. Later on, when the party was crowded, it was.

It ended up becoming a group effort. Two of my old photography students were at the party, so we kind of traded off the camera… each taking a turn. I’d swap out the memory card every so often, dump the pictures into Lightroom, and pass them through a quick round of edits (crop, exposure, major cloning needs). I’d heard about Eye-Fi Wireless Memory Cards, but I never thought I’d need one. Now, I know why I would. It would have been a big help to be able to snap pictures, have them automatically dumped into Lightroom, and not worry about swapping memory cards and importing pictures.

Note: The Eye-Fi won’t automatically import the pictures into Lightroom. But it should let you dump the pictures wirelessly onto your laptop harddrive. If you have Lightroom open, you can use the auto-import options to pick up the new photos and import them into the library as they’re taken.

The other problem? The scrap book. I bought some “photo splits” – little squares of double sided tape. Thought that would make it simple enough to peel off the squares and paste the pictures in the book. Boy, was I wrong.

If you go through the process yourself a few times, it was simple enough. However, the first time you pick up the box of tape, it’s quite confusing. My original idea was to have the guests put the pictures in the book, and that didn’t work at all - they all had a little trouble getting the tape to work right, and as a result there was a backup of people trying to put pictures in the book.

Instead, my wife ended up sitting there putting pictures in the book for the most part. This turned it into a 2 to 3 person job – one person monitoring the scrap book, and one to two of us taking/printing pictures.

Nonetheless, it all worked out in the end. Everyone loved the pictures, Jojo loved the scrapbook, and the night wasn’t a total disaster. In case you’re wondering, this is the scrapbook I got on Amazon. I love the color and design; it’s just the perfect shade of pink. However, the book itself is just so-so quality. The cover is fine, but the paper that comes with it feels like its a fairly lightweight paper. Also, I got a pack of ten additional pages to put into the book, but the post extensions wouldn’t screw into the book’s posts. The paper in the extra sleeves was a much heavier weight paper, too, which is what made me notice the light weight paper that came with the book.

I probably wouldn’t buy that particular brand again, unless I really wanted that particular cover and I knew I wouldn’t need more than 10 pages / 20 sides.

Posted some pictures from the prom over at my photography site. Group of my kids went to prom together, so we had the limo stop at Brookdale Park in Bloomfield, NJ on the way up.

The flower garden there is awesome, and the roses made a great backdrop for this set of shots. The sun cooperated, and although I could have used a little help from a speedlite off to camera right, the natural lighting was almost perfect. I love how the roses are lit up kind of in a spotlight and everything else is nicely shaded in twilight.  Head over to Olinda Gibbons Photography to see some more photos from the day.

It was a great, Sunday afternoon event, and everyone had a great time. Click through to the post to see some more pictures from the day.

The event was organized by Akeem Cunningham, an ’08 graduated from Campus High.  He brought together a bunch of people from the E.O. / Newark area – the fire department, restaurants, motivational speakers, photographers, barbers, clowns – to help celebrate single mothers and give them and their children a fun-filled, easy going day. It turned out to be an awesome day, and you can the album from the event here – Single Mother’s Appreciation Day at Watsessing Park.

Back in March, Olinda and I covered the 2011 William Paterson Fashion Show. It was a collab between HASA (Haitian American Students Association) and CARIBSA (Caribbean Student Association) at William Paterson.  Although it rained like heck outside, it was a great show and we got a ton of great pics.  Follow the link through to see more samples and the full album from the evening - William Paterson Fashion Show, “Still Standing.”

The organizer (John Cook) is planning another fashion show for this summer, and some of these same models may be involved. We also expect to shoot / produce a calendar to go with it, so stay tuned for some thoughts on how that process goes…!

Photo by: Henry.

I looked in the Recent Uploads section of Flickr, and this picture of a soldier moving with his rifle at the ready was number two or three on the page. It’s not a technically perfect shot, but there are a some cool elements here and I really like the gist of it. Notice how the background is really blurry, while the soldier is only slightly blurred? The soldier here is moving (probably not too quickly) and the photographer is moving the camera along with him. It’s a technique called panning, where you deliberately create some motion blur in the background to emphasize the movement and action in the shot. If a flash had been used, some of the ghosting would have been eliminated and the image would look a little crisper, but it’s a cool example of panning nonetheless.

Sometimes, motion blur is a good thing.

Photo by: Sziga.

I found this simple studio portrait in the “Portraits” tag on Flickr. It’s a good execution of a simple two-light scheme. If you click through to the photo page, there’s a description of the lights. But, you should have a decent idea based on the catch-lights in her eyes. The left eye tells it all – one light coming from off to camera left and one light off to camera right. They’re pretty even in terms of power output, because you don’t have a real contrast between the left and right sides of the face; there’s just a little shadow on the left cheek where the hair blocks some of the light.

Photo by: henrikj.

Found this in the Recent Interesting section of Flickr. It’s such an awesome scenic shot, I couldn’t pass it up. I love the composition, with the body of water in the lower left flowing out into the ocean. And there’s just a hint of a sky and horizon at the end of the picture, the bulk of it being land. Really makes you want to go travel and find some awesome scenes like this. There’s nothing like this in central Jersey…

Photo by: Viele Geischter.

This photo of some football (soccer) players posing together came out of the recent uploads section of Flickr. It’s a great illustration of how to take a quick posed shot outside in the afternoon: find some shade! Look in the background (or in the other pictures in the photostream) and you’ll notice it’s a very bright, sunny day. Put the three lads out in the sun, and they’ll be squinting and have some harsh shadows all over. Instead, they’re sitting in the shade and they’ve got some nice, soft light all around them. One problem with this is your background (if it’s in the sun) will usually get blown out, so don’t expect to get a lot of definition out of it. It can also help to throw in a little bit of fill light from a flash, but you don’t want to over do it.

Photo by: Ft. Couch Potatoes.

This snapshot of some cyclists taking a break came out of the recent uploads section of Flickr. Two things of interest here. One, a “sports” shot doesn’t necessarily have to be an action shot. Those are cool and all, but at the end of the day a lot of sports shots start looking alike – a cyclist riding down the road, a football player making a catcher, a pitcher tossing a ball. The really cool, defining pictures catch moments and faces that draw you to the picture. Which brings me to the second point. I love the way the guys are just standing around, in the middle of doing their usual stuff, and they looked over at the camera. It’s a lot more candid than a “Get together for a group picture!” group shot, but at the same time everyone (except the one guy checking his bike) is looking at the camera. Nice capture.