“It was not a dream, I used to read Nintendo Power Magazine, Legend of Zelda and Super Mario 3 was up in the TV screen, hangin’ level maps up on my wall.” When you look at my galleries think of Nintendo, cause your looking at a NES raised kid doing photography :) I think someday ill do an entire shoot with the look and feel of those games, they made the transition to computers easy for me. As much as I loved going to the Arcade, hot summer days were great in my cool basement room rocking the NES or Super Nintendo. Some of the biggest shock endings of games for me were Super Mario Bros. 2 Dream ending and Metroid the main character was a woman that was cool as heck.
This gallery of the wonderful Debbie King features quite a few Grayscale or Greyscale or as the old timers like to call in Black and White images. It’s nice to shoot everything in color and decide later, which images look better without color. Some people fell there is rarely a need for color, but I feel a lot of emotion is delivered in color, but its on a picture by picture basis.
Some of the shots in this gallery used a couple of the AlienBees B800 studio flash units. They actually work quite well. The wireless flash sync is decently reliable but I hear they have a newer one that runs on the 2.4ghz spectrum and is quite a bit better. I really like the Nikon system with flashes, the D3 is great with flash units compared to my old Canon 5D, Nikon just does it right somehow. Rumor is that a new FX (Nikon D700 or Nikon D3x?) is about to be introduced; I am excited because with most new camera introductions means new lenses and hopefully some low light primes with modern features and introduced.
The gallery name takes a cue for the recently released Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I really like Debbie's name because King can be played with in many different ways. I proudly have six other galleries of Debbie King Six Degrees of Debbie Debbie King are The Return of the King, Debbie Does Downtown, Debbie King Queen of LA, Debbie King Downtown Los Angeles and Debbie King Fall 2004.
You no longer have to lie that you come to dEaringfilm for the articles, you can come here and enjoy real bad writing and never lie! I really don't know what will become of this section, but I think it will allow me to do non standard photo collaborations. So I hope the new Articles section will be a important stop here at dEaringfilm. My qualifications for writing are that I used to go to the Young Writers' Conference while in grade school. That meant that I went above and beyond the call of duty to try to get out of a full day of school no matter if I had the ability to write or not.
The photos in this article are from the little Nikon marvel the D60. Its one of those cameras that I try to have on me at all times, even when I think there is no possibility that I will be taking photos and even if I am unmotivated because once you get somewhere you may have something go off in your head and will miss that opportunity to capture a photo that will never have the ability to be reproduced. The kit lens for this combo is terrific the AF-S DX NIKKOR 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G VR even works well on my Nikon D3 and it produces hard highly detailed images as seen in the photos provided within the article. I have also included some old family photo scans from prints for further understanding of the story.
From what I hear Riverview Park is flooded right now, it reminds me of the summer of 1993. There was flooding all over Iowa that summer, I remember a lot of my friends would volunteer to help sandbag. When I would travel to play the summer tennis tournaments I would have to worry about the driving routes because some highways were flooded! I sort of called it the great flood of 1993. My buddy Wyatt Coleman would drive his Power Wagon or as he called it the "PWah" through the flooded streets of Fort Madison. On a funny note he also drive his normal car through it and we had to vacuum the water out, great times. So as you can guess the sun would only shine when the clouds cooperated and I would go outside as fast as I could to play tennis or enjoy that great sunshine. In this month model gallery of Mai I let that good friend of mine the sun shine right into a lot of the photos in hope for fair skies :)
We shot from evening till night and in some of the night photos I used the Alien Bee's Ring flash. The thing feels like its gonna fall apart but it delivers a pretty decent looking image, its best to use a small camera like the Nikon D300 on a portable ring flash because it can get heavy and you have to drag that big battery around. Rumor is buzzing that Nikon will release a handful of low light fast primes sometime this year and a few other cameras but its the primes that really excite me. Hopefully they do it before my trip to Japan end of year. I will also be adding a new section to the site very soon on articles that I write, some will be photo articles, while others are almost blog like in nature.
Mighty Mai T is of course a play off of a cartoon I used to watch as a child in my babysitter Dodie's basement on Oak Drive called Mighty Mouse. Mai is not as small as Mighty Mouse but she is just as willing to get the job done :)
When I was a kid growing up in Iowa I used to play video games at Wong's arcade downtown Fort Madison, Iowa. I loved that place and it was 3 blocks away from my grandmother's house, so it was a easy walk. Kwok Wong had the best ham fried rice and egg rolls in town (the only ones), and you could eat while playing games. Kids would typically go there before and after a movie at the Fox theatre. While I was in Junior High Wong's got a game named Street Fighter II, about every kid I knew loved it. There was a character in the game called Sagat and he was a Thai Boxer (Muay Thai) from Thailand. Every character had a special killer move and I thought Sagat's was a move called "Thailand Uppercut," because he would shout it out while doing the move. But remember true readers that this was back in the basic 8-bit sound days and maybe my ears needed cleaning but he was actually saying "Tiger Uppercut." I had also liked a song called One Night In Bangkok, but I had no idea Bangkok was in Thailand.
Fast forward to today, I think Thai food is pretty decent and I really like the vegetable curry and music I currently like is on my Muxtape. So this month I have photographed my first Thai model, she has a great smile and wonderful personality and her name is Mollie. We did some interior shots and some in my favorite ever repeated hotspot downtown Los Angeles. The entire photo shoot was shot with a Nikon D3 and a nice spattering of Nikon's finest lenses. I guarantee she will not give you a "Thailand Uppercut" while browsing! heheh
The gallery name comes from James Bond's The Man with the Golden Gun, which was filmed in Thailand. I know its a stretch, but hey I like her smile :) Only like 20 more Bond name gallery rip off titles to go! I also named my last gallery with Sherry Wu "From Sherry Wu with Love" after the bond film From Russia with Love.
I really like the color pink, and I have grown to really enjoy the presence of flowers. They smell great and look great, what more can a man that loves beautiful things like? I also have a healthy obsession with the Japanese culture, which in turn they have a healthy obsession with time of the year that the Japanese Cherry (Prunus serrulata) are in in bloom. Japan has donated a lot of Japanese Cherry Trees to places all over the world including my very own Lake Balboa Park. LBP is close to where I live in Los Angeles so come April-March every year I try to venture there to look at their beauty and take a few photos. This does not even compare to the season in Japan, but if I am ever in Japan during that season I will be ready to take some great grabs. My mom would love to see this, she should come here this time of year :)
I grew up as a cat person, my favorite cat was given to me on my sisters birthday (hahah got you Hilary), his name was Odie. Since his passing my experiences with cats has been hit and miss, it even seems I have grown allergic to them now. So at this point I guess on a daily basis I have to result to a Sphynx cat or grow to love dogs, which I have done. This gallery features a few dogs that I have been around this year, and leads me to believe that there are only a few species of dogs I can tolerate. I really like my parents dog Sachi, (Japanese for “Lucky”) he is a real Pembroke Welsh Corgi and is a pleasure to shoot. He also appeared in my gallery Tails of the Heartland back in 2006.
Sarah Kim gets down in the Miracle Mile's hot new LACMA run BCMA (by Renzo Piano). I was surprised how cool this new structure is, and have yet to explore all the photo related opportunities. One can have quite image creating day or night there. We also shot downtown LA, which is a hot spot of night based photography in Los Angeles. There seems to be more and more renovation going on downtown as the city has been cleaning it up so it feel much safer than it did just 5 years ago. Some of my other galleries with beautiful Sarah are Sarah As You Love It, Sarah Kim Beauty and the Beach, Sarah Kim a Midsummer Nights Dream and Sarah Kim Spring 2005.
I used the usual suspects like the AF Nikkor 28mm f/1.4D the AF-S Nikkor 24-70mmf/2.8G ED and the AF-S Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8G ED . I can totally depend on the D3 at night without a tripod or monopod, using proper self bracing techniques. Nikon Capture NX is not as bad as it seems. I was a "Capture Classic" pusher, but this new version with Windows Vista 64-bit and 8gb of ram almost runs as fast at the "Classic" version. I tend to edit only about 4-5 images at a time because it still has issues, but it really treats NEF files better than other RAW editors.
Miracle Mile was a badly made 1980's movie with a very dark ending. But it suited this gallery name perfectly because most of the images we shot were in duuuuh Miracle Mile.
Previous Month updates are in the archives page.
