Scott Diussa Photo Travels

Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics

Mon, 1 Feb 2010 07:47:40 -0600

Hi everyone... For the next month I’m going to be posting some “behind the scenes” adventures/stories from the Vancouver Winter Olympics. I’ll be there with all of my NPS co-workers supporting the professional photographers that are covering the games. So, please click on the logo below to take you to my side-blog specially created for this event.

Wolf Hoffmann - Accept

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 20:39:37 -0600

With the string of musician posts recently I thought I’d post just one more... for now. Not only did I get to meet the legendary Ricky Skaggs at the Imaging USA show last week I also got to meet another “guitar hero” of mine as well. If you are an 80’s Heavy Metal fan like me then you will definitely remember the German Heavy Metal band, Accept and guitarist, Wolf Hoffmann.

I first contacted Wolf about seven years ago when I did a Google search for Accept and his personal website came up. Wolf just happens to be a working pro photographer in Nashville, TN. I remember having some good conversations back then and I decided to see if he would be around for the Imaging show. It just happened to work out that he was in town so we met at the Irish Pub at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel and had a great time talking all things photography and Metal! He’s a really nice guy and a great photographer... check out his work at www.wolfhoffmann.com

Here’s a quick picture that my co-worker, Sara Moosbrugger took at the pub of the two of us.

Ricky Skaggs

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:05:46 -0600

Sorry for the lack of posts recently. It was a great Holiday vacation and then a real busy “back to work” time! Well, I’m here at the Imaging USA show in Nashville, Tennessee and it was a fun time at the booth today.

My dear friend and co-worker, Bill Fortney, has been working with Ricky Skaggs (14 time Grammy Award winning musician) on his photography for the past year or so and had a great idea for Ricky to do a presentation on his photography at the Nikon booth. So... Nashville + awesome Bluegrass musician + great photographer + really great guy = one heck of a good time! We managed to make it all happen and have it come together and I will say that there must have been 200+ people trying to squeeze around the sides of the booth to get a glimpse of Ricky.

First of all, this really was about Ricky and his photography. He has a great eye for detail and he has really taken hold of the whole HDR (High Dynamic Range) style of shooting and done a great job. He was even one of the featured photographers in the booth with a very impressive enlargement hanging in the Nikon gallery.

Randy Jackson

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:17:18 -0600

Last week I was in NY for a final set of year-end meetings for work and took advantage of a great opportunity to catch a local show. One of my favorite guitarists of all time was playing at a bar in Massapequa called the Blue Parrot... Randy Jackson. Randy also has a band that you may know called Zebra which he still plays in as well. This night he was doing a solo acoustic show and played for four solid hours with only a short break in the middle. He is so talented and he kept the place going the whole time! It was awesome... Randy is also a really nice guy as well.

Shooting-wise... this was a tough place to shoot. Besides a few Christmas lights there was only one overhead florescent light bank that is usually there for a pool table. In technical terms... the only lens I could actually use was a 35mm 1.8 DX lens on a D300s camera at ISO 3200. That only got me about 1/80 of a second shutter speed. The other lenses I had with me weren’t bright enough in this low light situation. If I couldn’t shoot at ISO 3200 then I wouldn’t have gotten anything. I didn’t want to use a flash...

Saint Nicholas

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 10:30:20 -0600

This post serves a couple of purposes. If you have been following my posts for awhile you’ll know that besides being a photographer I am also a musician. When I’m not posting stuff about photography then I am usually posting something music related instead. So, here’s a music related post for you today.

One of my best friends, Matt Brechbiel, is a very gifted song writer, guitarist, teacher, producer... and more. He wrote a Holiday song quite a few years ago called Saint Nicholas, recorded it and sent it to all his family and friends. Now, he has teamed up with a very talented singer/guitarist named Chris Hendricks and has re-recorded Saint Nicholas and it is a great new version of this song.

Matt and Chris live in the Raleigh, NC area. I’ve never met Chris but am looking forward to meeting him someday. My first introduction to his talents were in the following video that Matt sent me... It’s Chris doing a cover of the Lady GaGa song, “Poker Face”. It’s very cool...

How To... Waterfalls 101

Wed, 9 Dec 2009 21:13:16 -0600

Okay... how about a quick “how to...” on shooting waterfalls? As you can see from a couple of my previous posts I have been in South Carolina visiting my folks. Besides shooting a great sunrise and a cool mountain tunnel we also got in a couple of waterfalls as well. My Mom wanted me to write down how to do this for her so I thought I’d make a blog post out of it instead. (This is similar to the concert photography how-to I did awhile ago... hope it helps.)

Let’s take a look at this waterfall called Oconee Station falls located in Oconee State Park in NW South Carolina...

Stumphouse Tunnel

Tue, 8 Dec 2009 16:18:46 -0600

Another one of my side trips this weekend with my folks was to a place in Walhalla, South Carolina called Stumphouse Mountain. Basically this is where a railroad tunnel was being built through a solid granite mountain way back before the Civil War. Here is an excerpt from a website about the Stumphouse Tunnel... Click here for the website link.

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Stumphouse Tunnel Park

“Located about 7 miles northwest of Walhalla on Hyw 28, the 1,617 foot long Stumphouse Tunnel is an oddity. Started in 1852 to connect Charleston to Knoxville and eventually on to Cincinnati, the Civil War—and lack of funds—brought construction to a halt. While there were various efforts by the Blue Ridge Railroad to revive the tunnel, none of them came to pass and it stands today as a monument to the efforts of pre-Civil War engineering. The tunnel measures 17 feet wide by 25 feet high and about mid-way in, there is a 16 x 20 foot airshaft that extends 60 feet upwards to the surface, causing a consistent cool breeze to flow out of the tunnel, a welcome treat in mid-summer. It also produces condensation and the tunnel is usually wet.”
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I was pretty amazed at how tall the tunnel was but also how dark it was inside. I had a D3s with me and a 24-70mm lens and decided to see how good the low light capabilities were with this new camera. Boy, was I amazed. The interior shots were in almost no light, handheld at ISO 12800. Incredible! I did absolutely nothing to these images. They are straight out of the camera! You gotta love technology!

Lake Keowee Sunrise

Mon, 7 Dec 2009 15:57:03 -0600

This past weekend I had a few days to spend with my folks where they live in South Carolina. My Mom really enjoys walking every morning and since my Dad bought here a Nikon D40 camera a couple of years ago she has gotten really good at shooting sunrises along the walking trail. So, I got up bright and early and sure enough we got some great early morning clouds to get some good sunrise pictures. These were taken on a lake in South Carolina called Lake Keowee which is in the northwest part of South Carolina near Clemson University. I just thought you’d like to see a couple of my favorites from the morning. I shot them with a D3s, 24-70mm and 70-200mm lenses.

Shuttle Launch Play-By-Play

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:18:17 -0600

A few weeks ago I got a Zoom H2 portable recorder. When I was at the shuttle launch I wanted to set it up outside to get the full sound of the whole event but it was so windy that I thought the wind noise and all the other extra noise around where I was shooting from would be too distracting. Then Ron Taniwaki (fellow NPS) had a great idea. He suggested recording the live feed from the television in the bunker. Thankfully I had just the right cable to do this so I hooked the H2 directly into the NASA feed and got the whole thing! This all came to mind about five minutes before launch time but it worked. I though that you may enjoy hearing the play-by-play of the entire launch through the fuel tank separation. The timeline is a bit off from the announcer and that’s because there were some long breaks in between the narration. So, I did a minor amount of editing and it plays really well. So, enjoy... It’s a really spectacular sound when it lifts off.

Just click the “play” button at the bottom of the image below...

Shuttle Launch STS-129

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:03:44 -0600

It’s a proud day to be an American! At 2:28pm this afternoon the Space Shuttle Atlantis made a successful journey into space on a beautiful Florida day. This wasn’t the first time I had seen the shuttle go up but it was the first time from three and a half miles away! Yesterday we went right at sunset for the “roll out” of the Rotating Service Structure (RSS) which I got to do the last time I came to a launch... except for that shuttle didn’t go up on time and I missed the launch. For the “roll out” they take all of the media in a couple of busses to the fence line just before the pad. It takes about fifteen minutes to roll the RSS out of the way and then they turn on the zenon lights. Here’s a picture of what the shuttle looked like last night against the post-sunset blue sky...

Cocoa Beach, Florida

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 23:10:13 -0600

This week I’m in beautiful, sunny, pleasant Florida. Sounds great, huh? Well, it is but I’m not on vacation, I’m here to work at the shuttle launch STS-129 that is happening on Monday, 11/16 at 2:28pm EST. We’re staying at some old, cheesy Holiday Inn that is right near the beach so this morning Mark Suban and I went out before sunrise to try out our D3s cameras. I wanted to shoot some more video and keep practicing with getting better and the sunrise turned out to be very nice. Now, some of you may know that I lived in Florida for about ten years and this time of year always makes me think about why I moved from here... well, a job for one... but, I would say it was June, July, August and September! The oppressive heat and humidity... the bugs... hurricanes... tourists... all those fun things came to mind and now I can say that it is a nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there. Gee, I’ve heard that somewhere before! ;-)

So, here is a quick video that I threw together in iMovie along with some still images from my D300s. I thought that if you all needed a break from work for about two minutes you might enjoy this. I’m still learning this whole video thing but I’m getting there. The sound is from the camera through a Rode Stereo Video Mic that is in one of the pictures below. It was fun to put together.

As for the shuttle... I have some good pictures that I need to download and take a look at from the “roll back” of the part of the pad that covers the shuttle until the day before the launch. They let the media get close and shoot some images of it which is always pretty cool to do. What an amazing sight. I’ll post those real soon... for now... just relax!

Photo Plus Show, NYC

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:53:52 -0500

Every year we work at one of the busiest photo shows in NYC... Photo Plus. It’s held at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in Manhattan and although I look forward to seeing everyone from work, I look forward to being home after this show is over. This year I didn’t really take too many pictures in the city so there’s not much to report on that front. I did have a great time after the show hours visiting with my work friends as well as some other good friends... Bill Fortney, Scott Kelby, RC Concepcion, Brad Moore and a few others.

Working the booth, on the other hand, is a crazy busy time! There is no real way to sum it up except to show you the videos below that will pretty much tell the story. My colleague, Mark Suban, mounted a couple of remote cameras in the lighting rig to capture what it’s like to see how people move through the booth area.

As you will see, it doesn’t look too busy at first. That’s because there was about an hour for making sure everything is good to go and another hour for the Gold Member pass holders to come in first. Then the flood gates opened and it never stops until the show closes. Most of us either lose our voices completely or get sick from this show... or both! Hand sanitizer is a must have!

Sometimes we take bets on who’s gonna get the first way off base question of the day... of course that happened to come to “yours truly”! I think the first guy in the door came straight to me for some reason and asked me what the exact pixel size, in microns, are the individual pixels on a D3 camera body. I asked him why he needed to know such a detail and he said that by his calculations he determined that to get the image quality he needs the pixels need to be at least 8 microns in size... Thank goodness the D3 has pixels that are larger than that. So, he looked at me... paused for a moment... smiled... said “thanks”... and then walked away. That was it! I think he came to the show just to ask that question! Who knows???

At least he was better than the guy on the second day that said, “F*** YOU!” to me! Yea... that was enjoyable! He was just mad because I wouldn’t take out a second piece of gear for him to see since I was already helping another customer. First of all, he had already been helped and walked away from the counter... then he came back and cut right to the front and interrupted my conversation. (We are only allowed to have one piece of gear out at a time for security purposes). So, I tried to explain why I couldn’t take the piece out then he decided to say what he said!

Anyway, here are a couple of videos to show you what the booth is like from a couple of angles. They are about four minutes long and the file sizes are around 75MB each so you may have to wait a minute or so for it to catch up to you... Enjoy...

“Ruby the Bowling Dog”

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:19:11 -0500

So, I told you I was going to post a movie about “Ruby the Bowling Dog”. I can’t believe I made the time to do this just now since I have so much to do to get ready for my trip to NYC for the Photo Plus show this week. It only took about 45 minutes total and it was fun to do.

The Old North Branch Inn is a really cool place about three miles from the Eddie Adams Workshop. It is owned by Victoria Lesser and she has done a great job of restoring it and making it a great place to stay. One very interesting feature that she uncovered was the fact that there are two bowling lanes that were under a make-shift stage in the back room. They are still in great shape and even the ball return is fully in-tact. She even has seats from Radio City Music Hall in there along with a projector, screen and a full surround sound system. It’s a very, very cool place!

So, her dog, Ruby, is an absolute nut! She’s a very small French Bulldog that loves to go crazy on the bowling pins. A few of us were there one morning and she got Ruby all fired up. I had my Coolpix S70 camera handy which does HD video so I started running up and down the lanes trying to video Ruby as she pushed a couple of bowling pins up and down the gutter. It was just hilarious. I told Victoria that I would put something together and post a YouTube video for her. So, here it is. I edited it in iMovie and made the music real quick in GarageBand.

Eddie Adams Workshop

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:34:38 -0500

Another busy week! Last week I had the pleasure of being at the 22nd Annual Eddie Adams Workshop in Jeffersonville, NY. This was my second year of being a part of the workshop and it is always a busy and fun time. Nikon is the main sponsor of the workshop and has been since the beginning. So, I got to do the intro welcome from Nikon as well as present the grand prize $10,000 scholarship to the weekend’s best student. There are so many great photographers who come to this workshop so be sure to check out the website to see all of the details. The final presentations were very inspiring and it is just amazing how well these students cover their photo stories in such a short period of time.

In between the busy times we get a few opportunities to shoot some images as well. I was having a lot of fun with the new Coolpix S70 camera that does still images in 16:9 format as well as HD video. I have some footage of “Ruby the Bowling Dog” that I need to put together so check back for an update on that... it’s pretty funny. I also was enjoying the D300s with the new 18-200mm VR lens. I have to say that I am pretty impressed with this lens...

Big Electric Cat - PSW Vegas 09

Thu, 8 Oct 2009 17:10:43 -0500

For a second post from Photoshop World I thought I’d share some images of Big Electric Cat that I took at the party at the House of Blues. Last year I shot with a D90 and this year I had a D300s with me. The lighting in this place is tough because there is very little white light. It’s mostly red or blue and that makes getting any proper color-balanced images difficult. So, I turned one of the black and white... then another... then another... and realized that I like them all more this way.

So, here they are in black and white. I kicked up the contrast and the “grain” of the images a bit to look like some old BW film I used to shoot way back in the day. It works... at least for me!