SmugMugged

I have officially been mugged.

Fortunately instead of being beaten senseless and lacking a wallet, I have been merely taken in by an excellent photo hosting service.

Actually, the term "photo hosting service" is doing Smug Mug quite a large disservice. It's essentially a fully customizable way to showcase a portfolio or even run a business. It is certainly an excellent place to host photos, but the amount features they offer for both basic and truly advanced customization are extremely impressive. The standard layouts are very nice, and offer an instant, pleasing way to showcase photos, with the added ability to print high quality prints in just about any size imaginable.

The real power behind SmugMug though is the nuts and bolts customization offered through HTML/Java/CSS re-coding of nearly the entire site. There are some incredibly talented coders and web developers (i.e. not me), who have taken the base framework and completely re-worked it to make some amazing custom sites.

Fortunately, for those of us who never bothered to learn how to actually code for web development, they have an extensive resource/knowledge base in the Digital Grin Forums. Here, many of the aforementioned talented individuals are more than willing to provide whatever advice is asked for on coding for style.

After pouring through the tutorials, forums, and FAQ's, I have finally come up with a format that I think is passable, which can be found here:

Will Robbins Photography

I am still refining the formatting and layout, and hope to eventually go beyond the basic black theme, but for the time being I'm not ashamed showing it to others.

If you are so inclined, feel free to leave me a comment on the layout/format and let me know what you think.

Also, since this is a photo blog, here's a cute picture of our cat, Nalla:

Mid-Ohio 2009

Dad and I have been coming to Mid-Ohio for nearly a decade now (next year is the big one-oh), and I still look forward to it every year.

This year I decided that I wanted to try my hand at getting some decent pictures. I took my 100-300 to the MotoGP races at Indy last year and got some ok shots, but Mid-Ohio is a much friendlier from an amateur photographer's point of view, so I wanted to make the most of it.

The Canon Photography Forums highly recommended Lens Rentals, so I thought I would give them a try and rent a lens that would be pretty much out of my reach at this point.

I wound up going with the Canon 100-400 f4.5-5.6L IS. This is Canon's long-range high-quality zoom lens that gives excellent versatility, reasonably light weight, and a nice image stabilization system. The retail is ~$1500, but I was able to rent one for 7 days (inclusive) for about $100.

The Lens Rentals process was as smooth as I could have asked for, with excellent communication, and a handy pre-paid shipping label, so all I had to do was use it, tape it back up, and drop off at FedEx. I'll definitely use them again.

The 100-400L itself is an absolute dream. The build quality is outstanding, and although it's not super fast @ f4.5~5.6, the copy I got really shone with some decent light. At around 3 pounds, it was much heavier than I was used to, but I wound up hand-holding it for pretty much all of Mid-Ohio.


Photo courtsy of B&H Photo

I wanted to get at least a little practice before Mid-Ohio, so I went to the local park to try my hand at some bird shots. It was much more difficult that I had imagined, requiring lots of patience, and quite a few shots to get anything decent. The light was great that evening, and I wound up walking away with these:

Female Red-Winged Black Bird:



Eastern King Bird:



Needless to say, I was blown away by this first outing, and very excited for the race weekend.

Without drawing it out too much further, the race weekend was great. The weather cooperated, and there was some great action on track. I took ~1000 photos, and wound up with about 400 that didn't get deleted. Out of those, I had about 100 that I was pretty happy with.

Here are a few of the real keepers:

Aaron Yates coming into the Esses


Larry Pegram on the Ducati 1098R


Yamaha R6 in Turn 9 during Daytona Superbike Qualifying


Corona Extra Honda CBR1000RR


Ducati 1098R coming into the Esses with Suzuki in hot pursuit.


I shot most of these hand-held (although I did use my monopod for awhile) at f7.1~8 and 1/640~1/1000 and the lens performed really well. I'm hoping to make some prints out of a few of these.

Overall, a great experience that I hope to be able to repeat with a 100-400L of my own some day.

The Maine Event

Randi and I recently got back from a trip to Maine with our good friends Bob and Kat Wollyung (hence the long span without updates). It was a fantastic trip, and one of the most relaxing vacations I've ever had.

Mount Desert Island is an amazing place, and Acadia National Park is now high up on my list of favorites. The hiking trails were some of the best I'd ever been on, and the sheer number to choose from was staggering. The close proximity to the Harbors and their bevy of excellent restaurants and shops didn't hurt either.

I took roughly 900 pictures throughout the week, and wound up with 200~300 that I was reasonably satisfied with, and at least a dozen that I was truly happy with. Hopefully I can continue the trend of increasing my keeper ratio with each trip.

Here are a few of my favorites.

Looking out into the Harbor near sunset:






Neat old cabin near our cottage edited to black and white:


Seagull portrait:


I took many, many more photos on this trip. The rest can be found on my SmugMug site.