TheBernharts.com » Photography

Fair Photo Booth 2012

Neil — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 17:59:33 +0000

Year 11 has been added to our photo booth series. Every year we go to the Orange County Fair and get a photo strip of all of us piled into the booth.

It gets less comfy every year… for me at least since I’m at the bottom. But, it’s so worth it!

Ten Years Of Photo Booth Strips: 2001-2010

Neil — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 15:11:30 +0000

Really? It’s been 10 years since we started doing the family photo booth at the fair thing? It really is crazy to think that it’s been that long… time definitely does fly.

When Melanie and I first started dating, we went to the Orange County Fair to waste our money on un-winnable games, scary rides that can be packed up and hauled off to the next county fairground location, and all of that indulgent and deep-fried food. The deep fried avocado and the Aussie battered potatoes are favorites of ours!

In 2000, we did the photo booth thing with just the two of us. The following year, we started bringing Lauren to the fair with us… and began this tradition of annual family photos in the booth. After about 4 years, I started putting the strips together on the front of our refrigerator in chronological order. Soon after, I began scanning them in and combining them into one picture.

You should click on the thumbnail above to view the photo on flickr.com, where you can see it larger. I believe it’s my most viewed photo on flickr… I think it’s been blogged a few times, which gets it some traffic for sure.

Here is the single strip from our 2010 trip to the fair… Now, I need to update the header image on our family website to include the latest shot.

Brody Turns Two!

Neil — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 21:07:22 +0000

Our baby Brody just celebrated his 2nd birthday on June 7th. We had family and friends join us at Disneyland, where he and his cousin Jake enjoyed their first ever visit to the happiest place on earth. Brody’s excitement over all of his Thomas The Train gifts was just so fun to watch. He actually turned down cake so he could play longer with his new trains! I presented him with a plate full of cake and he said… “no, no cake…. bye, bye”.

We now have the living room filled with trains! Here are some photos that I took at Disneyland and him opening and playing with gifts. I have some videos as well, but haven’t processed those just yet. Stay tuned.

This SlideShowPro photo gallery requires the Flash Player plugin and a web browser with JavaScript enabled.

Photo Booth 2009

Neil — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 16:51:25 +0000

The OC Fair came and went once again. We love to go to the fair, and part of our annual trip there is to pile into the photo booth and get a strip of group shots. This was Brody’s second year, and the booth is getting crowded!! Really not sure how we’re going to keep this up in the coming years.

I always love seeing how Lauren has changed over the years! Now we have Brody in there and we’ll have more fun changes to watch.

The ever popular compilation of all the years:

2009:

Lost and now found: Hiroshi Sugimoto

Neil — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 16:57:03 +0000

I studied Photography in college. It’s my passion. The group of friends I studied with would often go on museum outings and photowalks. On one trip, we visited the Museum Of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles. They had an exhibit by a Japanese photographer that captured my attention. They were a series of large format black and white prints of views of the ocean. In all of them, the horizon went right through the middle of the frame. Some of them were easy to tell that it was the ocean, others were more difficult; misty fog filled the sky and diluted the horizon, or the photo was taken in the evening with little light and you could barely see the horizon. All of them had the perfect balance of air and water. This struck me as so simple.

I’m not sure why, but I did not take note of the artist that day. The images of the photographs have stuck in my mind ever since. I’d always wanted to find out who the photographer was… but, never really took too much time in searching for their identity.

Fast-forward to present day: U2 has a new album out this week – No Line On The Horizon. I saw the cover art for it a few weeks ago and it was a black and white image of the ocean, with the horizon going straight through the middle of the frame. It also had an “equal” symbal overlaid on the image. I did wonder a little bit about it, but was distracted by the character overlaid on it. This morning, while searching for some music information on the webs, I saw a newer version of the album, and it did not have that overlaid “equal” character on it.

Immediately I knew it was one of those photographs that I stared at 17+ years ago. I did a quick google of “U2 cover art photographer” and did not take long to discover the artist: Hiroshi Sugimoto

And I found on his website, a page on his ‘Seascape‘ series. It shows three images, but I remember there were more than that.

Serendipity, for the win!

My fake band’s first album cover

Neil — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 21:08:59 +0000

There’s a cool meme going around on FriendFeed today: What would your album look like if you were in a band?

Here’s how it works:
Go to “Wikipedia.” Hit “random” and the first article you get is the name of your band. Then go to “Random Quotations” and the last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album. Then, go to Flickr and click on “Explore the Last Seven Days” and the third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover. If you are inclined to do so, use Photoshop or your favorite image editing software to put them all together.

It was a fun way for me to waste some time today. Here’s what mine comprised of:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant_Craving
http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/2444.html
http://www.flickr.com/photos/samzagaz/3289165478/ (cropped square)

2008 Holiday Photo Booth

Neil — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 16:59:37 +0000

This past Christmas, I started a new tradition. I was thinking that not only is the usual big group portrait sort of boring, it’s also difficult to get everyone in the same shot… especially if you have upwards of 20 or more people to shoot, half of them are watching the Laker game, a handful are out for a walk, and one or two are taking a nap somewhere (Larry, this means you).

After mulling about it, I thought: why not set up a photo booth so that everyone can get their shots whenever they like. 2008 is the first installment of the annual Holiday Photo Booth series. The details on how I created the booth, as well as how I made the images into photo strips, can be found here. 2 separate days, and 145 photos later… here are the results.

Individual Shots – These are all the single shots that I put into groups for the strips.
Photo Booth Strips – This is all of the photo booth strips in one set.
Coming soon… links for family to order prints or posters.

Slide Show:
If you don’t want to bother skimming through all of the shots, here’s an automatic slide show that you can use to sit back and see all of the strips. (click on the slide show, then click on the play button at the bottom left)

Flickr Meme: Melanie

Neil — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 21:00:32 +0000

On FriendFeed today, there is meme that I thought would be fun to participate in.

“It works like this: if you use Flickr, go to the sixth page of your photostream and pick the sixth picture there, then post it to your blog.”

This is a shot of Melanie taken back in October at some pre-halloween thing we went to at Lauren’s church. At that moment, I remember deciding that I should be getting more shots of Melanie. She didn’t think that it was that good of an idea… as you can tell by her expression. Oh well, I like the photo.

Click for a larger view.

Balancing: family and creative juices

Neil — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 01:15:04 +0000

I certainly hope you’re not here to get some pearls of wisdom on parenting. This is just me expressing my thoughts.

Brody was born in early June of this year, 6/7/08 actually. Since then my flickr stream has been chock full of photos of Brody. He is the cutest little baby you’ve seen, so it’s tough not to keep snapping pics of him. This also keeps family and friends satisfied with new photos of him; they are all very aware of his page on our site, and are instructed regularly to go there if they want to see new photos of him. This is especially nice as we (and that really means “I”) don’t have to fiddle around every week or so with sending an email out to everyone with images attached.

Today I quickly skimmed through my photostream and estimated that since June 10th, the day that the first photos of Brody were uploaded, he is in roughly 85% of the photos I post to flickr. Another thing I’ve noticed is that my photostream gets less views now. I suppose that this means most people see thumbnails of cute babies on flickr and don’t want to look at them. Case in point: the photo in this article I took as I was carpooling to work last week. In the 10-ish hours that it has been on flickr, it has gotten just about the same number of views as each of the last 4 photos posted before it… and those have been up for 3-4 days now.

Memories. And that’s just fine with me, the main purpose of me posting his photos is noted in the opening of this very article. Even more important, is the purpose of me taking them in the first place. I take them for me and Melanie… for Lauren, for our parents, our brothers, my sister… countless friends. But, mostly for Brody. For him to have photos to look at when he’s my age. I love to look at photos of when I was a kid. To hear my parents talk about what I (and my siblings) were like when we were Brodys age.

Priorities. Being creative has taken a back seat to what is currently more important: helping as much as I can at home with a 5-month-old, and spending time with him, with Melanie, and making sure Brody gets to spend time with the extended family. So, I have lapsed in my creativeness lately, but not totally. I still get to take lots of photos, but Brody is the center of the attention of it. One thing is for sure, we will have tons of great photos of him!

Creativity. Part of me still wants to draw those flickr viewers in to see my creative photos. The ones that don’t care to look at babys, but would rather look at a blurred car speeding along. It may sound vain, but I think it’s in the blood of any photographer to want people to “want” to view their photographs. At least for me, it’s a big part of why I photograph in the first place. I like to know that people enjoy looking at something I’ve created.

It’s been gnawing at me recently: gotta get out there an take some new photos! I pass things and can’t help but think to myself: I would shoot that, and this is how I would process it. Photography, for me, is part creativity, part meditation. It gets my brain to think differently, to break away from what could be clogging it up. It helps releive stress; a head-check if you will. I’m promising myself to slowly get some creative work done and post more of it. They will just have to be well blended among the shots of Brody and other family.

New Fair Photo Booth Strip For 2008

Neil — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 04:43:04 +0000

This year, on our annual day at the Orange County Fair, we had one extra family member. Brody was initiated into our black and white booth photo tradition. I’ve even updated the header image for our site… just look up at the top-right.

Cool tool for viewing geotagged flickr pics

Neil — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 20:52:06 +0000

My boss, Brett, was reading some Flickr group discussions on geotagged photos and came across one thread regarding putting a geotagged set onto another web site. The original poster of the discussion wanted to be able to show a map on his web site that had pin points for photos of flowers taken around a specific neighborhood… or something like that.
… more after the jump…

Brett got to work on a sweet little .NET application that allows you to build such a thing. It even gives you the code in an iframe HTML tag for you to place in your web site code. Check out his Mapaset tool here.

I used the Mapaset tool with a set from my flickr stream of photos I took on a work trip to Greece. I think it sweet! Flickr does not have anything like this that I know of. You can use the left/right arrows to scroll through the thumbnails in the set. Click on a thumbnail, and it shows you the location on the map above, as well as some details of the photo, and also provides a link to view the photo on flickr.

Shake It Off

Neil — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 16:03:03 +0000

I spent an afternoon trying to get just the right shot of one of the dogs shaking the water off of them. It’s not easy! I had no idea which direction they’ll be heading when they jump out of the pool. So, I shot about 100 frames of them… mostly of them facing the other way. Then finally, Taz got out and headed towards me… in the perfect location.

I couldn’t decide which shot I liked the best, so I stitched them all together.

Brody page update

Neil — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 15:31:03 +0000

Flickr has updated the slide show tool with some enhancements. I have updated Brody’s page so that there is now a slide show embedded right on the page. Hit play and watch the slide show without leaving the page. Nice! If you want to see a larger version, click on the link above the slide show. That sends you to the Brody slide show on the flickr site, and should show larger images in full-screen.

Watch the Melly Belly grow

Neil — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:04:37 +0000

I had planned this from the beginning; taking a weekly shot of Melanie’s growing belly, same angle, same pose, black and white. Then I would string them together in a slide show so you could see her belly grow week-by-week. Now, there were some weeks that we missed, so it’s not entirely complete, but it still looks pretty cool.

Full Screen Slide Show Here

Welcome Brody

Neil — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:31:33 +0000

With great joy, on Saturday 6/7/08 at 6:58am, Melanie and I welcomed Brody into the family. It was quite a long ordeal, about 28 hours from water breaking to delivery… so it would take a while to explain everything. I’ve summed it up in some key points listed below.

Brody has his very own page on the site, which has links to all the photos that I upload. Photos will automatically show up on his page as I upload them. So, be sure to check in regularly. But, be sure to keep reading if you want to know any specifics about his birth.

Here are the quick details to bring you all up to speed:

Water broke at 2:10am on Friday 6/6.
Brief panic attack. I assured Melanie that she did, in fact, have time to brush her teeth.
Arrived at triage at about 3:00am. No traffic!

Nurses surprised that Mel could not really feel what appeared to be strong contractions. In Mel’s words: “feels a bit tighter”
Admitted and in labor & delivery by 5am. Still only dilated at 1.5 cm.
Nurse and Midwife say that delivery may not happen until the next day.
11:30am, labor gets into gear with a little help from Pitocin.
Contractions got stronger.
Sometime early afternoon… Epidural, Melanie’s new favorite word.
Sleep.
7:30pm, dilated at 5cm… moving along! Dial that Pitocin down a bit.
Sleep.
10:40, still dilated at 5cm… ugh! Crank that Pitocin up.
Midnight-ish, dilated at 8cm. Whew… they were talking c-section if she had not progressed.
Slept more.
5:00am, almost fully dilated.
5:50am, lock and load. It’s time to push.
Called the welcoming committee to get ready
6:58am, Brody Neil Bernhart joins us.
The rest is history

Official specs:
Weight: 7 lbs. 10 oz.
Length: 20 1.4 inches
Head circumference: 13 1/2 inches

Thanks to everyone for all the phone calls, text messages, and visits. We appreciate all the well wishes.

Now, Brody is sleeping, so I’ll be doing the same!

Another photo contest! What do I get if I win?

Neil — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 21:02:23 +0000

At the risk of sounding too full of myself, I’ve had my share of solicitations from photo contests for me to enter an image of mine. I certainly would not be rich if I’d gotten a nickel for every request, but there have been enough times that I have become familiar with clicking on the “Contest Rules” link before doing anything else.

Recently, I was solicited by someone affiliated in some way with the upcoming launch of the website MomsTeam.com. This is some sort of site targeted towards “youth sports parents”. They posted a comment on my flickr page for a photo I took of Lauren bowling. I’m quite proud of this photo, not only because of the outcome but also the element of surprise; I had not seen her fingers crossed when I was shooting the image, and I think that element makes this photo speak to the audience…. truly telling a story.

At first I was flattered, as I would expect most photogs would be. I jumped over to their site via the link they provided in their comment. I read through the description of the contest, and then wanted to do the same for their contest rules. I get to rule #9 and read this:

In the event your photograph is among the ones selected for posting on MomsTeam, it becomes the sole and exclusive property of MomsTeam.com, Inc., and as such may not be published elsewhere (including but not limited to other Internet websites and print publications) without the express written consent of MomsTeam.com, Inc.

So, to summarize for this specific contest:

You send in a photo
They send you some Clif Bars, but only if you’re the first 200 in that sport. (Though, rule #11 states that they can send you whatever they want)
If they ‘select your photo’ for the website, they get all rights to reproduce it

What I see is a cheap way for them to get free image content to use on their web site. This is the deal-breaker for me. So, if I am lucky enough to have my photo selected for the web site, I can never put it on any other web site, or print publication without permission? Is this correct?

I do not understand why this rule is always in there for photo contests. And it’s not always small-time web sites that have this rule. There for a National Geographic contest that I wanted to submit an entry for, and they also had this stipulation. Any photo that I would think was worthy of submitting to a contest is one that I would never want to lose any rights to.

There has to be some reason for it. I can only assume that it is for the benefit of the contest proprietor and not for the entrants. I’m hoping that some legal guru will stumble upon this post and enlighten me on the reasoning for such rules.

Fun portrait shoot in a wheat field

Neil — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 17:51:00 +0000

Just about every week I drive past this large farm field that seams to be growing different crops each time the re-plant. The last crop they planted seemed to be wheat. I had watched it grow, slowly but surely getting to be about waist high. After a few months, the wheat turned a nice golden tan color (as wheat does before they harvest it)… I thought ‘that would be a great place for a portrait shoot in the late afternoon or sunset’. Pre-occupied with baby on the way, I kept putting it off. ‘Next weekend…’ I kept telling myself.

Then, one weekend as I was driving past the fields, there were tractors (and the sorts of equipment used to harvest) cutting down all the wheat. ‘Crap!’ I said to myself, I could not wait anymore… I wanted to get some shots of Melanie in that field while she was still pregnant. There were images in my head of what the scenes would look like. That weekend, we had Lauren with us, and we planned to go out into the field in the late afternoon.

We parked across the street, and walked over to the field. Out of acres and acres of wheat, I would estimate that there was less than 5% of the crop left. And it had been left there as if it were waiting for me to get the shoot I was thinking of. We walking along the waist high wheat, using the part of the cut-down wheat where the tractors drove. Once we got far enough into the field, I smashed down some of the wheat to make a small area for them to stand in while I shot.

The photos came out very nice. And I’m definitely glad I got the chance to get out there before it was all chopped down. Check out the choice ones from the shoot.

Fun at Speed Zone

Neil — Sat, 17 May 2008 01:11:26 +0000

Mel’s dad, Larry, loves cars and anything to do with them. Just about every year for his birthday, we all get together to go to Speed Zone in Hacienda Heights. It’s usually on a weeknight, which works out in our advantage for less people being there, but it’s never good for shooting photos of the fun. This year, we went on a Saturday afternoon. The crowds were not too bad, and I was able to shoot some cool photos of everyone.

Click on each one to see a larger version.

Thank You!

Neil — Wed, 14 May 2008 02:54:10 +0000

A big thank you to everyone who gave gifts for baby B! Everything is very much appreciated.

Finally…. some Portugal photos for your viewing enjoyment

Neil — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 21:23:12 +0000

Most of you know that Mel and I just moved into our new place earlier this month, so I’d been super busy dealing with escrow and then unpacking and also working on various projects around the new house. On top of that, I shot a wedding this past weekend… and not to mention… I’ve been swamped at work with all kinds of fun projects going on.

Well, I have finally gotten around to posting all of my edited photos from my trip to Portugal this past April [read about that in this post]. Head on over to NeilBernhart.com and check them out! There are links to view the gallery, which will automatically transition through all of the photos for you… so just sit back and enjoy the show. If you want to see a specific photo again, there is navigation at the bottom.

Along with the Portugal photos, there are two other galleries for you to enjoy. If you’re really loving a specific photo (or photos!) and feel the need to decorate your space with it… there are links below each gallery that send you to ImageKind.com for you to purchase a print of your very own. And you can even get them matted and framed.

Please pass this on to anyone else that you think would enjoy them.