Part 4 of my photo shoot with Molly at Vasona Park

Here are the remaining photos from the Vasona Park photo shoot with Molly last week. By the time we started shooting these last photos, the sun was pretty bright. Most of these shots had to be taken in the shade but they still turned out nice!

JP

Part 3 of my photoshoot with Molly at Vasona Park

For this next set, Molly was wearing a short blue dress that went well with the natural beauty of the park. We ended up shooting on the bridge and the nearby pier.

I must say it was challenging to be shooting in mid day under very bright sunlight (which translates into high exposure and blown highlights) but it's also a good way to learn how shoot in this extreme environment especially with a subject with fair skin.

JP

Part 2 of my photoshoot with Molly at Vasona Park

This next set I really like the outfit and the hat that Molly wore. This time we shot in the shot of a big tree next to the lake. However you'll notice that the background is really blown out because of the high noon lighting. [If I was more patient and a perfectionist, I'd use layers to clean up the background]. Fortunately the exposure was mostly nailed around my lovely subject, Molly. My impression of these photos is they could be straight out of glamour magazine ad or a Gap advertising!

JP

Molly Photo shoot in Vasona Park (Los Gatos)

Since I had such a fun and productive experience shooting with Molly a few weeks ago, I decided to do another photo shoot with her in Vasona Park in Los Gatos. I've had pretty extensive experience with shooting family portaits and engagement photos in Vasona Park but I can't recall doing a model theme there at all. Today's theme was a simple summer look. Fortunately Molly has a versatile look to her. We ended up shooting for 3 hours because I really wasn't keep up on the time. What I thought was going to be a 2 hour shoot quickly turned into 3 hours. I'm planning on posting a set of each "outfit" every day this week. I think I have enough photos to keep posting until Friday. Today I'm shooting with my Nikon D200 and Tamron 17-55mm f/2.8 lens. The fill flash was from the built-in pop flash. [Fyi I plan on adding a 50mm f/1.8 and 85mm portrait lens and maybe a used D300 to repertoire in the near future since I've re-ignited my passion for photography recently. This gives me the added excuse to do a shoot on my days off which should populate my blog with new content!] Without further ado, here's the first batch.... JP

Project Fi invitation

I recently signed up for the Google Project Fi invitation that was made available a few weeks back. After waiting all week long, my Project Fi kit came in the mail yesterday! I carefully removed the box out of the box. With much ohhhing and ahhhing, I unwrapped each of the 3 ribboned items in the box. They consisted of (1) Nexus 6 case (2) External battery (3) nice pair of high-quality headphones. All of which has the Project Fi logo branded on each item. 8) It took me about 20-30 minutes to factory reset and install Android 5.1 on my Nexus 6 before the kit arrived. Admittedly the installation was fairly easy following the information on the Project Fi (which I'm giving it a nickname of "P-Fi") website. It consisted of installing the P-Fi app from the Google Play Store. The only hiccup occurred when I attempted to transfer my current Google Voice number. It's supposed to take up to 2 days for the transfer but in my impatience I clicked on the finalized part. An error popped up to Contact Support which I immediately did. I spoke to a very helpful support rep, Genesis, who did some basic troubleshooting. It turns out I only had to restart my Nexus 6 to complete the activation. LOL. So here I am today playing with my Nexus 6 running Project Fi. So far I have not noticed any vast improvement in connection speed but I plan on doing more testing this weekend. For reference, I did run a speedtest app on both my Nexus 5 (using AT&T mobile service) and Nexus 6. If you look at the results side-by-side, the results are pretty similar. However I plan on testing my Clash of Clans game on both Nexus phones to see if (1) any difference in connection speeds and (2) if I get any dropped connections that I normally get during an average session using my Nexus 5 AT&T mobile coverage. I'll post my results here next Monday. JP