Casey Templeton Photography 2010 Promo from Casey Templeton on Vimeo.

Lighting was simple and straightforward: my WhiteLightning with a large Octobox pointing down at the table on a roughly 90 degree angle from the camera.  The background is comprised of a couple of salvaged boards  on the almond shot, and a random piece of tile for the peanuts; both were picked up for under a buck at Portland’s Rebuilding Center.

He was down there covering the competition, but this shot of the carnage resulting from the wave will definitely prove to be the best footage from the trip.  The shot was picked up by local and national news agencies as well as a cable TV show or two.  Way to go Tyler!

Be sure to check out his other great work on his site and his Facebook page.

The complete list is as follows:

Canon 40D
- 6 BP-511 Canon batteries
- AA battery holder for the grip, + 6 Sanyo Eneloop rechargables
17-55 f/2.8 IS
- Circular polarizer
70-700 f/4L
32 GB of memory cards
Soft case for the 70-200 (the 17-55 fits in there just fine too)
White Lightning X1600 flash
- soft case
- power cord
- sync cord (in case I have a major remote malfunction/loss)
- 1/2 CTO gel, blue cooling gel
- Standard 7″ reflector
- Little mini-clamps to secure the gels to the reflector
- Aluminum tripod with a brass stud*
- Small Manfrotto ballhead
Vagabond II battery pack
Paul C. Buff Cybersync remotes
- Extra batteries for both the transmitter and the reciever
- Sync cord to hook the receiver up to the flash
430EX II Flash
- Soft case
- 1/2 CTO gel, blue cooling gel
Business cards
Model release forms

This is pretty much the same kit that I brought down last time I was there, except I’m doing away with the small Pelican case that I lugged around.  There just weren’t enough times that I wanted to put the camera away to justify it, and its bulk was a real pain in the ass and didn’t really fit well in a backpack or crashpad.  The flash gels are also a new addition, since nothing ruins a beautiful orange sunset glow like a bright white fill flash (ok so that’s a little too big of a generalization, but it’s nice to have some options).

It sounds like a ton of stuff when it is written out like that, but in practice it is actually pretty reasonable and fits nicely in my old beat-up 40L backpack:

As always, the best gear is the gear that you have with you.  I find that if I take so much stuff that I have to leave half of it in the car then it was a complete waste of effort to bring it in the first place.  My goal here was to get everything in one bag (not counting the camera, which is always out) so that I can always set up a remote flash shot or change out gear on the spot.

*Tripods are waaaaaaaay better than lightstands when you’re outside, off pavement, and on a sandy/boluldery/shrubbery-covered hillside/canyon/field/cave. Plus, it’s a tripod so I can use it for my camera for night or sequence shots.

That works well enough when dealing with individual shoots (each catalog is well-organized into Collections), but putting together a portfolio that contains images from each year is downright tedious.  I have to select the shots from one catalog, export them, then import them into a new catalog.  Simply creating a new catalog and using the “Import From Catalog…” feature is imperfect at best, especially due to how much it lags and how difficult it becomes when there are half a dozen virtual copies of the same image.  I’d love to have an easy way to put together a Lightroom-created web gallery that pulled from multiple catalogs seamlessly.

Click on through below to the gallery:

I can’t wait to do it even bigger and better in 2010!

It was a great day to be out at Monkey Face at Smith, and thanks to some help we had a great line set up.  I dragged my WL1600 and its battery up there which really helped out with the shots.  A speedlight on a remote probably would have worked, but due to some space constraints it was nice to be able to put the flash a little bit farther away and nuke the entire area.  It worked something like this:

White Lightning X1600, Vagabond II battery, etc. The flash was on full power all day with no complaints from the battery.

The flash is on a tripod rather than a lightstand, which I highly recommend for places like this since it is much more stable and adjustable.  You can’t see it in this picture, but the tripod is also attached to a couple of permanent anchors in the rock to prevent it from taking a 300ft ride down the cliff if it were to get knocked over.  It was invaluable to have up there, but don’t let anyone tell you that it’s fun to drag 40lbs. of cameras, batteries, and support up that trail.

They’re in roughly chronological order, and span from the forests of the Pacific Northwest to Mongolia.  I put this gallery together 9 months ago and never got around to publishing it, so it doesn’t contain some of the more recent work that I’ve done.