Monthly Archives: March 2011

The Sherwood Forest Faire

Jeff, Jill, Tim, Buffy, and myself went to the Sherwood Forest Faire. It was located close to Austin out East along Highway 290.

There was this small, human powered, roller coaster set up like a joust. It was fun. Tim went first and I took some pictures. I used high-speed burst mode, but the camera’s computer assisted auto-focus didn’t track that well. Sigh. Then I took it for a whirl…

Next, we watched the performance of the Fatima Belly Dancers. They were pretty good. I took some video, but not during an entire song. Oh, well.

Then we went to see the Knights of Mayhem and their jousting show. Unfortunately, there was no real joust. Only a couple of passes with a horse throwing a spear at a stump and then taking a swing at a melon on the top of a participant’s head.

Filthy Rotten Scoundrels Mud Show

Then we went and watched the Filthy Rotten Scoundrels Mud Show. I was lucky enough to get a spot at the front row. Well, the fourth row actually, because the first three rows were within the “splash zone.” I took a bunch of pictures and some video. Unfortunately, the video was hand-held with a long lens. So it was a little shaky. I played around with Adobe’s After Effects and figured out how to stabilize certain sections of a movie. Well, mostly stabilize as it wasn’t 100% effective. Still, I learned something.

Filthy Rotten Scoundrels Mud Show from Mark Hamzy on Vimeo.

Jeff and Jill posed for a picture in one of those picture-posing-thingies. They make a very regal couple.

The Flash Bus

When one of my favorite websites announced that he was going to do a local presentation, I jumped at the chance to sign up! Both David Hobby from the Strobist website and Joe McNally would ride a bus around, called The Flash Bus and visit 29 cities.

David was up first. He did a 2 hour presentation and talked to a bunch of slides. He was very informative on how you go about taking pictures with manual camera settings and small flashes.

Then we took a one hour break for lunch. I rushed over to Osmo’s which was a Cajun/Italian food trailer (along with a couple of other trailers) across the street from the Parmer Event center. I was glad I ran over there because the trailers were not prepared for the amount of people.

David Hobby taking pictures of the Flash Bus

After lunch, I took a quick, hand-held picture of the bus which was parked inside of the auditorium. I felt bad about not using my flashes to take a better picture. Especially since David talked about taking his picture here. But there wasn’t that much time and there were a lot of people there.

Joe then gave his two hour talk which consisted of taking a bunch of picture with different flash modifiers and using the camera’s automatic TTL system. I didn’t learn anything at all and hated his talk. He did spend about a half of an hour taking a picture of the bus with a bunch of flashes though. And then David and Joe got up on the stage and answered questions for an hour.

I also bought David’s new DVD set called Lighting in Layers.