This new Canon camera body has a great auto focus system that actually works about 95% of the time, a HUGE improvment over the 5D MKI & MKII.

The jacket, an Alan Michael USA creation, is made from leather with fish skin trim which sounds really strange but is really an interesting combination.

The round wood pegs that you can see going around the outside of the guitar body, have a threaded metal stud in the bottom, which is held in place by a wingnut, this allows the builder to remove these pegs selectively when they need to glue in something to the body of the guitar. By being able to just remove a peg or two, they still have most of the other pegs in place to hold the guitar body.

Unfortunately the weather was a solid gray overcast and drizzly afternoon, not real pretty. But I still got out my camera with the wide angle zoom lens and sat down in my seat, buckled up and waited. I still took a few snapshots & a bit of video knowing full well they would be ugly, I just could not help myself (And I was right, they were ugly.) Within 3-4 minutes after rotation (takeoff) the plane was in the clouds so I put the camera on the floor and waited for the chance to put the camera back in the bag. Within 3 minutes we were out of the solid cloud cover to a wondrous and dreamy scene of color & puffy clouds, the timing was perfect and the finished results were stunning.

Go here to look at the 40 second video.

The video was shot with a Canon Professional Digital Camera set at 160 ISO, 1/50 sec. shutter speed, 24 fps, and the Canon 16-35 mm zoom lens was at 16 mm, f8. The video file was then processed in Photoshop.

If you would like to use this image, or any of my images for mock or comp use, please just ask. There is never a charge for this service. Any educational use is permitted without charge, unless published, but please ask first. All commercial use is available only with a limited copyright release prior to use from the copyright holder, Steve Thornton. Thanks for looking!

I was shooting several items for Alan’s new website and I just had to shoot this close up to show the luscious details.

From the quality hides, to finding special buttons to weaving tie strings out to leather to the trimming all wraps up in a special item that people who are familiar with Alan’s work know who designed it.

Milan, Italy – This fashion image of Sina was shot in front of an old villa in Milan. Within a few weeks the owners were restoring it & it was surrounded by scaffolding. Sina is a favorite model of mine, fun to be with, quick wit, knows how to move and project.

Marina Grande, Sorrento, Italy – this is an assembly of 12 images. This is how I shoot these types of images: I focus, then turn off the auto focus feature, then determine the average exposure I need to get a good exposure “Balance”. The goal in exposure is to have enough range without blowing out the highlights but still have some shadow detail. I then take a photo of my foot, this way I know where a sequence is starting, then take the photos, being careful to overlap each photo by about one third. Then I shoot my foot again showing where the sequence stops. I then open the files, adjust the color balance, exposure, sharpness etc. and assemble them in Photoshop. After they were assembled into one seamless image, I added sharpness to the clouds so they would show greater detail.