Brett Casadonte Photography

D800 has arrived!

Brett Casadonte — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 04:41:15 +0000

I’ve been out of commission for the past several weeks awaiting my ‘D’ arrivals from Nikon. At first, I ordered the D4 after it was announced, but a snafu with B&H caused me to slip back in the line a few days (note: don’t use paypal to pre-order anything… they charge in full right away! I love B&H by the way, I buy tons of gear there!). However, when the D800 was announced, I ordered one within hours of it being available on Amazon. Since I had two cameras on order and I knew that the D700 was going to start dropping in price as we got closer to the actual ship date of the D800, I decided to sell it. That meant a month with no camera, and a month of only taking pictures with my wife’s Nikon AW100 (not a bad little point and shoot, by the way).

Anyway, back to the D800. Lucky me, I was early enough to get into the first batch that shipped, and I received my little black beauty this past Monday (still waiting on that D4 to ship though…). I have been most excited about the video features, and have been doing some tests around the house. That said, I just had to see what a 36 megapixel raw file looked like, and snapped some shots of the kids. Wow, just wow. That’s all I have to say!

Look for some test shots coming soon!

Panoramas

Brett Casadonte — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 02:27:58 +0000

One of the nice things about the iPhone is that you always have a camera with you. Even when you are skiing down the side of a mountain or standing in line to see a flying telescope. Better still is that there are a bazillion photo application for the iPhone, including the very cool AutoStitch, which is a little app that assembles panoramas from images taken with your phone. I’ve experimented with this fun little application a few times, and have included the results here. The most recent image is of NASA’s SOFIA aircraft, while several of the others were taken this past winter at Yosemite National Park and on the ski slopes in Park City Utah. Enjoy!

Filoli Gardens

Brett Casadonte — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 15:50:28 +0000

Filoli Gardens in Woodside California is one of the most beautiful flower gardens you will ever visit. When I arrived there, it was an overcast day, and we had a very light shower in the morning. Of course, that made for perfect photography conditions, and I set about taking card after card of digital images of the vast floral beauty which stretched out before me. In addition to the images below, many of the images in my flower and nature gallery also come from Filoli. If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area and have the opportunity to visit, I would highly recommend it… especially on an overcast day after a light rain.

Street Ballin’ with Red Bull

Brett Casadonte — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 15:02:41 +0000

A couple weeks ago I was up in Oakland at the Red Bull Street Ball tournament helping out a good friend of mine, action-sports photographer Cameron Baird, who was shooting the event for Red Bull. I pulled out my camera and started snapping some pictures with him of the action, hooked in to his crazy fast Profoto Pro8 packs. It was pretty kicking’ using the Air remote to fire off these things as fast as I could press down the shutter release on my D700…. a bit of a change from my usual shooting pace with my Profoto D4 pack. The event was a lot of fun and there was some really good one-on-one b-ball being played to see which 4 from the 64 player field would earn the right to make it to the final round of 64 on ‘The Rock’.

Vintage Racing at Infineon Raceway

Brett Casadonte — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 01:44:33 +0000

This past weekend I was given the wonderful opportunity to spend some time at Infineon Raceway in Petaluma, California during the 8th Annual Charity Challenge, hosted by the Classic Sports Racing Group. The event benefits Speedway Children’s Charities of Sonoma, and highlights historical race cars from all eras. In addition to having a chance to see some amazing historical cars (and even take a ride around the track in a 1931 Alpha Romeo), I also got a chance to photograph the cars from some key vantage points around the race track.

Predator Drone

Brett Casadonte — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 01:21:27 +0000

Two years ago I had the opportunity to shoot a video for NASA about the research work they were doing to help combat wildfires. Research conducted at NASA’s Ames Research Center focused on developing remote sensor systems that could be flown aboard Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, such as NASA’s Ikhana. These systems would use infra-red and optical imaging capabilities along with sophisticated on-board image processing to relay geo-corrected imagery in near-real time to fire commanders on the ground.

As part of the piece, we talked to the folks at General Atomic, the creator of the Predator UAV (upon which the Ikhana is based) at their facility just outside of Lancaster, California. While there, we were allowed to see one of the Predator drones up close, and they even allowed me to take a couple of photos while I was there. The photo here is of the Predator in its hangar.

Water and Time in San Francisco

Brett Casadonte — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 05:08:35 +0000

A while back when I was meandering about the city one night, I started experimenting with some long duration exposures at this sculpture down by the Hyatt Regency and the Embarcardero. The patters that the water currents made were very cool, and also quite unexpected because you couldn’t really see them all that well in

Orange you glad…

Brett Casadonte — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 17:34:54 +0000

I was spending some time today going through some old photos and this was one from about 7 years ago that I really liked. I took it while I was walking the streets of San Francisco, and if I remember correctly, it was somewhere in Chinatown. I also seem to recall being shooed away by one of the chinese women shop owners as well…

Having a good walk anywhere is great for your creative vision, especially if you are not under the pressure of deadlines. Its great to just go out and see what you can see… you’ll be glad that you did!

Welcome to the new site!

Brett Casadonte — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 16:36:16 +0000

Hello. Please pardon the pixel dust. I’m in the process of updating the site to an exciting new design!

In addition to adding a slew of images, over the coming weeks I’ll be also adding new blog entries as well, touching on a broad range of photography topics as well as providing some tips and tutorials. Hope you enjoy!

In the mean time, please enjoy this image of actor Robert Taylor that I did a little while back during a shoot at his family home in Marin County, California.