Posts Tagged ‘KTH’
Squvalp!
School tradition is something to be admired. Squvalp is a celebration of ingenuity and beer drinking skills. It’s a day when KTH students design and build water craft and then race them in an epic battle to the finish that according to tradition takes place at 14:08 at RÃ¥lambshovsparken.
In exchange for my photography services  at this event, I was compensated in beer, perversely  large amounts of beer, and some of the best grilled meat I have tasted in a long while.
So all in all it was a pretty full day, we were given the freedom to shoot what we wanted and how we wanted. I worked with the 24-70/2.8 on one camera body and the 70-200/2.8 on the other. I figured this would be easier than swapping lenses and I was right… changing lenses in full on rain mixed with sawdust and beer is not the safest thing for your glass or your cameras. I’ve come to realize that a rain coat/poncho is a crucial tool. Due to the weather the light was pretty bad too, I shot a few test shots with flash while keeping the ISO as far down as I could but wasn’t getting the results I wanted so I opted for higher ISO and batch noise reduction in post. To be fair ISO 500-800 images from the Canon 50D come out relatively crisp, apart from the obvious color noise which is easily corrected.
This is the first time I’ve done event photography and it was a blast. Photography generally involves a lot of solitude, and this is something I enjoy. It gives me time to think, to relax, to take time and compose an image so that it conveys a certain emotion, to focus (pun intended). But once in a while it’s good to introduce a social aspect to it. This extended not only to the other two photographers I worked with, but to all the participants as well. Doing something you love and meeting new people in the process can’t be bad.
Squvalp 2010 - Sjösättningen
I also used this opportunity to test the  spring 2010 refresh of the 13″ Macbook Pro I recently purchased. I’ve edited the entire shoot (ca 1200 images) on it and boy am I impressed. It’s at least on par with my more powerful Win 7 desktop when it comes to running Lightroom. I haven’t had too many issues with the glossy glass screen, but I guess coming from a white 2007 Macbook I’ve gotten used to a little gloss. However the glass screen on the Macbook Pro provides way more contrast. The real improvement is the trackpad, which compared to the 2007 Macbook is actually very usable, though for most of the editing I’ve used a Wacom pen. For smaller jobs I see this being my main computer.
As a side note, the Lightroom catalog I worked with for this event contained about 1300 images. I still have to test how the Macbook Pro performs with my main image catalog containing around 70000 images. Here are a few more images from Squvalp 2010:
