Carl Hutzler's Blog

I found a great little stop motion movie that I first saw when DSLR camera’s came out and were becoming popular ways to shoot this type of movie. I lost track of it but heard the soundtrack on Radio Paradise this evening and Googled the song writer to find it again.

I bought a lens baby earlier this week. It is basically a distortion lens which allows you to have a small area of focus in your image and the rest of the image is distrorted/blurred. You can control the focus point by swiveling the front part of the lens around in a similar fashion to how a view camera adjusts.

I have been playing with it a little and it is a nice lens for adding a little bit of interest to an image. I can see using it for portraits as well as product shots.

Before I bought my first digital camera around 2003, I had a Nikon FE2 and a bunch of prime lenses. I bought the camera with a 50mm lens from Service Photo in Baltimore, used, for about $500 in 1988. I used the camera for 15 years mostly shooting black and white negative film and then slides.

I have a lot of B/W prints from my darkroom. But the slide collection was always hard to view. The projector, screen and inability to simply pull out an image and show someone were always a drag. For years I have been looking for a way to scan the slides cheaply, but the cost to scan 4,500 slides is not even close to approachable. I did not need the highest quality…just something fairly good…good enough for the web. If I really wanted to make a print/enlargement, I always had the original slide and could pay for a drum scan if I wanted.

The idea of putting the slides into a Kodak projector and somehow taking pictures of them with a digital camera was always a thought I had. I even briefly tried to make it work, but quickly ran into a number of issues which stumped me. The slide projector bulb was WAY to bright. Focus was an issue. And even getting decent color balance and contrast was problematic.

Luckily, my father (and mother) have a huge slide collection. My dad was also interested in the same thing – digitizing the slides. He did most of the work but I helped supply equipment, software and some know how on things.

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We did it. Our good friends, the Schnellers, joined Rylan and I for a trip down to the mall today to see Barack’s inauguration. We drove down to our old apartment complex across from the Iwo Jima in Rosslyn, Virginia and walked over the Memorial Bridge to the Mall. Took a little over an hour. But we got there and had good spots to view the festivities.

People were very happy.

Well, not really true. This is my friend Kenny who stopped down for the holiday with his lovely wife Michelle. Still a fun picture :-)

My buddy, Josh Sarubin, up in New York sent me a collection of photographs of his family from the past year entitled “The Year in Sarubin”. It was a great collection of shots from the year. Tough to believe his kids are so cute! (I love you, Josh)

Anyway, I happened to be putting together a set of images from the last year as well, mostly to print out and put into several frames in our family room. But Josh’s idea made me think about posting them online. So, without further adoo, The Year in Hutzler…

For the past couple of years I have photographed a number of performances for the Conservatory Ballet of Reston, Virginia. This year I shot two performances of their classic Nutcracker which they have done for over 30 years running. The dancers are incredible, especially considering that everyone is high school age and younger. Several of the dancers last year graduated and are performing in NYC, Germany and one even attended the world famous Vaganova School in Russia (she was the only American ever admitted to the school).

Not only are the dancers wonderful, but the costumes are completely hand made by the staff at the Conservatory. Julia Redick, the Artistic Director, would simply not have it any other way.

Combine the costumes, well rehearsed dancers, and great lighting, and the stage is set for some easy clicking. I will post some more images in the next few days, but I thought this one of Lexie Overholt with partner Stas Bolotsko stood above the rest on my initial scan of the images.

Back at the beginning of November I had the pleasure of shooting a couple so they could give some pictures as gifts to their family around the holidays. We enjoyed a splendid, warm day right at the end of the fall colors in Great Falls National Park. I just finished doing the final edits on the images and thought they really came out nicely.

One of the greatest artist I have had the privledge of listening to over the last 8 years or so is Alejandro Escovedo. My brother, Paul, introduced me to Alejandro at the Bumbershoot Music Festival in Seattle back in 2000. Since then, I have seen him play live maybe 10 times.

This past Sunday, he played an amazing show at the Birchmere in Alexandria, VA. We had great seats right up front, courtesy of my favorite line place holder, Stuart Pearlman, who I used to work with at AOL :-) At the end of the show, Alejandro mentioned that they had added another DC show for the following Sunday at a small hotel/club called Masion O near Dupont Circle. They were video taping the show and tickets were available.

The three piece band featured Susan Voelz on violin. She is an amazing violinist and even Alejandro mentioned that one fan thought she was Jimi Hendrix on Violin :-) Anyway, since my eleven year old son is learning the viola right now, I thought he would really get a kick out of seeing her play. So I got us a couple of passes and we did it…even on a school night.

During the show Jake was absolutely amazed. He kept talking about how the hair on her bow kept breaking and how fast she could play. If only she had lit her violin on fire at the end ;-)

I shot a bunch of stuff during the performance and captured some great moments. Enjoy.

(And check out John Buckley in image 16. He and I worked together at AOL during the good ole anti-spam days)

All images © Carl Hutzler Photography

From my good friend TKen…

“Callie Shell followed Barack Obama for much of the last two years, and captured some excellent photos (and micro stories to go along with them). Keep clicking ‘Show More Images’ at the page bottoms to see them all.”
http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0810/callie-bp.html

I really enjoyed the images. My style of candid photography. I am available for the White House job if it’s still available. Willing to travel ;-)

Photograph by Callie Shell