Steve Maller Photography

I am working several jobs in a row over these few weeks in early March so please excuse any tardiness in responding to your phone calls, cards and letters (and fruit baskets!).

I very much enjoy the long-standing relationship I’ve established with the Drama department at Burlingame High School. My older son Max was a member of the cast of four plays while he was there. Even though he’s gone now (and sadly, Sam hasn’t joined up…yet), I have stayed close with Mary and all the hard-working volunteers. So each semester since, they’ve asked me to shoot the cast and crew. It’s a fun afternoon, the kids are immensely appreciative, and everybody gets to feel like a real actor. I enjoy the creative challenge, and I know the kids’ parents appreciate the opportunity to get a “real” headshot of their budding stars. If you’re my friend on Facebook, you can see them all over there.

One of my clients needed to do a photo layout for a magazine ad/editorial, and I thought our kitchen would be a great location for it. And our old house rocked the shoot. Doreen did a wonderful job of helping me clean up the kitchen, and made some great suggestions that ended up helping me a lot. It was fun WFH today.

The product name is deliberately blurred out in the photo below. And the large black and white photo in the front (mostly blurry) is actually a photo of my brother Dan and me!

I was asked to photograph ODC Dance’s annual benefit at Francis and Eleanor Coppola’s winery in Napa. It was a lovely afternoon full of wine, food, and exceptional dance performances.

My lovely place on Marsten has become no longer the right place for me for a number of reasons. So I found a new place that’s about 150 yards south of this location. It’s a wonderful, funky old building that suits my needs wonderfully well. I’ll be packing up soon, so pardon my tardiness in returning phone calls and emails if that happens!

Wish me luck…there is a lot of stuff to move!

At business events where I am the designated photographer, I am often called upon to take a group photo (sadly sometimes referred to as the “team photo”…I am of the opinion that teams wear uniforms with numbers and compete against other teams, but I digress!) and it’s one of my specialties. My goal is always to survey the landscape, evaluate the lighting, find an elevated location (that’s one of my trademarks), and make the actual photograph itself take as little time as possible. This week I was in San Jose for a digital sales training, and I was asked to take a group photo. The original plan was to find a location inside of the conference center, but it was a beautiful, warm California evening, and there was a large white building (giant diffused light source!) adjacent to the grass. I couldn’t appropriate an upstairs room (they were all occupied) or a scissor lift (I love those things!), so I went “old school” and got an 8′ ladder. I secured my tripod to the top, and got everything metered and waited. When it came time for the actual photo, I made it as fun as I could, and if you click the video window below, you’ll see what the herding process looked like, and the final product is below (click it to see it larger).

By the way, the video was filmed with my Canon 5D Mark II (which was taped to the ladder) and the actual group photo was made with my Canon 1Ds Mark III, which was on the tripod. The whole thing took about three minutes.

I often take my “show on the road” when my corporate clients need headshots. Today’s adventure took me to the Palo Alto headquarters of Facebook, a little startup you’ve probably heard of (unless you’ve been under a rock for a couple years). I was doing some fun stuff with my greenscreen backdrop, which added to the enormous pile of gear required to do this kind of thing. Here’s a photo of what I had set up, and what it looked like after it was all packed up. So much for a lightweight traveling kit!

I was hired to do a marketing piece for a company that does high-end digital sales training, and when I told them I could do not only photographs (as I have done for them before) but video, too, they jumped at the opportunity. I decided that I would commit to the Canon EOS 5D Mark II to film this piece for a few reasons.

1. The gig was in New Jersey, and the complexity of flying out all my video gear (based around the Canon XL2) would be expensive, complicated, and probably require an assistant on-site.
2. The 5D Mark II would double as my backup stills body, further reducing the weight and quantity of gear
3. The phenomenal low-light capability of this camera also meant I could leave all my lights at home
4. The 5D Mark II will work on a small, lightweight fluid head I have
5. I just wanted to do it.

Overall, I was extremely pleased with the results. And my clients were flabbergasted when I was not only able to show them results in near real-time, but I was able to edit together a fun slideshow recap with about 10 different video clips embedded in the show.

• I found it very easy to “fool” the camera into using wide apertures when I felt like it would be an advantage (the snipped below was shot with the Canon 35/1.4 wide open using a technique I cobbled together on the forums).
• I decided to transcode all the H.264 video into Apple’s ProRes format because it was really hard to edit the raw camera files in Final Cut Pro on my Macbook Pro. And I’m really glad I brought out a pair of 500GB Firewire drives. I ended up with nearly 250GB of ProRes video files, which corresponds to only around 25-30 minutes of video!
• The quality of the video was exceptional. I found it easy to adjust the white balance before shooting, and I shot in a wide variety of situations, including hideously a dark and weirdly-lit bar and classrooms with combinations of window light and fluorescent light.
• The one huge downside (which cost me some time) was the complexity of using wireless mics. On two occasions I lost entire interview segments, once because I forgot to plug the XLR adapter into the camera, and a second time when I forgot to take the body pack off standby. Epic fail. I want a headphone jack on the camera to monitor the audio!

Anyway, here’s a photo of the rig perched on the camera. It’s an Azden dual-mic receiver with two XLR outputs. I ran its outputs into a BeachTek XLR-Pro adapter, which in turn has a stereo miniplug output, which works nicely with the 5D Mark II’s audio input.

Now here is a very short example of what the video looks and sounds like. It’s sampled way, way down so as not to swamp my poor server. See what you think…

I recently was asked to do some product photography for a local company who has a really cool business model. They scan and restore your photographs, whether they’re negatives, slides or prints. If they’re old, their technicians will perform a certain degree of restoration work on them. And the photos are ultimately returned to you with a CD. The service looks really cool, and they’ve recently added a Gift Box to their product offerings (that is the part I did). So check ’em out! Click here to go directly to their site, or click the banner below.

(full disclosure: I’m an “affiliate”, so I will earn a small commission if you purchase their services)

I love what I do for a living. Have I mentioned that lately?

Today’s photo shoot is for a San Francisco client who designs a line of breastfeeding products. I love these pillows. They’re so colorful and well-designed. But not exactly cooperative when it comes to sitting still on my cyc. So after rigging up a MacGyver-esque contraption to float them above the surface of the cyc (gaffer’s tape and clothes hangars are today’s ingredients), I cranked out this series of product shots.

All in a day’s work!