Brian Buckland Photography Blog

My angel is the centerfold….


A little J. Geils Band to help celebrate my centerfold in the July, 2010 issue of Parachutist.  Giddyup!  Thanks everyone in AZ for all the amazing jumps!  Can’t wait to see what you come up with for next time!

 There is a first time for everything.  This was my first time photographing a good friend of mine EJ in her new home of Charleston, SC.  Making this shoot unique, I was attempting to capture her embracing her soon to be status of motherhood.  She truly was amazing to work with and was so excited about becoming a mom that I can explain it the only way I know how, with photos.  You can see the love that she and her husband Kyle have for each other as well as their excitement about their journey into parenthood.

Best of luck guys! 

I was checking out the PD Blog the other day and couldn’t help but notice this old shot of Team Mandrin from back in 2006 when we were training at Skydive the Farm.  Good to see that Raymond’s photo is still getting some good use to announce the new PD Sponsored Teams.

Just landed on the cover again over in Italy.  90 Percent Magazine chose one of my shots from Arsenal’s AZ Challenge to be on their 23rd issue of the magazine.  Thanks 90 Percent!!!! To download and read the full PDF from this month’s issue click here.  And don’t worry, if you can’t read Italian, they print it in English too 😉

After leaving AZ I took the red eye and made it to my folks house in South Carolina.  After spending a few days catching up with them I headed up to Charleston for a photo shoot with my old teammate and his wife, Kyle & EJ.  Being 6 months pregnant she wanted to capture the moment, and I think we did just that.  Pictures to that coming soon….

That following weekend I headed up with Kyle to Chester, SC and Skydive Carolina for their annual Carolina Fest Boogie.  Going from the arid, dry desert to the humid mid Atlantic coast is a shock.   But all in all the cameras didn’t fog up until right around break off time so it was all good 😉  Tons of people turned out, a few hundred pre-registered and all of the vendors were there with bells on.  There were tube jumps, flag demos in the morning, tree landings and even a state record set as the icing on the cake!

For the full gallery, please click here.  Incidentally I’m working on a new website with a much nicer gallery and easier ways to order.  Hope to have that up and running in a few weeks.

I have to be honest, when I was contacted earlier in the year about heading to Arizona to shoot the Arizona Arsenal Sequentials, an invitational event, I was pretty stoked. It has been a while since I was up in Lodi shooting thier sequentials, so to have the opportunity to see some amazing fliers take to the skies and build some pretty cool formations, I wasn’t about to pass it up. Below are a handful of some of the shots I took during the event. To see the gallery click here. Thanks again Arsenal for making it all happen!  Looking forward to the next one!

Towards the end of last year I had a big decision to make.  After traveling around the world a few times I came to realize something that I needed to change, the pursuit of a better quality of life.  A new locale was in order and it was a toss up between Denver and Salt Lake City.  To be completely honest it was a tough choice, and I think I liked Salt Lake better than Denver.  What held me back was the smaller population and a lack of social outlets, community activities, etc…  Anyone who’s been to Denver knows that you can’t walk out your front door without stumbling over something fun to do.  With that said, I stumbled on some pictures of a hike that I took with my good friend Whitney, or as she likes to be called, Liz. 🙂  It was October and we venture up through Bell’s Canyon and caught the leaves coming down.  It might have been a gray day but some of the pictures really came out.

 

I stumbled on an old photo shoot that I did with my old teammate Dave Brown the other day.  These were taken before there was a Team Mandrin and before VRW 4-Way even existed.  Dave wanted some shots for his sponsors and away we went.  Here are a few from the archives….never been seen before….back in the day.  These were all shot in September of 2004 over CPI. 

Go Dave Go!

Hope you enjoy!

Last weekend I met up with some of my newly found Denver friends and ran up to Boulder for a little hike in Chautauqua Park near the first Flatiron Mountains.  Dogs in tow we made our way to the big arch at the end of the trail and were rewarded with a view that stretched from the foothills near Boulder to the skyline of Denver’s skyscrapers.  It was a fairly vertical 4 hour round trip hike and I could feel it.  It’s that good feeling you get when you push yourself a bit and feel the burn.  Of course my knees were feeling the pinch on the way back down, but I guess that’s what happens when you get old 😉  More please…..

 

Thanks for a great day guys!  Looking forward to the summer ahead!

When I moved into my house on a lake in Denver, one of the pluses was this peach tree in the backyard.  The property manager told me that it hadn’t produced a single peach in over 10 years.  Then just before last summer they decided to prune it and see what would happen.  It produced so many peaches that it couldn’t hold up it’s own weight resulting in one of the big branches breaking off.  I’m looking forward to seeing what happens this year and if it’s a repeat of last year.  So far it looks like a good start to a tree that wants to do what it was designed to do……

I also wanted to answer a question about ‘depth of field’.  I’ve been asked literally 3 times in the past month about it so why not explain a little bit of it here.  “How do you make part of a picture blurry and part in focus, or the whole picture in focus for that matter?”  That’s what you would call depth of field.  As I was taking pics of the peach tree I was playing with my settings a bit in order to illustrate how it works.  In the above picture the flowers on the branch in the center of the picture are in focus, almost all of them.  The shot was taken at 1/640 sec at f/6.3 about 5 feet away at 70 mm.  There are several online calculators that can help you figure out your range.  For instance the calculation for the above image being roughly 5 feet away are:

This next shot I opened up the aperture and shrunk my depth of field.  Same branch, only shot at 1/2000 sec at f/3.2 also at 70 mm.  The difference is very noticeable and you can start to see how playing with depth of field can really aid you as a photographer in getting the effect that you want in your image.

Four days later I took this shot going in the other direction.  1/60 sec at f/16 at 58 mm.

Notice that much more is in focus in this shot and you can clearly see the branches in the back ground.  The calculation for these settings are:

My range is much greater, meaning that the beginning distance from the camera that is in focus starts at 4.14 ft away and then it starts to go out of focus 6.32 ft away from the camera.  Thus giving you a depth of field that is 2.19 ft deep.

Long story short, making a very wide aperture with a fast shutter speed will give you a very shallow depth of field while making a very small aperture with a slow shutter speed will give you a very deep depth of field.

Hope that makes sense?