For a while now I’ve had this idea to do a shoot with a girl dressed up all cute and sexy playing video games – maybe it’s because I’m a big nerd at heart or maybe it’s because I thought lots of guys would love the images. For whatever reason, I was determined to do this shoot, and then I finally found the right girl on Model Mayhem – she was cute and nerdy, so it was perfect. After some back and forth we finally settled on a date for the shoot, but we didn’t know where we were going to shoot yet. Then she had this great idea…

Here in Springfield there is this neat little arcade downtown called 1984, which is owned by a bunch of friends that had collected several vintage arcade machines over the years that decided to open up a place, charge a cover, and let people have free reign over these classic games like 1942, Pac-Man, and Spy Hunter. She suggested that we contact the owner and see if he would be willing to let us shoot there.  I figured it was a long shot, but I gave him a call and he was more than happy to let us shoot there. In fact, he was pretty cool overall after we met him the night of the shoot.

We had the place to ourselves because we shot there on one of the nights where they aren’t open, so it was perfect. The owner, Devin, went out of his way to make the shoot happen and to make it fun. He gave our model the “I’m to sexy for my bow” shirt seen in the first shot to wear for the shoot and let her keep it afterwards. He helped us turn on the machines and let us shoot whatever we want, wherever we want. He even busted out his camera and shot some behind-the-scenes footage of us doing our thing, which was cool. All of that in exchange for some prints, which I happily ordered for him and personally delivered to Devin, along with our model, Jessica (along with some business cards featuring one of the images from the shoot to hand out).

The shot above is the shot I used for the business cards.

I’ll talk briefly about my lighting setup for these shots and work my way down the post.

The first shot was actually the last one we did, and the most complicated. It was a three-light setup with a Nikon SB-800 behind the camera into my 60″ umbrella for some fill, a Nikon SB-600 camera right through a white umbrella for the main light, and a Nikon SB-600 bare to cast some light on the first on the wall (and it blew out the side of the register, which I should have caught). Pretty much all of these shots had some slower shutter speeds and higher ISOs to let some of the ambient arcade machine light bleed into the image.

The second shot was a single light into a collapsed silver umbrella on camera left – I love the reflection it created, but at the same time I wish I would have had a polarizing filter to kill the reflection and see more of the pinball machine.  The third shot is the exact same setup, just a different pose/composition combination.

These next two shots were a two-light cross light setup, with the SB-800 clamped to one of the machines through a Lumiquest SBIII camera right and an SB-600 with a Honl grid back camera left from some rim/seperation.

The last shot I’m going to talk about was actually the first one we did. I stuck her into this old Star Wars arcade machine and added some fill from the top via a clamped SB-600 into a silver umbrella and then I stuck the SB-800 through the Lumiquest SBIII for the key light:

The idea was to look like she was being lit from the machine itself – I think it works pretty well.

I think this shoot turned out really well and I’d like to do a follow-up session with her that’s more home and console oriented.  I’ve got some cool ideas for that shoot as well.

I hope you guys enjoyed this one as much as I did shooting it!

Happy Valentine’s Day! I’m going to keep this post pretty brief because it’s keeping me from spending time with my girlfriend, Josi, but I wanted to take a few minutes and share a couple of pictures from a recent session I did with Josi’s friend, Wing.

We decided to head downtown at night to get some cool urban night shots, which is cool, but the bad part about this was the fact that it was freezing out. Since it was so cold, and since we were shooting at night, I decided to stick with my 50mm f/1.8 for low-light shooting and a single light stand with a Nikon SB-600 and a Westcott 28″ Apollo softbox. I didn’t want to lug around a bunch of gear in the cold, so I kept it simple and made what I brought with me work.

We started with a fun kissy-face shot, above, and then moved on to a couple shot as Wing’s boyfriend came along for moral support. Here they are in the doorway of this cool old building downtown:

He’s quite a bit taller than her, which made it hard to get a good shot of them together, but I think this one turned out pretty well.

After that we headed to the top of one of the parking garages downtown (as seen in this post) to finish up and I snapped another, sexier, kissy-face shot of Wing in a nice evening dress:

At this point we both had had enough of the cold and decided to call it quits for the evening, but not before I snapped over 200 shots, which was way more than I had anticipated shooting. I’ve got a few others I’ll share as I get them edited.

I’ve also got another shoot coming up this week that I’m excited about. Hopefully I can get everything edited by next Sunday so that I can share them with you then. I think you’ll like them.

Man, I gotta stop going so long between posts. I’ve been busy though, so at least that’s something. Busy shooting and editing the shots from this post and busy working on stuff for my business. I won’t bore you with all the business details like fictitious name registration, sales tax licenses, business licenses, checking accounts, etc., but I will talk a little about the recent St. Louis Strobist Meetup I attended towards the end of January.

I blogged about this time last year about attending the meetup up in St. Louis and decided to go again this year. Everyone I met and worked with last time was great, so it was a no brainer to go do it again. We shot in the same warehouse as last year, so I knew going in that I didn’t have a lot to work with, environment wise, so I decided to spice it up this year by bringing a smoke machine and really pushing my lighting skills to the limit and then coming back and pushing my post-processing techniques even further.

So, let’s talk about the image at the top of the post first, since I really like it and apparently lots of other people do (according to Flickr and Facebook). It really is a shining example of great lighting and even better post-processing. I knew I wanted some hard edge/rim light so I used two SB-600′s with Honl Grids on camera left and right to edge and rim Lauren out.  I spent a while adjusting these so they were lighting her where I wanted and once I got those done I brought in an SB-900 front camera right in my Westcott Apollo softbox for the key light.  Once I had everything set up I’d just have Lauren do a few pushups and fire the smoke machine, shoot a few frames, and repeat.  I got several shots from this setup that I liked, but the one above really stood out as being the best of the bunch.

The post-processing was my spin on Scott Kelby‘s Extended Definition Processing (see his tutorial on the NAPP website here). I modified it a little to suit my tastes, threw in some skin softening via the Joel Grimes Skin Retouching tutorial, and played with a few layer masks and called it good. I got such good reception from this photo that I’m thinking about doing a tutorial on the whole process in the near future.

While I had that hard/edgy light set up I just raised it up to shoot a couple of quick portraits using it of George, above, and his wife, Christy, below.

I post-processed these shots in a very similar manner to the one at the top of this post of Lauren. It’s definitely a look I dig and I’ll be trying to do more of it in the future.

There was also a couple of bands there for us to shoot, and since I’d never shot a band I had to give it a try. I grabbed these four guys from the band Brown Bottle Fever and shoved them into this tight garage space and went to town lighting them. Lighting four guys evenly in a tight space is no easy feat!

I ended up using four lights for this shot: a gridded SB-600 back left, an SB-900 with the dome diffuser behind the band, another gridded SB-600 camera right, and finally, an SB-800 into a homemade beauty dish for the main light on camera right.  It still didn’t look very good SooC, so I played around with it a bunch in Photoshop and came up with the shot above.  It’s ok. I definitely need more small group practice – I guess I need to find some local bands in need of press kit material.

Lastly I decided to try some tighter beauty style shots with Brandy. For these type of shots I should have shot with a smaller aperture, say f/11-ish, but I decided to be crazy and shoot this one at f/4, just for the fun of it. I miss the detail, but I like the shallow depth of field, so it works out ok. I used the same Joel Grimes skin softening technique mentioned above on this shot. I really like this technique and will be using it for all of my skin softening in the future.

That’s about it for this post. You can see some more shots I did of the meetup on my Flickr by clicking here and you can also see everyone’s shots from the meetup here.  Make sure you check them out as there is a lot of good talent and creativity flowing up in St. Louis. Hopefully I can get another local meetup going in the near future as driving 7 hours in one day isn’t fun, even though I did have lots of fun once I got there.

Stay tuned for more!

I’ve seen several shots like this recently and I liked the idea so I decided to give it a try myself. The latest one I saw that I really liked was shot by one of my favorite photographer’s, Douglas Sonders, where he shot the cover for Independent Banker Magazine. After thinking about how I wanted mine to look I headed out this afternoon with Josi to make it happen.

I wanted to do something similar to Douglas’ shot, with the clouds in the background, but unfortunately for us we had a pretty overcast sky with just a little bit of defined clouds in the sky. Lucky for me I got a decent shot of them before they broke up while I was getting my base exposure set up, so then I just had to tweak it and drop it into my final shots. It was cloudy and overcast, but that didn’t really help my exposure out – I ended up shooting at 1/200th at f/8 at ISO 100 to get the definition in the clouds that I wanted, so that meant my flashes were going to have to work harder than usual. And, once I had my camera setup on the tripod the clouds began to break up and move leaving me with a pretty uninteresting background.

I ended up using a two-light, cross light setup for this shot. My key light was the SB-800 at full power camera right into my new 43″ while umbrella (the old one had seen much better days) and for a slight rim light I used the SB-600 at 1/2 power through a Honl grid. Here is the setup shot:

There was quite a bit of Photoshop involved with creating the final image, and there is definitely much room more improvement. I really need to work on my masking and compositing skills. Regardless of that, I think I did a decent job. I took the shot of the clouds and edited it to be bluer and boosted its contrast and clarity to make it very well defined to use as the backgrounds. I stuck the shot of me holding the camera on top of it and did my best to mask away the crappy sky in order to reveal the good sky. After I got that done I moved on the the portrait itself.

I used the same cloudy background for the portrait and masked away the crappy background once again. Then I did my usual retouching, skin softening, sharpening, and soft light/high pass layers until I got the portrait looking good. I then made a new copy of the finished portrait and resized it to fit over the screen of the iPhone. I finished the whole thing up with a curves layer in Photoshop and them some slight warming and vignetting in Lightroom.

There’s definitely room to improve, especially in the masking part of composites. I’ll continue to practice and hopefully get better at it. Practice, practice, practice.

I also did one of Josi while we were out:

She wasn’t too happy to be out because it was a little chilly, but she’s a trooper for helping me anyway. Thanks, Josi!

That’s it for this week. Until next time…

Sorry this one is so late, but I have a good excuse this time. Sunday was my grandpa’s funeral, so I was on a last-minute flight to Colorado on Friday and wrapped up in the sadness and togetherness of the family while I was there so taking my weekly picture was the last thing on my mind. I did snap this photo from my iPhone at the funeral though if it makes you feel any better: http://bestc.am/Ke5

He was a great grandpa and he will be missed. I’ve been telling everyone that “he’s the grandpa that every little kid growing up should have.”

I want to shoot something in the near future in his honor and get some prints made and send them to the family, but I’m not sure what exactly to shoot yet, but once I figure it out you will know about it.

Since everyone was sad all weekend we tried to keep some humor going as much as we could and one of the running jokes was how we are all feeling “dark and cold” (aka emo LOL) inside, so I decided to shoot a few shots tonight depicting that feeling, especially since I’m still feeling the sadness of grandpa being gone.

I used a simple one-light setup that I read about over at the Lighting Essentials blog – a single flash through a white umbrella off to one side to create the shadow and then a fill card on the other side to open the shadows up a little. I fired off a few shots before my roommate had to leave, which meant I had to move all of my stuff away from the garage door.

When starting the setup I had this dark, noir, black and white theme in mind, and every time I think about shoots like that I think smoke and cigarettes, so I wanted to try and incorporate that into my shot somehow, even though I don’t smoke.

Luckily there were some laying around from one of my friends, so I lit one and fired off like three shots before I couldn’t take it any more and put it out. I’ve been coughing ever since LOL. The smoke didn’t show up (because I was shooting against white, stupid me), but I liked the feel of the shot anyway. It definitely does the “dark and cold” feeling some justice.

Here is the setup shot:

I have another noir-themed shot coming up in the future, so hopefully I can play with the dark, moody light again soon!

That’s it for tonight – just didn’t want to get behind on my project. I should definitely be able to get out and shoot some this weekend since it’s warming up here a little (going from 8 F to 40 F feels like a heat wave at this point LOL).

We got a decent amount of snow this weekend (3-4″) in Springfield, so I decided to take my roommate’s dog, Sylar, out back and play with him in the snow and try to capture the magic that is Sylar running around like a fool with my camera at the same time. He’s a one year old Siberian Husky, so the cold and snow are nothing to him, but it was a little much for, so I bundled up and headed out with just my 50mm f/1.8 (so I didn’t have to worry about zooming), set it on aperture-preferred mode at f/5.6, +0.7 EV (b/c I knew the camera would try to underexpose all of the white) and on continuous focus (because Sylar doesn’t stand still when playing is involved) and snapped off several pictures before I got too cold and wen’t back inside.

The shot above was taken after I successfully managed to steal Sylar’s duck away (not an easy task) and he actually sat still long enough for me to take a decent portrait of him. Usually when I have his toy he looks more like this:

Ready to pounce or run as soon as the toy leaves my hand. Most of the time he has his toy though (in this case, the duck):

He’s playing with it, but he’s got his eye on you and he’s ready to take off the moment you get too close:

And then it’s rinse and repeat: get away, lay down, run! He’s fun though, and you can tell he loves the snow – it’s like he was bred to love it or something.

Hope everyone is having a great 2010 so far. If you’re some place where it’s cold and snowy, stay warm, and most of all, stay safe. And if you’re someplace where it’s warm and sunny, then we should be friends and you should invite me to come visit.

I know it’s a few days late, but I’ve been traveling and settling back in after the Holidays. I snapped this on one of my last days in Colorado – I’ve been wanting to do some more HDR as I really like the way the images look, even if they are way overdone (to a certain extent), hell, HDR is one of the reasons I picked up photography initially, so I decided to give one a shot.

The sunsets over the mountains in Colorado are beautiful – maybe someday I’ll be able to live there again.  I wanted this shot to have it all: trees, grass, snow, mountains, sky, solar flare – I could do without the road in the mid-ground, but oh well. I put my camera on Aperture mode and bracketed it at 3 shots: -2, 0, +2 at f/22 and fired away on a tripod.  As a side note, shooting at f/22 lets you see all of the dust spots on your lens/sensor

I did the tonemapping in Photomatix and did some clean-up and enhancing in Photoshop. It’s not great, but at least it gets me thinking in the HDR mindset, so perhaps I’ll have more of them to share with you in the future.

Hope everyone had a Merry Christmas (or the holiday of your choice) and I hope you’re ready for 2010! I’ve got a few things in the works that I’ll keep you posted on as they develop. I’ll leave you with a couple for fortunes I tweeted this morning that I’ve been saving as motivation for things to come:

Ahh, Colorado, how I miss you some times.  Josi and I are here in Fort Collins visiting my family for Christmas – it’s a much needed vacation for me and it could possibly be Josi’s last American Christmas, so I had here come home with me so she could spend it with my family and I.  We got here on Friday and have just been taking it easy the last few days. We went to visit my grandpa in the hospital (he’s home now though, yay!), wrapped some presents, and watch lots of movies already. Josi has been wanting to take some snow pictures for a while now and since there is a little snow still left on the ground we decided to head out this afternoon to see what kind of pictures we could take.

I really wanted to get a little higher up so we could get some mountains in the background so we headed over to an elevated railroad track near my house to start out our adventure.  And it sure felt like an adventure with the climbing we did to get up there – traversing snow, ice, and lots of mud. We made it up and started to set up for our first shot:

This picture pretty much has it all: a beautiful girl, snow, mountains, some solar flare.  A little bit of post in Lightroom really made this shot pop. Since the sun was still high and bright we were shooting at fairly small apertures – f/16 here (based on the rule of full sun exposure = f/16 @ 1/ISO) – so we had to use a lot of flash power to get a good exposure on Josi.  I set up my SB-800 on a stand and then super-clamped an SB-600 to the stand and had them both firing into a silver umbrella just barely out of frame camera right to get a decent exposure on Josi.  After I shot a few shots of here she snapped a few of me and then we moved on to a new pose:

This shot was mostly for me to play with some high-speed sync.  Since I already had two flashes set up I figured I could push a little power and bumped my shutter speed up to 1/2000 of a second which gave me a working aperture of around f/2.8 using high-speed sync. Josi was cross-lit between the flashes and the sun, but it doesn’t look unnatural because of the angles of the light.  She doesn’t look so happy in the picture, but I was pretty happy because I got to try out high-speed sync and was pretty happy with the results.

After we were done up here we packed up and headed closer to the foothills for sunset.  We found this nice little trail and hiking area not too far from my parent’s house so we stopped there to finish up our first Colorado photography expedition.  We walked a little down the trail and stopped where we found a good shooting spot on either side of the trail.  The first shot we did there was this:

We still had a good amount of sun coming from camera left and I didn’t want to ruin that with flash so I just used a single, bare SB-800 off to camera right zoomed into 105mm just to give a little kick that matched the ambient sun exposure.  It created some harsh shadows, but since I wasn’t doing a close up I figured it would be ok.  You can see the base of the foothills in the background and the late afternoon sun adds a nice glow to the snow and the tall grass in the background.

We finished up with the shot at the beginning of the post – my favorite from the day.  This shot was done similar to the first shot of the day – overpowering the sun with two full power flashes off to camera right.  I just played around with the composition until I got the sun in a spot that I liked and snapped a few shots and we called it a day.

I didn’t use any Photoshop on these – it was all done in Lightroom.  Lately I feel like I’ve been spending too much time in Photoshop, so for these I decided to take a step back and focus more on the images themselves rather than the post-production.

We’re supposed to get some snow in the next few days so hopefully we can get out and play in the snow and take some pictures.  In the mean time, check out a few shots that Josi got of me during out outing today:

Make sure you check out the rest of her Flickr Photostream too – she’s got some nice shots there (probably because I’m such a wonderful teacher :-p).

Have a safe and Happy Holidays, everyone!

Here is the first setup:

I wanted to try using a gridded flash for on-axis fill to see what kind of quality of light it would give me.  Nothing to write home about is what I found. I’d really like to get a ring flash adapter to play with (like the Orbis) and I was hoping the gridded light would give me a similar result, but it didn’t. Now, I don’t have a ring flash to compare it to, so this is just me guessing.  Here is the final shot:

It almost has that ring-light shadow quality to it, but not quite.  For the key light I used the Lumiquest SBIII – small, but soft.  It kind of reminds me of a beauty dish – not soft but not hard.  It was pretty close to me on camera right and high – you can tell by the shadow on my nose.  Not a bad portrait (well, except for the subject) and easy to set up.  I want to try a variation on this setup with the grid light being 1/3 to 1/2 stop above the key light (instead of the 1/2 to full stop below the key as it is here) which is supposed to be a good look for female portraits – helps to hide wrinkles and blemishes.

The next setup I tried is a pretty standard setup – gridded light for the background along with a high key light with a reflector for fill.  Here is the setup:

Same to flashes and modifiers, just changed the positions a little.  The gridded light moved to the background light and the SBIII key light was lowered and feathered away some.  I also added in a hand-held reflector to add some fill to the semi-harsh shadows created by the SBIII.  I just held it in my hands and angled it up towards my face as I was shooting.  Multi-tasking at its finest!  Here is the result:

I positioned the key light in a way that it would create those deep shadows in my eyes to try and create a little mystery and drama.  The background light was a little lower than I wanted it to be, but it still worked for this shot.  The halo is supposed to be around my head I suppose, but whatever. It’s hard when you’re shooting yourself and you can’t see what’s going on without getting up after every shot and checking.

I also messed around with some different Photoshop techniques.  The second shot has my usual workflow applied whereas the first shot used some techniques I picked up from watching Joey L‘s first DVD.  Now if I could only get my hands on his new DVD, Sessions with Joey L…

Look at me! I’m all white and pasty and emotionless. Ladies please, one at a time.  If you couldn’t tell, I’m not a fan of the series. I finally broke down and watched the first one this holiday weekend and I can’t see what all the fuss is about. I just don’t understand is what many girls have told me when I ask.  Oh well.  I don’t have to understand to know that it’s crap! But despite my loathing of the series, I am kind of a fan of the promotional materials that Joey L. shot for the first movie; and of Joey’s work overall. So while I was driving home from filming some clips for my entry into the Nikon Festival I decided to pull of into a wooded area and shoot a quick self-portrait to try and make myself look all vampirey.

I’ve heard/read interviews with Joey about shooting the Twilight campaign and he said he used something like 10 lights.  Wow – I don’t have 10 lights, so I just made due with the two that I do have.  I wasn’t out to try and exactly replicate Joey’s awesome work (I wish it was that easy) – I just wanted something kind of close that I could play with in Photoshop.

On my way home I just turned down a side road where I would have easy access to a wooded area from the road and parked my car and started pulling equipment out of my trunk.  I went with a two-light, cross-light setup for this shot.  For my main light I used my Westcott Apollo 28″ softbox with my SB-800 on camera right.  My camera metered the scene at 1/80 at f/4 at ISO 100, so I underexposed by 1 1/3 stop and boosted my key light to 1/4 power which brought the key light up to around f/5.6 – giving me some brightness and glow over the ambient.  I used the underexposed ambient as a fill light and then brought in the SB-600 on camera left for some side lighting.  I wanted this one harsher, so I left it bare and zoomed it to 85mm.  I probably should have used a grid, but it was chilly outside, and I hate the cold.  I dropped the power on this one to 1/16 to be about 1/3 to 1/2 stop under my key light.

Here is the setup shot:

Make sure you view it larger to read the labels.

From setup to teardown it might have taken me 15 minutes tops to get the shot.  Not too shabby.  Then it was home to watch some football and after that I edited this shot and now I’m writing this blog post for all of you!

Total Photoshop time was about 45 minutes I’ll say.  I’ve gotten pretty good at editing portraits in a style that I like, which is good.  Just to give you an idea of what all was done, here is the before shot with very little editing, just some minor Lightroom adjustments:

Here is a quick rundown of the edits I did, starting from the bottom of my layers palette working up. Removed the branch coming out of my head, cleaned up my skin (because it looks awful always), brightened the eyes.  Merge the layers and then liquify the get rid of my belly.  Darken the background some using a Curves adjustment layer.  Softened the skin with Nik Color Efex Pro.  Used some Luminosity Masks to boost the highlights and shadows.  Merged all of that into a new layer, sharpened the layer then duplicated it.  Desaturated the duplicate and set the blend mode to Soft Light.  Ran the High Pass filter on that layer and dropped the opacity to lessen the effect.  Then I made some final Curves and Hue/Saturation adjustments layers and finished it off with a vignette in Lightroom.  There you have it – the cliff notes version of my editing workflow.

I have a few shot ideas lined up for the next few weeks and then I’ll be heading to Colorado for the holidays, so hopefully I can get some sweet shots of mountains and snow while I’m out there.  Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving – bring on Christmas!