Well, if you didn’t know by now, I moved to Denver, Colorado a couple weeks ago. Today I finally finished cleaning and unpacking, so it’s starting to feel more like home now. I snapped the the first picture of this post at a little carnival in the parking lot across the street from my new apartment. Josi and I went down there and messed around. I wanted to play around with the new HDR Pro in Photoshop CS5 and this is what I got. Still need to mess with it more…

Anyway, the real reason for this post is to talk about a few shoots that I did before I left that I haven’t gotten around to posting about yet. I set up a few shoots before I knew I was moving that I’m going to talk about here, plus once people found out I was moving I managed to cram a couple more shoots in right before I left that I’ll talk about later.

So, before I waste any more time, let’s jump into a few shoots:

Truett and the Traitors

I decided I want to try my hand at band photography so one of my friends hooks me up with a local band they know called Truett and the Traitors. We met downtown one afternoon and created several different looks within a small area. This shoot was a real challenge for me since it was pretty bright out, I was using small strobes, and I had to light four people, so it definitely tested my skills.

For this shot we ducked inside of a shaded alley so I could shoot at a fairly reasonable f/8, but I still had to light 4 people, so I busted out my 60″ umbrella and stuck both an SB-800 and SB-600 at full power through it to get the proper exposure on the group. I purposefully left a lot of negative space at the top so the band could use this for a promo poster or something.

I had to go for my “signature” sunburst shot since the sun was so apparent in a cloudless sky, so we climbed up on the footbridge over the railroad tracks and crammed ourselves in tight for this one. I was shooting at f/18 to get the sky blue and the starburst sun effect, so I used bare strobes, one at full power to camera left for the key light and then one above the camera at 1/2 power for some on-axis fill. This is a technique I need to play with more to create images like this since I don’t see myself getting a 1200 w/s lighting setup in the near future, so it’ll be hard, bare speedlights for me for overpowering the sun for the time being.

Raluca

Once I found out my friend Raluca was leaving for Arizona I knew I had to get together with her for one last shoot before she left. We’d worked together in the past, but while I was still learning, so I wanted to shoot her one last time and deliver her some awesome pictures now that I’ve gotten much better than the first time I shot her. We headed to the top of one of the parking garages downtown and got to work.

Raluca loves her little Scion tC, so I wanted to do a shoot with her and her car. This was the first shot we did, featuring her in the foreground and her car in the background. I double-process the RAW file, once for the background and once for the foreground, and then combined them in Photoshop and did my final edits. The lighting for this shot was a single speedlight at full power camera right (just out of frame) into a white umbrella. Everything else was ambient lit.

The sun was peaking around these awesome clouds and I knew I just had to shoot into it so I stuck Raluca in front of it and lit her with a bare speedlight at full power to hit the f/22 I was shooting at. I used the pop-up flash on my D90 to try and provide a small amount of on-axis fill. Again I double processed the RAW file and combined them in Photoshop.

Next we decided to do a more suggestive shot, so we had her straddle the front of her car while I shot into the sun and clouds once again. The clouds filled up most of the sky so I could shoot at f/8, which allowed me to light Raluca with my 28″ Westcott Apollo softbox from the right. Same post-processing as before.

Once the sun was mostly down we went all out and busted out the swimsuit and shot into the nice, deep blue evening sky. I meant to have her turn her headlights on for this shot but totally forgot, so I added them in post-production. Since the sun was mostly gone I was shooting at f/4 at ISO 400, so lighting wasn’t an issue; this one was lit with a single flash into a reflective umbrella camera right at 1/4 power.

Jessica

I worked with Jessica once in the past and we decided we wanted to do another shoot together and we settled on a fitness-oriented shoot. I want to give these shots more of a commercial look to them, so I kept that in mind while I shot and edited.

A nice one-light shot with the sun peaking through the trees in the background created this shot. A little post-production and this could be a good add for either Nike or some bottled water company.

This one felt a little “senior-portraity” at first but I think we managed to pull of a nice commercial-looking image. Would be a great Nike ad, IMO. This was a 2-light setup: key light was camera left, a speedlight through a white umbrella and then a bare speedlight back camera right for a rim/hair light.

For the last shot I wanted Jessica to get wet, so I had her slowly pour her bottle of water into her mouth and all over herself. I stuck a light back camera right to imitate the sun light in order to light up the drops splashing over her and then lit her with a shoot-through umbrella from camera left. I ended up combining around 5 different exposure from this series to get the water in all of the places I wanted it. In the end it turned out pretty well, though I think it might have went a little better if I just had her pour the water on her face instead of into her mouth.

Hallway Glamour/Fashion Shoot

I wanted to try to create some fashion/glamour shots in the hallway so I had Josi practice her makeup and set up a make-shift studio in my hallway. Here is the setup shot:

I used two speedlights through my homemade diffusion panel to create a pure white background and then lit Josi from the front with a partially collapsed silver umbrella, or as Zack Arias calls it, the poor man’s softbox. Here are the results:

Not too bad for a narrow hallway and a little creativity!

So, that’s some of the stuff I was doing before I left. I still have a few more shoots to talk about that all happened the weekend before I left, so those are still to come. Some pretty good stuff though, so be watching for it!

Stay tuned as I continue my photographic adventure in beautiful Colorado…

I’ve been looking to make it to Colorado for a while now and things finally worked out and I got a job in Denver so I’m making the move. That’s why there haven’t been many posts lately. Lots to get done the last several weeks.

Hopefully once I get settled out there I can get back to shooting and posting, and hopefully take my photography to the next level with new photo opportunities. Time will tell…

In the mean time I’ve been working on a site redesign so hopefully I can get that live soon. I’ll leave you with a recent shot I did of Josi:

See ya in Colorado!

Ok, so it’s not quite the prairie, but it is a nice, little house that is secluded out in what might as well be the middle of nowhere. A few weeks ago I had the chance to come visit this quaint, little house and take some pictures for my bosses friend, Bob, who is looking to sell his house and move closer to the city. After reading some Strobist blog posts about shooting to sell your house (One-Light Real Estate Photography, Working Around the House, and How To: Use a Free Blog to Help Sell Your House) I was armed with just enough knowledge to be a little dangerous when it comes to shooting architecture so I decided to have a go at it (this is my first ever architectural shoot).

Overall I think they turned out pretty good, though I did feel limited shooting a crop-sensor camera and using 18mm as my widest setting. Ideally I would have been shooting with a full frame or something along the lines of 12-14mm on the wide for a lens (or both if I can have my cake and eat it too , but I’m trying to get over the constant desire for more gear and just make do with what I have. So for this whole shoot I used my D90, the Nikon 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5, my SB-800, and 2x SB-600s and worked them to the best of my ability.

I have a slideshow at the end of the post of all the final images from the shoot, but I wanted to share a couple of them with you and talk about shooting them.

First, the exterior.

All of the exterior shots were done with a tripod, natural light, and bracketing. I knew I wanted to deliver a mix of HDR shots and flash-lit shots, so I planned to do all of the exterior shots as HDR. The one at the beginning of the post is neat because of the solar flare, which I dig. I feel this shot has a little more character than your typical exterior shot, but I also got some regular shots of the same area, just in case. It’s important to put your own spin on every shoot, so this was my attempt at doing this.

I also really like this shot:

I love HDR sunset shots – they looks so surreal. And with this house and the large windows I wanted to catch the warm glow from the inside. Plus there’s a little flair on the light that I like.

The inside was a whole different beast. I decided to put my speedlights to work to create natural looking light with flash and try and blend it with the light coming in through the windows.

This is a good shot showing the large windows and the ambient light mixed with my flash light. I had the two SB-600s bouncing off the ceiling on camera left and then used my SB-800 on-camera for a little on-axis fill. Overall it creates a pretty pleasing look that doesn’t really look flash lit, but it creates depth to the room that wouldn’t be there using just the ambient light (in fact at the ambient exposure most of the room was in dark, dark shadow).

The other really neat thing about this house are the stairs – they are built straight into the brick. It creates a really unique look to the basement of the house, as you can see here:

This was lit similarly to the interior shot above: on-camera SB-800 fill, SB-600 lighting up the ceiling by the stairs, and another SB-600 bouncing off the ceiling for fill.

By the time I was shooting the basement my legs were so tired from sitting, shooting, getting up to adjust light placement, and repeating. I think Josi and I spent 3-4 hours there shooting and talking, so it was a long, but fun, and educational day. I learned a lot and came away with some decent shots. I could see myself doing some more of this in the future, but in order to make it a little easier, a couple more lights and a wider lens, like the Tokina 12-24mm f/4 lens (which would also rock for environmental portraits , would definitely help.

Take a look at the slideshow below for all of the shots I did of this really awesome house.

I know this happened over a month ago. I’m a slacker; sue me! Just kidding, please don’t. Anyway, I wanted to talk about the last SWMO Strobist meetup and talk about some of my plans for the next meetup.

We had our 2nd meetup on March 6, 2010 at the same studio we had the first meetup at. It was a little chilly, but with a few heaters we made it pretty comfortable and were able to have a good time. There were a lot of familiar faces there along with several new faces. Word spread to the Southwest Missouri Camera Club so we had several of there members attend as well. It was good to see the different groups working together and just having fun doing what they love: taking great pictures.

Speaking of the Southwest Missouri Camera Club, I am giving a presentation in June (June 10, 2010 to be exact, watch for details here) on lighting and off-camera flash, which should be pretty cool, assuming I can put a coherent presentation together. Wish me luck! That following weekend we are doing a field trip downtown to (hopefully) reinforce the concepts I present at the meeting. Should be exciting. I need to start putting that presentation together…

Anyway, I digress. That’s in the future and I need to finish talking about this meetup. Again, with such an awesome studio everyone was able to try many different things and get many different looks. Here is a slideshow of shots from everyone that posted to Flickr and tagged them correctly:

You can see some more of my shots from the meetup in there as well, but I wanted to go ahead and post a couple more of my favorites here:

That’s probably enough for this post. But I got several shots I really enjoyed and one that made it into my print portfolio, which is cool. All in all I’d say it was another successful meetup.

Unfortunately I think this will be the last meetup we have at this studio. I talked with David recently and he has decided to leave the studio for something different, something safer. But with every end there is a new beginning so let me briefly talk about what I want to do for the next meetup.

I’ve seen several groups do a type of Strobist scavenger hunt, so I want to do something similar. We would divide up into small teams, maybe 4-5 teams of around 5 people and we would have 1 model for every group. I would have each model placed in a specific location around the same area, within walking distance of each other, each with an assignment sheet. The groups would have no idea what each assignment sheet says, so when they get there they would have to read it, come up with a concept, and execute it as group within a limited time window, say 30 minutes per model. Then by the end of the day each shooter would have shot 5 different models and each model should have a distinct set of shots from each group. Should be fun if I can get all of the details ironed out.

I think that’s going to do it for this post. I’ve got several shots to edit from some recent shoots, plus my Chicago vacation.  Hopefully I’ll get around to doing blog posts for those as well. I’ve also got some emails to write, shoots to plan, plus there’s that sleep thing that everyone tells me is so wonderful. Maybe I’ll give that a try…

I finally got around to ordering my first portfolio this past week so I wanted to take a couple minutes and share it with everyone. I ordered a hard-cover lay-flat press book from Black River Imaging, a local imaging lab here in Springfield, Missouri. It’s 8.5×11 and 40 pages and it cost me $110.00. Not too bad for my first portfolio. Ideally I’d like to get something fancier with interchangeable pages, but since my work is fairly specific at this point I figured I could get by with this press book for now. Once I get some jobs and more work I can work on getting a more permanent portfolio but this one should be good for now. Just got to start getting it in front of people now…

Special thanks to Josi for being my page-turner in the video and my friend Mike’s old band for providing the background music. The video was shot with my Nikon D90 and Nikon 50mm f/1.8 lens and a daylight CFL for lighting. It’s not the best quality, but you get the idea. The pictures look really good in person. If you’d like to see it in person, shoot me an email at photo AT mattdewitt DOT com or give me a call at 417-379-9500.

Let me know what you think!

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!

What kind of things do I like to shoot? Well, let’s start off by taking a look at some of my favorite images on Flickr:

One of the things several people have suggested you do when trying to define your style is to go through magazines and pull out your favorite images and see what they have in common. Find things that inspire you. So I did that with Flickr since there are tens of thousands of images to choose from. After going through my favorites I noticed several things in common with a majority of the images that stood out to me:

• portraits
• interesting locations/environments
• interesting lighting, both natural and artificial
• strong contrast, both in colors and from light to dark
• medium to high amounts of post-processing

Now, not every image meets all of the above criteria, but a majority of the images meet a majority of the things I listed above. So now I know what images I find compelling, I can break that down into a statement about the work that I want to shoot and show:

I’m a portrait photographer that shoots people juxtaposed to interesting locations and environments by utilizing light, both natural and artificial, to create contrasts in both light and color. I use post-processing to enhance these contrasts and to help realize my vision for the images I create.

It’s a work in progress, but you get the idea. That statement is a fairly accurate representation of the images that excite me and of the images I want to create. Hopefully you see this theme throughout many of the images that I have shot and shared with you on Flickr:

It’s not perfect representation of what I said I want to shoot, especially at the beginning of the set, but I feel that my more recent images are all starting to lean towards that central vision I want to adopt for my work. And yes, there is some studio work in there as well, which negates the interesting locations/environments portion of my vision statement, but shooting in the studio can really allow me to bring out my other talents, especially in the lighting and post-production departments.

Time and time again you here that you cannot market yourself until you know exactly what it is you want to shoot and be known for. If you don’t shoot and promote that work then you’ll be known for shooting that type of work, which will keep you from reaching your goals. I know I don’t want to shoot weddings, kids, maternity shots, etc. I want to shoot interesting shots of people, in interesting or relevant environments, that can be used to tell a story, or create a story or interest in a particular subject. Ultimately I’d like to shoot higher-end commercial and editorial type work, stuff like Joe McNally or Douglas Sonders shoots.

While we are on that subject I want to mention some photographers that I really admire. Photographer’s work who inspires me and makes me want to reach their level of ability and success. I already mentioned two:

• Joe McNally
• Douglas Sonders

But there are several others who’s work I really admire (in no particular order):

• Joey Lawrence
• Jeremy Cowart
• Dustin Snipes
• Zack Arias
• David Hobby

And that’s just scratching the surface. There are so many photographers out there that have amazing work that inspire me. But each one of them has photos that share part or all of my vision of what I want to shoot that attracts me to them. McNally’s use of light, color, and the environment. Sonder’s and Joey L’s use of light and post-processing. Hobby’s use of light and the environment. Each one of them shoots in a way that I strive to shoot and just by studying their work I’m learning more and more about what I like and don’t like. And, if I ever had the chance, I would LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the ability to learn from them in person, to meet with them and pick their brains about the hows and whys of what they shoot. And, if I could ever be so lucky, I would drop just about anything I had going on for a chance to work with them, to be their assistant (or whatever they needed), whether it be for a day, month, year, or longer. They all inspire me and would love to be able to work with them.

What/who inspires you? What’s your vision for your photography? What do YOU want to shoot?

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…