Holy crap, a new blog post! I know it’s been a while. What can I say; winter is killer for my motivation, plus the amount of shooting going on is pretty minimal. But, at least I’m finally writing about this shoot I did back in October…

This is the second shoot I did with Stacy (read about the first here). We headed out to a part of town that she used to ride her horse around, so we got lots of nice, country-feeling shots, which are way different than the fitness shots we did the first time.

I love using the environment as an interesting compositional element, like the grass is here. Combine that with a shallow depth of field and it creates a nice, interesting portrait. The sun was already going down for this shot, so I threw a warming CTO gel on a bare flash and used to create that late afternoon rim light around Stacy in the shot above. Once I got that looking nice I just added an umbrella for the key light on camera right and that’s it. Pretty simple setup that creates a nice, interesting portrait of Stacy laying in the grass.

Stacy was a trooper too, because right before this shot was taken one of those blades of grass poked her in the eye. You can’t tell at all!

There was this really neat looking shed where we were shooting so I had Stacy climb up and chill on these wooden things. Again, since the sun was mostly down at this point, I used my bare speedlight back camera left with a full CTO gel on it to create some late evening sun on Stacy and to create some interesting light and shadows on the shed behind her. For the key light I used a shoot through umbrella camera right with either a 1/4 or 1/2 CTO gel on it to create some more warmth in the picture.

We ended the shoot with Stacy in biker mode:

Ended up using the same lighting setup for this shot as the other two: fake sun rim light and umbrella key light. If it’s not broke, right?

Was a pretty fun shoot; Stacy is awesome to work with. Can’t wait to do another one with her, which will hopefully be soon…

Before we jump in I just wanted to point out that my website is back up and running on a new host and running on a popular framework, which should alleviate some problems with the crappy PHP code I wrote for my initial design. http://photo.mattdewitt.com

Ok, back to the shoot. This past fall I drove down to Colorado Springs again to meet Carissa to do the second of four shoots we had planned for our Master of the Elements series. Make sure you check out the Master of the Elements: Water shoot if you haven’t seen it yet.

For the Earth shoot we wanted to do some rock climbing and have lots of mud and earth tones/colors to convey the theme of mastering the Earth, so we hit up one of the state parks down in Colorado Springs. The shot above was a very happy accident while I was getting set up; there was no flash at all, just natural light. I really liked the look so I edited like all my other shots and it turned out pretty good.

The “hero” shot for this series ended up being this shot:

Everything turned out really well for this one. Since we were climbing all over the rocks while shooting I kept my lighting gear really simple: a single flash on a stand with a Lumiquest SBIII. Josi was with me climbing around and pointing the light wherever I needed it, and by sticking with a simple light setup it was easier for her to climb and hold the light quickly. For this shot it was high camera left at 1/2 power to help balance out the rim light created by the sun behind the model on camera right.

Carissa’s boyfriend had a great time throwing all of that mud on her. I brought a gallon of water and bowl and we just scooped up some dirt and mixed our own mud right before we started shooting. It worked out pretty well.

I ended up grabbing a tighter portrait of Carissa while she was all covered in mud that I really liked:

Same lighting as before: sun as a rim light and the SBIII as the key light.

I’m sure she headed home and took like three showers to get rid of all the mud, but it was totally worth it as we got some awesome shots and finished another chapter in our four-part series.

Watch for a post soon on the Wind chapter, and the hopefully shortly after that, the Fire chapter. Wind and Fire are both composites; Wind is already done and I’m just trying to finalize my idea for Fire before knocking that out…

This is Stacy. I did this shoot back in August and I’m just now blogging about it, so shoot me! Anyway, Stacy has a great story to tell. Here is a small excerpt from her website:

If you would have told me a year ago that within the next 12 months I would lose 55lbs, compete and place in a fitness competition, become a spokesmodel, then travel to different states to go on TV and tell my story,  and have commercials nationwide, I would have laughed in your face… maybe even thought it was a cruel joke.

You can read the rest of her story here.

I came across Stacy’s profile on ModelMayhem right after I moved here and she definitely had a fitness look to her so I sent her a message and then didn’t hear anything, until a few weeks later when she finally got back to me. We set up a shoot at one of the gyms where she works and had a lot of fun working together to create lots of different images.

I’ve worked with Stacy since this first shoot and she’s great to work with; laid back, fun, open to lots of ideas. Watch for a blog post in the future (whenever I get around to posting it) about the second shoot we did.

But first, let me share a few of my favorite pictures from our first shoot. We ended up doing a combination of both fitness and sexy; the shot above being very fitness-oriented. My typical sport/fitness lighting: to bare rim lights and a soft main light, some fancy Photoshop work and voila, the shot you see at the top of this post.

Like I said, we also did some sexier pictures; since we were shooting at a gym there was a room full of mirrors and I wanted to take advantage of that. Aside from making the lighting terribly difficult to work with the mirrors ended up giving us a pretty sweet shot:

This was just two lights, one on each side, one with an umbrella and one with a softbox.

After doing the safer shots we decided to have a little fun with water. Now, I can’t take credit for this next shot; I got the idea from this shot on Flickr by Ender Nguyen. Ever since I saw that shot I wanted to recreate something similar, and Stacy was willing so we made it happen:

I set the lights up (an umbrella for on axis fill and a grid spot for the key) and then had Stacy run into the shower and get wet and then come back out. I shoot this on my portable 5×7 black/white background and then added the rain later in Photoshop. It turned out pretty well; though I could have done a little better job on the rain splashes.

Once Stacy had enough of the cold water and running back and forth we wrapped up our shoot pretty quickly after that, but not before shooting this one real quick:

This was just done against a white wall with the same setup as before: umbrella fill and gridded key.

There were a lot more great shots from this shoot, but these are some of my favorites. I have lots more from our second shoot to share with you (hopefully) soon.

Stacy and I are also working on putting together a very cool themed third shoot that I will share at some point. Stay tuned for more!

About a month ago I was reading David E. Jackson‘s blog and came across a Halloween shoot that he did called “Murder 101” and it got my gears turning. So I decided I would put together a Halloween-themed shoot for this Halloween, loosely based around My Bloody Valentine. I was going for a typical horror movie theme; my first instinct was to get a couple and put them some place they shouldn’t be, trying to mess around and have some fun, and then get them killed by a psycho killer.

I did all my planning around that theme; I got a model I’d worked with before and her boyfriend to come up to be my couple, I got my brother to play the killer, and I ordered props and costume pieces. One of my coworkers even took my girlfriend and I off-roading up in the mountains to check out some abandoned mines and ghost towns. Everything was coming together nicely for an awesome Halloween shoot. I was even going to shoot an awesome BTS video of everything.

Then it all started to fall apart at the last minute. My couple ended up not making up due to the flu, so I had to try and recast my couple. With no luck I finally talked my girlfriend Josi into filling in for the couple, which caused me to have to change my story some; instead of a couple being where they weren’t supposed to be I ended up going with a girl breaking down while driving through the mountain. So now I didn’t really have an assistant to help and shoot BTS footage, but it was ok because I was back on track to shoot some sweet Halloween pictures.

Then we got up to our ghost town shooting location. It was about 34 degrees F and super windy. Great. No assistant and lots of wind meant trouble for my gear. Not to mention Josi and I were hardly dressed for almost freezing weather. But, we were already up there, so we decided to tough it out and make some pictures. Here’s what we got:

The girl checks out her car, the killer lurking in the background.

The killer attacks the girl; she pleads for her life.

The girl runs and hides, but is quickly found by the killer.

Thrown to the ground again, the girl nearly avoids her demise.

The girl escapes and runs, but the killer is close behind.

The girl gets back in her car, but she can’t escape fast enough.

On the ground one last time, the girl realizes what is about to happen.

The last thing the girl sees…

So there you have it, my Halloween 2010 shoot. The lighting was pretty run and gun as we were battling the cold, so I don’t have specifics. And, since I didn’t get to spend as much time in-camera creating these shots, I decided to use Photoshop and textures to try and tie the shots together and make them look a little creepier. I know Photoshop isn’t the solution to crappy photographer, but I really wanted to make something out of this shoot, and this is what I came up with.

Special thanks to my girlfriend, Josi, and my brother, Nick, for helping me out with this shoot. I hope you like it. Happy Halloween!

Shortly after I moved to Colorado I came across Denise, a fitness model here in Denver, who wanted some new swimsuit shots (I think there was an ex-boyfriend to make jealous as well , so I was happy to help out. I wanted the shots to have a beach/ocean feel to them so we ended up shooting at Cherry Creek State Park in Denver, which was happy to give us the look we wanted.

We ended up shooting while it was fairly bright out, which, like always, poses problems for small flash shooters like myself. For the shot above, Denise was probably 10-15 feet out in the water while I was shooting from the beach. I was shooting at f/8, which at that distance is tough for modified small flashes, so I just went bare flash on this one, held by her son on camera left at 1/2 power. I had him hold it vertically, to get some more light on her, and I made sure he held it at such an angle to not create ugly, harsh shadows. The sun on camera right added a nice, warm rim light.

As a side note, I’d just like to mention that if you are shooting on a beach, wear flip flops and shorts, not jeans and tennis shoes; otherwise you’ll come home all dirty and wet. I learned that the hard way…

After we had our fun playing in the water we took to the beach:

The sun was starting to set behind the ridge, and being the sucker that I am for shooting into the sun, I couldn’t resist. At least now that we were back on the beach I could get my light fairly close, so I shot through a white umbrella for this shot, which was high camera left. The beach was fairly busy with boat traffic that had to be edited out, along with cleaning up some trash from the beach.

After I had my share of getting dirty on the beach I had Denise take a turn and lay down:

This time I decided to milk the sun and create some flare, so I shot at f/18, which gave us a nice flare, and darkened the beach up nicely, which really helped create the illusion of a beach sunset, even though it was still fairly bright out. At f/18 bare flash is the only way to go, so I had her son hold the flush up again, bare and high camera left to create some nice light on Denise and the beach surrounding her. From my shooting position most hard shadows are avoided, as they are cast where the camera can’t see.

The sun went down pretty fast after this, so we packed up and headed out. Denise has lots of experience and was great to work with and I think we ended up with some really awesome shots. Hopefully we can collaborate again in the future…

After I made the move to Colorado I came across a local photographer, Rob Hammer, who’s work I admired. While looking through some of his images I saw a model that lived down in Colorado Springs that I thought would be awesome to do a series with. Meet Carissa, a fitness model who is awesome to work with. After talking back and forth for a while we decided to do a 4-part series called “Master of the Elements” where we take Carissa and put her in environment related to the four elements: earth, wind, water, fire (think Captain Planet, without the useless “Heart” element). I wanted the shoots to have a fitness feel, but still have some amount of sexiness to them.

The first shot we decided to do was the water shot, and Carissa knew of this pretty cool waterfall down in Colorado Springs called Graffiti Falls that we decided to shoot at. My idea for the water shoot was a very cool image featuring Carissa waist deep in the water looking fit and sexy. That was no problem  for Carissa, but the rest of the shoot provided some hurdles to overcome.

First, the water was very brown, due to lots of rain we got got ever the weekend – which really takes away from the coolness I wanted to depict. I shifted my white balance to Tungsten to get me some of the way there, but it didn’t help much. That’s ok, it can be fixed in post processing. The second issue was that Carissa had to get awfully close to the waterfall to be waist deep, even when kneeling, and I wasn’t comfortable getting that close with my equipment, so I had to shoot from pretty far back, which created more problems.

Since I wasn’t willing to take my flashes close to Carissa (I’ve had issue with water and flashes in the past) I had to keep it close to me, which was a good 50-100ft from the model, meaning I couldn’t use any modifiers, so I had to shoot bare, full zoom flash, with a full CTO gel to help compensate for the Tungsten white balance, and even then I was shooting at full power to get enough light to Carissa as it was fairly bright out so I was shooting f/8 at 1/200 of a second. I did have my flash wrapped in a plastic bag for extra protection, though.

The other issue was that I was still in a pretty high splash zone while shooting, so after 2-3 shots I’d have to stop and wipe my lens off in order to shoot a couple more and repeat. It worked out ok though because I was waiting on those full power flash recycles, so I had some time to spare. The water was cold, so we didn’t get too many shots off before we wrapped up this part of the shoot.

It worked out well though; with some creative post-processing we ended up with the shot above as our final image for the “Water” portion of our series. While we were there we shot a few other things, just to have some fun:

It was a great shoot and we got some nice images from it. Carissa was willing to do whatever it took to get the shot, which was awesome. I just finished up the “Earth” portion of our series with her that I should be posting (hopefully) soon. I’m looking forward to the other shoots with Carissa, just need to come up with a few great ideas first…

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 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:

One of the main points David makes in Chasing the Look is Get the Best Amount of Light In, But In the Best Way. Changing your aperture and shutter speed have profound effects on your photographs, and which combo you choose depends entirely on the look that you are after. Let’s take a look at two shots I took tonight during the snow for an example:

15 seconds at f/22

1/2 second at f/4

Everything else is essentially the same: ISO 800, 36mm focal length, same post-processing.  The exposures are the same, even though the aperture and shutter speed vary drastically between the two images.

For the first image I chose a small aperture to give me the nice starburst effect on the light, which caused a long, slow shutter speed, which causes the falling snow to blur together to a point that you can’t really tell it’s snowing.

On the second I opened up to a larger aperture in order to get a quicker shutter speed to allow the falling snow to still appear in the final image.

Which one is correct?  Well, that all depends on the look that you are after. Personally, I like the first one, as I’m kind of a sucker for starbursts (if you couldn’t tell from some of my other images).

Which one do you prefer?

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!