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!