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!

So, it’s November here in Missouri, but I don’t think the weather knows that.  We had a beautiful 70+ F weekend here, which is far from the norm. Hell, we had a few days a couple weeks ago that were almost below freezing.  But, I’m not one to complain.  I loved the weather this weekend and I’d love to live somewhere where it’ like this all the time.  That’s neither here nor there, though.  I did take advantage of this beautiful weather, though. Josi, my wonderful girlfriend, who I did not have to force in any way whatsoever, and I, along with my photog friend Jason, headed out to a nice, empty field around sunset today to make the best of this beautiful Sunday.

Our plan was to shoot into the sun with some fast shutter speeds and small apertures, which requires lots of light, so we set up two SB-600′s on a stand to give us the power we need, but as soon as we did that the sun dipped behind some clouds and only peeked it’s head out for a few minutes, so our setup was a little overkill, but we left it like that so we could take advantage of it as soon as the sun came back out.

For the shot above we had Josi crouching in this nice, golden tall grass with the lights into a silver umbrella high camera left.  I wanted it to feel like a nice, warm, golden sunset, but since the sun was hiding, I just flipped over to a Cloudy White Balance and then took it even warmer in Lightroom to give it that late afternoon sunset feel.

Josi’s eyes are very engaging in this shot and I love her serious, almost sad look.  She knows that this day is almost over it and with it the weather is going to start turning colder and gloomier as winter rolls in, and her look expresses that emotion nicely.

This shot has a similar feel to the one above.  Instead of looking into the sun, and into the warmth of summer’s last breath, Josi is looking away, looking to the grey skies and coldness that comes with winter just around the corner.  Actually, I have no idea if that’s what she’s doing, but that’s the emotion I’m seeing in this picture.  A slight bit of warmth to one side and then darkness on the other.  The grey skies with a hint of blue behind her give off the same feeling.  The slight blue gives the hint of summer, but it’s quickly lost in the sea of grey clouds.

Once of the biggest things I’ve read lately is that your pictures have to be able to stand on their own, so my goal with this session was to tell a little bit of a story and hopefully create some images that other people can look at and feel the story without me having to explain them.  Granted, I just explained them above, but hopefully you saw them and felt something before I explained them.

These are a nice segue to another shot that I would like to do in the near future.  I’m calling it “Winter Approaches” and I’ve got a pretty solid idea for it, just need the right weather and then I’ll get out and shoot it.  Watch for it here within the next few weeks!

Ahh Journey.  One of the greatest bands ever.  Every time I hear Don’t Stop Believin’ it gets me pumped.  While listening to it last week I got the idea to do a shot involving, well, street lights and people.  I wanted to mess around with my 50mm f/1.8 lens after seeing some of the great shots Dustin Diaz gets with his 50mm f/1.4.  I wanted to try using it at night at f/1.8 to get the really dreamy, blurry, glowing backgrounds and then adding just a touch of light with flash to bring out the subject.

My first attempt was a self-portrait that I shot earlier this week after I finished up a senior session downtown as the sun was going down.  Well, there were several problems with that.  First, it’s pretty difficult to get sharp focus on yourself at f/1.8 –  there is no room for error.  So I shot myself many times trying to get a decent one.  Also, I was nervous setting up all my gear downtown and trying to get a decent self-portrait.  Here are the results:

Not so great.  I also set up myself in a spot that had some ambient light so that bled onto my face along with the flash.  I was also trying to mess with the color and shoot in a bluer white balance with a warm gel to get some interesting colors.  And the backlight is way too strong.  Lots of problems with this shot.  It just wasn’t doing it for me, even with all of the Photoshoping I did.  The one thing I do like about it is the lights in the background from the wide aperture of f/1.8.  Very round and pretty.  The shutter speed here was slow (1/40 sec.) but still fast enough to not cause too much ghosting with the lights.

Tonight’s shot (the one at the beginning of the post) was different.  Since there aren’t too many street lights around my house I had to rely on a slower shutter speed (1/3 sec.) to let the few that are there to bleed in more and create an interesting background.  It was just shot in my back yard, so there wasn’t much to work with, but Josi turned on the cuteness that really made this shot.  I stole borrowed another play from Joe McNally‘s playbook and had Josi throw on one of my hoodies and lit her with a 43″ reversible umbrella with half of the backing removed to only light her face and fall off softly.  I also threw a 1/2 CTO gel on there to warm her skin up some.

Here is the setup shot for the shot of Josi:

Featuring my roommate’s husky pup, Sylar!  I forgot to get a setup shot for my portrait.  I was getting frustrated with trying to get a self portrait downtown and I was still nervous about being along with all my gear, so I bailed before I remembered to grab the setup shot.  I’ll have to work on that.  The setup is described fairly well on the Flickr page for that shot, so check it out if you’re interested.

That’s it for this week.  Still working on ideas for my next Project 52 shot…