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.

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).

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?

I finally got around to getting Jessica and Sa’dia their CDs from this shoot so I figured it should blog about it too, ya know, for good measure.  We did the shoot almost a month ago, but we’ve all been busy so we haven’t had time to meet up until now – it’s NOT because I’m a slacker.  Well, I am a slacker, but usually not when it comes to my pictures.  Anyway…

I just wanted to share a couple of pictures from this shoot.  I had two goals when I agreed to this shoot – shoot most of it at night and try some new things.  The picture above pretty much sums it up.  I think we had a lot of fun trying new things, which is what all three of us wanted.  When I sent this shot above to the two models I said it represents the shoot because it is “fun, different, and unique.”  Works for me.  I don’t have setup shots for these pics, but I’ll quickly run through the setups, though they are pretty easy to figure out.  The one above was at ISO 800 and 1/10 sec to bleed in the ambient and still let me shoot at f/8.  The girls are lit by a single shoot-through umbrella camera left and the flare is created by an Sb-600 at low power handheld by my buddy, Aaron.

Now on to a couple shots of each girl by themselves.  Continuing with the flare concept we’ve got Jess:

If you haven’t noticed by now I kinda dig the whole flare thing, whether its a sun flare or flash flare.  So I tried to work it into some of my night shots by using my SB-600 instead of the sun.  It creates a nice rim/separation light and also creates that beautiful flare.  The key light was the SB-800 camera left in the Westcott Apollo 28″ softbox.  I think I’m going to order a 60″ convertible umbrella in the near future to play with.  I want to do some full body stuff and most of my current modifiers don’t spread light that much.

Now, here is Sa’dia by herself:

I love the way this one turned out.  I like the warm colors in the background and the soft light up front.  Combined I think it creates a very compelling, inviting image.  Plus, that look.  Her eyes just draw you right in.  Very nice and very simple.  Sometimes it’s the simple shots that turn out the best over the complex ones.

That’s it for this post.  I’ll have another one soon as I just got back from Don Giannatti‘s Lighting Essentials workshop and I have a bunch of pictures from that to share.  Stay tuned!

Finally got a shot this week that I liked.  Nothing like waiting until the last minute.  In my defense, I shot two other setups this week for my project, but neither of them turned out good, so I kept trying.  Good thing I did because I really like this shot.

Josi can always turn the cuteness up to 11 when she wants to and tonight was no exception.

I wanted to play with some gels and adjusting my white balance since it’s been a while since I’ve had fun with it, plus I wanted to mess around more with the bokeh my 50mm f/1.8 can create, so I tried to cram it all into one shot – I think I did a pretty good job (I say that every week, don’t I?).

For this shot I dropped my white balance down to 3850K, which is getting into the blue realm of color temperature, and then brought Josi back up and added some warmth with a full CTO gel and a 1/2 CTO gel on top of that.  That was on my SB-800 in the Westcott Apollo 28″ softbox pretty close on camera left.

The nice thing about working at wide apertures like f/1.8 is that your flashes barely have to work so your recycle times are almost instant, which makes it much easier to capture the moments like this one.

For the rim/separation light I used the SB-600 bare zoomed to 85mm back camera right.  I also added a 1/2 and a 1/4 CTB gel – those along with the cool white balance helped to create that nice blue light.  I think the white fabric on the Apollo was picking up a little spill from the blue rim light and mixing it in some with the warm key light to give some slight coolness to her skin tones as well.  Pretty cool.  And I didn’t even plan that!

Here is the setup shot:

Another week done!  I’d really like to do a self portrait in a similar setup, but they are so hard to do at f/1.8 – getting the focusing locked in is so hard when you barely have inches to work with.  I’ll keep trying though and hopefully I’ll get a good one.  It took me 3 shoots this week to get a shot that I really liked and wanted to share, but if that’s what it takes then so be it.

Who knows what next week will bring…

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…

I love environmental portraits.  There’s just something about seeing a subject and it’s surroundings that really draws me in.  These are the kind of shots I really want to get better at taking.  This post is about a recent shot I did for Josi’s friend, Jonathan, who is an aspiring filmmaker.  His film “Roberto and the Robot” just debut here in Springfield at a local film festival.  He wanted some post-grad shots to use for social networking and the like.

I really like the shot above.  To me is has a very Joe McNally-ish feel to it.  I think it’s the dark greens from the sodium vapor lights down the alley. I enhanced the green just for some effect.  Joe would have done this with 20 speedlights down there – I went with the simpler approach of a single SB-800 camera left bouncing off of a 43″ reflective umbrella.  This was my first ever night-only shoot, so I was using slow shutter speeds, higher ISOs, and rear-curtain sync to blend ambient street/alley light with my one flash to create some interesting looks, like the shot above.

This next shot, or shots per se, really has be in a bind.  It’s the same shot, just one in color and one in black and white, and I love both of them.  The black and white makes it different enough that I can’t pick which one I like more.  Take a look:

See what I mean?  The lighting for this shot was the SB-800 in the Lumiquest SBIII camera left and right above Job to create a soft/hard light on his face that falls off nicely and creates a look that I like to call “looking for inspiration.”  I love the different colors that the sodium vapor street lights can create – in this case a very nice, warm orange/red combo.  I love the alleys here in Springfield for shots like this.

For the last series of shots we ended up at the Mud House, a local coffee shop that Jon works at spends a lot of his time at, so it was only fitting that we did some shooting there.  We had gotten some really good shots already, so I wanted to experiment some, so I went outside and shot through the window at Jon sitting inside:

I think this shot really sums up Jon’s personality (or at least how I perceived him after visiting with him during this shoot): working late at night on some ideas, at his place of work, enjoying some coffee.  That poster there on the left of the frame is a promo poster for his movie as well, so we snuck that in there as a little added treat.  I like the way the lamp on the table burns in with the flash, creating a nice contrast of light on his face and how the lettering on the window creates a sort-of frame-within-a-frame.  Speaking of flash, it was inside, camera right, handheld by my V.A.L. Josi, still through the SBIII.  It was triggered via CLS from the pop-up on my D90.  Rather than using manual flash control I was using TTL to try and get a better feel for how it works.  CLS is really a great system and I can’t wait to mess with it more as I add more CLS-enabled flashes.

That’s it from this shoot.  I got lots of great and unique shots from it and I hope Jon is as happy with them as I am.  Let me know what you think.