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).

Another high-key self portrait.  What can ya do?  At least I’m getting away from the usual awkward glare that normally haunts my self portraits. I really like the way this one turned out though – it’s fairly different from my usual stuff.

I initially got the idea for this shot about a month ago when I came across the August 14, 2009 issue of Entertainment Weekly in my office break room.  The cover was for District 9 (great movie, BTW) and I really liked the composition of the shot.  Here is a quick look at it:

Something about the composition really pulled me in.

Now, I lit this one completely differently.  Mostly because I just had the composition in my head and didn’t have the magazine in front of me.  I was over at Eliesha’s along with Jason waiting for a couple of models to show up to do a fashion/lingerie shoot – long story short, they never showed up.  Rather than waste the setup we convinced Eliehsa to model for us (post about that later), and while she was getting ready I hopped in and grabbed this shot of myself.

We used the same setup the whole night: white seamless paper, two Alienbees (B400 and B800) at 1/4 power as background lights (to get pure white) – these lights where flagged with some black seamless paper scraps, and a Photogenic StudioMax III in a 22″ beauty dish as the main light.  I really liked this lighting setup – it worked pretty well for all of the shots we did that night, including this one of me.  Here is the setup shot:

As far as post-processing goes I used my usual routine that has been seen on most of my self portraits.  It’s a look I like and it’s getting pretty easy for me to do in Photoshop.  It’s a much different look from the Entertainment Weekly cover, but it works for me none-the-less.  I ALMOST gave myself the alien eye, almost, but decided against it.  Maybe I’ll go back and try that some day.

I’ve already got next week’s shot in mind, so hopefully I can get it knocked out early and have most of the week to edit it.  It will be a fairly intensive Photoshop process, so the extra time would be good.  It’ll be an experiment with having a specific final product in mind that will require Photoshop to get the end result, so I’ll need to light, compose, and execute the initial shot with that in mind.

I also have a couple of other shoots I’m finishing up the editing on that should have their own blog posts coming soon. So watch for those!