For a while now I’ve had this idea to do a shoot with a girl dressed up all cute and sexy playing video games – maybe it’s because I’m a big nerd at heart or maybe it’s because I thought lots of guys would love the images. For whatever reason, I was determined to do this shoot, and then I finally found the right girl on Model Mayhem – she was cute and nerdy, so it was perfect. After some back and forth we finally settled on a date for the shoot, but we didn’t know where we were going to shoot yet. Then she had this great idea…

Here in Springfield there is this neat little arcade downtown called 1984, which is owned by a bunch of friends that had collected several vintage arcade machines over the years that decided to open up a place, charge a cover, and let people have free reign over these classic games like 1942, Pac-Man, and Spy Hunter. She suggested that we contact the owner and see if he would be willing to let us shoot there.  I figured it was a long shot, but I gave him a call and he was more than happy to let us shoot there. In fact, he was pretty cool overall after we met him the night of the shoot.

We had the place to ourselves because we shot there on one of the nights where they aren’t open, so it was perfect. The owner, Devin, went out of his way to make the shoot happen and to make it fun. He gave our model the “I’m to sexy for my bow” shirt seen in the first shot to wear for the shoot and let her keep it afterwards. He helped us turn on the machines and let us shoot whatever we want, wherever we want. He even busted out his camera and shot some behind-the-scenes footage of us doing our thing, which was cool. All of that in exchange for some prints, which I happily ordered for him and personally delivered to Devin, along with our model, Jessica (along with some business cards featuring one of the images from the shoot to hand out).

The shot above is the shot I used for the business cards.

I’ll talk briefly about my lighting setup for these shots and work my way down the post.

The first shot was actually the last one we did, and the most complicated. It was a three-light setup with a Nikon SB-800 behind the camera into my 60″ umbrella for some fill, a Nikon SB-600 camera right through a white umbrella for the main light, and a Nikon SB-600 bare to cast some light on the first on the wall (and it blew out the side of the register, which I should have caught). Pretty much all of these shots had some slower shutter speeds and higher ISOs to let some of the ambient arcade machine light bleed into the image.

The second shot was a single light into a collapsed silver umbrella on camera left – I love the reflection it created, but at the same time I wish I would have had a polarizing filter to kill the reflection and see more of the pinball machine.  The third shot is the exact same setup, just a different pose/composition combination.

These next two shots were a two-light cross light setup, with the SB-800 clamped to one of the machines through a Lumiquest SBIII camera right and an SB-600 with a Honl grid back camera left from some rim/seperation.

The last shot I’m going to talk about was actually the first one we did. I stuck her into this old Star Wars arcade machine and added some fill from the top via a clamped SB-600 into a silver umbrella and then I stuck the SB-800 through the Lumiquest SBIII for the key light:

The idea was to look like she was being lit from the machine itself – I think it works pretty well.

I think this shoot turned out really well and I’d like to do a follow-up session with her that’s more home and console oriented.  I’ve got some cool ideas for that shoot as well.

I hope you guys enjoyed this one as much as I did shooting it!

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.

Some of the shots are shots I’ve shown before, but I also want to share a few new ones we took just for the calendar, so here is a preview of the 2010 Kristen Calendar!

February

June

August

November

The rest were either too revealing or not as exciting as these. It took a long time to put this together, even with re-using some shots that we had done in the past. I think we did 3 or 4 separate shoots to get the missing months and then we tried different ideas for each month. Then there was all of the editing and post-production to be done. We spent a lot of time together working on this, so I hope her boyfriend appreciates it.

If you want to know more about how a shot was lit you can click the image to go to it’s Flickr page and read more about it. This is definitely something I’d like to offer to other people, but because of the amount of time and planning involved it wouldn’t be something cheap. If you conservatively plan for an hour per month for shooting, you’re at 12 hours already, plus a few hours for planning, and then probably at least another hour per month for post-production and you’re looking at about a 30 hour project, minimum. At commercial photographer rates you’re looking at about 3-4 days worth of creative fees, which could run anywhere from $500/day to $10,000/day, or if I were to just charge a very nice hourly rate of $20/hour you’re still looking at $600 minimum, or a more realistic hourly rate of $50 or more would push it up to $1,500 or more. I’d settle for a happy medium around $1000, depending on the shoots you would want.

So, it wouldn’t be a cheap project/present, but it would definitely be unique. A one-of-a-kind calendar for that special someone in your life. I’d definitely be willing to do it again, so if you’re interested in getting a calendar made and are willing to put in the time and effort and can afford it, shoot me an email and we can make it happen!

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!

Sounds like an interesting album title.  And if it was, in fact, an album title, this shot above would be the album cover.  This is a quick shot I grabbed in between fountains when Kristen had a little time to dry off.  I love trying to overpower the sun with little speedlights.  I’ve been doing it more and more.  For this one I used both my Nikon SB-800 and SB-600 at full power through a white umbrella – and it was JUST out of the frame camera left, in fact, I think I had to crop this one because it was in the shot.  Trying to get f/18 out of flashes is asking a lot, but they performed admirably.

Before I go any further I need to tell a little back story about this shoot. The first shoot I did with Kristen ended at one of these fountains, but unfortunately for us we got there too late and it had already shut off for the night, so we both left empty handed.  Well, we got some great shots from the rest of the shoot, but we missed out on that fountain shot, so we decided to do a new shoot dedicated to ONLY fountains.

The first fountain we shot was at Founder’s Park here in Springfield.  Unfortunately for us, right before we got there some guy cut his foot open real bad and bled all over the place – they called an ambulance and everything.  So, we were pretty hesitant to do much in the fountain, but we managed to grab a few shots real quick without having to get into the water much – just staying at the edges and we ended up with one of my favorites from the shoot:

The sun was still pretty high and bright, so we were avoiding it like the plague and using one SB-800 to create our own main light.  I think it worked out pretty well.  I’m working on doing some stuff to this one in Photoshop, so once I get that done I’ll try and remember to share with you guys.

After we bailed from the dangers of this fountain we headed up to the square where they have this really cool fountain.  I’d seen some cool shots done here so I figured it was my turn to see what I could do.  Last time I was shooting with flash around water I almost lost my SB-800, so I was being extra careful this time.  Kristen’s friend Amanda came with us on the shoot so I had her standing in the fountain holding my light stand to make sure the wind didn’t blow it in. That would have been bad.

We tried all kinds of different poses in this fountain, but the one that really stood out to me is this one:

I’m not sure what it is – the pose? The look?  But something about this picture really draws me in.  It feels like it should be in a magazine (to me at least).  I have a few other shots that have her legs in them too, but even without them I feel this is a more powerful shot.

The last fountain for the day was in Jordan Valley Park, where the first shot of this post was taken.  The main fountain there runs on a timer, so while we were waiting I grabbed the shot above.  This is one of those fountains that shoots water way far up in the air, so I moved my flash back pretty far and zoomed it in so I could still light up Kristen and keep my flash from getting wet.  I was using it bare, no modifiers, but Kristen has the body and face to handle it, so I wasn’t worried.  Here’s what we got:

Pretty cool.  I really like how the water kind of wraps around her and brings your eyes right to the center of the picture.  I used a slow enough shutter speed to smooth out the water from the fountain but then that flick of light from the flash really sharpens Kristen to make a sweet picture.

That’s it for this shoot.  I think it was a lot of fun for the both of us, and I really enjoyed have a fairly solid concept to work with for this shoot.  I’d like to come up with a solid personal project for me to work on focusing around a good, solid concept, so if anyone has any ideas, please let me know!

Case in point.  This shot wasn’t planned and was completely random, but it turned out pretty sweet none-the-less.  Jason, Eliesha, and myself were downtown doing a mini-group shoot with Nikki and Christie.  I was setting up some lights for when Nikki arrived and this guy walked by and was like “Yo man! Take my picture!” and I couldn’t resist.  He hopped in and told me I only get one shot, so I made some final tweaks to my settings when he posed for me and I snapped my one shot. A little post-processing in Lightroom and I’d say it turned out pretty good.

Now, let’s look at a few pictures from the planned shoot…

First up is Christie.  She’s a recent High School grad that Jason and Eliesha met one weekend while doing a big group shoot with the local camera club. We had her come down so we could do some practicing.

This was one of the shots she wanted to do.  She wanted to go up in the parking garage and look out over the new Hollywood Theater so along with those I grabbed some lower shots of her just looking off in the distance.  I really like shots like this…not sure why.  All of the shots we did during this shoot were done in or around this parking garage (the same garage where I shot my Week 3 series).

While I was waiting for Jason and Eliesha to finish up with Nikki downstairs I stuck Christie into the stairwell and had some fun with the sun:

I really like the lighting, composition, and colors in this shot.  I’m a big fan of the solar flares lately too.  I continue to try and work them into my shots when I can.  Using speedlights to overpower the sun like this is no easy task, especially when trying to diffuse it like I was here.  I think I’ll try some more bare flash shots when using the sun for a flare in the future and see how those turn out.

Right before sunset we all met up on top of the garage to get some shots of the city and sunset in the background.

After the sun was mostly gone I took advantage of the deep blue sky and threw a two-light setup at Christie doing a hard/soft combo:

This was a little while after the sun was gone, so I was working pretty fast, dropping my shutter speed every few shots to keep up.  This one was at 1/25 at ISO 200, so it was before I had to start bumping the ISO up, but it’s slow enough you can see a little ghosting in the shot.  The hard/soft crosslight combo works well here though and I dig the contrast in colors between her outfit and the sky.

Time for Nikki.

Nikki is a local singer/songwriter that Jason found and had her come down to shoot with us at the same time we were shooting with Christie, so we traded off models and photographers throughout the shoot to give everyone good exposure to everyone else and to make sure we all got a variety of shots.

My favorites of Nikki are all from the last part of the shoot during sunset and after the sun was gone.

Right before the sun dipped past the horizon I got this shot.  Another one were I was using both speedlights to overpower the sun to get the cool flare.  I was ONLY at around f/10 here so I didn’t have to blast them at full power, but it definitely strained the batteries.  It was worth it though to get a cool shot like this.

Another great shot of Nikki is this one:

Once the sun was gone we got this really cool color gradient in the sky that worked great as a background.  By boosting the colors it also brought out the blue in Nikki’s eyes that really make this picture pop.  The lighting on this one was a new setup (to me) but I liked the way it turned out so I may use it again in the future.  One flash on either side of her at about a 45 degree angle created an interesting hard light that worked well for her.

The last shot I got of Nikki was after the sun was all the way gone and all we had were the city lights down below.  I had Nikki leave over the railing and lit her from the side to get a nice balance of flash and ambient:

There were several from this series that I liked, but I went with this one as it was a nice balance of foreground and background and her eyes are just so engaging in this shot.  It’s hard NOT to stare into them.  The bokeh from the large aperture works great here too!

That’s it for this shoot.  I’m almost done catching up with blog posts for past shoots.  Watch for a couple more soon!

First, as I mentioned in an earlier post, is that I ordered Joe McNally‘s new book, The Hot Shoe Diaries, which came in a few weeks ago.  This book rocks!  I read through all of it in a matter of days and I’m re-reading it now.  Joe is really a genius and I would give just about anything to be able to work with him, but since that is probably never going to happen, this book is the next best thing.  You get some great insight to how Joe thinks and works and his approach to taking great pictures.

I’ve also been enjoying Joe’s training videos over at Kelby Training.  He has some great videos that go along with some of the photos from The Hot Shoe Diaries, which is nice.  I signed up for a one-month membership and I’m trying to get through as much training as I can.  Lots of great stuff there.  Speaking of Kelby Training – Scott Kelby, along with Matt Kloskowski, have been doing a weekly web series for Nikon shooters called D-Town TV.  There are some great tips there and a good watch every week.

Ok, on to the shoots.

Back in the middle of March I headed to the park to do some nice casual portraits of my friend Mandy.  I was out shooting with my SB-800 and triggering via CLS (which is awesome).  I’m really trying to fully master a single light source, so this is my go-to light (until I can afford an SB-900).  I got several good shots from that shoot, but I wanted to share one of my favorites:

This was shot with the SB-800 through a white umbrella on camera right at 1/4 power at 1/200 at f/5.6.  Very nice, saturated background and a great exposure on Mandy.  The look and the wind really add some flavor.  Speaking of wind, that shit is dangerous (as you’ll find out later).  Knocked my stand over many times and messed up my umbrella and stand a little.  I really need to get me some sand bags.

Last weekend I drove down to Joplin, Missouri for a little photog/model group shoot which was pretty fun.  The day went pretty well – got some great shots, got some exercise climbing all over rocks and trees, got some sun (a little too much), met some new people.  Almost too good to be true.  The wind was pretty strong that day, so my lighting stuff took a few tumbles, but for the most part it did well, especially when I was shooting with no modifiers, just zoomed flash, like this shot:

That was just a single SB-800 zoomed to 105mm with a full CTO gel plus and extra 1/2 CTO gel.  The camera was set to Tungsten white balance to get the cool feel.  The sun was pretty bright most of the day so I was pretty much at max sync speed (or higher with Auto-FP) and smaller apertures.  This shot was done at 1/200 at f/8.  Working close these little flashes work great, even with the bright sun.

After everyone shot at the park for a few hours we headed over to The Falls in Joplin to do some bikini shoots with the weather being nice and all.  Unfortunately this is when things start to take a turn for the worse.  We got to the falls around 2:00 or 3:00pm, so the sun was straight overhead with no cloud coverage whatsoever, which means I’m shooting at 1/200 at f/16 on IS 100 (usually I shoot 200 since that’s what most Nikons are optimized for) to get anywhere close to a proper exposure.  Forget about Auto-FP sync at f/16 – it’s not going to happen with just one Speedlight (maybe if I had a tree of Speedlights like Joe McNally did in the desert (p.259 in Hot Shoe Diaries)).

So, I’ve got one of the models out on a rock in the water and I’m several feet back trying to shoot some full body shots, hoping my SB-800 at 105mm on full power can get out there and through a little fill into my subject.  Not happening.  And just to make sure it wasn’t going to happen, the wind picks up and pushes my light stand over – right into the water!  Granted it wasn’t very deep, but still, my SB-800 went face first right into the water…not good.  So, I run over and pull it out and immediately turn it off and take the batteries out.  While maintaining a calm exterior but screaming “Oh my god, my flash!” on the inside I went over and finished that series with the model.  The whole time I was being nice and calm on the outside and freaking out on the inside.

I take my flash up the car and let it start drying out, but I wasn’t done.  There were still models I wanted to work with and shots I wanted to try, so I had to keep going.  I pulled out the trusty old Nikon SB-24 and some Cactus triggers and went back down to the falls to finish up.  Glad I came back because I managed to get this shot:

This was done with the SB-24 zoomed to its max of 85mm at full power and my camera set to 1/200 at f/13.  I wish I could have gotten the background slightly underexposed, but with the sun like that I was happy to just get some decent pictures.  Always have a backup handy.

So, I got some good shots but I might have lost my SB-800, and I definitely wasn’t looking forward to shelling out $450 for an SB-900 (even though I really want one…that’s a lot of cash).  On Monday I went to the local camera shop and got like 50 silica gel packets and packed my SB-800 with them and through it in a ziploc bag hoping they would pull all of the moisture out.  I fired it up today and everything appears to be working fine.  I tried it on the hot shoe, as a remote, manual power, TTL, no hiccups.  Bullet dodged…for now.  Hopefully it doesn’t slowly deteriorate.

Long story short, flashes and water don’t mix!  Be careful with your equipment when working around water…

I had my homemade diffusion panel I was itching to experiment with, the Nikon SB-800 I got for Christmas has only seen some brief use, and, just last week my new Nikon D90 arrived. So I was ready to take some pictures. Luckily for me my photography friend, Eliesha, seems to have an endless supply of cute friends willing to take some of their clothes off and pose for the camera. And to spice it up a little we called up our other photog friend, Jason, and had him come shoot as well. Three photographers, one cute model, should be an interesting Saturday afternoon.

One thing I’ve learned is that the more gear you get, the harder it becomes to haul all of that gear from shoot to shoot. Backpack, lighting bag, two light stands, collapsed diffusion panel, cover for diffusion panel – it all adds up. I hate making multiple trips to the car, especially when it was like 20 F this past weekend. Stupid winter.

So, aside from me bitching about the cold and hauling all my stuff, the shoot went pretty well.  Part of it might have been all the mixed drinks our model was putting away to help her relax, but that’s besides the point.  Here are a couple of my favorites:

This one was done with my diffusion panel on camera left with Eliesha’s AlienBee B400 at 1/4 power or so.  You can see the nice soft light it created on the the right side of Elise (her right).  Nice soft transition between light and shadows.  I wanted to leave the shadow side a little dark to add a little mystery if you will, so there was no fill flash or reflector or anything.  One thing Joe McNally always says is that sometimes light is more about what you don’t light than what you do, so I tried to keep from lighting part of her face to add that drama.  I did however want to work with a rim/hair light, so I stuck my new Nikon SB-800 on a stand behind Elise on camera right snooted it to keep the light from flaring into my lens or hitting the background.  As you can see this creates some nice separation on her left and highlights her hair nicely.

Here is a setup shot for the above picture:

Time to move it to the bedroom.  We were doing all of these shots at Elisha’s house and she just so happens to have a really nice bed, so we decide to take advantage of it.  At this point Elise is pretty tipsy, so getting her to take off some clothes wasn’t too hard.

We covered her up with a black shear and just had her lay all over the bed, change positions a lot, and we moved the lights as we were shooting.  It was kinda hectic, but I managed to get a few good shoots from it.  We left the big studio lights back in the home studio and just used small flashes for these. For this shot, if I remember correctly, I had the Nikon SB-24 right behind me at 1/4 power through a small white umbrella, and then on camera right was the Nikon SB-800 through a medium white umbrella, a little further back.

Gotta love those small strobes.  So versatile and easy to use.  With just a couple of these guys you can create so many different lighting scenarios its crazy!  If you don’t have any, go get some.  And try and get out of the studio with them.  Balancing ambient with strobe is fun and you can create lots of unique pictures.  I know that’s not what I did, but it’s way too freaking cold here, and I promise I will once we have a nice day.  Do as I say not as I do!

So, a few weeks back, I was talking with one of my friends from my photography class and she mentioned that her husband out of town and she wanted to do something nice for him.  Being the typical guy that I can be sometimes, I suggested some provocative pictures.  Well, she thought it was a great idea, so I quickly got myself into a somewhat awkward situation, and it only got worse from there.

So, I go over to her house (which is awesome BTW) while her husband is gone to shoot some pictures for her.  Me, a single, male photographer, in the house of a married woman while her husband is out of town, to take some seductive pictures…slightly awkward.  Anyway, so I do the shoot and we loosen up pretty fast and we end up getting some great shots.  It was a good experience that I wanted to share.

Here is one of my favorite shots from this shoot:

I really like the way this shot turned out. I really wanted to try a shot with the slowing white background.  Luckily for me she has some Alienbees Studio lights, so I got to play with those hehe.  It turned out really well IMO.  I can see where a seamless paper background would help though.  Here is a lighting diagram I put together for this shot:

Not bad for a little free diagram maker I found on a photography site.  Should make it easy for me to explain my lighting setups in the future.  So, overall it was a good shoot.  And it kept going…

After hearing about the pictures I did, her friend wanted to do some for her husband now.  So my friend asked me to come help her shoot her friend.  So, I end up back at her place until like 1 AM helping her shoot her friend.  I was mostly an assistant the whole night, but I managed to sneak in some shooting towards the end.  Here is my favorite shot from that session:

Very nice.  I really like the way this one turned out.  I think her husband did too.  I am quite proud of myself on this one.  The lighting was so simple too.  Just one flash on camera left through an umbrella.  I threw some sepia on in Lightroom and that’s it.

And the big thing I learned from these two shoots: even though I’m taking pictures of attractive women wearing next to nothing, that’s the farthest thing from my mind.  While I’m shooting I’m focusing on my lighting, backgrounds, aperture, shutter speed, posing, etc.  There’s no time to be thinking about anything else.  Makes me feel almost…professional.