This client was looking for something boudoir-y, but wanted to bring some nerdiness to it as well. I’m really happy with how her shots turned out, and am even happier she gave me her permission to share this particular one. She, like a lot of clients, wasn’t comfortable with actual posing in front of the camera.

What you can’t tell looking at the image is that this was not done in any fancy studio. It was shot in the client’s living room. There is a gray wall and white blinds about three feet behind her, with a bit of window light popping in from the cloudy sky outside. But thanks to a few grid spots and well controlled light, you’d never know.

Clients often come to me worried that their home won’t work for any type of shoot. It’s then that I’m glad I have shots like this to show that – with a little bit of lighting knowledge – you can turn any room into a gorgeous boudoir studio.

I was going through my lightroom catalogue, cleaning some things up, when I came upon these couple of pictures from a job I did earlier this year. I’d forgotten about them. They weren’t the clients. They were a couple of homeless by choice men living near the waterfront here in Vancouver.

I recall that one of their names was “Mountain Man”, though for the life of me I can’t remember the name of the other.

They offered their modelling services in exchange for a few bucks, which someone I was with chipped in. The photos were real quick and easy. I literally shot one frame of each of them and they came out good. Didn’t even need to light test.

I wish I had gone back and talked to these guys some more, or at least given them an 8×10 each. Talked to them, gotten more of their stories.

The character in their faces is wonderfully honest. I adore these photos.

Kate is a Comp-Sci major at WSU Vancouver, and the only female in her class level. While it’s sad that that’s the case, she thought her determination to stick with the program despite any gendered odds against her is something worth celebrating. I’m inclined to agree.

I got up to her place which is on a fairly hefty lot of land. At least compared to the suburbs I’m used to. Her family’s lived there for a long time, and given her connection to it, I wanted to make a photo that would bridge her computer geekery with the nature and home she’s so in tune with. If her reaction at the photos was any indication, I’m pretty sure I succeeded.

While this first shot looks a whole lot like natural light, the natural light under the pacific northwest autumn clouds was a whole lot more flat than this. I put a small light to the left of frame to give just a touch of shape to the face. It definitely wasn’t necessary, and the light would have looked good natural, it’s just the kind of little pop of ‘something extra’ to make the photo shine. She mentioned that white board as something she uses a lot as scratch paper when doing homework or coding, so we wrote out some fake python code and made it an element of the photo.

This shot is my favorite of the day, and one that I think succeeds most in bridging all those various aspects of Kate’s life. I used one of my big lights to light the front of her and bring that light pop to her immediate surroundings, and then used one of the small flashes about a foot behind her to bring in that edge light that separates her from the background and really emphasizes her presence. As is usual in my work for clients, I like to leave that nice bit of negative space on one side. It lets them add in their own copy for use on websites, brochures, business cards, anything really.

The nice thing about the Vista House location was the fact that it gave as access to backgrounds facing both ways down the gorge, towards the setting sun, and away from it. This meant we could do a lot of variety in very little space and time.

The tail end of summer and beginning of autumn is really the perfect time for some outdoor portraits for either your personal or professional life, so contact me now before the weather gets terrible again (though that can be fun too!)

We started out by hitting Orchards Park. The foresty backdrop may have been a bit cliche given the subject matter, but hey. Cliches work.

Halloween is a great time for fun photos of yourselves or your kids, so don’t hesitate to give me a call and set up an appointment to get some – if I could be immodest here – straight up awesome pictures made.

The first day of the shoot was all product shots.

After getting the ‘group shot’ in the bag, we did ‘individuals’ for each product. I really approached these the same way I approach most of my portrait clients. I lit them as if they were people. I styled them as if they were people. The products needed to be sexy, to be desirable. To be something that someone would see and without even knowing what they were think “I want that.”:

I sprayed each product with some water to give it the appearance of sweating, and I removed the black paper in the background, letting in a bit of the earth toned walls.

For the second day, it was all about people. The story we came up with was that while these products are designed with professional (or 24-hour) athletes in mind, isn’t everyone a 24-hour athlete? We don’t just work out at the gym. We’re working out when vacuuming at home. When working at the office. When pushing around the grocery cart, when playing basketball with friends on the weekends. To get that message across, I went with highly stylized photos like you’d see of an athlete in a magazine or on a billboard, but of normal people doing normal every day things.

Besides upping the contrast, I superimposed the ’24′ logo somewhere into each image, in order to push the brand.

Lastly, we did a poster shot. Not the most original idea, but the execution came out great:

Thanks to the client opting for a non-exclusive license, these images and more are also available for rights-managed licensing to any Herbalife distributor through This Gallery

If it’s not raining in the northwest, it’s an odd day. Use that to your advantage and let me make some awesome photos for you!

The Tae Kwon Do class I shot for last year had me out again, and it was another fantastic time. These kids are amazing and can do some crazy stuff I can’t even imagine making my body do.

The last time I shot them, I went out of my way to make the gym more studio-like, doing all I could to turn the background black. Since a lot of the students were the same this year, I wanted to give them something different, and instead opted to keep a bit of the gym in each shot. That way they don’t just have photographic memories of their achievements, but where they were and the friends they made while attaining those achievements.

This weekend I was hired to go up to a party in Seattle and shoot a few bands: Sigourney Reverb, Breaker Breaker, and The Union Stewards. Talking with the party’s host, I decided to do something just a bit different and crazy.

The event showed me that the lensbaby was a great purchase (I love how it can make blurry look good), the client dug their photos, and I had an awesome time. All in all, the best kind of job.

Last night I got together with local Vancouver, WA band ‘Jericho vs. Mankind’ to shoot some promotional material for them. The concept was left in my hands, and the band’s drummer has a new (old) house that is currently under renovation. The very unfinished interior and the rotting workshop/barn/shed thing in the back yard inspired me to go grungy with it, and I’m very happy with the results.

Alien Bees B800 through softbox camera left. B800 with 7″ reflector back camera right. B400 with reflector behind a wall in the background

This is the group shot from the basement. I rammed the clarity up to 100 in lightroom and added the same “rust” overlay I added in my NERF shoot a few months back. Those combined did a great job grunging up the far-too-clean straight from camera shot.

6 people in a basement is going to get hot fast, so we took the show to the backyard where an old dilapidated barn type thing was. The renovation crew had been using it as a place to dump all the stuff they’re pulling from the house, so there was a big pile of old cabinets and boards in the middle of the floor. The instant I saw it I knew what I wanted the band to do.

Alien Bees B800 with reflector front camera left. B800 with reflector back camera right. ABR800 Ring Flash on ground on lens axis, pointed up at band

This came out pretty damn close to how I envisioned it when I saw the pile of junk. I used the two B800s to cross light the group, and used the ring flash on the ground as some frontal fill. I set the ring flash about a full stop higher than it should have been in order to bring a bit of blown out detail to the image. I would never intentionally blow stuff out that much for a portrait, but in this case my mind was thinking album cover.

I also took the chance to do 2 styles of headshots for either in-album material, or the band’s website. Once again, cleanliness was not the objective:

I consider one of my best selling points to be the fact that I can take even the crappiest of locations and do something cool with them. I’ve been shooting a bit of personal work to advertise that fact a bit harder; You may have noticed a bit of it in my last post.

This time, I met up with amateur motorcycle racer Collin Spittal to create some awesome shots of him and his bike.

This was the location, as would be seen by the naked eye:

I’ve got two real options to fix the location: Blur it. Darken it.

Alien Bees B800 through Shoot Through umbrella, on axis and slightly above. B800 with 40 degree grid in back, camera left

Alien Bees B800 through shoot through umbrella camera right, B800 through 40 degree grid camera left. ABR800 Ring flash on axis

Alien Bees B800 through shoot through umbrella, camera left, B800 through 40 degree grid behind subject’s head, ABR800 Ring Flash on ground camera right

Alien Bees B800 through shoot through umbrella camera right, B800 through grid behind subject in frame

Natural Light

This is an industrial shop building in the Orchards area of Vancouver, WA. It’s nearing sunset on the opposite side of it, and this is how the natural light looks. Extended shade like this is the absolute best place to get nice evenly lit natural light photos, and it’s not too tough to do. Drop down the aperture, bump up the shutter, and your subject’s going to look pretty good.

Let’s give a natural light look a shot:

Natural Light

Natural light, exposed up in lightroom

Instead, I’d rather hook up some some big powerful Alien Bees studio lights, and do something cool with it.

2x Alien Bees B800s, one with 1/4 CTO, the other with reflector only

1 Alien Bee B800 with 1/4 CTO key, 1 B800 reflector only rim

1 Alien Bee B800 with 1/4 CTO key, 1 B800 reflector only rim

Now let’s swap the 1/4 CTO for a Full CTO.

1x Alien Bees B800 with Full CTO

1 Alien Bees B800 with Full CTO key from left, 1 B800 with Blue gel from right

Enough with this wall though. We’ve got a sun relatively low in the sky and some portable studio lights that can nuke our subject like the Bikini Atoll.

Alien Bees B800 with full CTO from camera left

Just because I’ve got the blue gelled 2nd light on hand, let’s toss it in to the picture and see how things look.

Alien Bees B800 with Full CTO Key from left, B800 with Blue Gel from right

Lastly, because I haven’t used it in a while, I pulled out the ABR800 ring flash. Guess what? It looks like a ring flash.

Alien Bees ABR800 Ring Flash on lens axis

By using gels like this, you can really create some cool moods and effects at any location. A lot of it may be achievable with photoshop or just switching up your white balance, but doing it with lights makes sure you’re getting at least one step closer to the image you want long before it leaves your memory card.

You’d be hard pressed not to have ever seen a lensbaby advert if you spent any time at all on any photography site. For those somehow not in the know, it’s a fully manual tilt shift lens. By pressing on the bellows like tube at different points and with different amounts of pressure, you can change not only your focus point, but your focus angle, allowing for some really neat effects. They have a ton of different optics available for the lens, and I opted for the plastic. While the fact that the plastic optic is the cheapest definitely helped my desire for it, the fact that I already have two amazing 50mm lenses (the 50/1.4 and the 16-50/2.8) made the need for ANOTHER piece of good sharp 50mm glass less present. Wanting to play with it immediately, I pulled out my favorite test dummy: A hand puppet Pip Boy from the Fallout 3 presentation at the 2008 Penny Arcade Expo.

Natural Light

Lighting in this shot was achieved by shooting in an area of shade created by a fence, and getting the puppet high enough that the direct light from the sun behind the fence would create a nice glowing rim. You have to be careful, however, as the plastic optic is very very sensitive to flare, and it’s not the pretty kind of flare I get with the 16-50/2.8.

Example of lens flare with Lensbaby Plastic Optic

Check out more Pip Boy or even order your pretentious “Art Prints” at this gallery.

Emerald England, wife of a friend of mine, had a 2nd shooter that she had lined up for a wedding this Monday cancel at the last minute for a family emergency. Her husband, knowing a bit about my work and that the wedding was being held less than an hour from where I live, hooked us up, and I got the gig having never actually met Emerald before.

I showed up early to the venue and started dealing with detail shots.

Natural Light

The groom and groomsmen were ready far earlier than the bride was, so Emerald and I took them to a nearby hill to get their photos out of the way. I snapped a quick portrait of the groom:

AB800 CTOd and blended with Natural Light

AB800, CTOd and blended with Natural Light

AB800 CTOd and blended with Natural Light

Emerald was shooting the same girls from just to my left using a whole lot more of the natural light. I haven’t seen her image from this spot yet, but she’s able to manipulate natural light in a way that – while gorgeous – is completely foreign to me. The combination of skillsets between her natural light work and my portable high-power flash work will hopefully give the client a much more diverse collection of images from which to enjoy the memories of their wedding day.

After the ceremony and dinner, it was time to hit the dance floor; and despite the fact that the DJs from MDM pulled out every trick I’ve ever seen – and a few I hadn’t – no one was there to join me. Seriously, no offense to the client, but their family is a pretty substantial group of party-poopers. Thankfully, because of the traditional events (garter and bouquet tossing, first dance, father dance), I had a few opportunities to make some good photos.

Cross lit with Two AB800s, Full CTO gels

I’ve commented before that I don’t like doing natural light photography (at least not as much as my other options). It’s not that there’s anything inherently wrong with the medium, I just prefer to have as much control over my images as possible. Location Flash Photography lets me do that.

Family photos may not be the most interesting subject in the world, but today’s case was a perfect chance to show off the power of flash.

Alien Bees AB800 through Shoot-Through Umbrella, front left; Alien Bees AB800 with Full CTO gel, back right

CTO Gelled AB800 Left; AB800 through Shoot-Through Umbrella Right

Natural Light

In the first, I keep the flash power relatively low. I want to balance with the daylight and make something that looks real, but stylized. The full CTO gel on the back light adds the warmth of the real sun, making the rim light feel very natural. The broad lightsource from the shoot through umbrella makes a nice soft light that doesn’t so much overpower the natural light, as enhance it, filling in shadows and making everything nice and soft.

In the second, I moved the camera position to the opposite side, shooting into a shade-drenched forest. I rammed the lights up to full power, with the intent of killing the sun almost entirely. While it’s not enough power to darken the bright skies to black, it’s more than enough to kill the shady areas. With the CTO in front, it becomes almost more like the family is together at a beach (or a fake movie set beach), staring off into a sunset. This was a shot of opportunity, as the kid was distracted by someone walking a dog, so I quickly had the family change directions to match the way he was facing, and adjusted the light powers and my position quickly to make a shot that would be good.

In the third shot, I’ve forgone “artificial” lighting completely, and am working with only what the sky is providing me. Not being limited to the flash sync speed allows me to drop all the way down to f/2.8 for the shallow depth of field. I use manual exposure mode still, and set exposure for the kid’s face. This has the effect of blowing the sky to an almost solid mass of white, as well as a few chunks of his shirt. Dad, slightly out of focus in the back, is smiling and watching his kid explore, making for a great lifestyle type image; something a family wouldn’t be able to get with traditional studio-based family photos.

So there you have it, simply through using moderately high-powered portable flash units (the entire set up could be bought for less than $1000), we can create three entirely different images in the same relative location, all in the matter of about 15 minutes.

View FULL GALLERY of Fremont Zombie walk images, as well as purchase prints or downloads.

Drove up to Seattle last night to shoot some photos of the 2010 Fremont Zombie Walk, as they attempted – and succeeded – to break the previous world record of number of zombies in one place.

As much as I knew it would kill my back, I opted to lug around the 20 pound Vagabond II battery pack and the Alien Bees Ring Flash.. It may have killed me physically, but the results were 100% worth it.

To keep weight down, I brought only the 50/1.4. It’s a good focal length for the ring, and its inability to zoom meant I wouldn’t have to bother myself with sliding the camera in and out and trying to zoom while holding the body with one hand, the flash with the other and twisting the zoom ring with…. yeah.

Left: No clarity. Right: Clarity

If you notice that the images don’t look entirely natural, besides the unnatural lighting, it’s because I slammed the clarity slider in Lightroom all the way up to 100 for every shot. If you were to shoot an older person or someone with bad skin and do that, it would make them look absolutely hideous; but when you’ve got people with zombie makeup and fake flesh hanging off their faces, it adds a darkness and depth to their look which is perfect for this kind of thing.

Lastly, one of my favorite shots, that I couldn’t find a way to work naturally into the blog post:

I’ve had an idea for a second NERF shoot for quite a while now (see here for the first one), and had finally set a date to do it. Unfortunately, I didn’t have near the numbers I was hoping for, and had to rework the story on the spot. I think that’s a good thing, however, as the ability to think on my feet has gotten me through a whole lot.

(Go HERE for higher resolutions, or to purchase prints or downloads)

This story is of a weapons deal gone wrong. The weapons dealer is waiting for a new buyer on some back road of suburbia.

I made extensive use of crosslighting throughout the shoot. I’m a huge fan of the technique in general, as it’s easy to setup and visualize, and gives you a very modern look.

The only lens used all day was the DA* 16-50/2.8, which has quickly become my favorite lens. The one downside, in this case, was that the images were way too clean. I thought about a few ways to dirty them up, and ended up importing an image I had taken of a rusty sheet of metal, converting it to grayscale, putting it on top of the images as an overlay, and then using a transparency mask to clean up the areas I wanted slightly cleaner. This leads to a sort of texture vignette that I really dig.

I slightly overwarmed the images as well, in order to keep set the mood I was looking for. Just to try it out, I have a full set of them with a cooler, more accurate, color temperature. They look fine, but just don’t have the punch these do, in my opinion at least.

About a week ago, I was commissioned to shoot a little league game up in Battle Ground. The game was yesterday, and while the team I was shooting for didn’t do too well, it was still a lot of fun. I’ll admit I hadn’t shot baseball before, and it’s definitely a whole different style than shooting basketball. When I’m at a basketball game, there’s always a good image somewhere on the court. With baseball, you really have to predict where things might happen, and pray that something actually does.

On the bright side (pre-pun entirely intended), shooting outside during the day makes it a lot easier to shoot with my 70-300. It’s a pretty fantastic lens, despite some fringing at the long end. The entire game was done with that lens, continuous autofocus, f/6.7 ISO1100, and a shutter speed ranging from 1000-4000 depending on the often changing lighting conditions brought on by cloud movement.

Through the game, I learned a few key rules that are easy to share about shooting baseball:

1. It’s super easy to get a good shot of a pitcher.

Much like Michael Ian Black’s preference for Funk rock over funk Rock in the short lived Comedy Central series “Stella,” I much prefer family Portraits to Family portraits.

The difference is, of course, very subtle. funk Rock has heavier drums and the guitars play much more of a role, whereas family Portraits put making a cool picture at the forefront of the creative process. Sure, the family is there, but it’s the Picture that I care about.

Such was the case today.

Alien Bees B800 with softbox camera left, LP120, pretending to be the sun, providing rim light and flare.

People will call me for images against backdrops, and more often than not, I’ll do them; but only after doing my utmost to talk them into going outside and getting something cool and unique.

After the family photos, they wanted a few individuals as well. This is my favorite of the lot:

Just the AB800 and 7″ reflector, with a bit of sun to even things out.

Things I’ve learned about seamless paper in the past week:
1. It’s awesome once it’s set up.
2. It’s a pain in the ass to set up without help.

I learned #2 after losing about 3 yards of it to wrinkles when trying to unroll it from the background stand on my own. Oh yeah…

3. It’s heavy.

My background stand’s locking mechanism couldn’t handle it, which led to me holding everything in place with vice grips. It got the job done, but I’m not sure the stand will ever be the same again.

I’ve been wanting to play with seamless for a while, so I grabbed a 9ft roll of Thunder Gray for use on a Boudoir style shoot I had coming up.

It’s a super easy setup to do, and just get the subject to do fun crazy things while you shoot away. Switch colors, do it again. It’s fun and has a definite mass market appeal, so I definitely plan to advertise this sort of thing as a special, along with a 16×16 aluminum print or something. You don’t even need seamless paper to do it. Could just as easily be done against a blank wall in a client’s house.

After noticing in the light of the new day that I had left my foot in one of the images from yesterday (a constant problem I have with giant feet and wide lenses), and having been watching Chase Jarvis’s live shoot feed all day, I decided to not only clone out my foot, but do a bit of extra punching up to the image to show a bit of how I work what post production I do.

Here’s the original picture:

That in mind, 90% of my post production is global adjustments. I don’t want to have to go in and paint in details or anything. If I’ve got to grab my wacom pen, I’m going to have to do too much.

All I did for the above image is boost the blue saturation to make the skies a bit more dramatic. I bumped the clarity in Lightroom, which is a sort of edge sharpening that comes off looking similar to doing high pass sharpening in Photoshop. I don’t use it often, but it adds an edge to an image that I like when something’s a bit more modern and fashion-y like this image was. 99 times out of 100, I won’t touch the slider. It’s an effect I don’t use liberally. Lastly I applied a gradiated exposure filter set to half a stop on the bottom of the frame. I stated yesterday I wish I had added a 2nd light down to bring out her shoes, and this is just a virtual way of doing that. With only half a stop change, and having shot at ISO100 and gotten everything else right in camera, it doesn’t bring any noise to the table. It’s still super clean.

All together they’re fairly minor changes. With the exception of the edge sharpening, it could very well be just a change in camera presets. But that’s how I roll. If my post image is unrecognizable from my original image, I’ve done it wrong. It works for some people, but it’s just not how I like to do things.

I woke up at 9 this morning with the intent of driving 3 hours down to Antelope, OR to do some fashion-y portrait stuff in the deserts of Oregon. Bad advice from google maps and a check engine light that I couldn’t figure out the reason for ended the trip early, but all was not lost.

We stopped at an overlook on 30 West overlooking the Columbia River Gorge, and worked it awesomely. The instant I saw it I knew what I wanted to do. I had to give a bit of leeway as the sun was a bit more south than I would have liked, but within about 10 minutes of shooting, we had the shots I wanted.

The AB800 is, relatively, not that big of a light. 320 Watt/seconds is a good two stops less than you’re going to get with an Elinchrom Ranger or Profoto 7b. Even less if you’re rocking multiple packs or a bi-tube head. But even with that 320 Watt/seconds, you can shoot right into the sun and still tell the sky what to do. The sun, in both cases, provides a great backlight, turning your one-light setup into a 2-light crosslighting deal.

This is my first time using the 16-50/2.8 outdoors with flash, and again, I’m absolutely stunned by what the lens puts out. Both of those shots are pretty much straight from camera. All I did was apply a color profile from my x-rite colorchecker passport, and eyedropper a square for white balance. No sharpening, no contrast, no saturation. Just a good, honest image.

My one concern with the 16-50, that I’m going to have to be careful about and actually slow myself down for, is that when it’s out of focus, it is out of focus. When it’s in focus, it’s absolutely stunning, but if you’re even a couple millimeters off, it’s going to show. Either way, the lens is a keeper, and I’ll definitely be shooting more in the gorge again. Beautiful place.

Up today at 11:30am – the break of dawn – to shoot some commercial images for Total Fitness of Battle Ground, who had seen the work I did for the Tae Kwon Do class that works out of there last year. It was also a chance to use the DA(STAR) 16-50/2.8 in my kind of situation: ISO 100 and Flashes. I thought the shots from the basketball courts were ok, but ISO4500 is not what this lens was made for. Having seen now what it can do, it’s a keeper, and I can’t forsee it leaving my camera anytime soon.

I shot two setups, and although we had set aside an hour for the shoot, we were done in half that.

Here’s the light test for the first setup I shot:

Click here for actual pixels.

The colors are incredible. The sharpness, beautiful. The contrast, orgasmic. The chromatic aberration I was worried about last night is completely gone at f/4.

Here’s the shot we chose:

My DA(STAR) 16-50/2.8 arrived in the mail today… err… that is to say it arrived yesterday… with no autofocus. A quick call to Amazon and I got another DA(STAR) 16-50/2.8 in the mail actually today, and it worked. With new lens safely in hand, I decided to go do some more half court shooting.

My original intent was to hit up the Evergreen vs. Skyview game at Evergreen, but the school’s website said something about the game being moved without saying where. So I went to Heritage’s 2 Stops Darker gym and made do. 2 stops darker meant a minimum of ISO 4500, which meant noise, and even then it was forcing me to compromise shutter speed, setting it at a relatively slow 1/250th.

The lens performed great when it comes to visual quality. The SDM Autofocus mechanism seems no faster than the screw drive, which is a disappointment. It is absolutely silent, but for my shooting, I think that’s kind of a negative. I like the DZHHH sound of the screw drive, and knowing that when the sound is done, my shot’s in focus. Knowing that when the sound starts, the lens is doing it’s thing. With a .95x viewfinder, it’s just not always easy to tell whether the lens is actually focusing or not. I’d take silent and faster any day, but just silent is meh to me. Then again, at least the autofocus works. The only other issue is it has some issues with purple fringing which are noticeable at about 50% and larger, but it’s not so bad that it makes the lens bad. The color rendition is fantastic, the contrast is gorgeous (though better at not ISO 4500) and the sharpness is incredible (again though, not so much at ISO 4500 after a bit of NR).

The first three quarters of the game, I did my standard thing. Find a spot on the sidelines, and shoot the action from there.

In the last quarter, ready to say I was never going to shoot at Heritage again, I decided to risk getting yelled at and sat down against the wall, right under one of the baskets. I didn’t get yelled out, though I did barely dodge a basketball at one point. I pulled the lens back to 16mm, prefocused halfway down the key (confident that at 16mm everything remotely near the key would be in focus, even at f/2.8), went to live view for safety, and spammed the shutter button anytime anything was happening near by.

I really like the anticipatory movements of all the girls in this one:

Despite being years upon years older, the Evergreen High School gym has a good stop and a half of light on the Heritage gym. This meant that I could go down to iso 2200, which meant no need for noise reduction, and that I could move my shutter to 1/500th, which despite what I said last time, really does make a difference.

Thanks to the extra light, I’m much happier with how things turned out today, and I’m really looking forward to picking up a nice long 2.8 zoom this month (still really unsure on whether I want the Pentax 50-135 or the Tamron 70-200. I’ve heard bad QA things about the Pentax, but I’m a fan of weather sealing and metal construction. I also like long length though. Quite the pickle.)

Evergreen won 64-56, though Kelso could have pulled it out if not for the string of fouls in the last quarter.

Favorite Shots:

As an example, here’s an image from above, with four different white balances:

The bottom frame is lightroom’s fluorescent preset. Not even close.

The second frame is using the eye dropper tool to select one of the white jersey’s as a reference point for white balance. It’s getting closer, but there’s still a definite green cast.

The third frame is the one that you see originally posted. Color as given to me by the x-rite colorchecker software, and it’s exactly what I saw as I was shooting the game.

After having enjoyed fake shooting the Seahawks game last Sunday, I decided to make a more realistic attempt at sports shooting. I grabbed my camera bag, 5 bucks, and a bottle of coke, and made my way to my Alma Mater to shoot some varsity basketball.

Things I learned:
- I don’t need to shoot at 1/1000th. 1/250th to 1/500th (depending on closeness of subject) is plenty.
- High School Gym lighting does not mesh well with a 70-300/4-5.6.
- Shoot from the left side of the basket (as you’re facing it) since most players are right handed and will attempt layups from the right side.
- f/2.8 is plenty of depth of field. f/2.0 is pushing it. f/1.4 is not even worth trying.
- I can just barely fit an entire game on an 8gig SDHC card.
- Shooting sports is fun.

Having discovered that 2nd point, I did most of the shooting with my 50/1.4. On a crop sensor, that works out to 75mm, which is really not all that bad if you’re only shooting one half of the court. With the 70-300, I could still only really shoot half the court, as the 105mm equivalent was too tight to shoot the half I was standing at. Because of this fact, I’m thinking I’ll push the d700 back a few months and pick up a Pentax DA* 50-135 in the near future. I also shot the entire game in manual mode, with continuous autofocus. The k20d did a great job keeping up in the focus department, and manual exposure assured me of consistent exposure.

I started off the game by shooting my new X-Rite ColorChecker Passport.

Heritage ended up losing, 58-65. I really enjoyed shooting the game, I really look forward to picking up a better sports lens, and I definitely plan to shoot at least 4 or 5 more games before the High School Basketball season ends. Favorite shots from the night below:

See my newest NERF shoot here.

I told myself over the past few weeks, as I was preparing for this shoot: “I’m not going to rush the shots. I’m going to nitpick every mistake, and reshoot it until it’s perfect.”

I didn’t listen to myself. And it shows. It didn’t help that I still had some food poisoning symptoms (never eating at Shari’s again), but mostly it’s just a quirk of mine where when I’m working with other people – particularly people I’m paying in sandwiches – I feel like I’m wasting their time if I don’t get things done as quickly as possible. These shots are pretty much straight from camera.

So yeah, not perfect, but I had some fun doing it (even though I was afraid I would vomit or crap myself the entire time). Besides those nitpicks though, I really liked several of the shots, and still think the concept is sound. I don’t know if I will revisit this exact story again, but I have more nerf based shoots rattling around in the brain.

After doing the Beach shoot for my family yesterday, I made a very quick and treacherous drive back over the mountains to do christmas photos for some friends who slacked on it. Slacked on it to the point where I delivered for them JPEGs moments after the shoot finished, which they promptly took to a walmart to print, finishing just in time to get to their parents.

The overgelled look can be obnoxious at times, but, especially in a festive season such as this, it can do a lot to turn a fairly cruddy location into something different, that your clients will like.

Life’s particularly a beach when you’ve got to be up at 10 AM to drive to Seaside, shoot an hour’s worth of photos, then drive back through dark, foggy, icy weather to shoot another session that night.

Both shoots were for family and friends, however (no other way I’d be working on Christmas Eve), so they were definitely worthwhile.

The first was for my grandparent’s anniversary. After seeing some of my new demonstration prints, my grandmother really wanted a nice 8×10 of her and my grandpa together. With them going to the beach every year for Christmas, I decided to follow them out there.

I’ll load up a few shots from the second shoot after Christmas.

Got a call at half til noon this morning from some friends inviting me to come up and do some shooting of their shooting. With an empty schedule and nothing better to do at home, I obliged.

Having not worked with this kind of action before, I stumbled through my setups and never really got anything I was proud of. If I were to do it again, the action shots would be much more usable. It was a real learning experience.

Thankfully for us, no one’s time was wasted. Shooting of any sort is always fun, and I ended the session with some gun-lovin’ portraits.

LP120 front camera left.

LP120 front camera left.

On a more learning-y note, the two images above are a really good example of the kind of power you have with portable flash lighting, even something on the relatively low end of the powerscale like the LP120 hotshoe flash. The top image, I’m slightly overpowering the ambient to bring out that detail in the distant landscape. In the bottom image, the sky itself was a bit too dull gray, so I turned down the light, bumping up the ambient, to make it a bit more white in contrast to the subject.

Without portable flash lighting on my side, any attempt to change the ambient would also have forced a change on the subject. Not always a bad thing, but in these cases, I wanted the subjects properly exposed.

…walk into a bar.

An hour later a photographer walks out telling you never to work with animals ever again.

1. Set up lights in a position that will be generally acceptable.
2. Tell people where to try to keep their heads facing.
3. Bring in animals.
4. Click the shutter every time the lights refresh and pray to god something looks good.
5. ?????
6. Profit.

Honestly, for a few of the poses, we never actually reached step 6.

Animals just make things crazy. I had to do my best to recover a lot of highlights, since donkeys would all of a sudden walk closer to the light, and I couldn’t risk missing a great expression from the kid. In retrospect, I should have shot everything a stop down and raised it in post.

The other thing I never realized is that horses are REALLY REALLY BIG. They asked to get some shots of the grandkid riding bareback on one of them. This kid was about the size of the horse’s liver. I had no idea how to frame it, and nothing was behaving properly, and I just couldn’t get them a great shot of it.

Thankfully, some of the poses did turn out fantastic.

A Battle Ground High student, with one of the most amazing smiles ever, called me up to get some past due senior portraits done. We opted to shoot at the school itself, and upon arriving I was disappointed with the situation. Nothing was inspiring me. I just didn’t like the look of any of it. Once she arrived however, and we started shooting, I knew I could be shooting in garbage filled vat at a waste disposal plant and she could make it look good.

I also originally planned on using nothing but the LumoPro since every source I could find was predicting rain for the day. Thankfully it was a perfect for shooting dry overcast. With the sky clear, I pulled out a B800 and the vagabond. To quote David Hobby “I am an available light photographer. Meaning, if a light is available I will consider using it.” And really, I can’t argue with having 400 watt seconds of light available to me, and if conditions aren’t wet or perilous, I’m almost always going to pull out the big boys. Or boy, in this case.

After getting the safe and easy stuff in the bag, we headed over to the daycare area with its little jungle gym thing, which made for some sweet shots.

Alien Bees B800 with 1-1/4 CTO.

We then walked to the stadium where I dragged the shutter for some blur effects. The cool thing about using CTO gels to turn the background blue is that you have complete control in post of just how blue it is. In this case, since there’s very little blue in her shirt or anywhere else on her, I can drop the blue saturation to 0 to really make her pop off the image. You’ve got a selective color effect with no masking or anything complicated at all. I know a lot of people frown on selective color, and it’s an easy effect to overdo, but it’s a nice thing to know how to do.

Unmodified LP120, Full Zoom.

And that, as they say, was a wrap.

My 2nd day down in Yachats was slightly less productive thanks to the premiere of “The Prisoner” on AMC, but thankfully that occured after dark, whereas before dark we went out and made more picture fun.

We found a series of tide pools that had some cool miniature cliff type things going on. The day was dull a gray again, but with the slightly overexposed Half-CTOd gel on the LP120, you’d never know it.

Down in middle of nowhere, OR to play with my usual light test model for the weekend, and brought along my new toy: The LumoPro 120 flash from MPEX.com. I’m not terribly used to working with small flashes, so it was a definite learning experience. Particularly learning to deal with a 6 second recharge time at full power. Even by the end of the night we were missing a lot of shots because I failed at counting to 6.

Used the light itself with no modifiers (umbrella ate f-stops like a beast), and a full and a half CTO gel over the front.

Marcus is a man who loves his suits. He’s also got nothing but an absolutely terrible cell phone camera and a bathroom mirror with which to show his suits off to the world (well, that and going out). Enter me.

We started inside, and I was somewhat inspired by those Dos Equis beer commercials with “The Most Interesting Man In The World.” I didn’t go quite as stylized as they go, but I still kind of felt it.

Four lights on this one, an AB400 gelled red pointed at a draped muslin background (really wish I could have found my old black satin sheet for this one), a gridspotted AB800 back and camera left to give a nice rim light. Another AB800 through a softbox, mounted high and just to the right of frame. Lastly, a ring flash on axis to fill in the shadow side just a bit.

When the northwest rain died down a bit, I grabbed the softboxed light and the vagabond, and got him something that looked like it should be on the cover of “Awesome Business Tycoon Magazine”

Took a senior portrait client out to Lewisville Park, north of Battle Ground. The ability to use flash lighting on location allows you to do some really cool stuff, such as underexposing the ambient to coax some nice bright colors out of a still fairly dull (to the naked eye) sunset.

Alien Bees B800 bounced off white umbrella, camera left.

Went to a parking garage in downtown Vancouver) with a senior portrait client today. They wanted something fairly urban but also near by (i.e. not Portland), and it was the best I could think of in my little corner of suburbia. The location turned out to be pretty awesome and I fully intend on returning in the future.

Alien Bees B800 bounced off White Umbrella, camera left. B800 with 7″ reflector behind pillar, bounced off grayish wall on camera right providing rim lighting.

Decided to do some light testing with a smoking friend of mine on a recent trip up to Seattle. While I’m not a big fan of smoking myself, it does make for some fun lighting.

AB800 bounced off umbrella, camera right, slightly behind subject

Had some plans to do something more formal and cool with a portrait client, but the northwest weather was uncooperative, and the rain forced us inside. Her small apartment didn’t leave us much to do, so I blasted the ugly green walls with light until they turned bright white, stuck a ring flash on the lens for a bit of on axis fill, and came up with something that both she and I really digged. There’s maybe 8inches to a foot of space between her and the all behind her.

Alien Bees B800 bare bulb behind subject, pointed at wall, ABR800 Ring Flash on camera.

I don’t shoot weddings often, but when a friend of my mom’s asks, and is willing to pay my full asking price, I can’t much say no.

The ceremony took place about 2 hours up into some mountain north of Battle Ground. The location was absolutely gorgeous and you could see for miles. They (and I) were on a ledge hanging over a good 500 ft. drop to more rocks. Thank god for wide angle zooms, because using the 50 would mean stepping back to my death.

The reception was at the Bride’s parents house, a much safer location. I had a couple hours to cool off, back up memory cards, etc. before people started showing up. I couldn’t cross light the dance floor exactly how I wanted to, but I got a setup that worked. To make sure I had enough light no matter where I was, I shot in Aperture Priority with autoEV set down half a stop, setting the aperture for whatever the flash would be where the subject was standing. That way if there was flash light in frame I’d have some fill as well, and if there was no flash, I could just bump the raw up a half stop in lightroom before exporting.

While I didn’t like not being able to cross light the dance floor, having nothing but backlights led to what, I hope, will be the family’s most treasured shot for years to come.

AB800 in Large Softbox, back camera left. AB800 with reflector only, back camera right

Met with a bride for her upcoming wedding so that I could scout the reception area. I brought along a single flash to get some light tests, and everything fell into place perfect for this one. The clouds, in particular, are so wonderfully white and fluffy. Very “Pushing Daisies.”

Alien Bees B800 in Large Softbox, camera right.

A company I do video and design work for was in need of some new photos – something better than old myspace mirror shots – for their “About Us” page. Seeing as we were having a company meeting that day anyway, I pulled a few of the guys aside, along with the Vagabond power unit and some Voice Activated Light Stands, and pulled some stuff together real quick.

Phil, here, refused to have a portrait done without his sunglasses, and then refused to move his head like I told him to to keep the catchlight out of said sunglasses, but even with the catchlight I’m happy with the result. I don’t generally want umbrella reflections in all my portraits, but for Phil here it kind of works.

StudioDG Commercial and Corporate Portrait Photography'>
Alien Bees AB800 bounced off White Umbrella

A week ago I ordered the Vagabond II power unit from Paul Buff and Joelle was kind enough to ride over and help me test it out. I dare say it’s the best thing I’ve bought since the Alien Bees monolights and that not being tethered to a wall plug is potentially the greatest thing ever. We went out to a small field near my place and figured out what we could do.

This is probably one of the more photoshopped shots I’ve ever done. I cloned the light stand out from the light providing the flare, and enhanced the flare itself just because I couldn’t get the lens flare I envisioned from using the lens alone.

Alien Bees AB800 bounced off white umbrella, camera right, AB800 with 30 degree Grid Spot in frame, behind subject.

Shot a Tae Kwon Do class up at a local gym today. Had each kid just do their crazy ninja stuff while I shot every time the lights refreshed. Toss in a couple group shots, and good to go. There was also a promotion ceremony for one of the students, so I shot that as a free bonus, which led to a fairly badass kicking a board in half shot. They also payed me with, in addition to cash, Digiorno pizzas. I don’t know why, but I won’t complain.

Alien Bees AB800 in large softbox camera right, AB800 with 40 degree Grid spot behind subject, camera left

Had a guy call me up wanting to shoot some portraits of him and his girlfriend in Portland. Met em at Lloyd Center and they took me to some abandoned lot saying “This is where we go to tag shit where the police won’t find it.” Needless to say I was a bit fearful I’d get shot, but things went off without a hitch and the location was pretty sweet (if only I could remember where exactly it was).

Did some ok stuff with him, but his girlfriend is super photogenic. Favorite shot below. I did a bit more photoshopping than I normally would, desaturating the bluish wall and boosting the orange to all hell:

Natural Light