the actor

actor - one who interprets, in this sense, an actor is one who interprets a dramatic character.

another portrait

I am still posting portraits that i shot last week but you will be glad to know that i am almost done and will only post one more from that series of shots.
This is a guy that i work with who was just stung by a bee and his tounge swelled. He was nice enough to pose before heading for first aid. I am kidding. There was no bee just a funny guy that gave me a whole range of facial expressions to shoot.
I shot quite a few images as he was changing the whole time. I have always said that i can only do half the work. If the subject can participate and try to make up that other half then you have magic.

portrait session

As i may have mentioned in my last post, i shot 4 portraits recently and thought i would just continue along to the second in the series for tonights show and tell.
Light setup stayed exactly the same as my last images, one in front and one behind.
I did a little retouching in photoshop but not much.
My favourite shot from this series is the image on the right. I really liked the eyes too however and wanted to show them in another shot, thus the image on the left. I have always liked photographing people with freckles. Why?? No idea. Mabey i can do a series of shots someday of many people with many freckles.
I still have two other people in the cue to share with you but i am having trouble picking my favourite image from one of the shoots. I have about 10 that i like. Mabey i will do a contact sheet image and you can pick the best one for yourself.

tryptic

As i mentioned the other night, i was in the mood to shoot some portraits.
I was able to shoot 4 people today, took about 5 minutes each, and all were just happen chance. I set up the lights for the look i wanted and then just said "hey, follow me". Each persons images were different and all shot under the same light setup.
I used one light for the background with a 30 degree honeycomb grid spot pointed straight at a black paper backdrop and used one light, butterfly, placed just above and in front of subject shot through a umbrella. I kept this main light as close to them as i could. I shot with a d700 and a 50mm f1.4 lens. My head was touching the umbrella so just to be safe i held a reflector, still in its black carry bag, over my head and camera to block any spill on me.
I only did a few shots of each subject and really was very happy with all.
In lightroom i cranked up the clarity a bit (80 i think) and just adjusted the exposure, blacks, and white balance settings. I wanted to keep the images with a cool tone and think i may have taken them too far away from this in the end.
As stand alone images they work very well but have to be viewed large for the full effect. They are extremely sharp and you can count the pores on the skin.

combo

I am in the mood to shoot some portraits. Why i have no idea.
Until i get some shot i thought i would play with a couple photos i took last month.
With the photo on the left i used the dodge and burn tool, mabey a bit too much.
To up the contrast a bit, with both photos i created a new layer and converted it to black and white. I did an adjustment and increased the contrast by dragging the white and black sliders three squares towards the center. I then changed the layers blend mode to overlay and decreased the layers opacity down to 15%.
I also did a vignette on both photos seperately.
The photo on the left was shot with available light and the photo on the right used one off camera flash placed to the left and aimed direct. The right hand photo was shot around noon.

cool location

My family went apple picking tonight at a place that i have never been before. I thought it was incredible visually and ended up shooting the whole time and not picking one apple. My daughter and her friend just ate and threw them at each other so i guess it was my son and wife that did all the work. Fitting as the two of them later made an apple crisp that was great.
I just combined three images here and ran through photomatix.
Below is another one, since i missed a couple days of posts.
I just did the exact same thing to this one also. I also did a curve to warm it up a bit. My little trick to do this is to add yellow and magenta to the shadows on the curve. I also did an apply image to put green info into the weak red channel.
I will go over this approach in detail soon as it works great for fall shots.

inspiration reworked

I rarely rework an image but thought i would try this one in black and white.
Not sure which way i like it better, both ways i guess.
I went to a wonderful photography art exhibit opening tonight.
Congratulations to all of those in the silverfish group.

pita pit

This is another image i took at the jazz festival. This one is straight up. No fancy process and nothing other than a curve correction and sharpened. Shot at iso 1250 f2.8 1/40sec with a 24mm lens.
Tired, must go to bed.

inspiration

First of all, yes i know, this is not a photo of a car.
I did look around for one, and found one, but thought this was a much better shot.
This shot gives me the opportunity to talk about inspiration and why we take some of the photos we take.
Sometimes its little things that spark an idea for an image. Today it was this scarf. I have seen the scarf before though, many times in fact, so why was it today that i wanted to photograph it. My guess is how it showed on the black outfit. It was the only source of color, other than the necklace. That was the "what" of the photograph. The "how" of the shot was the lighting and the photoshop high contrast look. All of this was included in the initial spark of inspiration. I saw it as a final image and in the end that is exactly how it came out. I am not saying that i have this great eye or anything as i am sure that many of you that read this post previsualize images in the same way. Sometimes we dont see it all of course and have to play for awhile to finish off the image. Another good thing to do it to "live with it" for awhile. Keep it on your computer screen or stick up a print and each time you walk by just take a quick look. You will start to get some ideas and also will probably notice some problems with the photo that you didn't notice to begin with.
So to end the inspiration speech my advice is to listen to it when it hits you and act on it. I have way too many photos in my head that should have been but i walked by them.
I lit the image with two strobes behind her and placed to the right and left for rim. I used one light for the main and placed it high and directly in front of her. All lights were direct and shot through a 30 degree honeycomb grid spot.
In camera raw i took the recovery, contrast, clarity, vibrance, and fill light to 100 and took the saturation way down. I upped the blacks and exposure to increase contrast even more. I then just retouched the image a bit and hit the scarf with the sponge tool set to saturation.
To finish the image off i extended the canvas size on the width so i could crop to a square. I sharpened pretty heavy also.

sign the bug

I never know what car i will find in my garage. Tonight it was a bug that was used at our local jazz festival to raise money for music in schools. For the small donation of two dollars you get to sign the bug. Pretty cool idea and obviously it looks like they did quite well.
I used a tripod here and bracketed over a nine stop range. Blended 5 images together in photomatix.
Thats all.
I should try to find another car for tomorrows post. Just to keep the theme going.

old ford in hdr

I shot a wedding this past weekend and i was very excited to see the car that would transport the couple from the church to the reception. I looked inside and knew that i wanted to try to get a minute to do some bracketed shots to play with later. This was shot handheld and three shots were blended together in photomatix. The only other thing i did was sharpen and do a contrast and color correction curve.

guest blog sunday

My first guest blog entry, i am proud to say, is from my father.
He has taken a keen interest in photography over the past few years and is doing extremely well.
Judging from the amount of full slide trays stored in the basement closet at my parents house, this isn't a new passion.
The image you see above was taken at a local park (centennial park) and placed 1st in a provincial government photo contest. He has now entered two photo contests and has placed first in both.
And i thought i got my eye from my mother. Not so sure now.
This is a pano made up of three images and stitched together using photomerge in photoshop.
The images were shot at f8 1/640sec and iso 200 on a d90 nikon.
Thanks dad for sharing this image with me and the people who check in here once in awhile.
I know there will be many more great images to come.

lights and color

Sometimes you dont really know why you like a photo but you just do.
I think in this case its the movement and color for me. I dont even mind the flare in the face.
I really did nothing to this image in photoshop, just adjusted the sliders in lightroom develop module.
I shot the photo at f2.8 1/25sec and iso 1250.
Tomorrow you get to enjoy my first ever guest blogger.

jazzy photomatix

We have an annual jazz and blues festival in my little city which i was fortunate enough to wander around at tonight with my family. This was the first time we took the kids and they loved it. I threw my camera around my neck with a 24mm lens just in case i saw anything of interest. I saw alot.
This was an outdoor stage and the sky above was great. My camera was set to auto white balance (which it always is) and it corrected for the tungsten that it saw under the tent, which made the sky a really nice blue. I was shooting at pretty high iso, but thought i would try a hdr shot anyway, handheld. I bracked 5 stops and chose three to blend together in photomatix. I did a couple curves and sharpened.
The only thing that did not turn out was the band under the tent. Where they were moving they turned out all funky. To fix this i just opened one of the original images and drug it on top of the hdr version. I selected both layers and hit edit-auto align layers. I then created a layer mask and masked out everything except under the tent.

royal canadian mounted police

I was looking at my blogs stats tonight and coulden't help but notice that I have people linking in from all over the world but very few from right here in canada. On my journey through my lightroom catalog for a photo to post i found this one from new brunswick day.
The rcmp, i think, are well respected around the world and they wear really great dress uniforms {different from the everyday ones}. Thus my reason for picking this photo for tonight.
In photoshop i did a curve to adjust color and contrast and then used the desaturate tool set to about 20% and painted over the grass in the foreground and the trees in the background. This helped really bring your eye to the main subject and make them pop out of the frame a bit. I then used the saturate tool and hit the red jackets just a bit. Try this method sometime. If you do a before and after you will really notice a difference.

adding flash outside

I seem to add a little touch of flash anywhere and everywhere these days. I have always liked ambient light photos but i find it rare that the ambient looks good when its a photo that i want to take. This image would be a prime example. The bands faces were in shade here, well mabey they had a bit of setting sunlight on their right sides, but nothing on their left.
I put a sb flash at the front right hand side of the stage and one at the front left. I just adjusted the power on both so that the left was brighter than the right and also set so that i could get the building behind them captured at under a 1/250 sec shutter speed (my cameras fastest flash sync). You definately dont want to set both flashes at the same power. This gives flat boring light, called copy light. Use it for artwork or copywork or large group photos (actually for groups move the lights more to the front and set them up nice and high). I always use my flashes on manual unless i have them on camera and am bouncing the light off a ceiling or something. I just adjust the power up or down a bit at a time and take a photo to see how it looks. Too easy. After awhile you can get a really close guess on the first crack.
I set off the lights with pocket wizards which i highly recommend you purchase at some point, or something like them, to get your flash off camera.
In photoshop i cranked up the clarity and upped the contrast by the method i have talked about in previous posts. I sharpened and was done. I did not use the clone or heal tool once on this image which could well be a first for me.
I tested this image as a black and white also and i really liked it.
The band by the way are "the hardcore troubadours".

liquify plus lots more

I have had the models permission to use this photo on my blog for some time now but just didn't have the energy to type about everything i did to this photo.
On the left obviously is the original and on the right is the retouched version.
Lets start with the concept. Two business professionals in an elevator. One has 60 seconds, or the time it takes the elevator to get to its destination, to sell the other on his idea. Cool.
We will now move on to how i saw it photographically. I started with a tour of the elevator to get my head around what i would do. I then sketched out a lighting diagram and in the end almost stuck to it. The wanted room at the top for some text so i decided to stay low and shoot up to get the lights in the ceiling. The elevator was pretty tight so i used a 12 - 24mm f4 lens. No, if i lay on the ground and shoot up at 12mm it wont distort anything, like waists or hands, no.
I moved next to the lighting. I considered my main light the one i placed high to the right side and aimed at the guy on the left. It gave nice light on him and a hair light for the guy on the right. I then needed to fill in the guy on the rights face so i put a light on the left hand side, zoomed in the head, on both flashes i think, and aimed it at the right hand side guy. With both flashes fairly high and zoomed in, everything from the waist down was black. My original intention was to stick a third flash on the floor and aim it straight up to give a splash of light on the back wall. I changed this idea and moved the flash out to the front of the elevator, set on the floor, and aimed it at their legs. It did cause some weird shadows on the back wall but i retouched them out later. I just set my shutter speed to the setting that put the ceiling lights at the brightness i wanted them. Easy.
The shoot was easy that is, the retouching took some time.
I started the retouching by removing the duct tape i had holding the elevator door open on the right of the photo. This took the most time. I also touched up any other little imperfections on the elevator walls and any shadows i did not like. Just used the healing tool and clone tool for this. I then used the liquify tool to shrink the guy on the lefts waist and legs and the guy on the rights hand in the foreground. This worked really well.
I did a few curves and sharpened. I added a vignette and i think that was all i did.
I was very happy with the outcome and thought it was worth the time invested.
Looking back at the photo now i realize that i should have shrunk the guy on the rights lower half a bit too.

photomatix interior

Photomatix is amazing, i really like it.
I had to shoot this room and the light was all over the place. It is all wood so if i had lit it i would have had reflective spots all over the place i am sure. It was a big room as well so how much fun would that be to light.
I had daylight coming in from the large windows and had spotlights on the sign at the far wall plus all the overhead lights to balance out. Photomatix did a great job. I bracketed over a 9 stop range and chose 5 of the images to blend together in photomatix. The color didn't come out all that great but that really dosen't matter. Just try to get the blacks and whites looking decent and then dump it into photoshop. You can open the file in camera raw and adjust there or just do a curve like it did on this one. I sharpened and that was really about it.
I have used this approach many times now and for the most part it works. Remember to use a tripod and a low iso.

slow day

A slow day today is an understatement. I went to my sons football game and then sat in a lawn chair for the rest of the day.
I havent been taking many photos lately that i can post. I have a couple in the cue that i am waiting for permission on but other than that i dont have much to post. Looks like i will have to take the camera for a walk and get some new stuff to get me through the month.

protection

Just a very light post tonight.
I thought everything about this photo said protection. I like the way the focus is on the main subject placed in the center of the frame. I used the creative aged photo preset in lightroom to give it the look it has.
I have a story brewing about this shot but am tired and it is not coming together fully.
I will try to add to this one tomorrow.

last of the 1.4s

This is the last shot i took while i was shooting outside the other night.
I put the camera on "auto area AF (auto focus)" and held it above her in my outstretched hand. The camera did an amazing job on the focus. The black background is my paved driveway.
The only thing i did in photoshop was lower the saturation to 0.
Tomorrow i start posting my f2.0 portraits, kidding.

another f1.4

My son is amazing. No two ways about it.
This is only one example. Last night as i was shooing my f1.4 portraits he had a headache, a very bad headache. He still however gave me two minutes to take his photo with no complaints at all. After a trip to the doctor tonight it turns out he has an ear infection. Ouch.
I really did nothing to these images in photoshop. Just placed them all on a new canvas to show them together.

f1.4 portraits

I had an unexpected night off tonight. No work planned just my sons football game. He had a nasty headache however and halfway through putting on his gear we decided that several blows to the head on the field may not be a good idea.
I took to the streets with a 50mm f1.4 lens, my favourite by far, and a freshly formatted 4gb card. It was later in the evening and the sun was going down and as the kids rolled by on their bikes i noticed how the light was hitting them. I decided to first of all lay in front of them so they could not go anywhere and then shoot at an upward angle as to just get sky in the background. I did a little series and this is the first one i will post. I shot it at iso 100, f1.4 and 1/8000 sec.
I only did a little bit in photoshop. I cranked the clarity up to 100 (in lightroom) and just retouched some highlights out of the sunglasses. I played with a curves adjustment layer quite a bit until i got the contrast and colors how i wanted them. That was about it.

bonfire flames

Lets set the mood here to start. Its friday night after a long work week. The street is quiet. Dark settles in. My fire pit sparks to life and the sweet aroma of burning hardwood travels from house to house. Doors start to open and out filters friendly faces carrying lawn chairs, hot coffee cups, and snacks to share. This event, luckily, happens frequently.
I thought i would try a few shots of the flames while sitting there staring at them and was quite surprised at the results. The patterns the flames create were amazing. I did a series, all shot from the same point and had planned to try to do something with them but never did.
I shot this image at iso 400, f4.5 and 1/1250 sec with a 50mm lens.
I will try a bunch of shots sometime at different shutter speeds. Might be interesting. Cant wait till friday.

missed shot

I am not talking about the golf shot in my title but the fact that already, three days into my little self challenge of posting one shot a day for the month, i have missed a days post. Last night in my defense was beautiful outside and all the neighbors got together for a bonfire and fireworks for the kids last weekend of summer vacation. We stayed out till well after midnight and thus the missed post.
The photo above is from a recent golf game and i ended up doing a fair bit to the image in photoshop. The tee box was battered to say the least when i started. Five minutes later with the heal tool and the box looked pretty good. I removed a bunch of grass sticking up on the grass edge in front of the golfer, my partner for the round. For this task i used the clone tool. I then played with the dodge and burn tool on the distant shore and was done.
This shoot was the second time i have ever shot jpegs with my camera. Lightroom made it nice to work with them though. The only trouble i had was correcting the color in the image. All the green threw me and although i am still not sure how i would have made it better, i am sure it in fact could be better.
It was my intent to keep the image a bit on the dark side. I wanted my dodging on the far green to show as a light point, as well as a little dodging around the ball.

room shot with tech

Not much time to talk as it is three minutes to midnight and i am still on the goal of one image a day for the month.
This was a really, really cool inn that i would guess not too many people have ever heard of.
I used two sb flashes. One was just laid on the table to the right of the laptop and bounced off the wall back on to the guy in front. The second flash was hidden behind the tv and aimed at the two girls in the background (zoomed in the head also). I had a full cto gell on each flash and had the camera white balance set to tungsten. You can see some blue in the background right hand side which was caused by a window being back there (i liked it though). Shot with a 24mm lens, f3.5 at 1/15 sec hand held and iso 200.

photo of the day

I shot this image a couple days ago as students were moving back onto campus. I just asked them to get close together and give me something cool and this was their result.
I took the image into photomatix and funked it up a bit. I then blended this result with the original image to lessen the photomatix effect a bit.

one photo a day

I am tired tonight, very tired. Mabey thats why i had this crazy idea to post one photo a day to this blog all this month. I am planning to talk about some and not others.
Being a photographer i get to see alot of stuff. By posting more often my hope is that you get to see slices of what i see.
This may not end up being that exciting but i will try hard to make it at least worth the 30 seconds or so you may spend here.
For some reason, this past monday, i had 106 different people visit my blog. Thats not a record but i just thought it was strange as i had not posted in almost two weeks.

a couple panos

I shot the above image last night under the soccer field lights. I knew it would be good lighting as the they line both sides of the field (cross lighting). I boosted the contrast in this image by the layers technique that i have discussed in previous posts.
The bottom photo was one i took a month or so ago.
What i like about cropping a photo for the web is that anything goes. I remember in photo school that i hated the 8x10 print size. One reason was that i printed about a million of them and the other was that it did not allow the full neg to be shown. I'm not so "pure" anymore and need to show the full image but i still hate the 8x10 crop. For the most part now i dont set anything in my crop parameters and just set the guides to what looks good. It could be 9.3 x 4 and that would be just fine. Cropping in lightroom is even better. I can fly through a shoot now and crop as i go. If i decide later that i have to change it thats fine, just go back and move the borders, the whole image is still there.

a bit of retouching

I scanned this image today from a 4x5 negative on an epson perfection flatbed scanner. The scanner works great on negs and all looked pretty good, except for the missing parts of the negative. I didn't really have to retouch the image but saw it as a bit of a challenge and decided to just do the peoples faces. That led to the rest of the people and then to the background. I certainly would not say that the job is perfect but i had lots of other work to do and could not spend much time on it. I thought it turned out ok for a rushed job.
I used the healing tool and clone stamp tool only. Lots of sampling and patience help too.
Actually i forgot that i had to fix the little girls face that has the big white blob over the right side. I selected the left side, copied, pasted, flipped horizontally, and moved it into place to cover the blob. I just blended it in after that so it would look real.
Below is the fixed version.

recent photos

Thought i would put up a couple photos i have taken recently. The one above is of david myles (www.davidmyles.com).
I had never heard of him before this and i really enjoyed his music.
The next is a shot of a little guy on a train. He was pretty patient and together we looked for moose, deer, and any other animals that we could think of.

And lastly we have a helicopter taking off. Everyone was pelted with dirt and small rocks off the pavement and had to look away.

These are just a random few shots that caught my eye.

back to hdr

I have been doing a few night shots for a local hotel and thought this image ended up ok.
I shot with a 24mm lens at iso 100 and bracketed over a 9 stop range. Just used ambient light and auto white balance.
The longest exposures were probably around 4 seconds or longer. Use of a tripod was necessary here.
Once downloaded through lightroom i sent 5 of the exposures to photomatix pro.
After tone mapping i basically had the rough start of the image. I did alot of retouching as there was a bit of flare spots in the shot and sidewalks and roads always show tons of cracks which had to be fixed. For the road i just duplicated my background layer and then selected the pavement using a few of the selection tools. I then filled the selection with black and changed this layers blend mode to luminosity. I dropped the opacity to 50% and the road looked freshly paved. Actually i think it ended up a bit too dark in the end after i did a couple curves adjustments.
I rotated the photo a bit to straighten it and sharpened it about 45% with smart sharpen. The curves boosted the contrast a bit and fixed the color. Color here is pretty subjective but in the end i liked it.
I also had to extend the branches as there were none in the upper right hand quarter of the image. I just used the clone tool set to 100% and took branches from various other parts. I filled in some gaping holes in the rest of the branches this way also.
One other part i had to fix was the delta sign. Part of the D was burnt out and the rest of it picked up some blue color through parts of it. I made a selection of the parts i wanted white and hit refine edge and feathered the selection by 1.5. Then just fill the selection with white.

to fill or not to fill 2

As promised here is the other shot i mentioned last night.
I still have the nice ambient light coming in from the window but have also added a sb flash behind my subject and angled a bit towards the camera. I wanted this light to spill onto the wall to my left and highlight the areas behind the computer monitors for separation.
I used the same camera settings to capture the proper exposure for the ambient and just adjusted the flashs manual power until it was the right intensity.
Not sure which i like better, but probably leaning towards this one.

to fill or not to fill 1

This shot will be an example for two discussions.
The first is showing another example for a main light.
When i peaked my head into this computer lab i noticed that there was only one window in the room and there was some pretty cool light coming in from it. Now some of you that follow this blog are most certainly "strobists". I did this post to let you know that it is ok to use ambient for a main light. Believe it or not ambient is not a dirty word (ha).
I chose a shallow depth of field, actually i had to as there was not much light coming in and my shutter speed was getting pretty slow. I was using a d2x nikon at an iso of 560 and the grain is pretty obvious. I could not have gone much higher with the iso. The window was the only light used in the shot.
The second example that this image will show is to try another option. I thought about how the shot would look with a flash added for fill and threw one in to try it out.
I will post that image tomorrow night.

supper sidebar

This is just a quick sidebar on last nights supper.
Used ambient light and a 24mm lens set to f2.8.
More importantly however: salmon glaze was made from 2cloves of garlic, maple syrup, lemon rind, and a touch of honey.

whats in a main light 2

I just wanted to talk a bit more about the main light. I wont talk that much actually, i did enough of that in the last post, but more importantly show an example.
The photo above was taken in a different area of the library in which i shot the image i posted yesterday but in the same type of setting. I had the model in between two rows of books. I placed a flash behind her again like before but placed it in pretty close to the row of books that she is looking at so the shadows would be good and dramatic. This light provided a hair, seperation, light and took care of the books also.
For the main light i wanted a bit softer light and did not want it to spill on the books too much while still being fairly dramatic. By dramatic i mean light a portion of the face and leave some in good shadow. I laid the flash on one of the shelves above where my model is and angled it straight up at the under side of the shelf above it. Luckily these shelves were a light tan color, almost white, which gave a perfect bounce surface. This softened and broadened the light and spilled it back down at her face below. Too easy, and i mean that as it worked really well on the first test. I then just placed her tight to the books and angled her face up a bit to catch the light right. She was perfect for the shot which made my job really easy.
If i were to try this shot again i might play with a CTO warming gel. Probably on the background light. I would be curious to see how that would look.
One of the things i really like about this shot is the hair light. The color of her hair was an added bonus.
Tomorrow we get into "to fill or not to fill".
Yes i know, i'm weird.

whats in a main light 1

This post and the next 3 will be talking about, and showing examples of, the "main light". This of course is the light that does the heavy lifting when lighting your subject, most of the time anyway.
If you used an on camera flash, and no others, then that would be your main light. If you used a flash off camera to camera left and aimed at your subject, and a flash placed behind the subject, then the first one i mentioned would most of the time be called the main light. I say most of the time because there are really no hard and fast rules here. Your main light could be aimed at your background if you wanted it to be.
I would call my main light in the shot above the one that is placed to camera left and is aimed at the models face. I zoomed it in a bit, cant remember how much, as i wanted it to more or less created a slight spot effect. I did not want this light to hit the books in the isles or spill too much down her body. I wanted it to be punchy so i moved some books to my left, at about her face level, and asked a very nice lady to be my light stand and hold the flash in the hole i made on the shelf and point the flash directly at my models face. No softening stuff here.
I placed a second flash (used sb 800's although thats not important, both set to manual) on a light stand behind the model and aimed it directly at her. I zoomed it a bit also so it contained the spill of light. I had to keep going back to adjust it as it took awhile to balance it to the main light. First it was too bright and then of course it was too dark. Ten trips or so back and forth and it was just right. At about this point i always would like to know what my subjects are thinking. Like "he really must care if he is putting this much effort into my photo", or, "I wonder what ratio he is using", or, most likely, "does this guy actually know what he's doing".
So after all this babble what do i want you to take away from this post.
1) There is really no right or wrong way to use a main light. Ex: you can use a direct flash, bounce it, use an umbrella, shoot thru one, soft box, whatever. What matters is what feels right to you at the time your taking the photo. If you want to convey a mood or a feeling then use a type of main light that helps you convey this.
2) Dont be afraid to experiment. Try something you havent tried before or something you read about once in awhile. Your taking photos remember, not doing heart surgery. Whats the worst that can happen.
3) Do what looks right and feels right to you, not what you think someone else wants to see. It's your name that will be going under it in the end.
4) Have fun.
Thank you very much to my model in this shot "A" for your permission to post your photo here. You did a great job in all the shots we put you in and were very patient with me running around balancing lights. One question though, what were you thinking at the time???
I'll go with door number three.

just a little something

It has been forever since my last post.
Vacation has me way too relaxed and my fun photo stuff has screached to a halt. I have been taking a ton of photos but they are all work and no play.
As a matter of interest to me, i just checked the file info on the last photo i have taken with my new camera (bought 10 months ago) and i have taken 27,000 photos with it. I was surprised actually, i thought the number would have been higher. At this rate i will need a new one in another 4 years. Dont tell my wife.
Ok, enough babble.
This was an image i liked of my son that i took last week.
I tried using black and white conversion and played with the color sliders but was never happy with the results. I ended up duplicating the background layer and desaturating this new copy. I then lowered the opacity on it to get some of the color to show through from the background. I did a curve on this layer to boost the contrast a bit and then flattened.
I added a vignette and also darkened the edges and his uniform using the burn tool set to midtones and a strength of 7%.
I ended by dodging his eye a bit using the dodge tool set to highlights.

photomatix with blend modes

I am officially on vacation and here it is 12:10am and i am on the computer working on a photo.
I guess where its of my mom that makes it special and ok for vacation time.
I dropped in to visit tonight and after baking for a client for two days straight, she gave me this pose.
The cooking was all done and she was on clean up or believe me she never would have touched her hair. Cleanest cook i have ever, or will ever know.
It always amazes me how much cooking she can do, not to mention how good it tastes.
I opened the photo in lightroom (i am a full convert now) and processed it for black and white and sharpened. From here i opened the image in photoshop and tweeked it just a bit more.
My default in lightroom is to open images in photoshop as 16bit profoto images. Important for the next step.
I then saved the file as a tif and closed it.
I opened photomatix and then opened this file. I went to process - tonemapping and tonemapped the image with some pretty strong settings. I saved it and closed. I then repeated this process and opened it again in photomatix and applied the same settings. I saved it and closed photomatix.
I opened the original black and white image and the photomatix double process version in photoshop and drug the photomatix one onto the top of the original, while holding down the shift key to center. I then changed the blend mode of the top, photomatix, layer to darken. what this did was give detail to the blown out sections of the image, like the windows and tops of the baking supplies. I did a bit of funkiness to moms skin also but i just created a layer mask and painted in black over her skin and apron. The original layer showed through this mask from underneath and everything looked wonderfull.
Remember that this is a 16bit image so i then went under mode - 8bit. I also went to edit- convert to profile and changed it from profoto to srgb. It was now ready for the web.
This is ambient light by the way shot with a 24mm lens.
The original image is below for comparison.

photomatix interiors

I had to shoot some hotel rooms recently, extremely early in the morning (started at 4am to be exact). We wanted to do the shots before this lounge opened for breakfast at 6:30am. I had started off slow on another room. I did some ambient light bracketed shots but they just were not singing to me. I ended up adding 4 flashes to the room and it got fairly complicated.
I started off in this room just adding one flash in the far right corner by the patio door. It looked good but the ambient in here looked pretty good all on its own. I bracketed from 1/250 sec all the way down to 15sec. I ran 5 of the photos through photomatix which gave me a start. The image looked fairly bland to this point and needed some contrast and some highlights. I did a curve in photoshop and then used the dodge tool set to highlights and did some creative painting around the image. I retouched a bit and sharpened and that was it.
As far as a hotel room goes i really like the coloring in the image. I had my camera set to tungsten white balance which is what made the wee bit of daylight coming in the patio window quite blue.
I find the image i posted here a bit too light and i still need to tweek the curves a bit. This is all i have in me for tonight though.

flash in rain

I have been way too busy lately to stop and smell the roses, or see the roses i should say.
Today it rained, and rained alot.
I have wanted to stick a flash out in the rain ever since reading joe mcnally's book, the hot shoe diaries. I was doing a little surfing tonight and found another cool shot done in the rain and that was all the motivation i needed.
I put a flash on a stand and attached a pocket wizard. I first put a ziploc sandwich bag over it, then two sheets of cling wrap, then topped it off with a semi see through (clearest i could find) grocery bag. I used electrical tape to seal the bottom of the bags around the flash stand and stuck it in the driveway. I set this flashes (backlight) power to manual 1/1. The zoom head was set to about 35 for a fairly wide burst. I put my main light high and to camera left and kept it just at the edge of the my garage, still inside and dry. I set this light to 1/8 manual power and zoomed to 85.
I shot from a lying position with a 80 - 200 f2.8 zoom lens set to exactly 116mm. No reason of course for this, just looked right and i got the zoom info from my metadata in lightroom.
Once in photoshop i retouched a couple distractons away, very minor, and then sharpened, and adjusted curves (a few times).
My flash was pointing just a bit too low and as a result his chest and stomach were too bright and the face was too dark. I adjusted the curves for the face and then duplicated my background layer. I applied a vignette and made it quite heavy. I took the darkness to -50 and the midpoint slider all the way to the left. This brought the tonal levels of the overall image down quite a bit. I added a layer mask and painted in black over the face and upper chest area to bring back the lightness of the bottom layer. I then flattened.
By the way, a few drops of water made its way through the outer bag but got stopped at the cling wrap layer.
Flash still works.
I did that little contrast trick where i duplicate the background layer, do a curves adjustment and bring the highlight slider over three squares and the shadows slider over three, desaturate, and then change the layers blend mode to luminosity and its opacity down to 30 or 40%.
I flattened once more and then just played by adding canvas size to the left, adding a bit of text, and dragging in another photo from the shoot. I lowered the opacity of all these new layers to 70% so your eye could stay on the main image and not be sucked over to the left until you were ready to roam.
One last tidbit of info. I shot this at about 7 o'clock in the evening. It was still very light out but i set my camera to 100 iso and the shutter speed to 1/250 sec at f4.0. This combo darkened down my background, while my large aperature combined with my longer lens, compressed and blured it.

strobing

I shot an event this weekend at which the downtown blues band played.
It was a great event and the music was awesome. I set up two sb flashes up high on a balcony that ran around half of the main area. I aimed them at each other so i had cross light. I filled this light in with an on camera flash with a dome diffuser on it and set at a 45 degree angle. I fired the remotes with a pocket wizard. The light worked out perfectly. I dont want to post any photos as there were alot of government people there and they may not want their photos on my blog.
This shot is of the band with the strobes turned off.

poster

I saw this movie poster in the mall and immediately thought of an old farm house down the road from my house. I look at that house everytime i drive my son to scouts and it really looks like its straight out of the horror shows. I found a digital file of the movie poster online and downloaded it to start. My daughter kindly photographed this house for me as i pulled over to the shoulder of the road and watched nervously as cars raced by.
I opened both photos and then made my new shot black and white and boosted the contrast. I made a rough selection of the house plus a bit of the area around it and drug it over onto the poster. I transformed the scale to fit over the original house and then created a layer mask to hide the parts of my selection that i did not want to show, like the sky around it and grass and trees in front of the house.
I used my dodge tool set to highlights and dodged a couple of the windows and most of the siding to bring out what was already there. I used the burn tool set to shadows and went over the roof and chimneys to darken them down a bit.
That was really about it. I think it looks scarier than the original.
I would drop in and give the farmer a print but i am afraid.

lighting test

I had to do some 3/4 length head shots in the studio today and grabbed my buddy kev to act as a test model.
I set up three lights. Main was placed to camera left up high and shot through an umbrella, angle of light to subject was about 45 degrees or so. Side, hair, light was placed behind kev and up high also, shot through an umbrella. I shot one other light on the background, white seamless paper, to make it close to white.
I opened the photo in photoshop and used the dodge tool, set to highlights, to make the background white.
I next saved the image as a tiff and opened it in photomatix and ran it through details enhancer, i have posted before about how to do a single file in photomatix. Once it processed i tonemapped it and saved it as a tiff.
I opened it in photoshop and did a little trick to it to pump up the contrast. I duplicated the background layer and did a curve adjustment on the copy. I moved (straight across) the top and bottom points of the curve in to the third line, three squares. I then went under adjustments and hit desaturate. I then, in the layers palate, changed this copy layers blend mode to luminosity. From here you just have to lower the layers opacity, in the layers palate, to taste (mine ended up at about the 40% mark).
Then flatten.
I then wanted to make the background darker, it was very light grey, and create a halo around him. I duplicated my background layer and did a curve adjustment on the copy to darken it alot. You will see darkness come right into and over your subject but thats ok. Make a layer mask and paint in black with a nice big soft brush at about a 30 or 40% opacity. Just paint over the parts you want the lightness from below to show through. You can also lower the opacity of this dark copy layer if you like.
I flattened once more and smart sharpened 40%. I cropped and extended the canvas size to create a white border.
If you like this approach to creating extra contrast in your image you could always make an action.
Hit play and its done.
One thing i forgot to mention is that i also used the dodge tool, set to highlights, at about an 8% opacity on his eyeballs.