Risque photography...

For day 25, I wanted to tell you a story. A story about a nut, who likes to get naked in front of people.



Okay, so it's not exactly NSFW. I felt a bit goofy today, and came up with the idea of a peanut M&M that likes it when you watch. The original plan was to have the second shot with all the shell removed and just the chocolate, but it appears to be impossible to separate the shell from the chocolate, so this had to suffice.

Critical components in this shot: Lightbox, pocket wizards, tripod, shutter release. Without all of that I wouldn't be able to get such clean, identical framing on the little photos. Gear may not make you a good photographer, but it sure helps.

I really like this picture, I hope you do too!

More macros!

I selected a few of my favourite shots from the rest of the night of macro shooting with my friend Paul. There were 40 keepers in total, so not a bad haul.

Once again, this is really a gallery of Paul's painting, not my photography, but it was a great learning experience!

To give you an idea of the scale of these pieces, here is a Napoleonic infantry unit in 25mm scale, with Paul's hand for reference:



Now here is the full unit so that you can see the detail in the modeling and painting:



Check it out in full size on Flickr to get a better idea of the detail.

From the same scale, a unit of Saracen Cavalry:



I used the blue backdrop to make more of a scene for this shot, but it really, really affects the available light. Speedlite to the rescue!

Finally, two shots of some of his western era miniatures. First, a Saloon and one of it's, um, employees:



Second, a gang of western hoodlums:



Thanks once again to Paul from Saber's Edge for providing me a chance to play with my new toys, and thanks for reading my blog! Comments are always wanted and welcome!

Macro shots ahoy!

Last night's shooting went well. I was working with the lightbox, the 60mm Macro, my new 580EX II Speedlite and a Sto-Fen Omnibounce for diffusion. All in the all the results were good, and I had a lot of work adjusting the flash power on the fly. I really learned a lot fromt his shoot, and by the end I was snapping proper exposures on the first shot or two.

I have a lot of post processing to do on the shots still, but I have two samples to share at the moment.

These shots are of wargaming miniatures, and they were painted by my friend Paul of Saber's Edge Hobbies and Games. Really this is not a display of my photography, but of Paul's painting skill. For reference, these figures are only 28mm tall.

First up, everyone's favorite scalliwags, a band o' murderous pirates!



Controlling depth of field was key here, and I was shooting most shots at somewhere between f/8 and f/16 to try and get focus across all the figures. This meant using fairly high power on the flash (anywhere from 1/8th to full power), and long exposures. My tripod and cable release were critical here. This shot was at f/9, 1/8th second exposure at ISO 200.

I was playing with depth of field on some shots though, and I like the effect it gave on larger groups of models or larger individual models, like in this shot:



This bad boy is a Space Wolves Dreadnaught from the Warhammer 40,000 wargame. This is a larger model, probably 40mm or more in height, so there is more detail and more to get in focus. As such, I thought about some DoF effects, and came up with the shot above, focused in on the claw and let the remainder of model fall into bokeh. I think it worked, and I like the shot. For comparison, this was shot at f/2.8, 1/40th second exposure at ISO 800.

More pics will follow as soon as I have time for post processing.