Swing on the Spiral

For day 66, I am still working on some post production stuff from yesterday's shoot, so this post will be a bit brief.

I've been working on my light sources lately, and I've got my lightbox stuff down pretty well, so it was time to stretch my legs a bit and play with it. I picked up a creative colour gel set a while back so I threw them on the strobes to make a pretty simple object look a bit more interesting.

Here's the result:



The subject is a tightly coiled roll of velcro fabric, and there is a blue gel on the left strobe and a red one on the right strobe. This was shot at f/10 (ISO 100, 1/200th) but the DOF is still super tight since this was very close to the front element of the lens. In this case, I like that the spiral fades out to blur a bit at the edges, it seems to balance out the sharp plane of focus.

A fun little shot, I think.

Family photoshoot #2

Today was a good day, did a family shoot on-site again, had a lot of fun ideas that they were happy to go along with, and I did a little more post processing work on this set. I'm happy with the results, so I'm going to say that Day 65 was a good one.

Pretty much all shots here were done with the 50mm f/1.4 USM, f/5.6, and 1/200th shutter. I screwed up and some of the shots were at ISO 400, but the noise isn't bad. I varied the lights to control exposure as we moved around.

First, meet the family:



I work with the Mom, and this is her husband, son and daughter. I blatantly stole this concept from Elizabeth Halford who is a regular contributor at DPS and a portrait photographer that I really admire. I had them jumping back and forth from surprised faces to silly faces until it broke into laughter, which is the final shot taken. It worked well, although the daughter couldn't do 'surprised' so she is just smiling in that shot. It's okay though, because she is FREAKING ADORABLE. She was also so patient and helpful, a great little subject to shoot.

Next shot:



In this shot I realized that Mom's hair was throwing a shadow over one eye. I couldn't see that on the small screen on the camera when I was shooting, so I missed it. It's not terrible, but I notice it in a few shots and I hate it.

One more shot of the daughter:



This is her bed, in her room. She was very happy to show it to me, and was happy to pose here. I tried to direct her arms and legs a little bit, but at five years old she's not the best at taking direction. A good shot, but the pose does seem a bit forced.

The last two shots are a single shot, and a collage of the teenage son and his guitar:





The single shot is in the collage, but I think it's a strong shot so I included it separately. This was the only series of shots that I used my muslins on, and the PP involved to kill the shadows and folds is *really* annoying. Whenever possible, I'm shooting walls for backgrounds from here on out. I like the collage, and the layout is fun too. I had a lot of fun putting those together.

Oh, one more note. Apparently, I have a website for the business now. WHAT HAVE I DONE?!

The galleries are not completely done, but feel free to look around and let me know what you think about the site. Thanks!

Overtime...

Both my wife and I have been working late, and often we are seeing each other illuminated solely by the glow of our laptops. It's not exactly candlelight, but so be it.

For day 64, I wanted to capture this.



This was a fairly simple shot, handheld but stabilized on the back of a chair with the new 50mm at f/1.4, ISO 400. I knew it would be hyper-narrow for DOF, a bit noisy at ISO 400, and probably a bit blurry from being handheld, so I decided to embrace it and play with it in post.

This picture has been through colour correction, and I added a semi-opaque, eroded, desaturated layer over it. I used something similar with a high-pass filter on the pictures taken of the models at the lighting seminar and I like the effect. Not hyper-desaturated but with a cool, smoothing effect that doesn't lose contrast.

I've got the next family shoot tomorrow afternoon, and I'll be working on the post processing then as well. Look for some samples tomorrow night.

Get your insulin ready...

Having fun with food tonight, and my daughter's new favourite dessert ended up in front of the lens for Day 63.

BEHOLD THE RAINBOW CHOC-O-RAMA!



Arrowroot cookies, a smear of Nutella, and a sprinkling of mini M&Ms.

I made a bit of a challenge for this one, as I wanted to make it more than just a picture of food. There was plenty of colour and contrast already, a lightbox to use, a crystal plate to put it on, but I took several shots before settling on this. This is the first shot I took at the exaggerated angle, and it just works. I've noticed this is a lot of food shots, especially in shots of repeating objects like cupcakes and cookies. I can't explain why it works, but this was the best shot by far.

ISO 100, f/10 at 1/60th shutter. 580EX II remotely fired with the pocket wizards at 1/8th power, from above.

Glitches!

Day 62, and I was continuing to mess around with light sources again today, and I was a bit frustrated with some trouble with my Pocket Wizards. These things are supposed to be bullet proof, but I find that my 580EX II doesn't always fire when triggered.

I think it might be the PC connection on my speedlite at fault, but I can't get over the feeling that my Pocket Wizards are a bit buggy.



Inspiration from the weirdest places. Two full months in on this project and ideas are sometimes hard to come by. I've been told that vision is the trickiest part of photography, and I'm repeating that to anyone and everyone that reads this. You can't expect a great picture to just show up in front of your lens once a day, and it's only harder if you have a lot of other priorities like family and work to eat up your time.

I need to work harder if I'm going to make it through the other 303 days.

Red light district.

Day 61 and my hand still kinda throbs. Silly little snake, people aren't food!

The snakes were instrumental in today's shot though. I was playing around with directly shooting light sources, and I was snapping a few shots of spiral CFLs. They looked kind of fun, but they lack intensity.

I was shooting a red bulb, when I realized that I have another source of red light, the heat lamps on my reptile cages. I flipped on of the reflectors over, took a few captures before I could dial in a manual exposure I liked.

Here is the keeper of the bunch:



Okay, I have to say it. I titled this one, "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave..." Since my name actually *is* Dave, I really don't have a choice, do I?

Final exposure settings were 1/60th, f/6.3 at ISO 200. I had dialed in ISO 200 earlier in the day and forgot to switch it back, but the noise level at ISO 200 on the XSi is still basically nil. I did bring this up about a 1/6th of a stop in post processing as well, just to fine-tune it.

I don't recall if I mentioned it earlier or not, but I have another family/child shoot on Saturday, so I'll keep building my portfolio in anticipation of launching my small business soon. I'm less nervous about this one, and I take that as a good sign.

A tale of two pictures.

Day 60 started off with an idea for a shot that never happened. I don't know why but I wanted a technical challenge, and I thought I would try and capture something high-speed. What's faster than a snake striking? I have snakes! An idea!

I setup up the lighting, did some test shots, figured out how to kill reflections from the glass, dialed in the focus, got my exposure sorted out, and got everything ready. I was planning to crop out any food items for those somewhat squeamish about such things, and no, I never feed live prey to my reptiles.

What is it that they say about the best laid plans? I dropped the rat, tried to grab it again with my tongs, and had my hand promptly ripped open by a five foot long python.

So no high-speed reptile shot. You get a flower instead:



I decided to take the opportunity to play around with the flower, so I cranked the lights, picked a light coloured flower and tried to blow the hell out of the highlights and see what I got. I like the effect, and all in all, the day could have been worse.

Although my hand does hurt.