These are the pictures of Hanna from last week. Some of them turned out pretty good. I do need to get better at “directing” a shoot. I really don’t know what I am doing. I was lucky in that Hanna was a natural in front of the camera.

 

I tried to work with a couple of pictures to desaturate the picture a bit, but left some color in the eyes and lips. I have had a comment that it looks too washed out now, but it was a first attempt at a look I was trying.

These pictures were taken with an Alien Bees ring light. It was kind of interresting. It was a little difficult to shoot with. Because of it being a ring light, it was hard to just hand hold the camera. We had to put the camera lens into the center of the light to get the right effect. We had a lot of people that needed a turn, so we didn’t actually mount our camera’s to the light or a tripod. It was a little awkward.

The light that comes from these lights is interresting. It is pretty bright. It would be nice to do a better comparison between softboxes vs bare ring light.

I finally got the pictures of Lorenzo “developed”. This was a difficult shoot. He was not in the best of moods. He was tired, and bored most of the time. Very squirmy. I didn’t get any of the pictures of the family to turn out. They were never looking toward the camera at the same time. A couple of the shots of Lorenzo turned out.

We had a 1 to 1 lighting ratio set up. Two strobes at 45 deg from the subject in softboxes. There was a light on the background too. I don’t think we had the background light centered well, and with Lorenzo moving around, the light was often in my pictures. I found getting good pictures of him difficult.

I finally got my swan pictures processed from Monticello a couple of weeks ago. I couldn’t get any of the heart shapes, when you have two of them facing each other and their necks make a heart. Part of the problem was there were too many swans. You couldn’t get a pair isolated. They would never get perpendicular to the lens either. Oh well, here are a few. More on flickr.

 

 

 

On Saturday I got a chance to go out and shoot. I wasn’t sure where to go, but I headed to Lake Calhoun. Turned out to be a great place to take my new lens. I got the chance to shoot some ice boats.

There were a few different kinds. There was a windsurfer, and both small front steer, and a long rear steer boat. I talked to the guy with the long rear steer, and these guys are really into this kind of thing. Multiple boats, multiday regattas, traveling around to different lakes. Crazy. The one guy thought that maybe this was the first and only rear steer boat to be on Lake Calhoun. Not sure how we can know when they have been around since about the 40’s, but if it is, I have the only pictures!

The first evening in the studio when pretty well. It was good to get into a real studio with real lighting equipment, and get to use it. We had between 2-4 strobes in softboxes and grids going. This is the view from the back of the room.

The goal of this class was to look at how the use of the different lights would effect what the picture would look like. We had our model Maggie sitting on a stool. She had a couple of different wardrobe changes, and we used both a dark grey and a white background. These are the pictures from this shoot that worked out pretty well.

Annie and I made fried egg roll things for supper. They are Mexican egg rolls, or Chinese burritos or something. They are Mexican type fillings in a fried won ton wrapper. They turned out great. The kids even ate a version that just had rice, chicken and cheese.

This needs a bit bigger depth of field. I shot it hand held with available light, which is just the light above the table which wasn’t very bright. I should have got out the tripod and maybe my flash, but hey, the food was getting cold and I was hungry.

So I thought I would try to take an interesting picture of some wine bottles, and a little wine rack we have in our house. It was kind of a fun little project. I think the best images were those that involved a mirror that we had near by. There is still some visual clutter in the pictures. One of the things I need to pick up are some white and black poster board sheets to use as flags. It would help to cut unwanted reflections for example.

In case you don’t know, the bottle of wine I featured is made in Italy at a small winery named after their family name, Endrizzi. That is also my wife’s name. Turns out, this vinyard is in the same area that Annie’s family is thought to come from, and they are probably relatives. Her brother got a case a couple of years ago. I think the only importer of this wine is based out of Atlanta.

I was able to get out to take some pictures on the local ice rink the other day. My daughter was at dance at the rec center, so I wandered over and took some pictures of some folks playing hockey and broomball. I was surprised that I had enough light at night. The big overhead lights pump out quite a bit of light. I was amazed that with the sun down, there was more light outside in these rinks (maybe it is the reflected light off the ice) than inside at the basketball gym that I have tried to take pictures. Still, there was a bit of bluring in the hands. If I could have kept my 2.8 lens on there wouldn’t have been any, but I felt I needed my zoom, and that isn’t nearly as fast. I found out that it wasn’t so easy to get good images. I could use practice I guess. Anyway, here are some of the images.