I set out this morning to take this picture, but forgot that they would be closed. Didn’t look very good. Took these a little while before posting them this evening. I started with my 50mm f/1.8, but ended up using the 70-200 f/2.8 racked out to 200. The working distance was nice, but couldn’t get quite as close as I would like. Still, turned out pretty well.
 My father was visiting from Winnipeg. I used the oportunity to take a picture with off camera flash. The camera is triggered by a friend, I am holding a SB800 just out of frame at about 45deg from him. There is also a street lamp to his right.
I think I should have hit him with a bit more light. Maybe tried from the other side. Still getting used to this off camera flash deal. I think I need to try brighter than I think works in the viewfinder in these night shots.
Also, I am going to try bringing my umbrella with me and getting much closer to my subject next time. This one is just with the diffuser, and I am a little too far away.
I was out shooting in Downtown Minneapolis with some friends on friday night last week, and we decided to go have a look from the Guthrie’s overlook. None of us had been up there. Very cool overlook, and I will have pictures from that later, but here are a couple I took as we were on our way there.
There was this great big long glowing red wall. Very cool. At first I was just setting up for some geometric shots, but then some people cam by, and I think that made the shot. It is more interresting with the people in it, even if they are “ghosting” through the frame. I’ve got to remember that everything doesn’t always need to be sharp in a frame.
Then I set up for a self portrait of sorts. I was going to use a wireless trigger, but I got Rich to take the shot for me. I also tried a shot with a flash fired directly across from me, but that just made a weird shadow, and having one part of the picture show up (me from the flash) looked odd. The silhouette looked much better.
One the weekend, I got to take pictures of my first newborn. Other than my kids that is. I also got to take pictures of the rest of the family, and use my new LightDome XS. For the whole family shot I used a shoot through umbrella. Things worked out pretty well considering it was the first time with the LightDome, but I think I could have moved my light closer. It wasn’t really a good time to experiment, as I was trying to “get the shot”. Anyway, here are some of the pictures. I took over 200, and felt that 80 were pretty good. Here are just a few.
Thanks Mike, Kelly, Adilyn and Emma for letting me take your pictures. I had a lot of fun.
If you are in the Minneapolis / St. Paul / Twin Cities area and would like pictures taken of your family, please contact me at photography@cyberward.net.
I have a few more pictures of Sam. Thanks Sam for coming to our shoot. You were great to work with.
I really like this shot in the elevator with the alien bees ring light. I would love to have one. Anyone want to gift one my way?
I have a few others that were from the studio. These turned out pretty good too. I don’t like how we had the background light. When it is really close to the background down low, a lot of light is reflected back, and yet the upper part of the picture when he is standing is not white. For the half face shot I needed to “erase” some of the pinkish beige that was in that part of the picture.
So goes the last studio lighting class I took with Gil Digden. It was a lot of fun. Mostly I think that was because I connected with several of the others in the class, and we got along well.
 
Rich is the photographer, using an alien bees ring light. I wasn’t sure I would like it when we started, but I¬† do now. The dang things are expensive, unweildy, you have to mount your camera to them, and can’t hand hold, but the light has been great for our more environmental type shots. It has worked great with the elevator.
 
 
So after touting the bees, these were taken with no flash. They are not tack sharp, I was down¬†around 1/15 sec territory with a 50mm lens.¬†I like them though, but can’t decide which one I like better.
The next thing todo is decide¬†on and actually purchase lights. It is tough, because Gil has a bias toward the big lights, and doesn’t think much of speedlights. He pretty much sold the whole class on getting Photogenics strobes. I am not sold. If I get strobes, I will get¬†Alien Bee’s lights. Lots of professionals better than I are using them.
I want to make some Big Light with Small Flashes before I move to the big guns. Joe McNally and David Hobby make some killer shots with speedlights.
Ugh. It¬†took a week to get to my shots from last Wednessday’s studio shoot. Well, not quite true. On the weekend I did the collage of Alex and the poster of Whitney. Last night I got through the rest of the images. I had to get the images onto CD’s to give back to people today. Here are some of the images from that shoot.
 
 
 
There are more in my portrait flickr set.
So today is the last of these classes. They have been a lot of fun, and I have learned a lot. I need to keep this up. There are some more things that I would have liked to have looked at more. We didn’t play with lighting ratio’s much. I would have been nice to set the lights, take a picture, change the lights, take a picture, etc. I might need to just spring for my own set to be able to do that.
Last week at my studio class I had the chance to shoot a family of three.  Once the little girl got tired, I was able to do some head shots of Alex. Turns out, he does improv, and has some great expressions. I put some of them together.
He was a pretty funny guy. Anyway, we had pretty typical lighting for what we have been doing. Two photogenics strobes in light boxes. As typical, I don’t think the hair light was positioned correctly.¬† They worked pretty well, but I think they are stronger as a group.
I exported all the images out of Aperture, scaleing them down somewhat. Then I created a new document in photoshop.  I opened all the head shots, then dragged them over to the new one. I created some guides to help me position the images.
I then used the fx layers to create a stroke (middle I think) around each image, and the shadow fx too. I also decided to make it look like all the images were sitting on a page. I expanded the canvas, then created another layer I filled with white. Then I used the shadow fx on the old background layer that was now our inner page to make it stand out.
I was shooting at my studio class and noticed that some people were taking pictures of Whitney jumping. Whitney leads her cheer group, so she is a natural at this kind of thing. We weren’t really set up for this kind of shoot. We were doing head shots before.
We had a gray muslin background, and the background light was too low and not configured correctly. I would have rathered it had a regular reflector pointing higher at the background. The background wasn’t really high enough either. To change the angle, I stood on a riser, and held my camera above my head. This way I wouldn’t have Whitney’s hands above the background.
We had to photogenics strobes in softboxes at 45deg to her that we had set up for portraits before. They still seemed to cover her well enough.
So I thought that I had a pretty good shot, but I wanted to so something with it. I didn’t like the background, and I needed a way to hide the light, so I decided to cut her out of the background.
This was harder than I thought. Well, actually just time consuming. The quick selection tool was horrible. It kept selecting parts of her. I then tried the magic wand. That was a little better, but there was still much to do. I then spent quite a bit of time with the other selection tools adding and subtracting from my selection.
Once I had her selected, I feathered the edge a few pixels, and then coppied her onto a blank layer. Another layer with a fill of white, and we were almost done.
When I looked at the edges of her legs, there was a bit of a grey line beside her jeans that didn’t look right. I replaced that grey with white. That looked much better.
Then I had an issue with her hair. I managed to “erase” some of her hair (actually did it with a mask) on the right side of her head. But, I am still not sure what to do about the grey that is still between her hair on the left side of her hair. I am sure that would show if printed.
So that wasn’t too bad, and was really what I had started out to do, but now that I had her seperated from the background, could I put her on a different background?
I looked through some older images and found one that was mostly clouds and sky. I then created another image with this sky, and added Whitney in as another layer. Because she was feathered when I cut her out, she placed pretty well on top.
Then, I expanded the canvas to give lots of space around the image. I added a drop shadow to the cloud layer and added the text at the bottom.
Voila. Cheezy poster.
I got a few pictures from my last studio shoot up now. I got to take pictures of three people. That made for a lot going on. I first shot this family in the studio:
This was a very squirrelly kid. I got a couple. This was probably the best. Then we shot another photographer, Ms. Cannon. We took pictures in the studio first, then moved out into the hall. I got a couple in the studio, but I had a difficult time getting a good look. She really didn’t want to smile. She didn’t like that look, but she seemed way to serious if I didn’t get some sort of smile from her.
The goal with this pictures was to get a picture of her with the camera, and the Canon logo.  This was another ring light shot. I liked the ring light shots with the previous model better. There seems to be a difference in the color of the face that I am still trying to figure out.