Harry and Jack were the first to take me up on the free Christmas Card Photo Shoot offer. I went to their house and set up some lights. They were a fun couple of guys to take pictures of. Tough too. It was quite difficult to get both of them looking at the camera with similar expressions. Continue reading
I was hanging out at Rich and Mary’s studio (that’s Rich above) and Kristen had an idea she wanted to try. She pulled out Joe McNally’s Hot Shoe Diaries and showed us the double exposure picture. She wanted to try to do something similar.
None of us had ever tried to do this with our cameras. With our Nikon cameras we went to the Shooting Menu and set Multiple Exposure: ON. Number of shots to 2, and left Auto gain on. Then I just pointed the camera and took a couple of shots.
Obviously that isn’t going to work. Kristen looks like a ghost, and the backgrounds from both pictures bleed together. We need a black background, and some light.
There are two strobes in light boxes set up at 45 deg to me on either side. The background works, and we learned that I am going to have to move the camera a bit to get separation of the images.
There was one more step, but I don’t have a picture of it. If you notice my ears, they look really weird. Too much light. What we decided to do, was fire only one light at a time. Only the light where the subject was looking was fired. That way the light drops off, and you don’t see the ear.
I also didn’t use the center focus point on the camera. I placed a point to the left of center on his cheek when he faced camera left, then switched it for the next shot. Remember I also only fired the strobe when it faced Rich.
It was fun, give it a try.
It has been a long time since I have just¬† been out for a photowalk either by myself or with some friends. Saturday I got to hang out with my “photo buds”, Rich, Mary, and Kristen. After a bite to eat, we stopped by their studio in Minneapolis’ north end, and did a little photo walk around the area. I was just looking for something interesting, and a bridge with some fun light patterns caught my eye.
This was the setting of my first photo gallery. It was awesome. We had the perfect sized room at the front of the Fabulous Catering kitchen, who also catered the event. It just happened to be my birthday, but I concentrated on the gallery thing.
This was just one corner. Annie did a great job of getting frames, and then hanging all the pictures I had printed off. We are going to have a really full house once we get these back.
If you every get the chance to put on an event like this, I would recommend that you just go for it. It is such a rush to see your work on the wall, and have people looking at it and commenting on how great it is!
Anyway, it was a great event, and I want to thank all the people that came, Annie and her helpers for all the work they did, and Fabulous Catering where we had the event and all the great food they provided.
Yes, Ok, you caught me. I just posted this the other day. But it fit with the topic well. Kinda wish I had kept it until today.
Anyway, David duChemin has a great e-Book out called Drawing the Eye. I am a little slow on this one. So slow in fact, that David has just come out with another called Chasing the Look. I tried to get this out before he put out another, but the guy has gone e-book crazy. He can write these faster than I can read them.
For the second “anyway” of the post… Drawing the Eye is a great read. This stands on its own just fine, or it could have been a fine chapter in a larger book. This book is about visual mass, and light, and what draws the eye. The really great thing about this little document, is that it doesn’t stop at telling you what draws your eye, he gives examples, and even step by step instructions in Lightroom on how you can do the same.
One thing I found really interesting about this, is that this concept of drawing the eye was something I was just learning about at the DLWS I was just at. In fact, I tried to do just that with the picture above. I lightened the road, darkened the edges, and lightened a spot down the road where the road winds a bit, as the lightest part. Did it work? Were you drawn up the road to that spot?
Head back to pixelated image and grab the e-book there, David does a much better job at explaining how this all works. Then give it a try on  some of your images. Tell me if it worked for you. This e-book is easily worth the $5.
Happy Halloween everyone. Last night we had a little fire in the front yard where we handed out candy to the kids, and had a few people over. I tried to get a few pictures with just the light of the fire.
Amazing how little light this is. I shot with my 50mm f/1.8 wide open. I increased the ISO to 640, and on manual set up a 20th of a second. Then tried to get a shot where I was still, and my subject was as well. I am not that good at shooting at 1/20th! I felt that this one turned out though.
If you were looking for pictures of my kids, see here.
Welcome to fall color. We timed the color about as well as you could for our DLWS Michigan trip to Traverse City. There wasn’t a lot of reds, but a whole lot of yellow maples were there. You couldn’t point a camera without taking a picture of one. There was the challenge. How do yo get a picture of fall color? You need more than just color in the picture to make it interesting.
I thought my winding path shot above was pretty good. After looking at it, I am wishing that I had zoomed in a bit more, and had it vertical. I tried a vertical shot, but it didn’t work with the focal length. Oh well. Some time I will get it in my head that I need to try things more before I move on.
That leaf shot is pretty standard for me. I try to get it every year. I like this years the best. Just the right mix of leaf, color, road, and focus. I entered this image in a contest before, but the leaf wasn’t as sharp as this time around.
There were a lot of really good pictures taken by the students at the DLWS workshop in Traverse City Michigan. When I was watching the participant slide show I saw several strong pictures that I figured must be contenders for the top photograph. Instead, it caught me by surprise, that it was mine!
I posted this image earlier, before I knew that it was chosen. I have reworked it a bit. Adding some things that Moose Peterson showed us, I added some contrast to the buildings, lightened them, and added a gradient to the sky to bring out some more color.
I am planning to get this printed. Still trying to decide on a print to frame, or stand out.
We have shot a couple of barns in the last couple of days. I am starting to blur the shoots together. At two shoots a day, one in the morning, and one in the evening, it is hard to keep everything straight. We got to two places this morning even. Both had old buildings in them. The first is really a school.
The shot above was pretty typical of what most people got. I got another one, actually before that one where someone drive a car up and shone their head lights on the barn.
This was the first shoot of DLWS Michigan. Fishtown in Leeland. We got up early enough to get there and watch the sun come up. Unfortunately the light didn’t do anything spectacular, but it wasn’t completely overcast either.
