My mom got teacher of the year for her school this year. She needed a updated Head-shot for her packet they require an updated head-shot.
So when she called asking I could do it I thought to my self hey a subject that is not under the age of 5 and that will stay still. I planed on doing about 3 different lighting set ups, but I only stuck with one. I started with one flash upper left from the camera with a 43 inch shoot through umbrella and one gelled on the back drop. After a few shots I discovered the light did not wrap around her face the way I wanted. So I went and got some poster board and had a human light stand hold it for me. This filled in the shadows on the right side of her face nicely. I had a great time learning and playing with the lights. Thank you mom for allowing me to test some things out on you.
Last month I got to be part of and document a wonderful moment in a family’s life. Emilee and Ryan Phillips gave me the privilege to shot their wedding and I had a blast. The weekend started with My friend John coming over on Friday. We went to the Rehearsal to scout things out and this church was great plenty of room for me to try and move around and yet stay out of the way. We were invited to go to the rehearsal dinner and get to know their family and friends. I think we found a new favorite place to eat.
The wedding was beautiful it was held at Pleasant Hill Baptist Church I have to say I really enjoyed shooting at this church. Here is a video and some pictures from the wedding. I again want to thank the Garner’s and the Phillip’s for allowing me to document the wedding, and I want to thank my Wife Katrina for keeping everything in order and running smooth. Also I would like to say how much I appreciated the help of my second photographers John Wallom and Jim Jones. Without all of your help the day would not have turned out the way it went.
Time laps photography is very cool technique. The problem is to truly do it traditionally you can eat through a camera body. Normal camera shutters last about 100,000 rotations. So at 60fps hd that is only about 27min of video…. So 30 FPS thats 54min of video. So we are talking 1000$ per an hour of video so to me this is quite impressive. Because it is about 2 min log so we are talking ~7,200 frames. I hope I did my math right but it is very well done.
EDIT: This was shot by a Canon 5D MKII in hd video mode.. Still very cool. This can be done the way I said above but with todays technology hd would be better and more cost effective to do it the video way.
One thing I enjoy artistic wise in photography is still using analog methods of photography this includes 35mm and Polaroid cameras. I have started the first project in a series I plan on doing. I will pick a city that I like the architecture of and the history behind it and I will go an photography different parts of the city and surrounding area with analog cameras. My first location I planed on using my Polaroid was in Carroll county where my wife’s family is from. For years I have drove through the square in Carrollton and down near Roopville and I have said to my self I need to take a picture of that however I never got the chance to stop and take a picture. So last month I decided to go out and start my project. I had a blast the only tough part was figuring out where to put the exposed photos where they would not get damaged and where to throw away the chemical covered negative sheets and tabs. It was the most fun I have had doing artistic photography in a while.
The next city’s I plan are shooting are Flowery Branch GA, And Gainesville GA keep your eyes out for future posts.
Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer
I downloaded the trial of cs5. The demos wowed me. So I downloaded it and tried to first remove powerlines from the sky after multiple attempts and following instructions online I gave up because using the brush the area is darker than the other. So for sky areas Aperture 3’s heal brush works much better. So I think the content aware is more for patterned areas. I noticed taking out polls from in front of bricks worked well also. I did a photo shoot this past weekend and after it was done I was disappointed in noticing that the pillow was turned the wrong way. So now we have this ugly tag in my picture and I would have to crop it out taking away the frame that I wanted. So I thought why not lets try this content-aware fill. It worked quite well see the before and after and the screen cast on doing the process below.
I set up my studio to do my niece Olivia’s 6 month shoot. While we were waiting on her to show up wed did Lillie’s 16 month shoot and I finally got to use my new grayish muslin and I thought to my self. Why not use a snoot with a blue gel.
Camera: Canon EOS 20D
Exposure: 0.008 sec (1/125)
Aperture: f/5.0
ISO Speed: 100
Strobist:
Vivitar DF400MZ left snooted on backdrop 1/8th power with a blue gel.
Canon 580EXII right into 43 inch with reflective umbrella 1/2 power 1/4th cto gel.
I have always had a fascination with old cameras. Most of my cameras you can no longer get film for or have to hardware modify them to take sheet film or 120 film requiring a darkroom and manual development. Both of which I do not have time for. So for the past 2 years or so I have been looking at old Polaroid packfilm models. My co worker and I were talking about cameras one day and he had one. He brought it in to show me and by the end of the day he gave it to me. The down side is the battery that it takes is no longer readily available. So I had to come up with some sort of 3v power source. After reading the web I ran across one site with directions. http://option8.110mb.com/polaroid/104/104.6.php
The steps basically are remove all excess plastic and battery holder and then solder in a 2 cell AAA battery compartment.
I can not wait to try this puppy out. I am buying some Slightly Expired FujiFilm FP-100C from photo barn tomorrow. Stay tuned to some posts about my Polaroid experiments.
I have been waiting to write this for a while now considering I was one of the people who was like WOW it has been released let me go right out now to the apple store and buy it. That was a bad idea. I learned the lesson about waiting for the first patch on a new piece of software. So I did not want to give a review on software that was broken. So now that they have fixed the memory leak issue with 3.01 patch I feel its time to do my review.
I am just going to go over the features that really impact me as a professional photographer. I know faces and places is cool, and flickr and facebook export are nice additions however I am sorry people, but theses are not features that professional photographers wait to tear the doors down for. If I only cared about those features I would of just stuck with iPhoto.
Brushes:
The first feature that came to my attention when reading about all of the new features was the new non destructive brushes with edge detection. Theses types of operations in the past had to be done by photographers in photoshop or gimp by using masks and layers. Each adjustment creates a new entry in inspector that allows you to just for example adjust certain colors in a selection
Here is the brush selection menu that you can chose the non destructive brushes from:
One of the cool features which you can apply when using the brushes is a color overlay that shows you exactly where your brush strokes fall. This is very handy and seeing exactly what has been modified.
When it comes to architecture and scenery photos this tool is a must. I was able to recover an over exposed sky and brighten the colors with ease.
Presets:
One other feature that I have really been craving after using Lightroom 2 when I was on windows was the ability to save and use presets. In Aperture 2 you had to save a preset for each individual adjustment. However now with Aperture 3 you can create fully custom presets and also use the nice handy presets the provided. I have yet to really use this feature much, but when I start adding artistic effects to photos from a shoot I will create a few nice presets I will be using.
Full screen:
With Aperture 3 you now can basically live in full screen edit mode. This is one of the things that I absolutely love about Aperture 3 and Aperture in general. I have yet to find an editor that will do this the way Aperture does. When editing an image I want to have it in all its glory shown on my screen as large as possible. I do not want to be bogged down with menus and other program elements that take up my screen real-estate. They added a few new features that is very handy is that you are now able to change and browse projects. This means you never have to leave full screen mode. Another cool feature is that you can hold down shift while sliding an adjustment and the inspector will fully disappear only showing that one slider giving you the full view of the image you adjusting.
Conclusion:
Aperture 3 was a pleasant refresh of their professional line of products. To me it was worth the upgrade. The additions to brushes, presets and full screen editing were very refreshing and The new ability to leverage dual cores and 64bits increases the performance. I would recommend this software to any Professional Photographer working on a mac. You can see all the other 200+ new features here. http://www.apple.com/aperture/features/
My friend is doing an ad for a gun shop he asked me to help. So I got to do some strobist fun. I actually fell of a stool and fell through 6 folding chars that were setup behind me when trying to get a directly above product shot… I did not care about my self I tried to not let the camera hit anything… It was ok however im hurting..
Camera: Canon EOS 20D
Exposure: 0.008 sec (1/125)
Aperture: f/8.0
Focal Length: 28 mm
ISO Speed: 200
Strobist:
Vivitar DF400MZ 1/4th power snooted from above.
Canon 580 EXII 18th power snooted on camera right at gun level hand held by my human lightstand Rob.
Camera: Canon EOS 20D
Exposure: 0.008 sec (1/125)
Aperture: f/8.0
Focal Length: 28 mm
ISO Speed: 200
Strobist:
Vivitar DF400MZ 1/4th power snooted from above.
Canon 580 EXII 1/8th power snooted with blue gel on camera right slightly above gun level hand held by my human lightstand Rob.
Camera: Canon EOS 20D
Exposure: 0.008 sec (1/125)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 28 mm
ISO Speed: 200
Strobist:
Vivitar DF400MZ 1/1 power with gobo to keep flash from entering lens on backdrop
Canon 580 EXII 1/4th power with shoot through umbrella way upper camera left
Lillie Kate turned one year old on the 6th. So this past weekend we decided to do her 1 year photoshoot in between church and media at night service. However Lillie had other plans she decided she needed to take a 3 hour nap. So I set everything up and we were able to do her shoot later in the night. One thing I have found the older she gets is you can not get her to stay in one place. With lighting the light falls in a range you configure so your exposure is correct. However if you move closer or farther from the light this changes. However through much picking Lillie Back up and moving her she stayed still long enough to get 1-3 shots per move. Instead of doing my normal boom setup I decided to just use a stand on the side to light the back ground. This way I showed it can be done this way also. I also tried using a flag to keep the light from spilling over where I did not want it to be. It seemed to work.
Strobist:
On background upper camera left behind Katrina and Lillie Vivitar DF400MZ 1/1 power.
Camera upper left 1 feet away Canon 580 EX II on 1/4th power with 1/2 cto gel With 30 inch shoot through umbrella.
I also made a time laps of me setting up the studio and a final setup photo.
I planed on doing about 3 different lighting set ups, but I only stuck with one. I started with one flash upper left from the camera with a 43 inch shoot through umbrella and one gelled on the back drop. After a few shots I discovered the light did not wrap around her face the way I wanted. So I went and got some poster board and had a human light stand hold it for me. 
This filled in the shadows on the right side of her face nicely. I had a great time learning and playing with the lights. Thank you mom for allowing me to test some things out on you. 
