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Here are a few links I found this week that I think could be helpful to any aspiring photographer.


The first is a great rundown on lighting, lens choice and communication with your model for a portrait shoot.




This ones almost 15 minutes long, but its a treat to get to watch Zack Arias work.  Very cool portraits, not a whole lot of technical info, but none the less. He gets a lot of different looks out of, basically, the same lighting setups.





Chase Jarvis shows us how to photograph Ninjas.  The interesting thing about this shoot is he was able to turn this piece of personal work into a large job for a video game company.  A perfect example of chasing what you want to photograph and people hiring you for it.  You don't have to conform to what all the photographers are doing around you.  Do your own thing and it will most likely pay off.





Cheers!

Vintage Me, Vintage You - Leroy Verdin

A few years ago I spent the summer in Louisiana working construction.  My brother and I would drive to Houma, Louisiana early on a Monday morning and stay anywhere from 10 to 16 days.  Doing nothing but working.  Like 12 hour days hanging sheet rock in the swamp.  It was horrible.  But a beautiful church did come out of it.  You can check it out here, The Life Church.  The upside to that is I made a good friend, Leroy Verdin.  Leroy is an aspiring actor working out of New Orleans and we wanted to do a shoot before the summer was up.  So one hot muggy muggy night we went out and shot.  Shooting at night has some serious challenges, but you get to create your own light.  So you can completely construct a look to an image out of nothing.  There is something very cool about that.  Here are some of the photos from that session.

Good luck in your acting career Leroy.

I Lead A Small Group At Church

I have assembled a small group at church, a small group for artists.  It was something I felt led to do, to be a channel of inspiration for creatives.  I want to encourage other artists, who may or may not be struggling, to create every day because its there gift.  If we don't use our gifts what good are they?  I took the opportunity to photograph 6 people that I don't know very well, or at all.

Shane: Artist/Mixed Medium

Stacy: Artist/Mixed Medium

Jeff: Graphic Designer/Director

Mario: Artist/Mixed Medium

Maria: Animator

Kay: Painter & Tom: Writer

Photographed these with the Saberlight at camera left and ambient light over head.

Technical Tuesday - Saberstrip Light Modifier

I've owned the Saberstrip light modifier for several months now.  In fact I bought it on cyber monday and got a killer deal on it, 1/2 price.  I think it was $60.  I've been anxious to try it out but just haven't had the opportunity.  And to be quite honest I was wven pressed for time to test it out tonight.

Here's what it looks like.

The bottom piece (where the little yellow twist knob is) loosens and pops off.  Then you just attach your strobe and wireless trigger.

Here's the set up I used for the test.  I love overhead soft lighting and this is a great tool to use for that.  I attached the Saberstrip to the head of a tripod and placed it on top of the dining room table.  Simple enough.  I actually love how incredibly simple this set up was.  I hate long arduos light setups.  Its not that I don't care about lighting, its just that I love simple lighting.  Thats why I use available light a lot and modify that to exactly what I want.  This modifier is just about as easy as that.

Front view:

Back view:

I started photographing my children first.  But they lost interest fast.  For the record using your kids when you are trying to test out a new piece of equipment is not a good idea.  They have no patience for it and could care less about what your testing.

I snapped this of myself, at arms length.

The only image I got of Scout before she decided what I was doing was lame.  I love how soft the light is but it still maintains really good shadows.  Sometimes shadows can be lost if the modifier wraps too softly around all the features of a person.

Lucky for me my wife came home right when I was testing.

I love this too.  With a little more direction to her I could have made a really good photograph here.  I love the black in this image.

Lastly my wife grabbed a frame of me before I shut everything down.  Its actually way better than the ones I took of them.  I love how the flash looks like a white line across the frame, very graphic.

All in all I think its a pretty cool modifier.  Its light weight, strong and easy to use.  The long slit in the tube gives a nice direction and width to the light.  Its very soft, but because its so small you still get good shadowing on the subject.  I would recommend it to other photographers, especially if you can get it for what I payed for it.

I will be experimenting more and more with studio lighting, but starting with the very basics.  I want to take my portrait game to a new level, and I want it to have a very painterly quality to it.  I think this modifier will really help that journey.

Here's the technical info:

Camera: Nikon D700
ISO: 100
File Format: RAW
White Balance: Auto, corrected in Adobe Lightroom 3
Lens: Nikon 50mm F/1.4
Aperture: F/4
Shutter Speed: 200
Flash: Nikon SB-28DX
Flash Power: 1/128
Flash Distance to Subject: 6 inches to 1 foot
Flash Triggers: Alien Bees CyberSync's

I Photograph Reflections

Sometimes you come into an environment and it just doesn't seem to have a good angle or the scene is just flat.  That's when I hunt reflections, or silhouettes or even shadows.  Reflections are an interesting way to incorporate the scene and the exterior of it as well.

In this image, there were several gentlemen surveying a location for a new radio station being built in a church in Buenos Aires, Argentina.  All in all the scene was pretty boring, but on the exterior wall there was a window which gave some pop to the guys in the room.  Between the room I was in and the one they were in was a large piece of glass, that's where you see me.  I love the layers in this particular image. I consider it a self portrait.  Had I changed the framing a little I could have got a great image without me in it.

We were shooting inside a coffee house in Santa Cruz, CA for this image of the band Wavorly.  The inside was nice but shooting into that window didn't allow me much more than silhouettes and that isn't what I wanted.  So I composed them and stepped out of the shop to take this.  Its one of my favorite images.  I love the tone and the color saturation that came out of it.  That's one of the interesting things about shooting reflections, if the glass is tinted you can get really great color shifts or any number of other unexpected beautiful things can happen.

Shooting reflections doesn't mean that you have to shoot into glass either.  reflections are all around you, rain puddles, car paint, the obvious...mirrors.  Use your imagination.  This image of From Indian Lakes was really just a grab shot.  The shoot was basically over, they were standing by that pillar in the right side of the frame and I looked down.  There they were in the water...so I took it.  I like it and so did they.  Could it be better if it was more planned?  Yes.  Is it OK like it is?  Yes.

Try using this technique with photographs of your children for an entirely new perspective.  If you want to check out a master of reflection photographs, give Matt Mallams a look.  Thanks for reading.