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Just a quick note about several things. First, happy holidays and thank you to all of our loyal customers. We’re so happy to have you backing us and allowing us to photography you and your family.
Secondly, Stephanie and I will be giving back to the community this Sunday by participating in a nation-wide movement called Help-Portrait. If you’re not familiar with it, feel free to click and watch the videos, but for those who want the quick run down it’s pretty simple. Find families or people in need this holiday season and take their picture. For free. Then make prints, burn a disc and deliver them to the families.
Stephanie and I will be setting up to shoot photos at a Christmas event hosted by Hand-in-Hand Community Services on Sunday. Blanca, the director, will be helping get us some of the families and Wills Chiropractic has sponsored some of the print costs. We’ll see where were at afterwards, but the plan is to give each family one large print and maybe get a second sponsor to buy frames for them.
It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, but haven’t had the chance until now. More to come after we do the shoot.
I took my first crack at modeling photos the other day. As you can see, it wasn’t Marissa Miller or any other top fashion models, but they certainly little heart-throbs in their own way.
Carly and Alexis are two five-year-olds from town who are looking to break into the child-modeling industry. I think the shoot went absolutely amazing. Here are just a few sneak peek photos from the session the other night. I can’t show too many of them because the girls and their parents won’t get to see them until tomorrow. I might throw a few more on here and our site after that though.
I’ve also got a few more from Abe & Tiffany’s wedding coming later today or tomorrow. Check back soon.
I got the chance to shoot a few sports portraits last night for a senior I had done portraits for before. Jen is an all-star track athlete at Rochelle Township High School and will soon make her rise to the collegiate level with a full ride scholarship at ISU.
I’ve been in a bit of a funk, mentally speaking lately. I’ve just felt like the same old tricks weren’t hacking it anymore, so I decided to go slightly different with this shoot. I really like this shot and liked it even more after I added the high pass effect I like so much.
My fellow journalists may not care for it, but I really like the look. Like anything, this style/fad will fade, but why not utilize it for awhile. I have a few more I may end up sharing, but this was my favorite.
I have to admit that I have a sort of new found freedom with Photoshop. Before, I was never able to clone, fix or remove things in photos to make them better. Portraits are completely different and I love it. Now I just need to learn some new tricks. Hopefully I’ll be getting a few DVDs to help me along. Thanks for looking.
As I promised on my other blog, here’s a quick post about an engagement session I did with a couple the other day. Steph and I had booked this couple for a wedding a few months back and they decided they wanted the engagement session at that time too. We had actually planned to do them a few weeks ago, when the weather turned nice, but rain during the weekend wouldn’t go away. Luckily we picked one of the nicest days of the week to shoot and the photos turned out really nice.
In all, we spent about an hour and a half shooting, but I learned more in an hour and a half that I have all winter long.
Here’s a small list of things I’ve learned.
1. I’m smarter than I give myself credit for.
2. Having an assistant is one of the most helpful things and is more than worth the money you pay out for it.
3. Not every picture turns out the way you want.
4. Letting a couple relax and be themselves is much better than forcing poses on them.
5. Having a vision for photos can yield great results.
We started the shoot around 4:30 p.m. A decent time for some afternoon light. The biggest problem with the day, it was extremely windy. I took them to a nice area downtown that I use frequently. I hired an assistant for this shoot because Steph wasn’t able to make it to the shoot. This move was probably the most important thing I could have done for the shoot. Not only was he able to hold the reflectors and light stands, but I really feel many of the shots woulnd’t have been successful without him.
As I said before, it was windy. Bobby, my assistant, acted as a counter weight to hold the light stands. Something critical for a few of the shots. It made the difference between completely backlit photos and nicely balanced photos. This is an example of one.
The keylight for this photo was an SB80DX with a 48 in. shoot through on camera left. I can’t even remember the approximate settings on the flash, but I remember it was pretty strong originally. I had to taper it back slightly. I was originally shooting at 1/250 @ f?? and ISO 100. The photo was neat looking, but I wasn’t happy with it. It just looked too faked. (Kind of like there was a strobe and umbrella right in the middle of a grass field?!?!)
The solution was actually pretty easy. drag the shutter. By dragging the shutter, I was able to bring in some natural fill light from the sun balancing everything very nicely. I had kind of wished I had brought a gel or two along to balance with the sun, but I was shooting Raw so I didn’t need to worry so much. In the end I ended up loving this photo and a few others from this field.
Here’s one that just didn’t work in my opinion. I still edited it for the couple, but it’s just not my favorite photo. I’m sure if I spent some more time at this bridge I could make some really interesting photos with some couples, but I was really trying to force it the other day. I really like her expression, which is why I kept it in with the other photos. I think it really shows their personalities even though you can’t really see his face.
I also like that the wind was taking her hair a bit in this shot. It worked for some shots and not others. I think it’s always important to utilize little things like this to your advantage rather than complain about them.
I also tried something a little different with this photo. I’m not sure yet if they liked this photo or not. I’ll get some feedback later, but I thought it was interesting if nothing else. I’ve seen it done before, but wanted to try it myself. I think I actually like this color version of the black and white version here.
At the end of the day I think we got a great mix of traditional and non-traditional photos. And again, the client was happy. In fact, here’s a quote from her email response:
“Thank you very much Danny, you did a great job with the pictures~it makes me that more excited for our wedding pictures!”
I’ve really been itching at the chance of getting outside to try some creative portraits over the past couple of days, and I finally took my chance this evening. Bobby and I went across the park with my camera, two strobes and a beauty dish modifier.
I wasn’t looking to make anything overly spectacular tonight. Just to try out some stuff I’ll use in the future. The photos I got turned out much better than I hoped. Especially since Bobby and I were both freezing.
The lighting setup is pretty simple when broke down. I took an SB80DX with a homemade beauty dish and place it just camera right. I then moved my 550EX on a modified hotshoe slave unit with a pocket wizard to camera left and aimed it directly at the hoop.
My first aim was to find the correct ambient exposure for the sky. Somewhere around ISO 100 1/30 @ F4. From there, I dialed my sky down a few stops by setting my shutter to 1/100. Next, I turned on my 550 strobe. Set it to what I though would be ‘okay.’ I think somewhere around 1/4 power. Next I grabbed the SB80DX/beauty dish and pumped up to 1/8 power. Aimed it right at Bobby and tested everything.
I didn’t really care for the power on the 550, so I backed it down to 1/8. Next I looked at the key light. It was lighter than I hoped, so I bumped it up to 1/2 power. I shot a few more test shots and finally got exactly the look I wanted.
I then just shot around a little and let personality come through a little bit in the poses. Easy enough with Bobby. This worked until all my equipment started to get just a little too wet. Then my cords started shorting out and couldn’t get everything to cohesively work.
Time to pack it in.
The whole shoot lasted about 15 minutes, but it was a long 15 minutes. I’ll definitely be using Bobby as a model a little more for some other shots I’d like to shoot. I’m also going to be buying one, maybe two more Strobes so I can get some rim lighting going on too.
Post Production: I used Photoshop for all my post production on these shots. Everything was shot in Raw and opened in the PS Raw Converter. From there I made minor adjustments in exposure settings, so the levels popped a bit more. I boosted the contrast and the black levels until I got the look I was going for and then added a vignette on the final image.
After that, I officially opened the image. I duplicated the background layer, desaturated it, and added a High Pass Filter with a 100 radius setting. I then changed the layer mixing to Hard Light. This gave me about the look I was going for, but I just wasn’t as happy with the way it made the background pop. I added a mask and then masked out the areas that stuck out too much. I was pretty happy with the outcome. Everthing together took me about 45 minutes for all these photos.
I’ll most likely be making a Photoshop action that does the High Pass action, but I want to play with the different radius settings before I do it. I’ll put it here if you’re interested when I get it done though.
Original
Edited
Just wanted to make a quick post about the importance of a clean sensor. Any photographer who has ever experienced dust spots on their photos knows what I’m talking about, but I didn’t heed my own advice before my last wedding. The result was that I spend hours retouching each photo to get rid of them.
As you can see the before and after out of the touchup, but that’s hours I could’ve gotten back if I simply went somewhere to have the sensor cleaned once inawhile. Sure it’s expensive to do two cameras, but highly worth it in my opinion.
Click the photos to see the larger versions.
NOTE: Dear readers, just a quick warning, this may bore the heck out of the average reader. This post is more for advanced photographers.
I promise to never use my crazy little setup for a portrait if you use my services. I really wish I would have taken a photo of the setup to show you just how crazy it was, but I was in a hurry and forgot to do that portion.
I really wanted to try out a a self portrait the other day because I was bored and hadn’t shot a portrait in quite some time. I also wanted to learn how to used tethered shooting.
For those of you who don’ t know what that means, it’s where you setup your laptop to your camera and the card is downloaded directly to the computer. With special software you can actually shoot the photos with your laptop and it gives you a chance to view the photo on a large screen before shooting it.
To give you an idea of how this was setup, I started with a 48 in. shoot through umbrella to camera right with a White Lightning Ultra 600 in it. It was tamed down to almost the lowest setting.
I shot a few photos and realized that the small area I was in was bouncing light all over from the reflection of the umbrella. It was bringing out the background in my basement and I didn’t want that. I wanted it near black.
So I covered the umbrella with the black backings they came with. I had to use two to black it out. I was still getting reflective light showing through so I moved to guerilla lighting. What is guerilla lighting? It’s basically taking anything you can to alter the light the way you want it.
I used my black card table to block even more light. I set it up on two of the chairs right behind the monolight to block and bounce light. It came close to doing what I wanted, but not quite. The extremely powerful monolight was still throwing light to the back of the room.
So then I had to move my backdrop stand with one of my muslims to camera right directly behind the monolight to shield light hitting the background. This seemed to do precisely what I wanted to do. Near black background. You can see just a little detail.
So now that I’ve got my main light going good it’s time to play a little with other lighting. After all, single-light portraits are a bit boring usually.
First thing I wanted to try was to add a hair light. Now, I don’t own any booms for hair lights. I’d really like to buy one, but I don’t use it enough to warrant the purchase right now. So what I did was to take my SB-80DX with a Pocketwizard and mounted it to my low ceiling rafter with a Wal-Mart bungee. I tied it to a low-hanging pipe directly over my head.
In fairness, I cheated because I knew I was going to be using a hair light so I positioned the camera and other lights before hand with that in mind.
I used my light meter to balance main light and hair light to end up with a slightly brighter light on my hair. About 1 to 2 stops. I know the light meter is a little cheating, but hey, I got one and it was handy.
Next move, fill light. Sure I could’ve setup my other monolight, connect it to my camera with a pc cord and easily filled it in, but I’m all about laziness efficiency.
So I picked up one of my 2′x3′ white poster boards, stood it up in the seat of another chair so the light reflected off the left side of my face.
I moved it around until I got the right amount of fill for what I liked. Then I took a look at the photos and realized there were three problems I had overlooked, one major one and two sorta minor ones.
The major one was that I was getting a little bit of light spilling in from a window. Easy enough, take my black 2′x3′ poster board and cover the window. Solved!
Next, I was getting a little bit of flare from the angle of the shoot through umbrella. on the right side. I had to use a wider angle on the shot because I was shooting so close to myself. When you’re firing off a 3′ remote cord you don’t have much choice.
I could’ve moved the monolight, but that would almost be like going back to square one. So I did something easier. I attached a flag to the right side of my lens to block that light. Essentially using a homemade lens hood.
Then I started getting some more background light and couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. Eventually I realized I had added a hairlight that was throwing just the slightest bit of light to the background. So the first thing I tried was zooming the flash in trying to direct the light down instead of down and out.
Did better, but not good enough. So then I added a flag to the backside of the flash with a little velcro. BINGO!
After that, I just spent a little time shooting around. I think my final fstops came in around f11 at 1/250 of a second at around iso 100.
I was a little confused at this point. F11???? I mean everything was powered so far down. Why was I getting so much background light? I mean My SB was powered down to nearly nothing. So why so high. I was in a big hurry and quit thinking about it for awhile and left.
Later, I looked at the photos and hit the EXIF info in Photoshop. AHA!!! Sometimes I’m very unobservant. Which is why I like to have my wife at my shoots, but I figured it out. I wasn’t at ISO 100. I should’ve known from the grain in the photos right away. I was at 800. A huge difference.
I thought I had changed the settings right off the bat, but I guess not. Luckily this was just a self-portrait and not an actual shoot, but then again, I would never attempt something like this on a regular portrait.
Here’s what the final setup looks like.
This past weekend, I had the joy of shooting my first maternity photos for one of my friends. I’ll admit, I was a little nervous about shooting maternity photos as I had never done any and I don’t have a full studio to bring people into to make them feel comfortable.
Instead, I opted to shoot the photos in Tony and Kate’s place. Faced with challenges on space, I wasn’t sure what lights to bring so I just took everything. I ended up using only one monolight with a shoot-through umbrella.
I was very happy with the session. If I had a full studio, couches, beds and other props I would’ve probably just gone crazy and shot 50 different poses, but we were limited on time and space, so we got about 10 total poses throughout the session.
I think this is my favorite. I have another with Tony down listening to her belly that I like, but this one just speaks louder to me.
I’m so happy for Tony and Kate. She’s due at the beginning of January and they will be the proud parents of a bouncing baby boy. Hopefully I can pick up a few more of these assignments because I really like the beauty and melodrama you can create with this type of portrait.
If you’re wondering why there’s a logo across her face read the previous post.
Thanks guys for letting me share this photo with the interweb.
