13/52 - Puppy

I actually took a few pictures this last week that I could have potentially used this weeks post, but I only have one of them on my computer right now, so this is the winner!

I saw a picture this week that I wanted to try to imitate...it was a picture that someone shot of their dog. It was kind of a dog portrait, if you will. I thought it looked pretty cool and Paige has been asking me to get more pictures of Ellie, so I figured I'd try it out.

I don't really like the background that I got in this picture, so I'm going to try to tweak it a little an see if I can come up with anything better in the future. I've seen a technique for putting in a background during post-processing, so I might try that as well. I might try to shoot it again and if I do, I'll re-post another picture.

I liked the lighting that I got on her, but again, could have probably done it a little better too.

It was my first time really trying to get a good picture of her, so I was happy with the first attempt...that and it took me all of 5 min to do.



Let me know what you think.

T.

12/52 - TRI

Over the last couple of weeks, I've started to notice a lot of photos using multiple lights to create a pretty dramatic look. There is typically a light on either side of the subject, creating a strong "rim" light, then another, more subtle light, in front of them to slightly fill in the shadows.

I've looked through a lot of them and thought they were really cool looking, especially for athletes. They really make the scene look a lot more intense when combined with a background, and alone, they really make the subject pop.

This last weekend, my parents were in town and I showed my dad a lot of these photos. Being that he's a professional photographer, I thought they would be a great addition to what he provides for high school seniors and athletes.

I just picked up two more flashes off of Craig's List and was eager to try them out, so, I decided that I wanted to attempt one of these pictures myself.

The set up was pretty basic. I hung a black sheet on the wall and stood in front of it. On either side of me, about 5 feet away and slightly behind me, were bare flashes aimed at me. In front of me was another flash, but that one was shooting through an umbrella. Pretty simple set up.

I didn't expect to be posting any of the pictures from the shoot, since I was just trying out the lighting set up, but I really liked the way it came out, so I thought I'd put it up.

After I edited the photo to make it look a little more dramatic, I cropped it so that I would have a lot of extra space around me. I did that to show my dad that you could put a school's logo or team name or something like that in the extra space to personalize the picture even more.

I didn't have a school name or anything to put with mine, so I thought I'd fill it in with the different events in a triathlon, since I've done so many of those over the last several years.

(And, I just realized, after posting this, that I have the order of events backwards for the race. I'm an idiot. When I correct the photo, I'll post it again)

I thought tha the picture ended up looking like an advertisement and really liked the way it turned out.

I'll have to try it a few more times and actually get a real athlete to pose for me!



- Updated image with correct sequence of events.

- Another update. Changed lighting ratios slightly.

Let me know what you think.

T.

11/52 - Abstract Macro

It's been a busy week and I was traveling most of this last week, so I didn't have a lot of time to get new pictures.

These are pretty lame, but they are the best that I could come up with in the limited amount of time I had to get stuff put together. I've got a cheap macro attachment for my lens that is a lot of fun to play around with. It would be fun having an actual macro lens, but this attachment gets me some pretty interesting shots. You can get really close to your subject and it cuts the focal distance that is standard on your lens by about 80%, so it's a lot of fun to experiment with.
Along with cutting your focal distance, it completely narrows your depth of field as far as what stay in focus, so you've really only got a fraction of an inch that will be sharp.

So, I put the attachment on and played around with getting really close to a few things and seeing how they looked. When you get that close, it really takes the object out of context and almost makes an abstract picture with just a small portion of the object actually being visible.

So, I snapped a few that I thought were interesting and this is what you get. I know the round object picture is kind of out of focus, but I was hand holding both the camera and the object, so trying to keep them both in the same fraction of an inch focal range was tough.





Let me know what you think.

T.

10/52 - Bump

With the new addition expected and on the way, I wanted to start capturing the changes that are occuring with Paige's belly.

I'm hoping to get a new picture every month, then put them all together in a sort of panoramic collage to show how things progressed and changed throughout the pregnancy. If I can put into action what I've got in my head, it should be a pretty cool picture when it's all said and done.

So, the other day we spent a little bit of time trying to get the first picture set up and arranged the way I liked. And, I have to say, I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. It is a very simple picture, but I think that it does a good job of just highlighting and emphasizing the belly and the (little) bump. It will be fun to see how things progress and even more fun to capture it.

For this shot, I just set up a bare flash slightly behind Paige and off to camera right. Dialed in my exposure to make the background black and make her belly pop.

I'm sure there are a few things I could do to tweak it a bit, but this is how the picture came out, right out of my camera and I liked it.



Let me know what you think.

T.

9/52 - Water Drops

It's been slightly over 2 weeks since I've posted. Things have been pretty busy around our house and with work, so I was slacking pretty hard when it came to getting new pictures.

I've seen a lot of water drop pictures before and I really wanted to try to capture one myself. I've tried this several times and always got very boring results at best. I couldn't figure out how to capture the drop at the right time, how to get the shutter fast enough to really make the water drop sharp and how to get interesting colors on the water. So, I did some research on how other people got good pictures and it's actually really easy. Having a flash is the key to getting good water pictures.

Since I just got my new flash, I was eager to try it out. I learned that if you put something with interesting color behind the water and shoot the flash into that background, your cool colors will reflect into the water when you take the picture.

So, I found a gift bag that had green, red, yellow and orange stripes and put it behind my bowl. Then it was just a matter of getting the exposure correct to go with my fast shutter speed and that was it!

I shot around 30 pictures and came out with a few that I really liked, but this one was the best of all.

Next time I do this, I'm going to use a larger bowl or pan so that you can't see the rim in the picture. But, for what I was trying to accomplish, I was really happy.



Let me know what you think.

T.