25/52 - Waiting

I've seen a couple of images like this and really wanted to try one out for myself.  I wanted to try a picture with a 'blown out' window (meaning there is little to no detail in the highlight) and with Paige laying on a white cover or sheet or something to give the picture a overall high key effect.  I like the way these pictures look as they kind of make it look a little dreamy.

I knew the room and window that I wanted to use in the house, since it is one of the few large windows we have that gets direct sunlight in the afternoon.  On top of that, the bed in that room has a white comforter and pillows, which makes it even better.

So, the other afternoon, before dinner, when the evening sun was shining directly onto that window, I had Paige come up and lay on the bed.  We tried a couple of different poses, with her looking at the camera and looking away, but I think that this one is the best.  It gives a feel to the image that Paige is daydreaming and thinking about the baby to come, just lost in the moment.  To me, it's a very calm, relaxing picture.

I kind of messed up the picture a little bit in that, preparing to take this photo, I was using a different lens, trying to get this same effect.  I had to boost the ISO up pretty high to achieve the blown out window while maintaining a relatively fast shutter speed.  I didn't like that and switched to my 50mm f/1.8 so that I could open up the aperture and have a fast shutter and give me a great depth of focus.  Well, I forgot to lower my ISO, so when I opened up the pictures on the computer, they had a bunch of noise in them from the high ISO and my point of focus (Paige's face) wasn't very sharp.  So, I tried cleaning it up as much as I could in Photoshop.

I really like the way it turned out, minus the mistakes.  I've got a few other ideas in mind that I'm going to try with this same concept, but really open up my lens and close down the depth of focus to a minimal distance.  But, I'll have to save those for another post.

Let me know what you think.

T

24/52 - Painted Hands

We finally got our nursery painted in preparation for our baby boy.  We picked a very masculine baby blue, painted the room and got all of the furniture arranged.  Now, we've just got 3 months left and we can finally put the baby in his own room.  We can't wait and get more excited each day waiting to meet him.

It took me a couple of evenings after work to get the room painted and after my first night of painting, I noticed how much paint I got on my hands.  After seeing the paint on my hands and seeing some of it flake off, this idea came to mind.  I wanted to get a shot with my hands covered in paint and make it look pretty weathered and cracked.

So, after my final night of painting, I took the rollers and ran them over each of my hands a couple of times.  In order for it to look weathered and cracked properly, I kept working while the paint was drying.  So, I grabbed my touch-up brush and went about finishing up a few extra spots around the room.  After about 20 minutes of opening and closing my hands while the paint was drying, it looked a lot like what I was going for.  The fingers had worn away where I was holding the brush and roller and the paint on my palms were really cracked and peeling away.

I went downstairs, got my light set up the way I wanted and fired off a few shots.   The hardest part about it was getting my hands in the right position for the shot.  I put the camera on a 2 second delay and started shooting.  I wanted the shadows to come across my hands at a pretty hard angle to really give texture to the cracking paint, but if I had my hands turned slightly the wrong way, or my fingers bent too much, they would throw shadows across the rest of my hand, so it took a few shots to get it just right.

I really like the way the shot came out.  The paint doesn't look quite as blue as it does in the room, but I still like it.

Let me know what you think.

T.

23/52 - Feeling Bubbly

This is a picture that I've been wanting to do for a while as well.  I've had this idea sketched out for a few months, but never got around to actually putting it together.  I found the sketch that I had drawn with the idea the other day when going back through a notebook of mine and decided to finally try to get it done.

It's really a pretty simple set up.  I filled a large, clear plastic salad serving bowl (square) about 3/4 of the way with water.  Then, I just squirted some liquid dish soap into it and blew into it with a straw to get the bubbles.

For the colors I had a flash on either side of the bowl, one with a red gel and one with a blue gel.  After getting the power levels right and getting the camera settings how I wanted it, I snapped off a few pictures and that was about it!  I really wanted the colors to pop and I tried to get them split about as evenly as possible. 

I had a 3rd flash set up behind the bowl pointing at a white board that I used as a background.  That flash didn't add much to the lighting, but it helped make the water at the very bottom white and it brought just a little detail out in the bubbles as well.

That's about it.  Pretty easy shot of some bubbles.

Let me know what you think.

T.