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.

8/52 - Medal Winner

This last week I got my very first flash in the mail (along with a full Strobist, single flash, kit).
So, I spent some of the weekend and first couple of days this week playing around with it. It seems so simple to use off-camera lighting when looking at other people's pictures, but actually trying to put it to use yourself is a lot more difficult. I've done a lot of reading about off-camera lighting, looked at a lot of pictures and studied examples of how other people are using it. But, the first time I turned the light on and popped off my first shot with it, I was sadly disappointed in my 'natural' abilities.

I had Paige sit in for me so that I could try to figure out flash output, distance to subject, angle, shutter speed, aperture, etc. I also played around with using a shoot through umbrella versus bare bulb. While she was patient with me, it got boring for her to just sit there, so I had to try using the timer and get in the shot myself.

It takes a lot of work to get a shot just the way you want it, and even at that, there's always something that you could do to make it better.

I know that I'm brand new at using off-camera lighting, so I don't expect to be all that good at it right away. It will take a lot of practice, but I'm excited to get into something new and excited to see some of the results that I can get.

Paige's brother was in town over the weekend and the first half of this week. Last weekend we ran an 8k trail race and he ended up getting 3rd place overall (6 minute/mile split over 5 miles of hilly difficult terrain!). He got a medal and got to stand up on the podium and everything. I thought it was pretty cool, so I wanted to try to get a few pictures of him with his medal.

This first shot I took, I wanted to get a little more dramatic lighting that just kind of highlighted his profile and showed a little more emphasis on his medal. I shot this one with a bare flash, angled down so that the focus of the light was on the medal and the light feathered up slightly towards his face. I had the flash zoomed to about 50-85 mm so that it would be tighter and not spread too far. I also wanted to keep the background pretty dark and didn't want any light spilling back.



The second picture is more of a typical 'portrait' style shot. This was done with the umbrella on the flash to give a more even, softer light across his whole upper body. I had the flash zoomed out to about 35mm, which filled up the whole umbrella to create the softer light. I tried to take the background a little darker in post processing, but didn't do a great job, so he has a slight halo around him where I didn't fill properly. I'll fix that eventually and get the final picture posted in here.



All in all, it was a fun time. I got a few other pictures that came out pretty well, but didn't have time to mess with them and get them uploaded on here.

Thanks to Chad for posing for me and congrats again on killing it at the race.

Let me know what you think.

T.

7/52 - DIY Ring Light

OK, well, let me start off by saying that I know these pictures aren't great...technically speaking. This week, it was more of going for an effect than trying to make them great.

I'll try, over the next couple of weeks, to get better pictures using the same effect, but I wanted to at least get something posted for the week.

I've always really liked the look that you can get using a ring flash. Typically, ring flashes are used in close-up portrait photography or macro photography because they tend to give a nice, all around light with very little shadows. Also, when you're shooting portraits with them, you get a really cool, circular, catch light in the subject's eyes. You really tend to notice it when you see it and it always caught my attention.

Since ring flashes are typically very expensive, I looked around on-line a lot on how people made their own DIY ring flashes. One method I came across wasn't even for a ring flash, as much as a constant circle of light.

Using a Circline Fluorescent light bulb, they were able to get much of the same effect, for considerably less money ~ $10-$15 versus $300-$450. The down-side to this is that the light isn't nearly as powerful as a standard flash, so you have to get much closer to your subject to get the same light power, or slow down your shutter way too slow. Also, lugging around the light bulb versus having the flash attached to your camera is a bit of a pain as well. But, for $300 savings, I figured I could make it work.

So, I set about getting and building my own ring light this weekend. I got the bulb, which came along with it's own ballast, starter and light socket connection, then built a small cardboard reflector to attach it to (in order to use as much of the light bulb's own light as possible). In the picture of Paige, you can see where I attached the bulb to the reflector using black zip-ties. As soon as I get some white ones, I'll swap them out, so they'll be less noticable. Granted, you can fix all that in photoshop, but if you can fix it before you shoot it, you might as well.

So, that was about it. I'll keep playing with the light going forward and try to get some new pictures to add. But, as far as achieving what I was going for, I was really happy with the results. In the future, I'll look into getting a bigger light bulb, so I'll get a bigger circle as the catch light and less shadows in the picture, but for now, the one I have will work. I'm looking forward to using it more and seeing what I can get!





Let me know what you think.

T