Day Forty: Cherub

Today has been a long day.  I was up late (for no reason at all) and have been dragging all day.  And the weather, cold and rainy, wasn't much help.  After work I had a commercial shoot.  And while I might have asked for permission to use one of the photos from this afternoon for today's post, one of the rules I set out for myself was that this was going to be a wholly personal project.  Even with permission, I don't want to use paid work to satisfy the requirement of a photo a day for this blog. 

So, dragging and slightly under inspired, I set up a background and a light and took pictures of a cherub reading a book.  Not much else to say.  Til tomorrow.

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Day Thirty-Six: Head in Hand

Literally.

This is a photo of a stature we've had around our various houses for the last 12 years.  It's always been a conversation piece of sorts, and I've photographed it a number of times over the years.  I used a very classic lighting, using just the beauty dish high and and right in front of the statue.  You can tell by the way the light drives the shadow of the nose directly down.  This is called butterfly lightting and it's the same lighting used in the Mona Lisa. 

My goal was to try and produce a 3-D effect.  It was a rather long process to work the image to this state, and while I'm fairly happy with it, it falls short of my vision for it.  I usually try to keep my post processing to a minimum, or at least toward a realistic (if slightly poppy) rendition of colors and tones.  But another goal of mine in doing this project is to improve my post processing skills and that includes using creative effects.  I think I can do better in processing this image to get what I pictured.  But not tonight.  It's late.
Please check out my main blog: http://bmcportraits.wordpress.com/

Day Nineteen: Cool Under Pressure

Went to a Triangle Strobist meetup tonight at Mojo's Billiards in Apex.  Had fun...but got home late.  Got lots of good stuff and will add some more to this post tomorrow once I have a chance to process my images.  Dyvo (Flickr name) modeled for me (and others) some and also got a bunch of candids of people playing pool and just generally in the bar.  More later...

Please check out my main blog: http://bmcportraits.wordpress.com/

Day Eighteen: We're not in Kansas...never were.

Today was a long day at work and all day I couldn't figure out what I was going to shoot for today's shot.  I had nothing.  Usually I go for a couple of short walks during the day with the point-n-shoot at least just getting some suff that I could use in a pinch.  But today, didn't even manage to do that.  I had about 45 minutes when I left work and decided I'd shoot Molly's Wizard of Oz figurines.  They've been living in a pocket of my camera bag for the last two weeks, and I've posed them in various places for my idea file I've been keeping to draw back on when things get to feeling stale. 

I remembered seeing yellow bricks at a location I was shooting at last week.  The picture of the castle at the bottom of this post is also from that location.  It was one of last weeks runner-ups.  I brought a flash and reflectors with me, but the light was nicely broken up and interesting looking filtering through trees, some high grass, and the castle and I was able to position Dorothy and the Witch to take advantage of the natural light.  I under exposed to give an ominous feel and pumped the saturation up a good bit (the yellow bricks are kind of pale and faded) to get rich warm tones.

One of the concepts I really want to learn to develop is having a good sense of visual weight for the subjects in my photos.  After years of practicing classic rule-of-thirds composition, producing relatively boring photos that weren't snapshots...but weren't much better, I started reading some ebooks by David duChemin, (http://www.pixelatedimage.com/blog/) Drawing the Eye, in particular,  and learning to think not in terms of thirds of the frame but rather about the visual weight given to the subject matter.   In the past, I've tried to shoot stuff like this and have always been disappointed.  But it occurred to me today that all I needed to do was to apply the same principles to make a shot like this work. 

Here is the castle which is also at this same (abandoned) location:

Please check out my main blog: http://bmcportraits.wordpress.com/

Day Five: Plan C (meet Flash)

This morning I really planned on going out to a park this afternoon to shoot a self portrait I've been thinking about doing for awhile. But it was cold and by 4:30 the light I was hoping for had slipped below a row of trees. So...Plan B. Plan B was shooting my son, Isaac, who's about 14 weeks old. But he's not feeling quite himself these last two days and while we did shoot for about 15 minutes, with the whole family pitching in, I really didn't get anything I liked.

Plan C. This is Flash. He's lived with me for over 20 years...sitting on this shelf or that in my various offices, dens, shops and now studio. So Flash and I put our heads together and this is what we came up with.

Strobist: Key is SB900 with ~10 degree grid, fired CLS at 0EV. Background is gridded and snooted SB800 with a blue gel, fired CLS at -.7EV. On camera (D300) flash is firing as well at -1.7EV to just keep any of the shadows on the front from getting too deep. Shot with 35mm F2.