Babies are great!

I may have posted this image earlier but I think it may have been about a vase. It could look like one but it is much more than that. It was a beautiful little girl growing and not too many weeks away from being in the world.

There she is. The couple had me over to there place to get some newborn images. I have gotten away from shooting babies with flash as it often startle the little tikes. So it is just as easy for me to go to where the baby (and new mom) is most comfortable. I bring my little Westcott constant light kit (below) and use it to either exclusively or to supplement the existing light work great. 

I use an X-Rite ColorChecker on the first shot of any new lighting setup and it is literally two clicks away from setting the white balance far any number of images.

The lime green blanket that was used caused a little trouble for me in post and I will be adding a neutral blanket to my baby kit bag in the future. Here are a couple more images of this little darling.

I like the finger as the focal point that threw her slightly out of balance.
Take care all... Doug

New Twist on Body Art

Traditionally when one thinks of body art, the thought of a tattooed body comes to mind. Another possibility might be piercings or body painting. Here is another take on using the human body for art, in this case a more abstract art. Take a look.

I had take some picture of a soon to be mom for a baby bump session and was thinking of how could be used as a piece of art rather than just a picture of her bump. This particular shot started out with a tight T-shirt that gave a smooth line for a nice back lit image.

It started out with a single black and white yin-yang type of image. I was going down the line shadowing road when I changed direction and came up with this gradation of grays.

Nothing like art that has special meaning.

Take care... Doug

New Kid on The Block

It has been a week since my last post but it is one that has not been without serious busyness in my life. Last week I was at work hurried in a project until I headed home on Wednesday. Got home around 9:00pm and in bed by 12:15 am. So why is that remotely important to this post? I was up three hours later getting ready to catch a flight out to Maryland on Thursday. The 7th being our grandsons birthday and Friday was my daughter was going to deliver her second child which by the way came off without a hitch.




Raegan Michelle was born at 12:05 on April 8th. One of the images was on of my daughter the morning of the delivery to which I added a few touches in Photoshop but she liked the picture treatment.








Yes I did take a number of images in the hospital room with the 5D Mk II and an EF 50 f/1.4 prime to get as much light as possible. Of course most every image looks good on the back of the camera, when you get them in Lightroom things change just a bit. Here is what I think is the best to pics from the opportunity I had. I definitely made the right decision to bring the 5D Mk II rather than the 40D as I was running at ISO 3200 most of the time.

Well, it's home tomorrow and back to some form of normalcy.

Take care... Doug

In The Moment

This could go up on a wall as black and white art and no one would be the wiser. What it is though is a well along young lady looking forward to her delivery date. The silhouette of her  curves gives the image a yin-yang feel to it.

There is something special about a pregnant women. Special may not be the correct term but it more or less covers the range of emotional, psychological, and physical attributes that comes with pregnancy. I cannot even imagine the flood of female stuff that goes on in their minds but after three children I do appreciate what they go through and how the attachment with the child is so strong in the ladies. Must be why it is call maternal rather than manternal instinct cause we just don't get it. So in my little way I can use my skills to help a young mother or mother to be appreciate the life that is growing inside of her.

Here we have a nicely lit vase this is waiting flowers... NOT! It is the same pregger belly in the previous shot with a different twist. Creatively cropped in front of a folding divider lit from behind by natural light gives it a vase like look. Here is another image that could be used as a birth announcement.

All the images were shot with a Canon 5D Mk II with an EF 24-70 f/2.8L USM lens. Lighting was by Westcott lights. You can see in tomorrows post how the lighting was done.

Take care all... Doug

Flower Child

Well this is going to be a short post as I have been buried all week. I have been heavily into graphic development at work and then editing this shoot I did a couple of weeks ago. On the MacBook Pro your wrists rest on a portion of the computer that tends to warm up. Not hot but enough to let you know you have been on the computer for some time.

Anyhow I wanted to get this one up as I it was really the result of some artistic exploration on my part. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't. All the flowers are shots I took at the Orchid display at the Hawaiian Botanical Gardens just north of Hilo Hawaii.

Working with the baby files in Lightroom, I was converting some of them to black and white and this idea struck me.

Hey, it was fun and I might shoot flowers at some different angles in the future for a library of 3D looking flowers.

That's it for this week. Cya next week and have a great weekend... Doug

Catch Mom

Before we took of for Hawaii I had the opportunity to do a baby shoot. The mom knew we were going to be gone and it would be a couple of weeks before I was able to process them. That time is now and I am having such fun working with these images. I shot them on a Canon 5D Mk II with both a EF 70-200 f/2.8 L IS lens and the EF 50 f/1.4. Lighting was with a pair of Elinchrom RX600's with a 39" Octa Bank and a 14x35" strip box on a Manfrotto Boom Arm.

Little Gabriel kept his attention on mom while I shot away. We were laughing so much during this sequence as he just drooled away. Click on the image to see how clear the bubbles are.

So here I am working on these images and I saw something that exemplifies the detail this amazing camera can capture. In the first image on the left eye if you look close, you can see the reflection of Gabriel' mom in his iris. Well, just take a look at the image below.

That is really something. Obviously this has had the crop beat out of it as this image is 522x485 or 253KB where as the original image is 5616x3744 or a little over 21MB in size. That makes this 1.2% of the original image and it is still respectable. Ok, I'm done with the geek rant.

So if you couldn't figure out the tittle of the post, you now know.

Take care and I'll cya later... Doug

Little Feet

Little feet can often times be just that... Little. This photo was from the baby shoot I did last Friday night and I had an EF 50 f/1.4 lens on the 5D Mk II. Not exactly a macro lens and I did not have flash for this image so I quickly opened up the aperture to f/1.8 to get more light. Yes I could have pushed the ISO up to3200 or something but it was just easier to dial in the stop with my thumb.

Anyhow the result is a pair of little feet with a very shallow depth of field. So what to do? I had two options, dump it or try and salvage it. Now that I am an avid Lightroom user, I try to get everything done in LR before I have to go to Photoshop. So here is what I came up with.

With a little creative cropping and the use of a WOW-Glow preset, I have a nice image that a mom may want to put up in the nursery. All is not lost when the image does not turn out the way you had intended it too. Sometimes when the time factor is there (like when shooting babies) you get what you get some times. As long as there is a focusable area of the image, I believe it can be salvaged.

Fix it in Photoshop is a poplar term, Maybe I'll take the Salvage it in Lightroom saying!

Cya... Doug

LIghtroom Adjustment Brush Presets

The above picture is of a young mom and her baby that I was privileges to be a part of a special moment in their life. Baby pictures are once in a lifetime moment and they change daily. Snapshots are so important to them memories of the parents during their child's development. The child will not remember expect for the images being shown on a graduation slideshow or to a girlfriend and the final insult is during the wedding reception video.

While snapshots are so important, professionally taken and processed images are more than just a moment in development, they are pieces of art that can should be hung on a wall.

During this particular shoot we were at the moms house. so I had to get portable. I used a Westcott black and white collapsable backdrop, a Lastolite EZbox, two Canon 580EX II speedlites mounted to PocketWizard Flex TT5 receivers. On the Canon 5D Mk II was mounted an EF 70-200 f/2.8 L IS lens and the PocketWizard Flex TT1 transmitter on the shoe. All good intentions aside, I forgot a reflector so  we used a white pillow case for some of the shots which worked out well for fill. I went to the other flash unit as a hair/fill light about half way though the shoot. For that I set it to manual and dropped it down to 1/3 power which worked just right. Of course the image did not come out of the camera looking like it dies above and that is what this post is all about.

Lightroom has develop presets as well as the ability to make your own, or purchase preset. Those presets can even be used in the Library Module as well as during the import process (very handy BTW). One of the little secrets to Lightroom is there are many other locations to save settings. One such location is in the adjustment brush.

Just under the "Mask:" in the screenshot is the word "Effect". This field has a drop down box to select different brush presets to be used. As you can see, I have selected Skin Softening Mild which is one I saved a while back. It drops the sharpness all the way down and reduces the Clarity some. 

As you can see in the drop down menu, I have a Medium and Max version of the same. On the opening image I used the Max version as I wanted to get the effect of full foundation on the moms face. I used the Mild version for the baby's face.

Here is the original image out of the camera with the Canon Faithful profile added at import (remember the import presets) to all the images as a starting point. What used to take gobs of time in Photoshop using layers, masks, and plugins, can all be done in Lightroom now. It still takes time to get an artistic image but a salable image is just minutes away from import now.

Take care all... Doug