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

Back to Work

This tittle has two meaning, first I am back on the road and second I am done with the directory shoot and can focus my energies back into the seniors before it is too late in the season. One of the features I like to do with seniors is to have a customized design using their schools logo and colors. This can be time consuming at times depending on the detail of the school logo or masthead. Here is an example of a web page with the masthead.

Using the pen tool in Photoshop makes a detailed selection real easy. I must say it takes a little practice to master this tool as you learn how much stretch it will take to create the bezier curves that allows a vector mask to be created. See below for the points that re-created the logo for my use.

With the points and segments established you can either establish a selection (marching ants) or a vector mask. I like the vector mask myself as it is only a Command Click away from generating a selection from the vector mask.

The next stage in this image was to get a "letter" style image. The font they use for the letter jackets are popular and identify the senior with their school. So it was back to the web to see if I could find that one. 

This is all I had when I started. Resizing the image to 240 dpi smoothed things out a bit but it was still back to the pen tool to get things under control. The Eagle had came from another image on their website as this one was not going to work at all. Here is the result of the work.

So how was I going to use these elements to get a pleasing result to the client. There is a little back story to this in that the seniors dad had a picture of him holding his Gibson guitar and was interested in having Tyler in the same pose with the same guitar. Here is the layer pallet for the image to follow.

Both the logos were brought in from their own files, the image of Tyler was extracted from a white background and the rest is some tweaks here and there in CS5.

The final image is a mix of these multiple images and some drop shadows and bevel and embossing to enhance the text and I ended up with a 16x20 sized image weighing in at a slender 320 MB.

Hope you enjoyed the journey... Doug

M&M To The Rescue

Last Friday night we had an opportunity to shoot two toddlers and it was a blast. It was the first time I had worked on white seamless paper also. I have had this roll of paper for a while but have been needing to cut about 15 inches off the tube so it would fit the studio and this was the opportunity.

Shooting the toddlers I knew I wanted a little higher key effect than I had previously shot and it was going to be interesting to see if I could pull it off. What I had to work with were a couple of Elinchrom 600RX heads for main and an overhead hair/fill, an Alien Bees B800 flash head and one of my Canon EX850II speedlites. The B800 and speedlite were going to be my background lighting with a flag on the 850. The Elinchroms both had Rotalux Softboxes attached.

The Bees head and Speedlite were fired by Pocket Wizards (Plus II on the Bees and FlexTT5 on the speedlite which I was shooting in manual). The Elinchrom heads were fired by their own Skyport system. On the camera I had the MiniTT1 Pocket Wizard in the shoe and the Skyport Controller on top of the Wizard. As long as everything is powered up, this system seams to work fairly well. I do plan on another Bees B800 before another high key shoot though as the speedlight while strong enough simply could not keep up with the recycle rate of the powered heads.

Balancing the background lights was a fairly easy job as I simply adjusted each flash output until I had an equal blowout pattern on the back of the camera (so much for my light meter). I brought in the little M7M dispenser to use as a lighting subject to get the Elinchroms dialed in. While the dispenser was a wonderful tool for the toddlers to work with and keep their attention focused on remaining semi still (yeah!) it later became a point of contention a you can see form the image below. The composition is not what I would have liked it to be but you just got to understand, photographic control was not an issue at this point.

The working area for the children was about eight seven feet by five feet before they got too close to the back. By the second shot, I realized this was going to be a hit and miss proposition.

After about thirty five minutes of just letting the two of them roam around on the white seamless I had enough shots to work with. Al the ladies in the room were in stitches watching these two interact. I really think they found it amusing to watch me tray and get anything useful as it was looking really out of control for the most part.

Working at 1/200th of a second to freeze their motion as there was plenty of that, the aperture ran between f/9 and f/13 for the entire shoot. Using a little bit of desaturation on an image of the two of the children resulted in the following image.

Persistence and patience paid off in this shoot and it was just a whole bunch of fun putting it together. I’ll probably have some more images form this shoot up here in the next few days.

For now, take care... Doug

Time Flys

Wow did I ever get busy, Wednesday through Friday just flew by and now here I am leaving town again. It started Tuesday night when I was putting together an equipment line-up for a shoot I was doing on Wednesday. I had just… I mean just received an Alien Bees B800 Monolight and the 64” Bees parabolic umbrella so I had to work with that for a while.

Using a combination of the Pocket Wizzard Flex and Plus 2 triggers I went to work. Mixing the two trigger systems meant having to shoot all flashes in manual. Not having a light meter made it a hit or miss proposition.

Using a Westcott Charcoal Gray background, I was able to put a speedlite on a stand with a red gel to  pop the background. The B800 and umbrella was to the left and a reflector for fill to the right. That worked pretty good for a portrait shot as it gave some nice shadow on the face. The only problem was that would be shooting more of a corporate head shot and the light needed to be a bit more balanced. Out comes the Lastolite EzBox to the rescue. With speedlite mounted and the Pocket Wizard FlexTT5 to trigger that light. As I said earlier, E-TTL was out the door as with the mix of triggers as well as the B800 is a manual flash head.

Anyhow I had planned on an hour and a half for the shoot. I had seven individuals to shoot so I might have been a little optimistic. Well with set-up, shooting, and tear-down it was more like two and a half hours. The lighting specs ended up with the following.

Background light was set at 1/16 power with a light blue gel and zoom set at 28 mm to spread the flash wash on the background. The main being the B800 was set at 9/16 power and the fill was a 580EXII in the EzBox which was set at 1/2 power and 35 mm zoom.

So why no images? They are sitting on the Drobo back at home as I did not have time to get them transfered to the laptop to take on the road. Maybe next week I will post some of the images. Tomorrow I will make up for it as I have a really cool and tekkie device to share with you.

Cya then... Doug

Engagement

Yesterday I was able to do some engagement photos for a couple of our friends. For a full disclosure here, I am not currently a Wedding photographer but engagements are just portraits for two, and that I can do.

A few days ago my wife and I scoped out a relatively new park in our area and figured a couple of spots might work. So Sunday at 4:00 PM we met at the park in very harsh sunlight. There were two basic areas I was interested in shooting. On was on a pier that went out into a small lake and I figure this would be good shooting if it were cloudy (which it was not!) and the other would work as I was going to use fill flash for the wooded shots anyhow. The shots above were with a Canon 5D Mk II with an EF 50mm f/1.4 USM lens mounts using a EX580 II flash using I-TTL. All but one of the shots flashed and the one I was able to recover in Lightroom using some exposure, fill, and recovery adjustments.

Today we will be out riding after missing some opportunities last week so I am out-a-here.

Cya... Doug

The Gathering

Good Monday morning, I hope you all had a great weekend. My daughter was in town for a wedding and it was real enjoyable to hang out with her as often as we could.

The montage of images in this picture below I took last Sunday night for a ministry at our church. It is a new ministry focused on the college and career group in the age range of 18-33. I used to be one of the teachers of this group o Sunday mornings until the church hired a full time pastor for the position which it really did need. Anyhow I am still associated with it even though I am well out of the top end in age. But that is more of a physical thing anyway.

All the images were shot on the same evening. The room was very dark and the lighting was mostly reflected off the wall which put the people in a backlit condition. I had a pair of EX 580 II's mounted on light stands and was firing them with the little Canon remote trigger. I had the flashes pointed about 30 degrees off vertical which blew out the white tile ceiling but gave me enough light on the band to get the subdued lighting effect I was looking for.

I have yet to see this in print but I think it will look pretty snappy when it is done.

Have a great rest of this Monday. Cya... Doug