Welcome to the Blog of Photographer Luke Townsend

Payoff...

2011-03-16T23:06:00.008-05:00

I shot this portrait of my roomate Kellie "Grimble" Kvern the other day since she is back from Morocco temporarily until she heads out to Minnesota. I didn't plan on taking any pictures that day when she came to visit but after seeing how the hood and hair frame the face I was reminded of the picture Steve McCurry made of the Afghan Girl. I had to grab the camera and take some frames. We have a huge picture window in our kitchen so it was kinda a no brainer. Despite her hatred for self portraits I received a nice little note stating her approval...phew, definitely relieved!

Incidentally enough I was snooping around on facebook and noticed this comment from one of her friends.

What an amazing compliment! I'm incredibly honored to know that the folks who enjoy my pictures perceive it to be of quality and merit to one of most highly recognized NGS pictures. I mean, what do you say after hearing that? Wow! Kinda gives you that nice warm fuzzy feeling inside. You start to realize though, that you might be doing something right, that all the work might be starting to pay off and to have that effect on people through your work is why I continue to photograph portraits.

Whether she's serious or not and whether or not I totally believe it I really do appreciate my followers and supporters. With out you guys I would not be here doing what I love, and for that...I thank you!

Cheers!

How Many Lights...

2011-01-27T10:41:00.015-06:00

First things first. I am so honored to have been sponsored by Bogen/Manfrotto, specifically Mark Astmann, during my time demoing lighting and ideas at Imaging USA last week in San Antonio! They were so kind to ship me tons of grip and lighting gear for the demo. Also have to shout out to APAG (American Photographic Artist's Guild) who paid my way to Imaging so I could help man the booth during the trade show. Quinn and Robbin, you rock!

Now down to business.

How many lights? I posted this question on facebook yesterday and got a huge amount of responses. Only one person guessed right...Darren Whitley. Go pat yourself on the back. Actually I posted the answer but well, no one believed me.

I digress.

Photography literally means "to write with light" and how you apply your knowledge of lighting when going into a job can turn a simple set up into looking like you hi-jacked McNally's gear house. Our booth in the trade show was 10x10' space. Okay not so bad. Now add two 3x8' folding tables, 7 paintings and the painter, all of my crap, and an entire studio full of equipment and you start to get a little cramped....YA THINK! A blessing in disguise as I like to think. Robbin was about 2 feet from the background and I was clear in the middle of the trade show isles with a 70-200 trying to make a freakin' picture. Imagine, not the smallest of folks, rolling around on the floor with a camera, all along my tether cable acting as a trip wire for the lucky people that happen to uhh, get in my way.

When you look at this picture I can immediately pick out 5 lights, 6 if you include the reflector...but that's cheating. I see a key light, separation light, hair light, background light, and generally there would be some ambient fill as well. All this light carving out dimension and giving the image a 3-d feeling to it. I said that having the small space was a blessing in disguise because I was able to use the confines of my "studio" to allow one light to act as many different lights. The one and only light is coming from camera right. I have two Sb-900's with the dome diffusers rigged onto a c-stand pushing through a Lastolite 3x3 foot panel. It's basically a huge square swatch of translucent material, or a bedsheet on a stretcher for that matter, that helps take the small lights and make them into one big light source. The whole rig is on a c-stand and attached to the cross bar is a handy little knuckle. This allows you to rotate the panel any direction as you can with any traditional soft box. I had the panel up high and angled down at her which allowed me to use the light not only to light her face but to skim the top of her head and spill onto the background creating that nice follow through lighting you see in old school images from karsh and those folks. I'm talking about having the hottest part of the background on the shadow side of the face and the darkest part of the background on the highlight side of the face.

I used a gold tri-grip, also by Lastolite, to camera left as my fill light, which because of the size the light wrapped around her hair and shoulders creating the dimension of having a separation light.

That's about all there is to it. Learning how to adapt to your situation and learning how to turn 1 light into 6 is a skill that you can use anywhere and everywhere. And not to mention it will make your client happy when they don't have to pay for 300 studio packs and heads and stands and assistants and catering...etc. etc.

More Imaging USA pictures to come...

The Opener...

2010-07-23T17:05:00.005-05:00

So I was assigned to shoot this series of portraits of three guys in Manhattan who all have "man caves." I had this stunning idea for a 32 page spread on these guys (I don't even think MM has more than 32 pages;) and I kept wondering about an opening shot. I eventually came up with the decision to do a group shot. Lets face it, photographers hate groups. Every time John asked me to go shoot a group sweat started to bead from my forehead and I eventually passed out from the heart palpitations and sever "legs turn to jell-o" syndrome.

I digress...

But it's true. Everything is a-ok with one person but when you add two more, people start to freak. How am I going to pose them? How do I light all three people? How do I get all of them to get the reactions I want? How do I keep their attentions? In the strobist's case...What if my CLS doesn't work?

I haven't shot enough groups yet that I'm confident tackling any job yet so I went simple. It didn't always start that way. I was going to take him out to the wood field where Glen's "man cave" is and light each person independently with HSS and all that. Turned out that that was going to be super complicated. And when you have to juggle three grown mens schedules and end up with 30 minutes of time that scenario would have killed me. Had to think of a new image for the freakin' opener and ended up taking them out to lunch. This time I went simple. Simple background, big windows, great photo.

For a group you want a giant light source that wraps so your subjects can move around and not have worry about staying perfectly still. When you and the subject don't have to worry about the light the better. You can see that I took a simple bed sheet and gaffed it to the windows at the restaurant...instant softbox. Stuck three Sb-900's zoomed to 200mm out in the street and blasted them into this bed sheet. Because the strobes are zoomed to 200mm the light that hits my subjects is still going to be a little punchy even though its very soft and smooth. Perfect for this portrait. It gives it more definition and feeling to it. Simple, easy window light when the ambient light just isn't cutting it. I shot this with my 70-200 so I needed to be back far from the table and where my vantage point is there was no windows left for my flash to trigger the remotes out on the street. I stuck the Sc-28 flash cord on the camera, stuck the master flash on the other end and attached it to a stand right next to the windows. Now my flashes can see each other and I can move freely knowing the signal is reading, giving me the advantage of working the subject. Really I didn't do anything. Maury, in the middle, was the talker of the group and I just had him tell a few jokes and it got everyone laughing. Told you I went simple. I went so simple that I had my subjects entertain themselves so I didn't have to.

After spending about 5 hours on each subject and shooting an entire story on each subject they ran one picture of each. They did run the group...but on the contents page about 2x2 inch square, haha. Oh well, this was one of my favorites which deemed it necessary to have a spot on the blog.

(Image captured via D700, 70-200VR, on Sandisk digital film)

RAGIN' CAJUN...

2010-06-18T23:03:00.006-05:00

Had the honor of photographing some of the entrees from one of the best restaurants in Manhattan, Hibatchi Hut, for the summer issue of KANSAS! Magazine. Obviously the best thing their is the gumbo and corn bread, hands down. Among the many other great dishes, cooked by the talented AJ Thompson, there are the sausage with red beans and rice, southwest seafood feast, bread pudding, and who could forget the hot wings!

Shot the entire job with small flash...what a surprise! One Sb-800 w/dome diffuser pushed through a Lastolite 24x24" EZYBOX. Used a reflector where needed to fill the shadows. Never shot food before so it was a slight challenge. Turned out pretty good.

Onto the portrait. I really like this portrait. Don't like Kales hand in his pocket like that but what can you do. I like the posing though, the angles of the bodies and all that stuff. Again all shot with small flash. EZYBOX up high and feathered across them as to allow the light to skim across their faces. It was actually up so high it was knocking around the ceiling fans. Right by that center column I had an Sb-900 w/dd and full cut CTO to light the background of the rather dark restaurant. And I mean dark! Thankfully I'm pretty good at hand holding slow shutter speeds. I'm talking ISO 800, f/5.6 at 1/10th of a second...eek! To be honest I could have stopped right there. Nice portrait, directional light, done deal, but us photographers can never leave good enough alone. I added one more Sb-900 zoomed to 200mm for separation and added dimension to the image. Justin clamped it to something over there on the far left and just let it skip across their backs. Necessary addition, in my opinion.

Shot the famous line of hot sauce bottles with the same EZYBOX on a c-stand. Used a technique called focus stacking on this one. Had the camera at f/11 and shot the first half of the bottles, then focused on the second half. Blended them in photoshop so I could have perfect depth of field.

Playing with Reflections...

2010-06-11T23:58:00.004-05:00

I haven't had much time to just go explore with my camera so tonight I went and explored a few streets around Vinegar Hill in DUMBO. I was planning to go straight into the Hasidic jungle we call Williamsburg but when I dropped off a friend at the subway I was amazed at the light in this area. I had to stay here because if I didn't the light would be gone. One of the first things I photographed was this building. It caught my eye because of the large circular patches of light that were reflecting onto it from another building. I'll tell ya, the light in NY is just amazing as it skips through the alleys and bounces off buildings, you never quite know what you will find, which makes your experience all the better. I only had my telephoto with me (which is how I see most of the time anyway) and as I began to zoom and play with composition I noticed this small tree right on the edge of the terrace. It's common to see gardens and even parks on top of the roof terraces but a lone tree makes this image even more visually interesting. You start to wonder how that tree got there, why it is there, how long it has been there. All these questions play out in your head. The entire scene to me was just very calming and surreal, from the wind swept clouds, to the slight bend in the blowing tree, to the light patches illuminating the building. And yet, only a few floors down the city of Brooklyn is hustling and bustling more than ever. Street vendors vending the finest fruit, the carrying on of several basketball games in the projects one block away, above ground subway cars speeding by...but you would never know. Here, for an instant, all time stops and you are sweapt into this make believe of inner city paradise. People always say they want to travel the world to make their photographs because they light is so beautiful but the truth is the light is beautiful here in Brooklyn. I wonder how many people saw this image today. My guess is no one. The trouble is, is people are too caught up in there lives and the day ahead of them that they forget to look around, forget to look for the beauty in the everyday things that surround them, that make their lives happen, but for us as photographers it's our job to pick apart the everyday crap and find the beauty in it. Lets be honest, what better job is there?

Fake?

2010-06-09T21:28:00.005-05:00

Got a call from Rob the other night telling me I need to go to the roof and look at the moon, cause after all a moon looks a helluva lot better over brooklyn. Big and full, high in the sky, I immediately thought double exposure. How easy is it? Easier than you might think. Sorry canon users, in camera double exposure is just not an option for you. Basically you just just scroll through the menu (I have it in my "my menu" so I can find it at any split second) and select how many images you want to over lay (up to 10) and start shooting. Make one exposure of the moon, then turn 180 degrees and take exposure of Manhattan, in about a second you have the combine image. Only thing is, is that after you finish one it turns off and you have to turn that feature on again or else your just shooting normal frames...yeah, you don't want to look at my contact sheets. I guess this is good though, or I'd forget it is on and be shooting double exposures all day. Some times you thunder thumb the buttons and it doesn't work, or you now have 10 images laying over each other, or you start to see mysterious figures appear in certain frames and you have to start over...it's a process, yeah, thats it....

I digress...

Even funnier yet I was reading a Q&A with Jim Richardson today during lunch and I came across this little number...

...So there you have it. Is is fake? All one frame, one RAW file, In camera capture, but an impossible image at that. I'll let you make that decision.

Colour Coincidence...

2010-06-02T23:31:00.006-05:00

So...been a while. I know I know. I've been busy. Get over it.

Was at B&H the other afternoon buying a battery charger because well, I thought it was a great idea to not bring one with me to NY. Turned the corner on 9th avenue and saw this great scene. What made me really want to take this photograph was that I cant even imagine how big of a wedgie that lady is giving that man by holding onto his pants like that. Haha. Sometimes a little humor does a bit of a good every once in a while.

Spontaneity can be a great thing photographically some times. I literally made about three frames of this scene. I picked up the camera, still walking, did a quick three frame burst and then it was over. Not a pulitzer by any means but its what I saw, and what I saw was interesting to me. So many personalities going on with each person in this image. This is New York. Sometimes you get lucky and get a fun image, sometimes you don't. I remember following them for a while before I grew the balls to pick up my camera and take the picture. Street photography can be a bit intimidating at times but you need to suck it up and just shoot. Something I'm working on doing and it really is hard.

The more you look at this image and the reason this post it entitled "colour coincidence" is because, and I didn't realize this until I saw it on the screen, the lady in the jersey and the man she is holding onto are the only people in this image that are wearing any colour in their clothing. From the mean lady in the corner, to the two guys behind her, to the guy in the yankees hat, to the gentleman in the cafe...all monochromatic clothing...spotting the two main subjects. Very strange but an interesting coincidence.

Mr. Metal...

2010-04-13T23:56:00.005-05:00

Got to photograph one really cool guy awhile back for Manhattan Magazine. Daniel Hunt. You walk into his small little office, sculptures piled all around, tools, canned mandarins, enough dust to cover texas, a sparkling clean iphone and there he was, drinking from a white porcelain cup with super bright vivid images of fruit all around. 100 degrees on the thermostat, hot as a whore in church (I'm going to hell for that one). Best part was the constant jam of Parliament on the speakers. One of the most chill, down for anything kind of people. He loves what he does, and still can't believe he's making a living doing what he loves. He makes art for people and museums all over the world. He loves humor and he really integrates humor in his art, so go take a look.

These images here were taken at a bronze pouring underneath the old stadium, west side. This was a tough shoot, tough tough light to work with and augment. Thank God for Tommy Theis for coming along to help hold flashes and move around with me as we shot. Really couldn't have done it without his help.

We stood around for about an hour waiting for the metal to melt and then when the pouring started it was done in about 5 minutes, thats it. I had them stop for 20 seconds or so so I could figure out what the heck to do with my light. Egh. Things worked out okay though, my faves didn't make print but the spread looked pretty good!

Sculpting students use a massive electric pulley to lift the cast molds out of the sand pit after being poured.

The breaking of the cast molds after they are pulled from the sand pit. Sludge hammers and hand axes are used to break open the casts to reveal beautiful bronze leaves for a student project.

(Images captured via D700, 70-200VR/14-24/24-70, on Sandisk digital film)

Todd and Anne Farrar...

2010-04-12T21:50:00.007-05:00

Was assigned by Manhattan Magazine to shoot Todd and Anne Farrar's house out in the Colbert Hills area a couple months ago. This home is brilliant I say, Brilliant! Basically Todd and Anne found this beautiful lot, waited, made and offer but waited too long. The lot sold. Six months later the lot was put back on the market and as quick as a mayflies life comes and goes they sealed the deal, as if fate intervened. They spent two years planning out the incredible design and floor plans, and we're talking all 6,000 square feet of it! The only strange thing I noticed was that there was NO art on the walls, anywhere. Nothing. Perhaps this allows the beauty of the specially designed home to really shine.

Was actually pretty pumped for this shoot because I had just come back from a class on how to shoot interiors. Gotta love Nathan Ham and Stephen Smith for putting on such a great class for the Kansas Professional Photographers Association! Colin also played a hand in teaching some of the post processing techniques that I used for this post. Thanks Guys!

This portrait below is a favorite of mine. They have this little breakfast nook that coved outward and wrapped around almost semi circle-ish which really caught my eye. Was trying to play with shapes and angles on this one for something simple and graphic for the reader. Never saw print but was more fun to shoot than the rest of the house, in my opinion! Got to use the Auto FP High Speed Sync function in the Sb units with this one. Ran the camera on Aperture Priority, 1250th, f/5.6, minus 1.33 EV to saturate the background a bit, which silhouetted Anne. Hauled out my trusty friend the C-stand, boomed one sb-900, zoomed to 200mm (may have had a 20 degree grid on the light but not sure), up and over the scene and tried to mimic a sliver of sunlight streaming in. Coulda done without the tree's in the background but that small bit of nature is why Anne loves living in the Colbert Area.

Word on the street is that K-state has been apart of the Farrar family for over 100 years and Todd has collected the original Willie push up board that was used for push ups after a touchdown starting around 1994. Pretty cool stuff. If you look closely there have been 14,327 push ups done on this board from 1994-2005...talk about one ripped wildcat!

(Images captured via Nikon D700, 70-200VR/14-24, on Sandisk digital film)

Look at that Light!

2010-04-02T01:16:00.004-05:00

Shot this tonight of Jessi. Perfect opportunity to test out a lighting technique I've been pondering for a long time now. These files are straight out of the D700 to show the amazing quality of this light. Basically the idea is to create a light similar to, for instance, the reflective octa. What's so special with that modifier? The hunt for softness in your light is always a struggle to people who can't leave good enough alone and one of my "mentors" just happens to be that way (Mcnally, for those people who have been completely spacing out on everything I've ever written on the blog). Using an umbrella just isn't good enough and either is a soft box so lets just combine the two!

Traditionally in a softbox you place the light through it so the light would be pushing through the diffusion facing the subject, creating a hot core of light in the middle of the box. Double diffusion helped that issue but taking the idea of bouncing a light away from the subject then having it spread and soften, bounce back and then spread and soften even more as it goes through the diffusion panels is pretty smart. So what if you don't have an octa? For this I pushed a Profoto unit into a Lastolite Silver Umbrella then allowed that to push back though a Lastolite 3x3' panel. In essence, a reflective softbox.

Needless to say it is super soft. When I say 'soft' I'm not talking about how dramatic or feathered or flat the light is. Look closely at the as you transition from highlight to shadow. Hot spots are drastically reduced, shadows have tons of detail, and an overall 'creamy' quality is emerging. The physical size of the unit is quite small so you still can see a 'harsher' contrast than you would say, the 7 foot octa.

The Image below is just a straight up reflective umbrella that I shot at a workshop a while ago. Notice the higher contrast from highlight to shadow. The shadows are deeper and more rich and thus giving a sharper transition of tones. Is this still pleasing? For sure. Actually this is my favorite picture of Jessi I've taken so there really is no right or wrong way here. Just another solution when an umbrella just ain't cuttin' it.

First Day of Spring...

2010-03-19T21:01:00.003-05:00

So it goes a little something like this...

...There I was, doing 65 down I-70 in the passing lane in front of this dude who was also passing a car. No harm there. The rain we're in starts to transition, rather quickly, into slush rain, which I've figured out is quite slippery. At that moment the guy, no more than 2 car lengths ahead of me, decides he's going to stop....That's right, STOP...right there in the passing lane...which I'm also in...doing 65 mph...I digress... Within 3 seconds or so he's down to 30 mph. I am forced to slam on my brakes and blare the horn. Times going fast, have to do something...hit him...uh, not the best option. No traction at all from the slush my only option, besides nailing this guy, is to take a hard left. I make a heavy turn of the wheel and slide right into the median ditch headed for oncoming traffic. I stop short of killing myself, HURRAY, and manage to drive out of the ditch before it got way to slippery. And a great start to a new season...

...Fuck you spring!

...oh yeah and to make matters worse, I was driving when I took that pic above.

Aye Aye Captain...

2010-03-13T00:34:00.007-06:00

And another beauty photographed! I photographed Amber in a "pin up" style for her boyfriend who is a military man, and I have to say I was quite nervous. I had never done pin up photography before so I really had no clue what to do. Got some help from Blake White, who is a phenomenal shooter, who shoots tons of this stuff. Lots of great tips. Funny thing is, is that her man is a marine not a sailor...I mean, thats like KSU/KU rivalry, I don't even wanna know how that went down!!!

Amber really has this 30's-40's WWII pin up look to her, especially when she slapped on that red lipstick, and she did really well in front of the camera. Her friend Abby and room mate Jessi were there to help out, I made her my bitch..thats right she got to move the lights and all that fun stuff, and the night went by smoothly. Such a classic beauty, I'm glad I got to photograph her.

Needless to say her man loved the pix, job well done!

(Anything not in a sailor costume I photographed with Westcott Spyder lights, the TS-5's. Amazing lights! Super smooth and constant at that, so there's really no fussing around trying to guess what your image is gonna look like. Probably one of my favorite lighting systems out there.)

(Images captured via Canon 5d mark II, 70-200VR, on Sandisk digital film)

She's on Top of Her Game...

2010-03-12T00:15:00.005-06:00

I know you all have seen these pix but I felt they deserved a place on the blog. I've been working with Jessi for a while now and what can I say...she's on top of her game! I mean, you could shine car headlights on her and she'd still make a good pic. Kinda helps that she's drop dead gorgeous. I've been blessed with some of the most beautiful models and friends and well, the work speaks for its self. I've said it before but when you put one of my models (yeah, I'm proud of 'em) in front of the lens I really don't have to do much...although my index finger gets a good workout. (that's when you break out into hysterical laughter)

Gonna be working with another beautiful woman this sunday, Emily May. Have known Emily since she was like 3. We went to the same day care together and boy oh boy do I have some stories to tell you...okay okay I'll refrain....Hopefully a blog will come soon with those images!

Gonna end with my favorite pic I've taken of Jessi so far. I could go on and on about why I love this pic but instead it's time for a little lesson in lighting...YAY! Been using the big 4x6 foot Larson box lately, and quite frankly that's one helluva light. Big as shit, hence the dimensions, and light goes everywhere. Sooo easy to just set it up right besides her and just go. This pic, lighting wise, is straight our of camera. Been trying to combine the extreme softness and creamy quality of light with the controlled look of a smaller box. I've found that the answer is quite simple. Just raise the light up higher than you would normally and you can twist the box to keep light in the eyes. Seen lots of images made with this box and the entire body is light at the same f stop but I wanted gradation. By raising and tilting you get that perfect fall off of light rather quickly and as an added bonus you get ultimate face sculpting and a face like jessi's just shines under this quality of light. Added the 14x48" strip for separation and you got yourself one fine portrait...or at least I think so.

Don't be afraid to raise/lower/twist/turn the modifier you are using. Each move creates a new possibility, a new solution for you to stow away in your mental rolodex of lighting patterns. Just experiment, have fun with it.

(Images captured via Canon 5d Mark II, 70-200VR, on Sandisk digital film)

15 minutes, In and Out...

2010-03-10T14:33:00.000-06:00

Time is of the essence on shoots like this one. Was asked to go photograph the 5 starters at MHS during practice Tuesday. Was told they wanted a picture of them huddling over the camera and me looking up at them. Cool. Got to the gym, made my introductions with the coaches. Asked him how much time I had with the players and of course he, half way annoyingly, glanced down at his watch and said about 15 minutes. The storm clouds were amazing that day and made the point that I would like to take them outside and do a really kick butt shot but oh no...they would have to change their shoes if we do that. C'MON!!! Of course you can't argue with the coach so I was stuck inside. At this point I wasn't really excited about the idea of the shot so It was super tempting to push the iso and just make a really bad ambient light exposure. Luckily John convinced me to take some strobes and actually make a decent portrait. Good thing I listened to him, the image turned out kinda cool. Made some frames of them just leaning over me just looking bad ass but it needed more emotion, more interest, more movement. Simple solution was to tell them to yell as loud as they can and flex. Can't really get a bad portrait that way. 16 exposures and I was done. CLS really helped out here cause it allowed me to be fast and alter everything on the spot without leaving my spot on the floor. Good thing too cause after I let the players go I realized the coach was waiting on me before starting practice. Nothing like quick deadlines to get your adrenaline pumping!

Had no clue how I was gonna light this at first. Was worried about getting proper separation light on them and well, I brought no stands with me. Turned out easier than I originally thought. Just had one of the other players hold a strobe (group B) and feather the head across the pack. Worked pretty well, although the guy holding the light had no clue what "feathering" was and kept moving from his position...VAL FAIL!

Main light was just 1 Sb-900 w/dd (group A) bouncing into a gold zebra tri grip reflector below them. Gives them that hard, foot lighting pattern you see in theatres and runways. Reminds me of how they always light the Hulk and Dracula. Great for situations like this, not so much for elegant portraiture. The harsh, brassy quality and the direction from which its coming is the leader in helping set the mood and emotional response I want the reader to feel when looking at this image. If I had use a soft light and come from above or from the sides the mood is gone, and the image takes on a whole new attitude.

(Image captured via Nikon D700, 14-24, on Sandisk Digital film)

KSU M. Basketball vs. ISU ...

2010-03-07T20:53:00.011-06:00

Basketball is by far my favorite sport to shoot and watch. I love love love it. Here are some images from yesterdays game!

Production shot of J. Knight setting up his remote in the catwalk at Bramlage.

(Images captured via Nikon D700, 70-200VR, 14-24, on Sandisk digital film)

The Queen of Christmas...

2010-02-13T18:11:00.002-06:00

Allie St. Amand showed up while on winter break and we did a pretty cool shoot. I must first mention that Allie really is the Queen of X-mas. I mean, she's beyond obsessed, she's gone mad I tell ya, MAD!

...but I digress

Allie's such a good model and photographer and she loves x-mas so I had this idea to wrap her in wrapping paper from head to toe, you know, super skin tight like a mermaid dress, to show off her amazing figure and well, that didn't work out so well. I know, I know, she tried to tell me it wouldn't work and she was right. BUT...we found that if she crumpled the paper it wrapped better so while I was shooting Jessi...from the post below...Allie and Troy were busy constructing this amazing dress! So, this my fashion take on Christmas.

Same lighting as Jessi's post below but I slipped back into auto white balance, took off the CTO's on all the lights, and put a red gel on the light hitting the floor.

(Images captured via 5d Mark II, 70-200VR, on Sandisk digital film)

The Perfect Opportunity...

2010-02-10T01:48:00.008-06:00

Sometimes, in the field, you have to make something out of nothing. You take a subject that really doesn't want to be there and you make an image. You bounce flash, use what ever you can, and still that image means nothing to you or the subject. Then, sometimes you find the right person and have the right moment, and it all comes together. This shoot was all about Jessi, and all about that dress. Un arguably one of the most beautiful dresses I've seen on a woman. When you look at it up close it is covered in jewels (gansta). No matter where you walk in this dress you will be seen.

Jessi bought this dress for prom some years back and due to circumstances I don't wanna bring up her opportunity to show it off and dance in it was robbed from her. This was supposed to be her night, her chance to get all glammed up and strut her stuff, this night was supposed to be all about Jessi. After hearing her story I knew I needed to do something about it. Not only is this dress special to her but when you put it on a body like hers, jaws start to drop. Thats what I wanted. I wanted to make an image that makes her look the best she's ever looked in that dress. I wanted to give back what was robbed from her...this was her time to shine.

Giving someone the appreciation they deserve and being able to do it through a medium that I know is what made this shoot mean a lot to me. Spend anytime with her and you quickly realize that she deserves the world, and to be able to give her that moment in the spotlight that she missed way back when is what makes me continue in this industry. Everyone has a story, a bad moment, a ruined friendship/relationship and when you find that person, give back, do something special, because they too will shine.

I tested this location last year when shooting with my friends and great shooters Grant Watkins and Joe Geske and I knew I had to use it. I tested some ideas with Grant as my model but I knew I wanted an actual model. I spent almost a year trying to find the right person and Jessi's dress fit the colour scheme of what I wanted so in that instant the perfect opportunity arose. Lighting is a pretty common pattern that I use for a lot of 'glam' type work. And I have Troy Ward to thank for his endless hours of help on this shoot. Okay, only a couple of hours... Boomed the 24x24" EZYBOX overhead with one Sb-800 w/ dome diffuser. Had another Sb unit bouncing into a lastolite silver panel for a low fill. About 60 feet away at the very end of the hall I had an Sb-900 with full CTO, zoomed to 200mm, blasting upward to illuminate the awesome pipes along the ceiling. I didn't get enough rim on her hair and shoulders from this one light so I placed another Sb unit about 20 feet behind her, with full CTO/200 zoom, pointing straight at her head. Prior to studying Joe McNally's latest blog post he used light to not only light his subject but he light the floor to provide separation from the dark background. Light the floor with another Sb unit, full CTO/200 zoom, to provide the separation from the wooden box and the dark corridors of the hall. Had no CTO's on either the light hitting her face or the low fill. Just switched into cloudy white balance in the camera and it gave me just enough warmth to play with the scene

The amazing rainbow flair I got in this shot below is not lens flair, but rather the colour spectrum of light dispersion coming from one of her jewels on her dress. Pretty damn lucky if you ask me, and an awesome bonus feature for the shot!

(Images captured via Canon 5d Mark II, 70-200VR, on Sandisk digital film)

A Truly Merry Christmas!

2010-01-04T10:24:00.002-06:00

Sometimes self assignments are the most rewarding because you really know that you're touching peoples lives and that, as photographers, is kinda the point of our existence. Like so with this lovely couple. I was taking a drive one night and when I hit Zeandale this little house on the corner was completely covered in lights, I mean covered! I knew that I had to make a photograph of the folks that live there. I took this photograph purely out of my need to make a picture. I talked to my good friend Tom Leopold to see if he knew the couple and it just so happens that he did. My job just became 100 times easier. Steve is a truck driver so catching him while he's home was kinda tough but I kept pushing and we schedule a date. Deal was to make the photograph on Christmas Eve when the whole family is together but after two days of white out blizzards the weather finally opened up and I made my move. Thanks to Tom not only did I have a contact but I had a camera and lens to make the picture with. Two feet of snow on the ground, sub zero degree temperatures, no gloves, tounge stuck to the c-stand, I made the picture. Started later than I should have though. Lost that beautiful twilight glow toward the end of the take. Went simple on the set up too. Had a bit of motion blur from my hand hitting the tripod (hey, I was numb, I couldn't feel it) but thank goodness for the stopping power of strobe. Pushed two Sb-900's, one with full CTO, the other with 1/4 CTO through a 3x3' panel. The Lastolite panel has really become standard issue for me lately. Who would have thought a 3 foot piece of material could make light sing such a perfect harmony!

Had no problem getting Pat and Steve to interact and get silly in front of the camera, despite the frigid temperatures. At this point they were laughing and giggling and I was just ripping frames. Turns out that they haven't had a photograph taken of them in years. They were so thrilled that I wanted to come take their photo. Whats better than that? As a photographer we encounter the people who, everyday, don't appreciate what you do, are the first to ask how long this is gonna take, and quite frankly really don't want you there but when you get the subjects that appreciate what you are doing it makes the whole deal worth it. Knowing that you're making a difference in somebody's life is that reward factor that we wish to get out of every assignment and I am so glad I was able to put a bit more joy into Pat and Steve's holiday season.

Playing with Bulldogs...

2009-12-28T19:37:00.005-06:00

Although I didn't click the shutter on this one I still think it deserves a place on the blog. This was John's vision but I had a great deal of influence in the lighting. Pretty simple actually, three lights. Main, separation, and background...sound familiar?

Most of the time at Highschools, at least around here in Manhattan, the back wall mats are very dull and have no sort of writing on them but this one really stood out. John wanted to use it and knew how he wanted to use it, so well, he used it. I put a strobe into a Lastolite 24x24" EZYBOX and I held it up and over head of Gannon with the help of the extension arm of the c-stand. Put a second light, zoomed to 200mm, on a stand directly behind Gannon about 25-30 feet behind him and blasted it right at his head. Instant rim. Next we battled the age old tale of angle of incidence angle of reflectance with the backdrop. I'll tell ya, those mats are a heckuva lot more reflective than you would think. We zoomed a light to maybe 80 mm if memory serves me correctly and let it fly at the background. Like I said, pretty simple.

Added a bit of red texture in post to finish it up and you get a super colourful and pretty graphic image for our senior. So to all of you who hate shooting in high school gyms here's proof that they really can be beautiful.....

Au Natural...almost

2009-12-28T18:07:00.000-06:00

Tried sooooo hard to go out and shoot while not using flash at all...unfortunately as we were leaving our location I found this ledge right at the edge of the creek and I had to shoot it. I mean right at the edge. One more step backwards and Sarah, and Grant would be prisoners to the unusually high waters and roaring currents of a flooded wild cat creek. I Climbed a bank, a couple times cause my fat ass couldn't get up the first time, racked out to 135 mm to bring my background right behind my subject and well, flashed her...photographically, of course...

but I digress...

I was doing good, I promise. Got a nice natural separation light on Sarah but sometimes you just need that little flicker of light to formalize your foreground to make the entire picture come together. Shot with one Sb-800 through a Lastolite Tri-grip.

Anyway, mission failed but some good pix made!

Heh, you did believe me, I told you it was deep.

(image courtesy Grant Watkins via Palm Pre!)

(Images captured via Nikon D700, 70-200VR, on Sandisk digital film)

Photoshop; A Tool that can Save your Butt

2009-12-27T18:30:00.000-06:00

Shot a few groups a while back for Dave Mayes at KSU Photo Services . Being a photographer you need to make anything work. As expected I was stuck in the smallest corner of a huge conference room and expected to produce quality work. As you can see I got dividers on the walls, all sorts of signs, columns, cords running every where...it was a mess. Can't turn this image into Dave though, would not fly very well. McNally says your always as good as your last job and one aww shit can wipe away three atta-boys. This is where simple knowledge in photoshop can make or break a photo.

As mentioned I was stuck in the corner, thats my only option. Had to make it work. Still don't like the guys hand positions, looks like their grabbing their junk. John was first on the scene to tell me to never ever do that again and I haven't had a man grab their junk in a photo since!

Photoshop is an important tool. Getting things right in camera is such a great skill but when your only option is this wall you gotta know how to make due. Actually I got my job at the studio for my knowledge of photoshop. It can open a whole new world of possibilities for you, and in this case being able to clean up this image into a nice simple group portrait allowed me to keep my job! Typically for something like this I send all the Nef's to Dave and he does with them what he wants but like most photographers we can't leave good enough alone, we want the best. So I gave him a finished product. Even though it was not my responsibility I still felt responsible to provide the client the best possible image imaginable.

Moral of the story...LEARN PHOTOSHOP!

You Got Ten Minutes...

2009-12-16T21:12:00.004-06:00

Everything seemed behind schedule. Rushed. Down to the wire. I see this red bench covered in books and three ring binders and knew it deserved a bride. Asked the boss if I could take this picture. He looked at me, slightly flustered, and in a tone more similar to panic than true assurance he said..YOU GOT TEN MINUTES.

Kidding 'bout the panicking thing, but it sure sounded good, I mean, you've read this far.

So what'cha do? Whipped out the good ole' 50mm 1.4 on the 5d (my heart shrunk three sizes that day) and put a flash on the camera. That flash is being used only to trigger an Sb-800 w/dd that was pushing through a Lastolite 24x24" EZYBOX that's running SU-4. The reason this works is that SU-4 mode is basically an optical trigger built into the unit itself. Super handy when you work with multiple systems. When your backs to the wall, and your moving fast it really doesn't matter how you make the picture, it just has to come together in the end.

Had the boss hold the EZYBOX , fixed to the end of a C-stand extension arm, over head. You get a light that lights the face in a pleasing way, virtually no spill onto the cinder block background giving you that dramatic edge, and you get a light that, since coming from the top, really carves out the ripples of the dress adding tons of depth and contours.

One light, Ten Minutes, and you get a nice, simple portrait of the bride.

(Images captured via Canon 5d, 50mm 1.4, on Sandisk digital film)

Kiss and Tell...

2009-12-10T01:11:00.000-06:00

I had the pleasure of photographing local band Kiss and Tell maybe 2 years ago before they really hit it big. Known these guys for quite a long time. Used to Play drums with Jonny, and was in a band with Chase and Jason back in Middle School. Great bunch of guys and I was honored to have photographed them.

Did these pix very early in my start of being a portrait photographer but came out with some nice images.

These guys are just crazy, plain and simple, which make for some great pictures. I think since then they have added a fifth member and I hope to do some updated pix some time this year.

They had this thing where they would stick their fingers up and "shhhh" at you. Chase is the lead singer so I had him wear the brightest colours...yeah, I do know its in black and white...

I digress...

Simple set up here. One sb unit above shooting through a tri-grip with a silver reflector laying on the ground. Thats it. On location, moving fast, gotta take it easy.

This was my favorite out of the entire take. Had them do there "thing" once more but really bring it this time. Told them to really come at me, over dramatize the emotion...and they did. It worked out well. Chase's distance to the camera really does it for me, boosts up the depth that I didn't get in the static, emotionless, earlier shots...sounds worse than it really was.

I never liked this pic, but it was their favorite. Just what they wanted. Sometimes you just have to please the client. Shoot what you want, and shoot what they want.

Went to their house in this tiny ass room. I mean, we're wall to wall here, packed in like a heard of swine ready for the knife. Put a small sb unit behind shooting up on the wall at +3 ev to turn somewhat dull egg shell, cream coloured wall pure white. Boomed a light up and overhead pushing through the good ole' tri-grip. A little photoshop work to make it look like a white cutout and you gotcha a picture. Did I mention I never liked it...

...ran on almost every poster they had for about a year or so. Maybe still out there, floating around somewhere. Probably hanging off a rusted over staple on a telephone pole outside PJ's bar.

Shooting local talent can be kinda rewarding when you look back and they're really pushing forward, recording album after album, going on tour, doing the sorts of stuff the big boys do. Kinda gives a purpose to what you do, and that feels good. A photos worth is summed up in the emotions that it inspires upon its viewers. For me, its seeing the leaps and bounds of these that teeter between obscurity and utmost possibility. It's that "moment that it clicks" (no pun intended...okay, yeah it was), when you know you got it, when all the pieces merge together to sing the harmony that overtakes the frame with pure realism. That's what we're after and getting that one frame makes being a photographer an amazing and truly special job. Doesn't happen enough really, but its a learning process. You grow and you accomplish higher grounds each and every time you put your eye to the camera.

Working Through Problems...

2009-12-09T18:57:00.010-06:00

Trying a new thing out lately, you know getting things right in camera. Pretty much a big deal. Gonna try to think, and might actually create one of those wrist bands thats says "What Would McNally Do." Feel like I'm spending too much time in Photoshop trying to fix crap that can, and should be fixed in camera. Kinda important for, you know, when I get that call from Nat Geo to shoot an assignment...HAHA YEAH RIGHT!

Been getting a few questions lately on how I made this picture. Took some improvising to perfect it but that extra ten minutes thinking of solutions saved me hours in photoshop cloning out reflections in the blinds. Parsing out the pic is pretty simple.

One of the ways I wanted to use this window was to shoot straight at it and use the blinds as a backdrop. Went theatrical with this one and did the ole' white balance shift to tungsten again. It can really make images pop in the right situation. Slipped into tungsten B4 for that really really rich blue daylight. Started out at f/2.8 thinking this was gonna do the background justice but it really just turned it to mush sooo....scratched that idea and went straight to f/5.6

f/5.6 is definitely enough depth of field to cover the face and it brought my background back where it needed to be in order to get the graphic lines out of the blinds. You'd figure any smart photographer would have realized that to begin with. Ran Aperture Priority with -2 stops of EV programmed in to really saturate the background.

Decided to do a pretty classical lighting set up here with the clam shell light. When you get access to cheek bones like Jessi's you tend to light them in certain ways...and ohhh do I light em!

I digress...

Started with a 24" EZYBOX boomed over head with a cut of CTO. Looking at her skin tones I obviously need to double up and add more CTO, which I did in the final image. Photography's pretty much a game. You put one light up, or solve one problem and you create 10 more problems, which is the fun of it really. Trying to tweak and augment your light and elements so they all sing a perfect harmony. I put up the softbox and I get the reflection. You could just go with it, clone it out in photoshop BUT that would take time, and if I get that call from Nat Geo (still laughing) and turn in this image to them I would probably never work there again. Remember this always, you can't fix a bad image in photoshop...'nuff said.

Need some sort of cutter, or gobo, or skrim, or whatever you want to call it but I need something to cut that light from hitting my background. Could change my angle, angle of the light, or just scratch the idea all together but when you're onto something shoot it. McNally said in his latest blog post that when "On location, shoot it. Don't think for the editor. Don't foreclose a possibility. You will never be there again." Although Hutchinson is only 2 hours away I probably will never shoot in this restaurant against this window with Jessi again so I had to get it right.

Ended up booming my black fleece jacket just barely out of frame next to the softbox via a c-stand. If I didn't have the boom capacity of the c-stands, keep in mind, that I couldn't have achieved this quality of light or been able to cut the spillage. Still have a small piece of the equipment in the frame, which one of the students pointed out to me, so lowering the stand just a tad completely eliminated the reflection. Now to think about light.

Added more power and CTO to the light over head and had a student hold a gold reflector underneath Jessi right above the chest where her black dress cut off.

(Straight out of the camera...pretty nice egh?)

Added another Sb-900 zoomed to 105mm with a full cut of CTO to add a little separation behind her head. Didn't have another stand with me so had to place it on the window sill which, in my opinion, isn't high enough to completely rim her out (you dirty, dirty boy).

(Images captured via Nikon D3, 70-200VR, on Sandisk digital film)

Winter calls for Workshops...

2009-12-08T03:45:00.008-06:00

I've had the amazing opportunity to teach a few work shops on Small Hotshoe Strobes. Although this photographic fad is "in" right now I choose to use the small strobes simply for swift versatility. I can fit them in my camera bag, take them anywhere, and get the same quality as an Elinchrom/Octa rig all weighing next to nothing. Pretty handy for me, and really any location photog or even ones who are starting out and don't have the luxury of a studio space, myself included.

The majority of the images, apologies for the sheer amount of images here, are from my latest workshop in Hutchinson, KS but a few are from my workshop at the KPPA Fall Seminar. Just a bit of House keeping to do first. I must thank KPPA for asking me to lead a small "safari" as it was called and even more so Mark Astmann at Bogen for help in sponsoring. Bogen was kind enough to send over some amazing give-a-ways including keychains, Manfrotto t-shirts, and even a Lastolite Tri-Grip. (In which I really really wanted to keep for myself MUU HAHAHA...but I didn't...)

...I digress

Can't thank Mark enough for his ever giving generosity and I hope you enjoy some of these images!

Latest workshop was held in Hutchinson, KS and was put on by Aaron East of Salt City Photography Club. Had a bunch of wonderful people stop by and I think we were able to parse out some beautiful images. Bunch of great talent in this group, and I urge you to wonder through their site! I had an amazing crew with me this time. The always gorgeous Jessi was back and, to tell you the truth, you can't deny cheekbones like that. Nathaniel was there helping me with grip and all that sort of shit that just has to be done, and Robby Hill was our male model who, turned out to be a wonderful guy. Booked him on the fly the night before after my other model bailed on me. Found him at a local fitness club, he's a trainer, 'nuff said.

And of course gotta thank Stephen Smith for letting me borrow his D3, in which I am now crazy in love with, and quite frankly wanted more time alone with...nevermind...

Started out slow, flash on camera. Pretty bad, pretty harsh, and generally unflattering in almost any situation.

Simple solution is to take the flash off the camera. Diffused one Sb-900 with a tri-grip. Simple, clean light for Jessi.

Took things a step further by reflecting light off of a white Lastolite All-in-one Umbrella. Little more harsh due to the distance but still one of my favorite images of the day.

Moved the light in close here with Robby with one Sb-800 punching through a 24"x24" Lastolite EZYBOX. Starting to believe that there's noting easier than it. Almost like cheating really, how sophisticated the light is coming through it. Always one of those tools with me at all times!

Shauna was my model at the KPPA "safari" and, as always, did a wonderful job. Took the EZYBOX and boomed it up and over her via the c-stand. Really pushed the benefits of the c-stands during these workshops. Wanted to show the crazy awesome amount of versatility you have when placing your lights. I mean, you can boom a light up and over with out encroaching on your scene...pretty important. Bounced a group B strobe off the floor to fill in the shadows, then placed another unit behind her head to rim her out. (does that sound weird...) Striking light that resinates off her face in a pleasing way.

Stayed simple and used two separate tri-grip diffusers and strobes for the double exposure of Jessi. Programed the double exposure into the D3 and went to town. Have seen this a lot in Joe McNally's work so thought I'd try it out. Used the focus cursers in the viewfinder to line up the faces. Not the best pic here but It was all an experiment. Jessi's been wanting a sort of "alter ego" images and well, this is a good start. Definitely know we can do it again better.

Went the executive route with Robby. Pretty simple actually. Two strobes with the dome diffusers pushing through a 3x3' Lastolite panel that I had skrimed off as to act like a stripe light so only a quarter of the panel was raw diffusion material. Had another strobe in the EZYBOX for the separation light. Put the separation light in the box because I wanted to keep the quality of light the same through out the picture. Having a soft main light and then putting a hard, stark, quality of light for a kicker probably wouldn't look right, so hence the soft quality all the way through the image.

Had the same set up here for Jerry, Aarons dad. Jerry, was a good subject. Been making pictures for longer than I've been alive. Got him to chuckle after asking him about the numerous playboy covers he's shot...

...nuff' said

At lunch we went to eat at this old mom and pop mexican restaurant in town and I couldn't help shoving all the tables to the side and making some images right in our banquet room. Was attracted to this window in the corner of the room and tried to make at least three significantly different images from the same window. My goal of putting Jessi in as many awkward situations as I can is quickly becoming a reality! Lots of trial and error on the second image but well worth the time to tweak the details. First image was made to replicate straight up window light. Natural light metered in at 1/4th second at ISO 200 at f/5.6. Pretty dull, and soupy light so I had to augment that with strobe. Shot two Sb-900's zoomed to 200mm through the window that was covered by a 3'x3' Lastolite Panel...Instant soft window light. Had to trigger the lights outside with the Su-800 that was taken off the hot shoe and snaked around another window looking outside via the Sc-28 cord. Tried leaving the Dome Diffusers on until I realized the windows were double panned and tinted, in which I had to zoom the lights tight to give me a lot of punch to it.

Tried to demonstrate the vibrant colour shifts you can get by switching your white balance and gelling your lights. Slipped into Tungsten B4, which gives you that even richer blue, gelled my lights with CTO and now your skin goes back into the normal realm. Sb-800 in EXYBOX boomed up and over to get the butterfly light under the nose. Reflector underneath to fill in the shadows and zoomed sb-900 behind to rim the head. This adds another dimension to the image that makes the image "pop." Had some trouble with reflections and f/stops to get the blinds the way I wanted them but ended up with a great result.

The third way I wanted to use this window was for a dance shot. Shot two sb-900's with CTO through the window again. Tried covering the window with the 3x3 but light kept skipping around the panel where the curve of the piping is so I threw a bed sheet over that. Nice, warm, late afternoon daylight in 30 seconds. Triggered again via the Su-800.

Back from lunch, and while every one was inside getting all warm I took Robby out and tried some Auto FP High Speed Sync. Use the windows of a building across the street that were reflecting the afternoon light like a mirror as the backdrop. Pretty cool graphic elements. Had one Sb-800 in an EXYBOX bumped up to 1:1 power. Shooting Aperture priority at 1/1250th at f/3.2, -1.33 EV dialed in to bring detail into the windows.

Stayed with Robby as we built our way into a "sports illustrated" style photo shoot. Robby had a whole bunch of muscles and ripples that were screaming for a strong overhead source. Used an Alien Bee with a beauty dish table topped overhead. Diffused it with the sock that comes with it and then again through a Lastolite Panel. Wanted a stark, but still diffused light to fall and etch the shadows of his body. Hooked up 4 sb-900's zoomed to 200mm running Su-4. This added a nice rim down his entire body. Then we went another direction and gelled the four rim lights purple, got rid of the beauty dish and put in an sb-900 with spot grid and CTO for the main. Got a basketball and had Robby levitate it, and I'll never tell how's its done! (heh heh) Put a reflector underneath and snooted another sb-800 onto the basketball to fill in the detail. Not a bad image but has potential for future use.

Shot a quick group portrait of Robby and Jessi with two sb-900's and tri-grip diffusers. Can't get easier!

Decided to finish up with a very classic beauty light combo. Clam shel lighting is generally a large soft box over head and a smaller softbox underneath. This type of lighting, if done correctly, will make your models really like you...trust me! Its that, damn I do look good, kind of lighting. Started at f/8 to make sure I cover the entire face with enough depth of field but quickly opened up to 2.8 and loved the effect of extreme shallow depth. Puts more focus on the eyes and radically changes the feel of the image.

One of our participants, Deborah Walker, filled in for me as Jessi was getting dressed. Wonderful presence behind the lens and really made my job super easy. Decided, on one, to rim her out with a small unit directly behind her.

Overall had a great time teaching and learning and have met some amazing people along the way. Love to be able to just play and create, I mean, who doesn't?

(Images captured via Nikon D3, D700, 70-200VR, 24-70, on Sandisk digital film)

End of the Road for Chipman...

2009-11-21T20:27:00.005-06:00

Senior day at the KSU W. Volleyball game today. Focused on Senior Kelsey Chipman, 14.

Action shots are well, action shots but I tried to get a different angle to hopefully get my camera in a different place. Instead of going up and shooting down on the court which, I'd say, is fairly common, I laid down on the ground and shot up into my scene. Got the crowd in the background and got a good picture.

Had to shoot the senior recognition after the game for KSU Sports Information and of course used it for the mercury too. Kelsey Chipman just broke down after the game yesterday as her team mates rushed out to hug and congratulate her. The image at the top is my favorite but of course, due to layout, it didn't run. Instead you get the image below, which I think is boring, but what can you do?

KSU W. Basketball vs. Indiana State. (I think)

2009-11-16T00:36:00.007-06:00

Ahh Finally the Joy of Sports Photography...

Possibly the most fun thing I've ever shot. It's all a game, trying to capture raw emotion and action all while never knowing what's gonna happen. Anticipating the moment, ripping frames, high ISO, yelling fans, yelling coaches...IT'S GREAT ISN'T IT!

*First and Last Images shot during KSU Football Game earlier in the day*

The lead image was shot for the Mercury for a story on fans who choose to spend their time hanging out tailgating rather than in the stadium watching the game. These two guys have been friends ever since High School, were College room mates, and have been tailgating since 1995. They were celebrating a KSU first down. I had to drive around a while to find the right subjects and angles. Found these guys standing in the middle of the street, drinking of course, and just having a good time. I didn't want them to know I was there so to not spoil any true moments so I sat down on the ground and leaned on front car wheel, racked out the lens to 135-200mm and just let them be them. Spent about 10-15 minutes just watching and luckily K-state got a first down in the 4th quarter and they, naturally, had to celebrate. Got the people, the cars and parking lot, and stadium all in the frame to help tell the message of the story. Not a great picture by any means but it portrays what I wanted.

This last image was one of my favorites. I was sitting on this hill waiting for a photo that I wanted, which ran A1, and I started playing around with motion. I was looking for something graphic and colourful, and I think the tight compression makes the image work.

(Images captured via D700, 70-200VR, on Sandisk digital film)

Colour, Composition, and Techinque...

2009-10-31T02:55:00.005-05:00

"Colour, and control thereof, is a big deal. Colour controls the mood of the picture, and thus it affects the mood and interest level of someone viewing it. Light has colour, of course, and when doing small flash lighting, it is important to remember that both the flash and the scene have colour. These are battery-operated units you can fit into your camera bag. They are not light bazookas capable of blowing away all available light. (This can happen, say, in a headshot/studio scenario, and in those instances we need only worry about the colour of the flash.) But, often, when working out in the world, we will be filtering them into an existing scene that already has a mood and a colouration. We need to decide if we are going to alter that mood and shift things by introducing a new colour palette, or if we need to slip our flash light in, subtly and unnoticed. "

-Hot Shoe Diaries

Exactly what I did here, which is actually a series of tests I did since getting my camera back from Nikon. On location outside my buddy Nathaniels house, I immediately saw a lot of character. I find myself drawn to the rectilinear shapes of the windows, the leading lines of the diagonal roof top, and the texture of the building. It was, as you can see below, a very dull, dark day out. My camera meters the scene rather bright via the aperture priority mode in the D700. Too bright, I would say, too neutral in colour, and way to flat.

Easy fix here is to simply take out 2 stops of light from the equation and really saturate the background. The light was very mute and well, soupy, which generally makes for some pretty crappy pictures, but I was determined to succeed, or at least try to. I see soupy, dull light and I immediately think the deep blue of the shadows. I slip, and this is quite typical with my photography, my white space into the tungsten realm rendering the entire daylight environment rich blue. Put a 1/2 cut of CTO on the strobe to bring Nathaniels skin tone back to normal and fire away. Only after a few frames did I realize that I had not in fact changed my white space. Still a nice portrait, for sure, but I'm not likin' all of the warmth in the background. I want my subject to pop and to do that I'm introducing him to a separate colour space.

After the change of white space I hit it dead on. This is the effect I was hoping for. These are handheld at 1/6th of a second so that prolonged time where blue light can creep into and permeate my subject caused me to add another full cut of CTO to bring the warmth back into the ball park of a perfect exposure.

Why keep the two warm windows light in the background? Traditionally, and you see this very little in photography today is, what is known as follow through lighting. Im talking back in the days of Yousef Karsh and John Blaker. Instead of lighting the background evenly you would light the background in the direction of the light hitting the subject, so a natural fall effect. I left the two warm lights light as a means of adding light to the background and since it is the same colour as the light on Nathaniel and coming from the same direction thus following into the frame, is a great example of a classic technique.

(Images captured via D700, 24-70, on Sandisk digital film)

Allie Online...

2009-10-03T18:30:00.002-05:00

Good friend, amazing model, and fellow Nikon shooter Allie St. Amand is now online! She's going to school in Arizona for photography and has recently put together a website for everyone to enjoy her work! Check it out HERE!

Bigger IS Better...

2009-10-01T22:40:00.005-05:00

I must be getting luckier. First Rachel Christian, then Kellie Hays, then Kaitlin Schaub, then Allie St. Amand, then Sarah Bowers, and NOW, da dada daaaaaaa Jessi Ruskievicz. I mean seriously? I tell ya, one look at this girl and you'll be like a deer in the headlights staring into a vast and endless vortex of beauty. Yeah, too bad she's taken...talk about ruining the mood.

I digress...

Assignment was to take the idea of a domino and create a concept with it using strictly PURE IMAGINATION . We'll begin with a spin traveling in the world of my creation, what we'll see will defy explanation.

Everyone I could think was going to use the literal form of the domino and photograph it as is. Pretty typical, you know, easy, challenging, fun...okay. Sure, that sounds fun BUT why not go big. I mean, they always say bigger is better right? Why not build a 6 foot tall domino? Now I have to hark back to a photo I saw by Joe McNally of a volleyball player holding a giant volleyball in the middle of the desert. Lets play around with that concept and apply it to this assignment. See, thats why it's important to look and study other peoples photography and create a mental rolodex of ideas up there in your empty noggin--in my case an extremely full noggin...?--and when the time comes you'll have those ideas and solutions you can pull out to make an image unbelievable. I spent a week thinking and researching how the hell I was gonna construct a 6' domino. I had the bright idea of constructing it out of styrofoam, paint and wooden dowels, 30 c-stand extension arms, you know, 500 pieces of cardboard...anyway it was going to be a jumbled mess of stuff and things and well, Jessi!

I was promptly awaken one night as visions of sugar plums danced in my head and It came to me. I mean, my mind was like a ragging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives. A mattress! A mattress! That was it. Box spring section cause the top mattress is too flaccid. Put a white sheet over it, cut out some shapes from cardboard, paint them black and botta bing, botta boom you've got yourself a 6 foot domino!

Next question is to where in the hell to shoot this. Not in the studio to be sure. Need to go bigger. The woods! Another one of those trusty location ideas stored up in the ole noggin rolodex. On our way to Pillsbury Crossing day after day to photograph seniors I always remember this huge, glorious ditch on the side of the road. This was it, had to shoot there!

Despite the spiders and the snake I saw when we first got there (shhhh I never said anything to her) Jessi, and her entourage we were able to pull out an image. Of course I couldn't have done it without the help of my wonderful assistant Nathaniel LaRue. Good guy, great shooter. You can check him out here.

How'd ya light it? Actually it's simpler than ya might think. Key light comes from 2 Sb-900's zoomed to 200mm pushing through a 3x3' Lastolite Skylite Panel. One of the strobes was gelled with a full cut of CTO and the other was left daylight balanced. When the sun went down below the tree ridge, which was my separation light, I had to impart my own "late afternoon daylight" kind of light so I pulled out another Sb-900 zoomed to 200mm with a full cut of CTO. Ran it on SU-4 and you got yourself instant sunlight.

Ran the camera on Aperture Priority with +2.33 stops of compensation dialed into the camera. Slipped into the cloudy white space to give it that warm, late daylight, gucci add kinda feel to it.

I had Nathanial stand behind the domino to tilt it and hold it so Jessi wouldn't die from being crushed by a giant domino. HEADLINE NEWS: Model dies from bone crushing domino accident!

(Images captured via D700, 14-24, on Sandisk digital film)

Beauty Headshots with a Twist...

2009-09-22T00:37:00.000-05:00

I first learned this trick from Scott Kelby and from then on out I had to try it for myself. Why not, I mean, its all technique. Find the right model and the right concept and you got a winner. Well, its not all that easy. The point of setting up a shot this way is to get a perfect high key background as well as the softest, most wrapping hatchet light you'll ever get...EVER! Traditionally this kind of shot is done with your main light, one or two lights cross light on the background, and then two more lights...one on either side of the model to get that nice separation. Keep the main, ditch the other four and replace 'em with an extremely large octa or in my case a 4x6 foot light bank. I think, in theory, that the octa would be slightly more advantageous in this instance because its not, uh, 6 foot long. Thank goodness the larson wraps like crazy or I'd be pretty much trying to make grape juice out of raisins, just doesn't work.

Here's the set up. Beauty dish as the main light, reflector underneath as a low fill. The only other light you got here is the 4x6. Tilt that puppy up at a 45 degree angle, so the beauty dish and the larson could perfectly touch if lined up. This helps to create the side light effect and also allows for most of the light to pass over the lens. Pretty crucial. Now here's the tricky part. I found that this creates a ton, I mean a ton of wash back. Rigging two, fairly large, flags on each side allows you to only shoot through a small slit, greatly decreasing the amount of washback from the larson.

This kinda light is great for those close up, stand still kinda shots. If you want your model to move and open up then, well, you're screwed. I'm kidding, but no I'm not.

Key to dealing with the obvious washback is in Adobe Camera Raw. Take the black slider and just go crazy. I'm serious. I was up at around 30 ish range with the blacks, which is no mans zone for regular work, but it gets the job done.

Its something worth experimenting with. I wouldn't set this thing up for day to day portraiture, cause as you can see there is a lot of production to it, but it is a really cool look and feel that can make an image extraordinary.

(Images captured via D700, 70-200VR, on Sandisk digital film)

Happy Valley Neighbor...

2009-08-18T17:53:00.000-05:00

While the boss is on vacation at the Mercury I was brought in to help out. Finally I get some editorial time in my schedule. I, to say the least, missed having photographic assignments. One can light anything if they have time to do it but in the world of newspapers you have to produce top quality work under outrageous time constraints and generally in very, well, crappy locations. I got lucky today, very lucky. Assignment was to make a photograph of the owners/chefs of Happy Valley Restaurant in Aggie Ville. Okay, not to hard. The couple had recently visited their family in China, where they are from, for her mothers 80th birthday. I was told by the editor to shoot a picture of them next to the picture on the wall. How do you say, uh, boring! So I made them hold it, actually John La Barge told me, with a strict, stern voice "don't you dare leave that picture on the wall," YIKES!!! Note to self...take the picture off the wall.

Having never been to this restaurant I packed everything I could think to bring. I'm talking 4 stands, tripod, 4 small strobes each with a Justin Clamp, Conversion Gels, every lens in my arsenal, tri-grips, soft boxes, reflectors. You name it, I brought it. I scheduled the photo for 3pm knowing, from my prior restaurant experience, that this would be a down time. I arrived, three customers are sitting and ordering...shit! Okay need to move fast! I met the couple, who speak little to know English, and tried to explain that I was not there to rob them or steal their souls, I just needed to make a picture. Finally an English translator, Chen (apologies if name is misspelled) came to my rescue. Okay, so initial meeting has been done, the couple cleaned up for the image and I take a moment to scout. I have about 10 minutes to meet and great, scout for a shot, light the entire building, make a picture, and say the final good byes. Chen let the customers know that the chefs are busy taking pictures so it would be a bit longer before they get the food out...talk about pressure!!!

Where do you start when put into this situation where speed is key?

Step 1: Location Assessment. I scouted out the location first, 2 minutes tops. Have to move fast. I know I didn't want to take time to set up a soft box for a key light or push light through a panel or tri-grip so I find a location in the corner with a HUGE window. This is where I get lucky. Smooth light streaming in from a window is often your best source for light on location. Bump the ISO to 800, f/5.6 for depth, and let the camera drive the exposure via aperture priority. Simple, easy, done.

Step 2: Make a test shot. I place the couple, with the picture, in front of the window to get nice, smooth light on them. Problem is the interior went dark. Pretty predictable. I always try to start with one light and build as I go. This often helps avoid confusion and sheer panic when you start out with 20 lights without really knowing where you need them. Simple is better. Now I know I need to light the entire building...hello CLS!

Step 3: Light the background. The overall feeling of the place is very homey and warm. I definitely don't want to flood the building with cool, daylight balanced light because I want my picture to not look light. I needed to slip light in the frame without being seen. Traditionally warm and cool colours mesh well with each other so instead of my typical technique of sliding the environment into the blue realm and hitting the subject with warm light I did just the opposite. Okay, I got 2 Sb-900's with the Dome Diffusers and put a full cut of CTO on each strobe. I clamped the units on the benches of the existing booths via Justin Clamps on each side of the building. Both strobes group A. Pump in enough power and you got a light interior.

Step 4: Tame the Light. I had, initially, put +2 stops of EV into the units and, well, as you can see, that was waaaay too much light. Take a stop of light out of the two units and the exposure now works.

Step 5: Add another Dimension. Photographers can never leave good enough alone, we have to take it further, adding more light where needed. I couldn't stop without adding some sort of separation light to the subjects. I grabbed a stand, Justin Clamp, and a Sb-800 unit. Zoomed the fresnel to 105mm and let it fire away. Programmed this light into group B so I could push and pull its exposure independently of the two background lights. Sb-900 on the hot shoe of the camera lets me do all of this with speed and ease. I still think its too hot even after taking away one stop of power but it's all over, so what can ya do?

All of this happened within 10 minutes cause I didn't want to keep the customers or the chefs waiting. I'm pleased with the results, I mean, it's a nice, clean, open portrait and hey, it ran front page! Here's a paper diagram of the set up!

(Images captured via Nikon D700, 24-70, 3x sb-units, on Sandisk digital film)

Colour COOOOOOOOOLOUR...

2009-07-30T21:32:00.004-05:00

OMG....look at her! Damn, thats ridiculous. I'm way to lucky.

Before we get into the pictures of Allie I want to direct you to a shoot that Joe McNally and Kenneth Robert shot together this last week. This stuff is amazing. Let me tell you, who wouldn't want to shoot a bride with an F-16 in the background? 11 small strobes, 2 rangers, twilight, and you got a classic McNally photograph. Here's the link to Robert's blog, its a little more detailed than Joe's.

Okay now back to Allie. Wanted to play with colour a lot just to do something fun. Told here to go crazy with the hair and make up, and well, she did!

Everything's super basic, not much to it. Everything here is done with an Alien Bee and Beauty dish and a few small strobes running SU-4 mode. Haha, I had a friend ask me, in reference to the first shot, why it seems like every time I photograph a girl they get naked. As much as I wish, oh...did I say that? As much as it seems like it, she is not naked. Can we get back to the photographs please...

I digress...

Okay, top photo. Beauty pan above and one sb-900 with purple gel as back light. I love the beauty light for this type of work. Gives great contrast and fall off, and allows for that very sultry look. And with Allie thats never a problem.

The next two shots I've just added in colour to both sides of her. She mentioned Mardi Gras a few times so the colour choice was inspiration from that. I wanted a very fashiony, theatrical look. I like the black dress. It gives less attention to her clothes and more on her and the colours. Perfect! I also added a very low power Sb-900 bouncing off the floor to fill in the shadows a bit. Love me a floor skip! Problem with the purple was that it wasn't showing up very well so I had to pop in another strobe to allow it to show up. When in doubt, add more power!!!

Photos with the red back lights are again just a beauty dish and a sb-900.

Looks good in Grayscale too!

All About Allie...

2009-07-29T21:32:00.005-05:00

All about Allie today! Well, for a while actually. Got a lot of stuff coming with Allie and even more after that. Beautiful girl. She's like, you know, that girl that every guy wants to be with in high school, and college, and well, really any time. Her whole family's got the good looks though, it makes me sick. She's going to school in Arizona for photography but with her skills as a model she should just pack up and move to New York. Got some models out there that she could work with. Photographed a bunch of them when I was out there last month. They're from Emmanuel Modeling Agency. Check out Marianna! Super nice, wonderful person, amazing model!

I digress...

Love small flash. So versatile, so fast, and yet so powerful. Wanted to do something in this back alley and try to mix fashion with drab. I love colour so drab would be hard for me but we got a pretty cool picture. At first I tried to mix green and purple in the background but rarely do I get it right straight from the get go. You can call me the ding dong daddy from Dumas. Mistakes, mistakes, mistakes. Used them to get an idea and we changed things up. Went to a bare bulb, 200 zoom, sb-900 Justin clamped to an old staircase prolly about 60-70 feet away from where the camera was. Used that to light the background and aimed it to hit smack in the back of her head to give me that nice hair rim. I put a Sb-800 with the dome diffuser in the EZYBOX with 1.5 cuts of CTO to warm her. Had the light pretty much table topped to get a slightly softer beauty pan light out of it. Add a little low fill from a strobe bouncing into a gold reflector and you got yourself a nice portrait. Again, trick is I slipped into the tungsten white space. Had to be careful with my floor fill though cause I forgot my other CTO's at the studio so I had to fill her with cold, blue light. Tried for the longest time to trigger with the su-800 commander but the signal just wouldn't get to the background strobe that was directly behind Allie. This would have been a great time to whip out ('scuse me while I whip this out) an sc-28 off camera flash cord to snake it over to the wall so the signals would all line up. Well, I lost mine in a field. Man, I suck.

Another super simple shot (try saying that 5 times fast) of Allie on an old rusted out stair case. Wanted to add colour to compliment the red in the dress so I went blue.... ha, what a surprise. Had three lights in this equation: Kicker gelled blue, Key in EZYBOX, and Floor fill. Ever since watching McNally utilize the floor skip and seeing how well it works I've become accustomed to using it. So, kicker light was Justin clamped to a stair at the very top of the stair case. It was zoomed to 200mm. Why? I wanted a hard, direct throw of light skipping down each stair and rimming her out at the bottom. Sure, I could have gone traditional and had a kicker coming from the back left area with normal colour but I felt the blue and the light skimming off each stair adds another dimension to the photograph that makes it appealing. That's what I'm trying to do here right? Excite the viewer? Absolutely. Again, I used the sb-800 in the EZYBOX overhead to sculpt those beautiful cheek bones. Using light in this fashion gives me a nice fall off pretty fast. Simple floor skip was added about 2 feet in front of her. The thing with the floor skips is you gotta watch out for casting upward shadows. Those aren't pretty.

Same set up here, I just went tight. Prolly racked out to 200mm to really compress the scene and it allows me to get a very graphic background out of it. I don't know about you but I wouldn't be able to tell if those were stairs or not. That's the point of compression. It takes away the stairs and gives you shape, and dimension, and texture instead. Perfect for portraiture.

(Images captured via D700, 70-200VR, assortment of hot shoe flashes, on Sandisk digital film)

Carnie Ballerina...

2009-07-28T22:43:00.002-05:00

Carnies. Circus folk. Nomads, you know, the ones that take your tickets, sleep under the food carts, sell you day old jumbo corn dogs. Doesn't matter what they do, they still smell like cabbage. Carnivals always seem to be the rendezvous point for the slightly strange, red neck folk of the western world. I think it is the only time of the year when the ones locked in the basement closet are allowed to come out and gorge on over priced funnel cakes and sno-cones, but yet our whole town still shows up for the "festivities."

What does a dancer, carnival, and cabbage all have in common? Okay, well nothing but that's why it works. HAAA! May I remind you there is a reason for my madness...well, at least that's what I want you to think. Shhhhhhh...they'll hear.

but I digress...

You can clearly see I put decided to put a ballerina in the middle of an overcrowded fair ground just to make a photograph thats a little different and interesting for the viewer. I must give credit where credit is due and my boss, John, brought the idea to my attention so I did what I had to do...make him my bitch...I mean, grip schmuck...I mean, assistant. Phew!

Jessi. Oh my God. What can I say about her? She is all sorts of beauty jumbled up in that very tiny body. Funny as crap too, always cracking jokes. Love her, great friend, great model. Much thanks to her for subjecting herself to all kinds of awkward stares and the occasional "what the shit" comments.

This shot was not hard at all. Any goober with a camera could have done it. Here's the equation:

-Get dangerously seductive dancer
-Lug tripod around
-Slow shutter to blur crowd and rides
-Impart flash to add well, light...
-Stuff face with deep fried goodies
-Acquire an assistant to hold light in middle of crowd.
-Ability to work fast.

That's it. Simple, clear as mud. Here's a map of my setup.

Cool thing I did here was impart a little trick that I often use when shooting at twilight. If you want amazing blue colour out of the sky running Auto White Balance might not be your best choice. I wish I had shot an example for you guys but the AWB will render the sky a very dull, muddy blue which, you know, is not where I want to be. I waited all day for twilight so I sure as hell better get that rich blue I'm seeing. How do ya fix it? Simple, slip into the Tungsten or Incandescent white space. This will take any daylight in the exposure and render it the richest of rich blues. But that's only half of the equation. You're flash now becomes blue because its balanced to a midday, daylight kind of light. Pop a full cut of CTO (colour temperature orange) onto the flash and it brings that daylight balanced light back into the tungsten realm, which since you're now shooting in Tungsten your skin tones will be back to neutral colour. Pretty cool stuff. Problem arises when you shoot at way slow speeds such as 1/6th of a second like I did here. The shutter is staying open sooo much longer than the flash duration so there is continually more blue ambient light bleeding into the exposure so you need to compensate by adding more CTO. Be careful because too much warmth and you might as well walk your model over to the pumpkin contest a few booths over...hey this is a fair remember!

Of course all of the grunge and texture I added in post negated all of the work I did in the camera, colour wise, but I didn't know what I would like so I got it right in camera.

(Images captured via D700, 14-24, sb-900, on Sandisk digital film)

Walking on Water...

2009-07-26T19:27:00.008-05:00

What do you do when u get tired of photographing people on land? You put them in water. What do you do when you get tired of photographing people in water? You put them ON the water. Ding Ding Ding...You've just won a brand new caaaaaaar!

I digress...

I've had the idea to make someone walk on water now for a while but I've just never gotten around to getting it done. My original idea was to have a ballerina on the water but I wanted more. We did photograph a dancer on the water at J&C but I wanted to perfect it. I really wanted to excite the viewer and to do that I needed two things: A shiny, sparkley gown, and fire. I mean, how could that not be exciting? So, I got one of my good friends Jessica Tracz, a KSU baton twirler, to be my subject. I remember seeing her twirl fire batons (aka: flaming inferno sticks...OHHH the humanity) back in High School so I thought why have just regular batons when I can light something on fire?

I'm not a carpenter or handy in any sense so even the smallest projects become way too complicated for me. Luckily my father is a natural handy man and was able to construct a platform that would stand right at the waters surface. Of course I had to make myself feel important so I did what every great carpenter's assistant would do...well, mostly nothing but I did hand him screws, hey, it's enough for me. I digress... This platform is the key to this image. This whole thing took place on a boat ramp out at the marina and in order to get the angle to make the illusion work I needed three things:
One, I needed to be laying on my belly or sitting very low.
Two, My subject needed to be far enough out that I could have a sufficient amount of foreground water to make her look like she's really out in the middle of the lake.
Three, The platform needed to be at just the right angle to have it sit right at the top of the water so her feet would be right on the water's surface.

Done! Well, except when we went out to measure the angle we forgot a tape measure so we improvised with how the water came in conjunction with our sock tan lines. Yeah, didn't work so well. We were about 4 inches short on the front end so I had to find rocks to raise the front end up. Oh yeah, I'm surprised Jessica even agreed to get on it...eeek.

The rest of the shoot went flawlessly. Had to move fast, tons of boaters wanted out of the water. It feels good to be able to hold up 5 boaters for some pictures!

Simple light. I had fading twilight, hoped for clouds but to my surprise the light was beautiful, so I ran aperture priority the whole time. I really let the camera do all the work for me. In situations where my light is fading fast I choose to let the camera do the work because as the light changes my exposures will change with it...automatically. A huge help when your moving fast and allows you to not have to think about it constantly. I had -1/3 stop of EV in the camera to saturate the colours just a bit. One sb-900 was on the hot shoe acting as a commander to trigger the two sb-900's in a 60" umbrella. I wanted a nice gradation of light down her body so I kept the black backing on the bottom half of the umbrella. I had the beautiful cool colours of twilight so I didn't want to blast her with cool light as well. Since warm and cool colours work well together I put 1.5 cuts of CTO on the strobes. I had to put so much warmth into the strobes because I shot this at 1/8th of a second. Thats a pretty long exposure. The more ambient light you have the more it will flood your subject where the light is hitting, so you need to compensate for that by adding more CTO. Not only did this warm her up but it mimicked the light coming off of the fire batons, making it look like the fire was lighting her up. Exactly what I wanted. Since the fire is up near her face I didn't want to evenly light her feet as well, hence the need for the scrim. This is a case of making your artificial light behave and act like natural light.

(Images captured via D700, 14-24, (3x) sb-900, on Sandisk digital film)

Kurt and Michelle

2009-07-18T22:17:00.007-05:00

What a fun couple. Thats all there really is to say. They met online and with in the hour they were drinking together at a local bar. Holy crap. What are the odds? I mean, seriously. Kurt kinda reminds me of John Goodman's character on Roseanne and Michele just is so sweet. They laugh all the time and really do put forth a great presence.

The wedding was in Keats in a small little church with huge open windows. Kurt's parents happened to get married there 50 years ago on the same date...by the same pastor! They rode a harley to the wedding, which I'm not including here cause I didn't shoot any of that but it will be on the J&C Imaging blog soon!The guys got dressed in the sanctuary cause the only other room was occupied by the women. Kinda funny, slight wrong, but made for the most simple and elegant backgrounds! Life is easy.

(Images captured via D700, 70-200VR/24-70/14-24, on Sandisk digital film)

Playing Photographer with the Boss...

2009-07-17T18:57:00.006-05:00

So I've been in this "I don't wanna write anything" mood for a while now but hopefully I can get back into the blogging market and keep it up. So much stuff has happened, I've gotten lazy, been to workshops, planning for my own workshop, making pictures, being lazy...oh whoops, I've said that already.

I digress...

John and I both needed head shots for our KPPA workshops to go into the program so we took an hour today and created something cool. I went crazy, and John stayed, well, vanilla. We both ended up with some cool images.

My workshop is about using small strobes and blah blah blah, so I wanted to incorporate the physical lights in my image. What better way than to light myself with them. I set up two kicker lights (sb-900's zoomed to 200mm.) each with a full cut of CTO (colour temperature orange) gels to give me that hard edge hatchet light. I liked the orange. It went well with my green shirt. Plus, I knew I was gonna light my rather unpleasing face with cool, daylight balanced light which we all know that warm and cold lights work well together. Yes, there is a reason to my madness...well, most of the time. Simple as that. John shot with the Nikon (it was like he'd never shot with a camera before) and triggered them via the Su-800 commander unit. You can see my EV values I've programmed into the Su-800 below.

Group A - Key light
Group B - Edge lights
Group C - Glamour glow light

Johns shot was a little more traditional, but I love how it turned out. We used a White Lightning inside a 14x48 Strip Bank as the key light. I love how narrow of a beam it produces. You can put this light anywhere and it will produce nice dramatic portraits. I slipped a couple of sb-900's into SU-4 so they would trigger via light slave and used one as a hair/separation light, and one as a floor skip. We had a reflector and also a back light in the equation as well. I find having the light slave option on my nikon strobes to be extremely advantageous when working fast and in tight situations. Canon needs to up their game and get with the picture..(HA, no pun intended, okay, well, yeah it kinda was)

I just wanted to slip this in here. This is a 100% crop of an already cropped image at 4000 ISO. HOLY SHIT!

(Images captured via D700, 70-200VR, on Sandisk digital film)

Two shooters, One wedding, One moment...

2009-06-20T16:22:00.004-05:00

(photo by Mark Greathouse)

This last wedding presented a wonderful lesson that everyone should remember when they are out shooting. The concept of walking around your subject looking for the best light, the best angle, the best backgrounds has been around for a long time but rarely do many of us do it in the heat of the moment. (okay that's prolly a lie, but what the hell it sounded cool)

I digress...

Mark and I took the Bride and Groom out for one last portrait session before the rest of the reception started and we had perfect light. What is perfect light you say? Well, that depends on your taste. The top image is a favorite of mine from this wedding. Simply light by the direct sun, super clean background, nice colours, its perfect. Also pretty flat light. Flat light is not always bad. In this situation it works. Everything fits, in my eyes. The sun is low enough that it is not to direct or harsh and brassy but it still gives you that wonderful warm glow to the skin. The image below is shot exactly from the opposite side. Here I've used the natural sun as a kicker to rim the subjects and with a little exposure compensation got a good exposure on there faces. This is also wonderful. There is a little more depth, and dimension to this image because of the way I used the light in a more creative way but that's not to say that either one is right or wrong. They are both solid images, sellable, and creative in there own ways.

Basically I just wanted to show you the difference it makes when you take the time to walk around the subject to find different light, angles, and backgrounds. Each photo is of the same moment but each photo has a distinctively different feel to it, deeming them each just as sellable.

(photos captured via Nikon D700, 70-200VR, Canon 1ds Mark II, 70-200, on Sandisk digital film)

Matt and Jennifer Kilgore

2009-06-11T00:31:00.009-05:00

Fun fun fun wedding. I had the great honor to photograph with Mark Greathouse this wedding as John had another wedding to go to. Mark is a terrific shooter and great guy. Check him out here.

I was assigned to cover Jennifer getting ready this time, uhh, talk about nervous. I've never been put with the bride before but I just had to put on my game face and go at it. Very exciting and I'm glad I was able to have a little more responsibility. I got to try out a new technique I've learned from Cliff Mautner and I think it turned out great! Mark and I went out to the Country Club, where the reception was taken place, and scouted and did some tests the day before. We only had 15 minutes to make some great pictures before the party started. I'm not complaining, these guys were gorgeous. I love photographing people who look good and can work it. They did great.

I must give credit where credit is due. Cliff, thanks for the idea!!!

(Images captured via Nikon D700, 70-200VR/24-70, sb-900, on Sandisk digital film)

The Greathouse Clan

2009-06-06T00:44:00.005-05:00

Photographed the Greathouse Clan tonight. Sooo nerve racking shooting another photographer. I could almost hear Mark thinking to himself...what the hell is this guy doing? Man I'm gonna have to get another photographer, this guys crazy...and he doesn't even know how to make a picture...eeek! I never want to do that ever again. Anyway, we were able to make some images despite not having an assistant to schlep grip equipment for me. Oh well, I'm 20 years old...do I really deserve an assistant?

(Images captured via Nikon d700, 24-70/70-200VR, sb-900 (x2), on Sandisk digital film)

"It Don't Gotta Be Human to Light It"

2009-06-04T20:42:00.005-05:00

"When we think flash, we think face, right? People. I mean, we grow up with parties, birthdays, and weddings where the flash is going off in our memory. Smile! Flash!"

That recent excerpt from Joes new book "The Hot Shoe Diaries" explains that "it don't gotta be human to light it" and that is exactly what I did here.

We missed our light (sonuvabitch) as we were doing 85 down the old dirt country road to get to our location. We got halfway there and in the blink of an eye, the light was gone. Consumed by that one cloud the size of Texas that always seems to come from no where at the worst possible time. We got to our location and I tried various different HDR techniques with one last attempt to pull out what colour was left in the sky and with no luck I gave up. Having working for a newspaper for 2 years I've come to realize that I need to make a photograph regardless of if I lost the light or not. The editor doesn't care what happens while your out there as long as you come back with a strong image. So, I was sitting there on this rock, inspired by absolutely nothing, pissed that we missed the light, as my buddy Joe was pacing back and forth photographing this and that. Knowing I needed to make a photograph I thought to myself (I tend to do this to often) "What would Joe McNally do?" FLASH! I smacked my palm to my head in a very desperate "could have had a V8" moment and whipped out ('scuse me while I whip this out!) 4 hot shoe sb units.

Sweet. So now I know I want to strobe something but what? I've been eying this tree on a nearby hill for some time now so I must make this work. I always start by getting an ambient exposure so I can see what the camera is thinking so I can dial in my EV to my taste. Above you can see my starting point, kinda dull. Lifeless. A boring, overdone silhouette of a tree on a hill. It is safe. "Safe, as in...blah. A smooth exposure. Publishable. But nothing with edge or difference or colour. So, I got rid of it. All of it. I took over the controls and put the camera into manual mode."-Joe McNally

I knew I wanted some drama to the light so I under exposed the ambient by 2 stops or so do darken the whole exposure significantly. In doing this I also was able to saturate the colours of the sky to get that rich dark blue you see above.

Time to add the light. Time to talk about colour. Small hot shoe strobes are balanced to a mid day, daylight temperature. In other words they put out blue light, exactly what the sky colour is. Colour is also a big additive to drama so I needed to mix it up. I know that cold and hot colours together in the same photo pop really well, making each other stand out. I also wanted to create a feel as if the last shaft of sunlight was popping through the clouds and falling on my tree. Looks pretty fake to me in that respect but screw it, that is the last of my worries. Having this kind of lighting grid also helps to define the hill line and separates it from the hill in the background, giving depth...all with one speedlight. I put a full cut of CTO gell on the fresnel head to get that warm light. To get the defined shaft of light I wanted I went to the power of the sb-900. The 900 is extremely advantageous in the fact that it can now zoom to 200mm. This is HUGE! I can now, and we could zoom with the 800 but now we can zoom so much more) take that spread of light and throw it right at my subject from a ways away. This, in turn will be a long, hard, and super direct throw of light perfect for what? Shafts of light. Hey, I'm in luck! So I did just that. I had Joe hold the light about 30 feet away from me and I started making pictures.

I triggered the strobes via an sb-800 on the hot shoe of the camera, zoomed to 105mm, and aimed towards the remote unit. It took some moving around and tweaking via flash exposure compensation but I was able to create a stunning image without the natural light that everyone runs for!

The image at the top of the post was pretty much the same idea. I believe this was a 30 second exposure at f/10 and prolly around ISO 400. Again I wanted to use vibrant colours to express the beauty of the actual drab grass hill I was on. Kansas really is beautiful, I promise! Here I had Joe paint the foreground with a daylight balanced LED headlamp while I focused on the tree with my CTO gelled strobe. I dialed down the test button to 1/128th power and popped off around 20 pops. As all things like this do, it took some time to perfect the technique and amount of time for each painting. Again, we got a wonderful image full of colour and drama that you could not have got via any HDR or layering technique.

No flash in this picture. I just thought it was cool. ISO 1250 for 30 seconds at 5.6. I had to raise the ISO for two reasons. One, I forgot (doh!) to bring my cable release so I could only go for 30 sec. and two, I wanted to freeze the stars in the sky. 30 seconds lets me do just that. I shifted the WB manually into some weird colour and was really amazed at how much light and colour I could pull out of the sky so late at night!

Please read Joe's new book (The Hot Shoe Diaries) and you will learn everything you need to know about strobes and light. You can even apply those techniques to shooting landscapes like I've done here. The possibilities are virtually endless!

(Images captured via Nikon D700, 24-70, sb-800/900 units, small LED headlamp, on Sandisk digital film)

Cara and Kirby

2009-06-01T01:48:00.008-05:00

The beautiful and young Cara Bradley and Kirby LeMoine are getting married!!

Okay, third wedding that I shot with John and Cindy at J&C Imaging. Again, being a third shooter I could get a lot of the little details that John can't get. But he did give me some time to lead some images with a little more complex setup. Tried experimenting with my first of the Cliff Mautner technique.

So, every thing happened in Sharingbrook in a huge house. The reception was in the back yard. Wonderful people, wonderful day.

The photo above is one that we put together right before they ran through the sparklers and took off for the night. I was able to use the Nikon system to hang a strobe on a wood panel right behind the curtains on this little gazebo area. I had a master flash that drove the remote attached via a Justin Clamp. I had a full cut of CTO to warm up the light. I only had two strobes with me so I had John take one of his strobes and manually fire it for a separation light as I exposed for the image, about 1 second. We ended up adding Cindy in with another strobe as a second kicker. Overall it was a great idea for a very unique portrait.

(Images captured via Nikon D700, 14-24, 70-200VR, sb-800/900 on Sandisk digital film)

I got Joe in my Mind...

2009-05-26T02:34:00.000-05:00

Got done with another amazing photo shoot today with Grant and Kellie. Created some cool light, got Kellie topless...hmm, seems to be a reoccurring theme...and turned her into a fashion model. I've been trying a great deal to improve my on location "strobist" techniques and this little church gave me some amazing opportunities to hone some new ideas.

I get so much inspiration from Joe McNally so I take what I've read and learned from his blog and try to implement that advice into my own photos. Since I've purchased my new strobes I've had a blast going out and playing. I love natural light, don't get me wrong, but being able to create and augment your own light in ways that you can't do with natural light is just such a good feeling. And when you look a the LCD and see what you've just accomplished is astonishing. Having the tools we have now in the digital format is such an amazing gift that I am so thankful for and will continue to embrace and create things that I never dreamed about with film.

Okay, here we go. Started out outside the church, bright sunlight, harsh contrast, one strobe. I wasn't getting enough power through the Ezybox so I slipped the strobe into Manual 1:1 ratio and went hard and bare bulb. Nice enough.

Sun went away, softened the light. The strobe went back into the Ezybox...voila, soft light!

I shot various scenarios in this church but this was my favorite set up. Grant was shooting Kellie at the time and I kept thinking what could I do that would be different, what would Joe do? I found myself thinking about introducing colour, shadows, drama, and then it hit me. Throw the light in front of something! I've shot Kellie in front of this doorway before but now I was using the ripped open wall to make my shadow pattern. Took an Sb-900, zoomed all the way out to 200mm (I LOVE that feature) to send out a hard, direct punch of light, with a full cut of CTO. Instant late afternoon daylight! In this earlier scene I had the light to low so it did not jump over a wooden barrier creating shadow on her entire lower half of her body. I immediately fixed that by raising the light up a foot or so but I do like the natural gradient that it gives me.

This image I really like. Same setup, nothing's changed. Kellie had the idea to sit in the old window sill so naturally I didn't argue. I let her do her thing, and again, voila...a decent image. I left the entire door frame in this one because I wanted to show more of the environment and it just so happens that it adds to the idea of it being late in the afternoon...hence the late afternoon daylight.

Now the image everyone has been waiting for! This is the idea that brought us here in the first place. I wanted to do this shot for a while now but could not find the right venue to bring it all together. I've seen many many rimmed out bodies in my time but I've learned a cool, extremely advantageous, tip from Joe in his newest lighting video for Nikon. Yeah, its so simple that you're immediately gonna have a V8 moment and bop yourself in the face. Basically instead of just using two strobes you use four. *SMACK* See, told ya. Pretty much the thought behind this is that by using four strobes, two on each side, you can complete the rim of light down your subjects entire body. Having your strobes attached to Justin Clamps gives you a huge advantage in the fact that you can attach one to the pin on the top of the light stand, raise that up, then just clamp the other strobe onto the lower half of the light stand with the A-clamp built into the J-clamp. Did that sound confusing to you? I used the Su-800 commander unit to trigger all of the strobes and voila...an image!

There was a bit of modifying I had to do to the strobes. Although they were zoomed to 200mm I had to make gaff tape gobos to keep the light from spilling onto the back wall. Simple solution that only took a few minutes to do.

(Images captured via Nikon D700, 24-70, 14-24, Sb-900(x3), Sb-800(x1), Su-800, on Sandisk Digital Film)

Be There or Be Square...Get it, huh huh?

2009-05-15T00:58:00.003-05:00

So, I came across this image of Times Square I shot with my good ole' D70 back in 2006. I always loved this picture. I tried to get there when the royal blue of the NY twilight was still high and mighty but I learned very quickly that you can never trust MTA...NEVER TRUST MTA, and one more time in cause you didn't get that, NEVER TRUST MTA! And with that being said, you get an image with black sky.

but I digress...

I always loved this image just because of the way the car streaks came out. I shot a bunch of shots like this, lets face it everyone has shot a bunch of shots like this, but none of them had car streaks just like this. Simple 30 second exposure prolly f/8 or 11 I don't remember. I was, and still am, amazed at how the three people in the middle median managed to stand still as a rock for 30 seconds, not to mention it was like 10 degrees out. This whole image is full of wonders, to me at least, so I share it with you. Not my best photograph ever but one that I enjoy very much, and thats what its really about right? Pleasing yourself first...I think so.

Art?

2009-05-14T21:05:00.004-05:00

Having missed a gorgeous sunset due to my inability to get off the sofa I finally reached a point where I managed to dig into the depths of my fat ass soul and wrangle up enough energy to get outside and shoot. Since theres not much to shoot at dark, at least nothing I wanted to shoot, I remembered a common tip Joe McNally always gives to people and one that I've used time and time again. Basically if you shoot near a body of water the water will pretty much keep the same exposure as the sky which will further your time shooting in the field. Okay, okay. So its pretty damn close to night, nothing to shoot on land but maybe I can take that whole water approach in a new direction. Instead of shooting a portrait next to or in the water to help hold the exposure maybe I'll just shoot the water its self. Hmm, seems logical.

Went down to one of my favorite spots on Wildcat Creek set up the tripod, 70-200 on the D700, aperture priority and went to work. It was a game between ever changing light and my exposure compensation button as I tried to expose for the highlights of the water shimmering over a road bridge. Exposing for the highlights in such a dark situation allowed for the rest of the water to go black. Pretty cool stuff. I got a bunch of cool abstract images of water, thats it. Nothing special but I had a great time out shooting, despite the hundred of mosquito bites that engulf my body.

None of these images are in gray scale, their still in the RGB colour space but in a very interesting white space to make the b/w feel.

This image is as I saw it at the creek. The solid black is the smooth water of the creek and where the highlighted ripples are is where the water hit the road bridge and started to make rapids. I find it so cool when you just look at the basics of highlight and shadow, you begin to see things differently. I think these kind of exercises will teach me to see light in a different and more creative way.

And of course I couldn't forget the tree. I saw it as I was packing up. It was light by a baseball diamond about a quarter mile away. I slipped this into the fluorescent white space too, out of all things it worked, who would have guessed? Threw on the 14-24 racked out to 14mm, long shutter speed, f/8 and be there sort of thing. Thought it was cool with the wind and all--what the hell is this guy thinking???

I've been struck with the McNally Virus...

2009-05-13T03:17:00.006-05:00

Once you go McNally, you don't go back!

So I got to hang out with the Collegian crew again tonight shooting some portraits of each other. Try getting three photographers on the other side of the camera to model. The success rate of that is about as much as Wile E. Coyote had catching the Road Runner. However, I managed to shoot a few decent pictures throughout the evening.

Okay, here we go. First set up. Pretty complex right out of the box but I had an idea in mind and nothing was gonna stop me. I saw this huge loading ramp that ramped downward (wtf?) only to end up with a coved in doorway. A super warm tungsten light was present so I felt like I needed to emulate that in the setup. I set up two sb-900' s on the railings on either side of the loading dock via a Justin clamp. I love those little clamps, best piece of equipment I've every bought. Zoomed the lights to 200mm, feathered them to cross light pattern, and you got your double kicker lights. Background light. Clamped a sb-900 unit to the door handle with a full cut CTO and punched it into a gold reflector on the ground. This was to illuminate the cove area bright orange for a background. I chose to bounce the light back up rather than point the strobe up to the ceiling so I could avoid any hot cores of light or hot spots that could appear from doing so. This light was about 35 or so feet away from my subject.

The key light and background light proved to be a problem. Since I only have four sb units I couldn't waste a unit having it on the camera as a commander so I knew I needed to use the Su-800 commander as just that, a commander. Okay, first problem solved. The Su-800 fired all of the lights except the light 35 feet away soooo, back to the drawling board. I slipped the background light into su-4 mode as to pick up the light from my key light so it would fire. I absolutely love the fact that Nikon added a light slave mode into their sb units. That alone has saved my ass in the field more than I care to tell you. I wanted to use my key light in a soft manner either in a softbox or umbrella but I knew that the light would not be direct enough or bright enough to trigger the background light so I had to go to a hard quality of light. Sometimes the problems you encounter revel greater results than you had originally planned. In this case I zoomed my key light to 105 and it triggered the light with no problem. I utilized this to give me a natural gradation of light on my subject. I had the strobe positioned so that half would hit my subject, almost table topped, and the other half would make its way down the loading dock to the strobe far far away. I chose the 70-200 lens so I could really compress the scene and bring the background right up into the frame. Problems created, problems solved, one portrait made.

This shot is the same in the fact that the lighting grid is the same. I slipped the white space in the camera to tungsten which rendered the daylight balanced strobes a bright blue. This time very little light hit my subject, which in essence is a mistake, but I love the result. Its very dark. Very X-Files, pod people, kinda feel.

Okay, time for a little simpler set up. We saw a huge pile of broke tables and chairs next to the dumpsters and I knew I had to use them. With nothing coming to mind on how to incorporate the chairs in the photo I harked back to the Strobist blog and the infamous "light through wine glasses" post. I took the same idea but applied it to these tables and chairs. Two sb-900 units zoomed to 200mm, gaff taped snoots, one gelled red, one gelled blue shooting through the huge pile of crap we just threw, literally, together. Sb-800 in the Ezybox and you got yourself a nice portrait. I urge you to put things in front of your light. With just a few old chairs we created insane shadow patterns that resulted in a wonderful background. You would pay a background painter possibly a couple thousand dollars to reproduce what you see here. Remember this always, pixels are free, experiment.

(Images captured via Nikon D700, 70-200VR/24-70, on Sandisk digital film)

Gettn' Hitched

2009-05-09T01:20:00.007-05:00

So my second wedding with John and Cindy went really well. We had a really fun time and I learned a lot about, well, everything. I've gained a lot of respect for and get a lot of inspiration from Cliff Mautner and Jim Garner so I wanted my images to reflect that style. Simplicity is what John keeps pushing into my head and I really worked hard this wedding to only include elements that have meaning. Some of the images I shot knowing what I wanted to do in post so I had to shoot accordingly.

We started the day early, early for me anyway, at 10 at the St. Thomas Moore Catholic church. This was not an unlimited coverage wedding so there were no "getting ready" pictures from the grooms side but John was able to grab a few shots of Pamela getting ready. There was some really great new building areas that we used to it fullest. Being a third shooter I really have some freedom to be creative and look for those artsy shots and details that John just can't get. I would lay down on the ground, run around the subject, anything I could to get a cool shot.

The ceremony provided me lots of opportunities to get creative with my cropping and composition while still creating images that would sell.

From there we moved on to the Jardine Apts. on Campus. I don't think any college student should be living there for the sake of their wallets. John was able to get some amazing images on some rocks out in the water that we had Pamela and Brad stand on. We were walking to our new location and I spotted from across the pond these series of apts. with white picket railings. I had to put the bride up there. John ate up the idea and we were shooting. These three pics show the different focal lengths and perspectives we captured. I love the image at the top of this post. It is very much Jim Garner inspired in the since of tons of negative space with a little hint of texture in the background. I had to shoot according to what I would do in post for this shot.

The reception was great. My first full length reception I shot. They did a huge train type dance where everyone gets up and follows each other...crazy bunch of people if you ask me.

We went outside to shoot some fun portraits before the dances began and I was able to grab the nice portrait of all of Brad's brothers, all but one are cops. If you were gonna commit a crime this night would have been the night to do it because about a quarter of the RCPD was at the wedding!

(Images captured via Nikon D700, 70-200VR/14-24, on Sandisk digital film)

"Destruction" Tornado show at the Beach Museum of Art

2009-05-07T23:02:00.007-05:00

(16x24)

So, here we go. The Beach Museum is holding a show dedicated to images from the June 11 tornado that hit in Chapman and Manhattan, Kansas. Myself, Tom Leopold, and Rod Mikinski have images in the show which will open, I think, June 11, the 1 year anniversary. I must give credit where credit is due and I give my thanks out to Tom Leopold who really pushed for my images to be in the show. If you haven't had a chance to get a copy of Tom's book go and buy a few hundred copies.

but I digress...

I have 7 Images in this show. None of them are very big but hell, I'm just lucky enough to have my work in such a prestigious museum. I have 4 images that are running 12x18, one image at 16x20, one image at 16x24 and one image at 12x24. I am entering mostly documentary images but I do have one portrait in which I put my own little spin on it. The colour images are all from Manhattan and the black and whites are from Chapman.

(12x18)

(12x18)

(12x24)

(12x18)

(16x20)

(12x18)

(Images captured via Nikon d70/d200, 70-200VR/18-70/17-35, on Sandisk digital film)

The Varneys Project

2009-05-05T00:21:00.006-05:00

My quest for a good HDR image has finally come to an end. Only question is, is can I now be consistent in my HDR photography, prolly not. Nuff' said? I think so.

...I digress

My buddy Grant http://luketownsendphoto.blogspot.com/2009/05/three-heads-are-better-than-one.html asked me to come along with him while he shoots the front of this building for his job. He is the photographer for Varneys Bookstore so he gets all the awesome assignments like photographing clothes, and products and on special days he gets to photograph the front of the building!!! Did you hear that sarcasm? Nah, Grants a good guy, and a good photographer. Check him out at his website. http://grantwphoto.com. For reasons we need not get into Grant was an hour late arriving for our little photo shoot and he, unfortunately, missed some of the best light.

I did try my HDR technique, which I've been trying to perfect for some time. I think I have finally got it down...HA, YEAH RIGHT! I'm not one for that cartoonish HDR, actually I think down right sucks, so I tried to stay in the realm of "real world" HDR. Post work involved Photomatix, then a trip over to Nik's Colour Efex Pro 3.0 and back into PS for some Lucis Art and basic toning. Thats it, pretty simple.

How did I do it? First things first, camera needs to be on a tripod. DID YOU GET THAT? Okay, now that your stable meter and shoot. The image at the top was 7 exposures, and another was five. Why so many? Many people think that HDR is a simple metered exposure, and one stop over and under. Not so. You should always have your blinkies on so you can know when you've got enough exposure to cover your highlights. If you see highlight warnings then you know you need to take another exposure. Same with the shadows. If you don't get enough over exposure images, when the program merges and generates the HDR you will most likely get a lot of bad noise, why? HDR is going to try to pull out the detail and if you don't have enough detail it will still try to pull it out anyway creating noise where there might have not been any to begin with. Pretty crazy stuff.

Just a crazy picture of Grant taking a photo of the building. You can tell at this point the sky is gone, the mood ruined, the integrity of the image compromised.

I figured while I was there I would get a little artsy fartsy. 14 mm lens on the camera tilted up super high to really emphasize the height of the street sign and light post. Couldn't cut off any of the marquee so I had to move around a bunch to find the right angle and tilt to get it in between the two posts all while not cutting off the light post at the top of the frame. Some how that worked out great cause there was some Iraq women rape protest going on right below my frame. My New York mentality told me to ignore it but I couldn't help laugh at all the drunk military folks yell and try to pick fights with the protesters...ahhh only in Kansas. I thought the colour version looked a little fakey so I put some texture and shifted the colours a bit and was able to achieve a very nice image.

Okay, this image is a favorite of mine, and is the only non-HDR image here. The sky was gone, and I was running out of room on my card from all of the exposures so I felt the need to do the classic car streaks. I tried shooting some HDR with cars going through in hopes that when I merge the images together they would produce a long car streak. Not so. So I had to result back to the old school method, long exposure, f/22, and BAM...you got a car streak. Shot a few frames and everything was just so dull and groggy. It was to late in the night to get any colour out of the sky on auto white balance especially since the clouds had just closed in. Wait a minute...what kind of light is being put off by all of these buildings? Looks like tungsten to me......you prolly know where this is heading. One simple switch to the tungsten white space and the entire universe turns a rich blue. The tungsten lights on the buildings negate the blue daylight and stay neutral giving me a very dramatic and vivacious effect. Colour is an amazing thing, play around with it, experiment. I've learned a lot about colour from Joe McNally, please check out his work. http://joemcnally.com/blog

(Images captured via D700, 14-24, on Sandisk digital Film)

Flashing

2009-05-03T04:06:00.005-05:00

Had a lot of fun and learned a lot tonight with Chelsy from the Collegian. We explored on campus, got chased by some creeper, but most importantly created some cool images. I just recently purchased three sb-900 units and I really needed to go and just mess with them. I took them out by the nuclear power plant on the KSU campus and put together some interesting images. We went out looking for some really cool places and this little drive way in between two buildings proved to be a simple and great place to work. This was my first 4 light set up via the CLS system and yes, we did fight off some pit falls but we managed to make things work in the end.

Nice window, great pose, light via two Sb units. I had an sb-800 in the Ezy Box to camera right throwing soft but punchy light back at Chelsy while an sb-900 unit provided just a slight bit of rim and shadow detail. I should have done this in the below photo but didn't think of it at the time. I drove the strobes via the su-800 unit. I wanted this to look almost as if it was some of the last rays of sunlight skipping across the earth to light up Chelsy, hence the warmth and softness of the light. I did have a full cut of CTO gell on the strobe.

I love this image. Very typical Joe McNally but I've always wanted to try it. I had an 800 above punching through the Ezy Box and two strobes gelled purple behind her about 20 ft. or so back zoomed to 200 to flood the entire wall with brilliant colour. I was driving the system with another 900 hot shoed to the camera. You know the sb-900 packs a large punch when you get university security on your ass trying to figure out why they're seeing bright purple flashes comng from the nuclear power plant about a quarter mile away. It didn't help that it was 1 o'clock AM either.

(Images captured via Nikon d700, 14-24, 70-200VR, on Sandisk digital film)

Jager-Schriber Wedding Teaser

2009-05-02T22:20:00.003-05:00

Okay, so I just finished shooting my second wedding with John and Cindy. Wonderful day, lucked out on the weather, and most importantly made some amazing images. Here's a little teaser of me shooting the Pam and Brad (bride and groom) as they were leaving the church, and one during the insane dance party!!!

Stay tuned...lots more coming!!!

Three Heads are Better than One

2009-05-01T02:26:00.006-05:00

Why put three sb units through an umbrella rather than just one? Is it so you can have more power and more light? Is it cause you want to be Joe McNally? Is it cause you got nothing else to do with the other two sb units just laying around? Well, for starters I want you to take a look at the size of the light modifier I'm using. I'm using a 60" umbrella...thats HUGE! Sure, you can get a great quality out of one sb unit through a diffuser (http://luketownsendphoto.blogspot.com/2009/03/quality-of-lighta-short-lesson-inspired.html) but I wanted to effectively have a make shift octabank. Instead of taking one small strobe through a Lastolite tri-grip diffuser I wanted to have a light source equivalent to John's 4x6 Larson Softbox.

When you use a modifier of that size with one small light that comes from a 2 inch Fresnel head it will tend to give you a hot core of light in the middle of the umbrella and the only way to remedy that is to increase the volume of light pushing through the modifier. The sb-900 makes this hot core effect a little less noticeable due to that you can program an "even" dispersion of light so you get very little fall of of light at the ends of the Fresnel head. This helps to get light onto every speck of real estate of the umbrella. I decided to put three sb-900 units through the umbrella triggered via the Su-800 commander which drove the strobes at a +1/3 stop compensation. I was shooting at 125th at f/8. This worked really well. I got close to the same wrap and softness as I get from the 4x6'. Keep in mind, size of the light source, distance to the subject....it all matters. You can see from the image above that the light is inches from my subject to allow me to achieve the softest and most wrapping light I can ask for. So, I'm not using three strobes to increase my power but to simply increase the volume of light. You can also see how evenly light Grants body is due to the huge source and if you take a look at the umbrella being light up you will see top to bottom is light evenly, hence the three strobes.

I then turned two of the strobes off and used one through the umbrella as you see below. Is it great light? Of course, but you can see a difference. The one head gives you a little more directional light, a little more punchy and its not as soft. A good example is the transition between highlight to shadow. The image above has a flawlessly smooth transition where the below image has a little more stark and sudden drop off from the highlight into shadow.

Either one is perfectly acceptable but If I was going to be shooting any sort of fashion or a business portrait the more volume the better. Each scenario has its place and its up to you to decide where you will incorporate them. Grant wanted a new, simple headshot for his website so I tried to give him something very standard that he can use for anything he wants. I skipped the kicker light, as I was out of small strobes but I did have a reflector bringing a little f-stop back into the exposure. I might re-shoot when I get my other strobe back just so I can have that added dimension of the kicker light...and Grant could be dressed a little more appropriately too....

(Images captured via Nikon d700, 70-200VR, su-800, sb-900 (x3), on Sandisk digital film)

Vintage Faith

2009-05-01T01:23:00.000-05:00

Located on the corner of 6th and Osage, the 1912 building is now the home base of Vintage Faith's services and ministry.

Thats right! Newly renovated and housed by the kindest of people on this side of the Mississippi the new look and feel of the church is truly the bees knees. Yeah, I can't believe I said that either. Not long ago Rick and Neva Whitney and Pat and Cindy Sokoll teamed up to with a bunch of college students and started this church. The Whitney's used to be in Journalism so having me their to do some documenting was just another assignment for them but it was a great assignment for me. I've always wanted to go into this church and now I finally got my chance. Let me tell you, this place is HIP! You walk up a few stairs into a corner door...oh yeah, the place is smack dab on the corner...and you immediately feel as if you stepped into a coffee shop. Warm, comforting colours flood the room, a giant flat screen heads the front of the church, and instruments are askew all over the tiny stage. If you dig the contemporary style church services then this is the place for you. Oh, and I hope you like bycicles cause on of the pastors is part owner of the brand new bike shop in The Ville! Last time I was there he rode up on a motorized bike...WHAT!!!

Here are a selection of images that I got from my half an hour visit. The weather was perfect and made for a very nice group portrait outside the church you see above.

You gotta capture the details of any story and it just so happened that the church had their own "business cards" to help market their new church. What's one thing you don't associate with a church...a website, but let me tell you this one is AMAZING! It really blew my mind at how hip, fun, and creative it is...for a church that is. Check them out here...http://vintagefaithchurch.cc

Cindy Sokell seen with her hubby, Pastor Pat in the background. The wives also help out a great deal with teaching the congregation about their faith. Everyone socializes and the small size of the congregation is what makes this church intimate and appealing to the younger crowd.

This is probably my favorite image of the series. I can't help it, I'm a sucka for motion blur. When the meeting was over everyone came outside to check out the new motorized bikes. I wanted a lot of environment in this shot so I chose the 14-24 got really low to the ground to emphasize the height of the church. Shooting so wide and low allowed me to also see all the way down the next block, as I wanted to show that it was sitting on the corner.

(Images captured via Nikon D700, 14-24, 70-200VR, on Sandisk digital film)

The Art of Perspective...

2009-04-14T19:13:00.004-05:00

Went to shoot the Senior Softball players with John the other day at the ice house. Pretty cool place, not to play on words...HA. I had John play with colour a bit by changing up the white balance in the camera and gelling the strobes. He seemed a little nervous at first but it worked and the poster turned out great! Basically we used three lights, two being small strobes and the other being a Profoto head. We drove the camera into the tungsten realm and underexposed to get that rich blue out of the entire scene then put a CTO over the Profoto head to bring the warmth back to the players. The two small strobes acted as kicker lights which we left as daylight balanced. I had asked John to keep some of the flare from the strobes in the exposure to add to the design elements and that worked out really well.

I wanted to design a very dirty urban looking poster so I utilized a bunch of fonts via http://dafont.com which has a "graffiti" section of fonts that I just love. I transformed the "MHS Softball" to be on the same plane as the ground and did some magic to make it appear as if it was painted on the concrete. I wrapped the year around the bucket, and added "Indians" on its own plane which, because of the flare, is back light and casting a shadow on its own plane. Pretty cool shit! Some texture and special retouching and you come out with a pretty schweeet schedule poster.

A look at some past work

2009-04-14T00:36:00.004-05:00

I came across a couple of old photographs I had taken for the local newspaper which I really grew to like. They are not Pulitzer Prize images by any means but just simple images that I love and enjoyed capturing.

We all know those great little hole in the wall bars. You know, the ones that are basically a small dungeon in the basement, light by Christmas lights, a soft ranting of classic rock on the radio, people enjoying their pint of Guinness, talking, laughing, having fun....smoking. Ahh yes, sucking on the cancer sticks, ciggs, darts, coffin nails. What ever you call them they have been around forever and is pretty much a staple for a great hole in the wall pub. In 2009 Manhattan, Kansas voted on the smoking ordinance which deemed there to be no smoking from 20 feet from any business in the town. Like it or not there are a TON of smokers out there and trust me they were not happy campers, so the night before the ordinance went into effect all of the smokers had a huge last smoke out in this little pub in downtown Manhattan. Guess who got to cover the event...you got it, the joe schmo in the newsroom....ME! So I pull open the door to the bar and smoke comes pouring out, it was so dense you would have thought the place was on fire. Everyone was just hanging out, enjoying the night and chain smoking. I'm pretty sure I took off about 5 years of my life just from second hand smoke alone. I'm all for showing mass numbers and smoke clouds and all but I'm also very into the portrait aspect of photojournalism. The story featured two young kids so I thought only appropriate to somehow make a decent portrait of the two. The Christmas lights gave off this great warm glow and to enhance it further I drove the camera into the cloudy white balance in the camera which gave me such a wonderful ambient colour. I tried every angle and focal length I could think of and nothing seemed to really pop out at me. I was then reminded of a portrait of some young girls that Joe McNally did as they were mourning the death of Kurt Cobain and I knew then that that was what I need to go for. I went around the bar, put on a wide lens, shot about 5 frames, and I was done. I knew I got the shot. The image ran A1 the next morning. I had managed to get a frame in when the two were focused entirely on smoking, they are in their smoking "element" at this point. The glow lighting the mans face from the lighter, I think, adds so much to this image. It was the right moment...and its funny when you know that is the frame, that distinct feeling when the moment it clicks...no pun intended. Side note...iso 6400!!!

I was assigned to photograph the campaigns of each party for this last election. I was supposed to get coverage of the volunteers working in the headquarters all while showing the environment and "done up" buildings of each party. I guess I was feeling pretty "graphic" because I really wanted to present my editors with a different than the usual volunteer work image, cause we all know those pictures are, uh, BORING! I also wanted to show each side's political art because the powerful statement of the art of that campaign can really tie in the purpose and message that party is trying to project. I was actually rejected from the Democrat headquarters at first and was told to come back at night so I had no other choice but to hang out with the Republicans. It was a little interesting to see the age difference of the volunteers in each party. The Republican volunteer at the time had to have been in her 70's where as 80% of the volunteers at the Democratic side were all young males in their late 20's and teens. Pretty predictable results. The entrance to the Republican headquarters was covered in flyer's and posters and they also had one HUGE poster of McCain and Palin that I couldn't pass up. I knew I wanted something very graphic and a little different so I sat on the ground outside the building and just ripped frames. The volunteer walked in and out about half a dozen times carrying yard signs for people and that became the last piece to the puzzle. I put my focus courser on the large poster to the right, stopped down to f/18 or so to obtain a slow shutter speed in bright daylight and did some motion blur of the woman walking in and out. With stuff like this you get a lot of failures but then and again you get a few keepers. I definitely didn't want her to be my main focus but I needed that human element in the image to tie it all together.

Again at the Democrat side. I opted not to even go inside as I didn't want to get rejected twice in one day...that would be a bad day in the field. It took me a moment to figure out what I was gonna do but after stepping back into the street did I finally see the image. I had only brought with me my 70-200 so I felt it was appropriate to make a long shot and stack up a bunch of elements for another graphic image. The outside of the Democrat side was not as exciting but I knew I needed an image with the same feel to it. I loved the light on the lone phone operator right inside the door of the headquarters which made for a perfect subject. I simply framed up a life size card board cut out of Obama and included the famous "hope" poster and botta bing botta boom...you got yourself an image.

I find that the single, lone subjects surrounded by mounds of political memorabilia makes more of a statement for their side than a bunch of volunteers answering phones or standing in the buildings with their thumbs up their asses. This was my vision for the story, so I told it.

Where do I begin?

2009-04-12T21:45:00.003-05:00

While everyone else is outside desperately seeking out terribly designed painted eggs hidden in the cracks and crevices of the lay-mans grass I'm in the studio working my ass off...WAIT, what a crock of shit. Actually I can't believe I just said that. So it's raining outside, pretty much a good ole monsoon Easter Sunday. As for working my ass off...well I am writing a blog, so that should give you a hint to how hard I am working. Logistical reasoning hints that I should be working harder giving that I have a couple loans to pay back, but laziness once again prevails...hey c'mon, it's EASTER! I never understood why parents would put quarters in easter eggs for us little joe shmos to find. I mean, what the hell are we gonna buy, we can barely run with out tripping over our own feet, let alone take a drive to the quicky mart for a yard of nerd rope. I would always try to trade my quarters...cause little kids are so stupid they will take money in a heart beat...for the good ole Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Looking at me know you could tell I found a lot of eggs with quarters in them. Back when I worked at the Country Club as a dishwasher we would take the eggs and hide them anywhere we could. Inside plants, pots and pans, the refrigerators, room dividers, and we would still find some throughout the year. We became so clever in our hiding places...hiding them from the managers...that we quickly ran out of those little plastic eggs. Ahhh what a good time!

So I walk into the studio slurping on my 44oz. Dr. Pepper and my single sized bag of chocolate covered dough nuts,which by the way leave a waxy film in your mouth, plunked into my chair and raw processed all of the files I need to. I had this great idea to buy a tin of Altoids so I could use the tin for all of my Rosco filters, its like the perfect size. Word of advice, don't try to eat as many altoids as you can...you might start to foam at the mouth. Speaking of filters, I'm really excited about the New small strobe from nikon which contains a filter holder in the kit. Yes, no more goo and sticky residue from mounds of scotch tape and gaffers tape holding the gels in place. I took all that gaff tape and lined the inside of the Altoid tin with it, cause I'm never gonna need it again. I've moved over to facebooking, whats new? Hey, I'm waiting for a bunch of files to convert to JPEGS, I have to do something...right?! Hunger sets in so I snarf down one of those 1 million calorie micro wave things, not bad actually. About to slip into a sugar coma from the 44 oz. Dr. Pepper and the two coke zeros, which surprisingly taste like the classic coke giving that they have absolutely nothing in them but salt, I over hear John Tesh tell me that my headache I have is the first sign that I have brain cancer. Sheesh, I come to work on Easter...of all the days...try to get work done, eat myself into a sugar coma, and then I have some guy on the radio diagnose my headache as brain cancer. What the hell? The only thing to do then is take a picture and out of the "nerd" hemisphere of my brain think it's cool to try to work the image into a "Rockwell" type poster for my frequent readers to see....oh shit, just shoot me now.

I digress...

So my mom tried to make these muffins the other day. Usually she makes delicious muffins. Perfectly cooked, great colour, perfect round top with no cones but things didn't go as well this time. She waited all week for some bananas to rot just so she could make these muffins, prepared all the ingredients and of all things forgot the baking soda. How to solve the problem, reach for the baking soda thats been soaking up all of the unwanted odor in the fridge for years....EEEEK.....NO! NOT gonna happen. I don't know about you but I really don't wanna eat muffins that have that distinct odor of fish and rotten veggies and whatever else is in our fridge...sometimes I don't wan to know. She went to the store, got the baking soda, made the muffins, I snuck tastes, she scooped them into the tins, and put the in the oven. WAIT WAIT...the muffins come out, back into the bowl. She forgot the baking soda! Being I came from a cooking background I tried to explain that you cannot perfectly whip a batch of muffin batter, bake them for 5 minutes, take them out whip in more ingredients, and bake them again. Apparently I don't know how to bake cause "oh sure, its fine." Well, now we all see how they turned out. 'Nuff said.

THE BEING OF MY EXISTANCE.........posters

2009-04-07T21:12:00.002-05:00

Okay, okay...posters. Not much you can say about them, not much you want to say...Sorry, I forgot, I need to put on my smiley face....

HELLO, I LOVE POSTERS!!!!

but I digress...

There's a time in every mans life where he must perform the act of designing the latest and greatest sports schedule posters. This just so happens to be the same time that I prove to be just a little more man than photoshop can handle. So I've just figured out how to use the magnetic lasso tool, I swear that tool was sent down from the ole mighty God as a present just for me. I guess he forgot to include the "work correctly" button as PS would crash during every single cutout I did. Hmmm...you figure Adobe would include some sort of Auto save feature if it ever crashes, just KABOOM, and you're saved.

...but I digress

I've only really designed three posters but every time I take a little extra time and try something new, that has not been done before...by us that is. My passion is making images, hence why I'm working at A PORTRAIT STUDIO, but photoshop has so much cool things to offer one cannot help but to sit and create. The Soccer poster above was pretty simple. Basic hard edge lighting, all via small hot shoe strobes, a little creative retouching later and it turns out a cross between a muted Dave Hill and Dustin Snipes look. The crazy collage of interwoven action was inspiration to one of the kings of sports collages, Dave Junion. Throw some texture on there, and hurray, you got yourself a poster.

This baseball one I did today, which surprising, took quite a bit of time. We shot each kid paired up in two in the studio in which I was to eventually cut out, via the magnetic lasso, to put together in a line at the bottom of the poster....YES I AM THE PRINCE OF RUN ON SENTENCES. Why not the King, I don't want that responsibility yet

....again, I digress

I wanted to try something completely new to me, and something I had absolutely no idea how to do. With a little research and multiple hours of playing and learning I found how to create multiple planes and add text to them, also devising techniques for reflections and false floors...the list goes on and on. Any who, I came up with the poster you see, which is my favorite of the two.

SUPERSLAVE!!!

2009-04-03T21:25:00.005-05:00

Okay okay...So I've been hearing a lot of people wish they could use their small strobe units in conjunction with their big studio units to ultimately double their amount of lights in the studio. Well, the cool thing is ...YOU CAN!!!

I was talking to a camera dealer not to long ago in the capital city and he kept trying to devise a way to make this happen without filing for bankruptcy because he just bought out the entire Pocket Wizard corporation. This is one reason that I think the Nikon Creative Lighting System--yes, that does need to be capitalized--is the best flash system in the world, and that is SU-4. No no, its not some wack star wars character it is simply Nikon speak for internal light slave. I don't know about the Canon units but Nikon has not only included an incredibly intelligent i-ttl infrared senor slave but they have also put in a very handy light slave unit as well. What does this matter? Lets say you have one Elinchrom ranger unit in a softbox lighting the face and one lighting the background. Okay, well your studio lights are spoken for BUT you want two kickers coming in from both sides of the back...no worries, set your small strobe units into the SU-4 mode and shoot. It's THAT easy! You can toggle between full blown manual or Automatic...my advice, choose manual. The slave is triggered via the small circular sensor on the base of the unit...exactly like using the ttl function.

This is an excerpt from David Hobby. (yes I'm to lazy to write my own instruction so I searched through his archives...copy and paste, a function sent to me from the heavens)

How To Slave an SB-800 1. First, turn on your flash.

2. Now get into the submenu by pressing and holding the "sel" button for 2 seconds.

3. Arrow right (the "single tree" button) to get the upper right quadrant highlighted.

4. Push the select button again.

5. Scoll down ("-" button) until "SU-4" is highlighted.

6. Push "sel" again to select.

7. Push and hold "sel" for 2 seconds to get out of the submenu.

8. Your flash will now say "REMOTE."

You are now in SU-4 mode, a legacy, wireless, quasi-TTL mode for which the SB-800 is backward compatible. But you are not going to use it for TTL. By pressing the "mode" button you can toggle between automatic and manual. Choose manual.

By pressing the "+" or "-" buttons, you can change power in 1/3-stop increments all the way to 1/128 power.

You now have a flash that will slave to any other flash. You want to use both in the manual mode, so they will not influence each other's output.

As far as I can tell, the "eye" of the slave is the circular optical port on the left side of the lash if you are facing the front of the flash. So you will want to rotate the flash body so the window faces the master flash.

The joy of using small strobes just became even more joyful. No more do you have to worry about not having enough studio strobes because your 300 dollar hot shoe unit just became one!

This is one of those things that is buried deep within the menus and well, in my opinion, the strobe costs enough to take out a second mortgage on your house so why not take the time to familiarize your self with all of the options available to you.

NOW GO OUT AND SHOOT....but remember to SU-F it!!!

Competition Time Again...

2009-03-22T02:30:00.004-05:00

This times a bit different in the since that I am taking a huge risk of co-entering an album rather than entering one very exceptional print. There's even rumor of discontinuing the entering of physical prints and going to an all digital system. What good is a print competition when you're looking at a bunch of 1's and 0's on a computer monitor. I've always felt very passionately about having the physical print and the whole point of the photographic process is in light of the print. The print is always the final outcome, the thing we try so hard to perfect, so why take that away. Anyone can make a digital file look good, but it takes a very special process and a slew of knowledge to make a perfect print.

The first three files here are my competition prints for the Heart of America Competition in Kansas City. Pretty straight forward, 16x20" canvas, not much to it.

The image above did really well, 1st place in illustrative category, in our Fall conference but I really didn't like the advice I got back. They wanted to crop out most of the sky and foreground but I contested saying it takes away from the "space" of Kansas. I wanted to show this vast vista but sometimes you just have to swallow your pride, leave your ego at the door and take the masters advice. Have you ever noticed that photographers have huge egos... I reworked it and took their cropping advice.

This image, my favorite, has earned both second and first place in our previous conferences and I've reworked it just a bit to get that perfect print. If I get a loan print this year this is the image I would love to represent me in the loan book.

This image I left as is. At the first conference the judges loved this image. They recommend me fix one little thing, I did, and the next conference they hated every little thing about it. Funny how that happens. In fact they wanted me to take out the taxi sign, change the colour of the car, add more motion blur, change the colour of some of the flowers...the list went on and on and on. I couldn't believe it, it was ridiculous. Sometimes I hate the power of digital because we tend to judge things on the basis of what they could be. When people start to use the word "photoshop" as a verb rather than a noun is when all matters of good photography go out the window.

Therefore, I decided to take my chances and just enter it as is.

Here are a few of my favorite pages from the album I designed to co-enter along with my boss. To co-enter you had to have photographed at least half of the images in the album but it does not matter who designs the album. John's graphic designer, Amy, laid the foundation for the design concepts on this album. In fact, the client album is 100% her design. Competition albums are just a bit different in that you're entering more of an art piece than a client ready album. Is this album client ready, absolutely however, the actual client album has more images just to ensure their getting their moneys worth and to be honest there are images and spreads in the client album that are meaningful to only the client...probably not something I would want to enter.

I took the entire album, with the exception of I think 5 out of 22 spreads, and redesigned it for simplicity. That's the trend now and well, you have to follow it sometime.

Opening spread

Ring detail spread

Detail spread

Full spread of Anne and Father

Anne getting ready spread

Anne bridal portrait spread

Paul getting ready and portrait spread

Flowers and flower girls detail spread

Ceremony spread

Formals spread

Reception introduction spread

Dance spread

Cake full spread

Cake detail spread

Ending spread.

it's alive...IT'S ALIVE!!!!! (A look at Digital Restoration)

2009-03-19T20:06:00.001-05:00

So you guys thing that being a professional photographer allows you to trot along the street and make cool images everyday...HA, what a crock of shit! There is a lot of office time and computer time involved in every session or in my case...RESTORATION. Do I have fun doing it, absolutely not BUT, it pays well and can be very rewarding when finished..not only to you but rewarding to the client as well.

(before)

(after)

Here at the studio I get thrown all of the restoration pieces that get dropped off and boy am I excited. Yeah, about as excited as I was sitting through "The Wicker Man," or any other Nicholas Cage movies for that matter. It has, though, proven to be slightly more exciting than wiping your ass or driving through Iowa, which both top the charts on the least exciting things to do poll.

but I digress...

This first job was pretty difficult and super tedious. In fact it took me about 10 hours to complete. HOLY COW! This image came to me at a size of 2x2 inches...yikes! The backing was ripped off and it felt like it was printed on a sheet of brown packaging tape. Every single millimeter on this print was, in some way, destroyed. The clone stamp, and patch tool VERY quickly became my best friends. In this situation I must give credit where credit is due...Wacom saved my ass, 'nuff said. You can pretty much guess the rest...

(before)

This job was my first real super intensive restoration project. I spent three days on this, on an off of course. We had a client that got some portraits and when she received the prints they asked me to add teeth into where she was missing some. That actually sounds worse than it is...She had braces and all that jazz but you can see what I mean from the before image above. I drew in a retainer because I didn't save an actual original, and I didn't want to go back to the RAW file...you might say I'm lazy. Basically I started from scratch and physically drew in teeth, used a multitude of different dodge and burn techniques to get the shading into a believable realm. This is cropped SUPER tight so you can see the detail. In an 8x10 size print this look absolutely 100% believable, which is sort of the point, right?!

(after)

You can follow along with these directions on how I did this with the composite below.

Stage One: This stage was the beginning of the end. This was where you really had lay the foundation for the rest of the teeth and make sure it was structurally sound with the rest of the mouth. When you make a soup you strive to develop strong, bold, and deep flavors at the very beginning of the process because that is ultimately the body of the soup. You can't wait until the soup reaches the table to do your seasoning, it must start at the very beginning. Creating teeth is the same way. Stage one and even stage two are all about building the body of the soup, if you will. You have to have a solid foundation in which to start, with out it yields unnatural results. Hell, I should be getting a dentists salary. You can see I removed the front brace and drew in three teeth.

Stage Two: A dramatic difference from stage one. One big difference right off the bat is a local de-saturation to every tooth. this is important as the teeth had a lot of colour in them to begin with. Don't worry, I'll add some of it back in at the end to give it that "real" appearance. I did draw in a few more teeth, yes I do have mad drawling skills...man, I'm just so full of shit today. I really worked on shaping the teeth so they appear more even and not all jaggedy and sticking out in weird directions, because that is what we're trying to do. Looks better, but we've got a long way to go.

Stage Three: Whether it is very obvious to you or not at the apparent size of the blog image this stage is a super important one. Not coming from a true art background I had to pick up on the mouths natural shadow to highlight definition system. I spent my nights looking at magazines and other portraits to study how the mouth is shaded in the gum area, in between the teeth, and clear back in the corner of the mouth. You have to keep in mind the lighting used in the portrait and how that interacts with the shading of the teeth as well...something no one ever thinks about. You have to have the definition in every little nook and cranny or it will not look real.

Stage Four: Pretty simple stage. I felt that the side of the mouth, to camera right, was a bit to elongated for my taste, and frankly for what I had already drew. After tucking in the sides a little I then cloned the gums out to the edges.

Stage Five: This step was used for one reason and one reason only...to save my butt. When I had originally drew in the teeth I had left, for me, too large of a space between the top side teeth and the bottom lip. Well, how do you close that space up and make the teeth fit into the mouth better...give her a smile! I did just that, I made her smile. Gotta love the liquify tool! Giving her a smile, not a big one, allowed you to close the gap just enough but you also have to make her whole face smile. WHAT? If you've every noticed when you smile your mouth isn't the only thing that moves. You have other muscles in your face that "smile" too, such as the cheeks, eyes and even the nose. I had to liquify each of these body parts to make the smile believable...see you didn't even know the smile was fake!

Stage Six: Again with the dodge and burn, and again it is a critical step in the process. I was especially looking to smooth out the areas under the top and bottom lips but more importantly in the far back molar areas. In stage five the back molars just stopped and they had the exact tonality as the teeth in the front. I had to fade them back quite a bit to get that definition and illusion that the teeth curve back into the mouth. This step took me quite a while but yielded great results. I also had to add definition to each individual tooth. This meant developing a shadow/highlight pattern to where the teeth meet together, and meet the gums as well. The biggest problem I encountered was getting the teeth to appear 3 dimensional. Creating the false shadows and highlights was key, please research these basic art techniques if you ever want to do high quality restoration work.

Stage 7: I'm getting very close to finishing. I did a lot of small clean up work in this stage. The teeth, although nicely defined, were very patch and harsh. I smoothed out everything and finally added a little colour back into the teeth so they didn't look dull and gray...cause teeth aren't gray.

Stage 8: The final step...HURRAY! This step was a little more clean up and I did more dodging to lessen the harsh distinct shading in between the teeth. I did some gum shading as well to finish it up.

All in all...restoring photos is definitely not the bee's knees but it is very rewarding when you're all finished. This kind of work takes a lot of time and knowledge of the little details that can make or break the illustration. If you have a passion for drawling then you will love doing digital restoration. Having patience and a super fine attention to detail...aka a perfectionist, is key for this genera of the industry. Hope you learned a bit about what you can do if you just put your mind to it...or in my case if your getting paid!

The Kellie Hays Test Part Deux...using small strobes to enhance natural light

2009-03-19T00:31:00.002-05:00

Okay, here we are. Camera in hand, model in position, beautiful, directional light hitting the subject. Were working fast, lights fading, got about 3 minutes to make some photographs. This entire series is based on making use of natural light and using a reflector to further enhance the quality of light. This series here on the blue wall was a perfect chance to ditch the reflector and revert to using small strobes to add depth and dimension to the image. This particular day I was using the Pocket Wizard system to fire the strobes, a bit more obnoxious due to the fully manual nature of the PW system, so I had my assistant hold one behind Kellie to really edge her out. I guided Kellie into a pose that allowed for the light to flood into the cove we were in, just enough for me to fill her up. Hmmm did that come out right? But I digress...Full cut CTO on the strobe, dialed down to just give her nice edge light up her body and into her hair. The orange glow from the gel gave an appearance of a late setting sun. Ooooo, nothing like a fake sunset glow to set the mood! POINT is, this all took about 3 minutes...phew, I matched my allotted time. HA, like that happens often!

This and the lead images are just simple, two light setups. Two lights? Looks natural to me. Yep, it is. The sky becomes my key light and a reflector then becomes my second light source. Check into it...a reflector and natural light can do you wonders out in the field.

(Images captured via D700, 70-200VR, Sb-800, Pocket Wizard x2, on Sandisk digital film)

Tidbit's of Knowledge to Ponder over...

2009-03-17T22:48:00.004-05:00

A little birdy once told me --WAIT WAIT WAIT, a little birdy? scratch that --

Associated Press photographer Orlin Wagner once told me to think of sports photography as a sport in itself. Shoot the sport as if its a sport to try to capture emotion at the source. You can mount cameras, as I was inquiring about, and you get great shots...amazing shots but where does the real emotion and action come from? It comes from the camera in your hands, it comes from you...your response to the action, your emotion for the sport, for the players, for the love of photography all combined with the obvious action that you can't control. That is what makes a truly remarkable sports image.

but I digress...

Joe McNally once told me that the world is all seen, get your camera in a different place.

So the question remains...can you still get true emotion out of a perfectly vanilla remote picture?
Is it possible to take your camera into a different place, fire it remotely and truly capture YOUR emotion and life in it at the same time? Or is it just a pretty fucking cool image? Sure it will sell, but is it pure. Is the insane emotion of the subjects and interesting angles enough to satisfy you as the photographer...or do you need to be apart of the image, physically and spiritually, to be completely satisfied. OR...are you already "in" the picture? Does your intellect behind the brainstorm of the image justify the pureness in an image, regardless if you are physically tripping the shutter?

...yeah, it ends here...put together your own ending

ULTIMATUM

2009-03-17T22:27:00.003-05:00

So here's the deal...

I need to start doing some cool shit or NOTHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN...

...or has it and I'm just to stupid to put two and two together

more tk...

The Kellie Hays Test

2009-03-17T03:15:00.006-05:00

The Kellie Hays test was one of the last few tests I needed to do with my D700 to see the true potential of the camera. I love Kellie and I'm so glad I got to hang out with her capture some amazing images for my library. Kellie does a wonderful no-smile, and a wonderful bust-out laugh, so you will not see any in between but the extremes work so well for her.

Awhile back I was shooting with the Canon 5d and the Nikon d200 almost daily. Taking the D200 out on a senior portrait shoot in low light was absolutely disastrous. At ISO 400 the image was terribly grainy, and for some reason the camera could never match up to the extreme sharpness and clarity I got out of the files from the 5d. I know there are some shooters out there that will argue it must be operator error for my lack of captured sharpness but after looking at the files from the d700 my problems are solved. I would pull up an image from the d200 on the cinema display and you could tell that the image was tack sharp but there was a haze like film over the file that the 5d was void of. Well, no more hazy film...the d700's files not only have the extreme clarity and sharpness of the 5d but hold what seems like even greater amounts of detail and colour. I've been constantly blown away by the high ISO performance but after shooting a "mock" senior session I have full confidence in the gear that I will come back with a technically perfect image.

I'm getting into the style of very candid portraits that really bring out the personality of the subject. Kellie is so fun, and getting her to laugh is not difficult and it really paid off. When she forgets about the camera and just lets loose I get my best photographs!

I love this deep red door for a clean and simple backdrop. It just creates a stunning visual pop of colour that gives your images a distinct flavor.

Since I've been with John at the studio I've begun to learn how to use anything and turn it into a background. Whether you have to tilt your physical angle to make it interesting or tilt the plane of your camera you are trying to create a graphically different perspective on an ordinary texture. Here I've shot wide open to make a surreal perspective on these wooden archways on a building side.

All of the images were shot at ISO 200 with the exception of this last one which is at ISO 500. There is NO visible noise and blew me away. The quality of ISO 200 on the D3/700 is so incredible the low res images here on the blog don't do it justice.

(Images captured via Nikon d700, 70-200VR, on Sandisk digital film)

Luke's Top Two Reads of 2009...so far

2009-03-17T02:33:00.004-05:00

(Image courtsey Tom Leopold)

Alright guys, I've got a couple of amazing reads for you here.

For those of you who've seen the long bearded, Gandolf like (for you lord of the rings fans) fellow out on the street, Nikon in his hand have witnessed the man behind the images. Tom Leopold, native street photographer, has spent hours upon hours capturing and perfecting images in the field and in the digital darkroom to bring you what I consider one of 2009's top reads. He has teamed up with The Manhattan Mercury's G.M, Ned Seaton, to produce a truly visual and impacting journey straight through the heart of a tornadoes destruction. The book documents three regions that were hit by the tornadoes on June 11, 2008 including Chapman, Manhattan, and Soldier. Tom put his heart and soul into creating astonshing images that let you into areas and events that "in an instant" are torn to the ground with no mercy. "As impressive as the photographs are, the true beauty is in the concern and hope that they carry." -Jim Richardson

The most rewarding part of all is that ALL of the profits from sales will be donated to the Chapman school system for tornado relief, and to the United Way of Riley County for tornado relief.

You can find this book virtually anywhere now including Varney's Bookstore, The Beach Art Museum, and even Best Buy, where Tom also has displayed multiple photographs from the book. So go and buy yourself a few hundred copies! You can find more information on Tom and High Class Photographs at http://tomleopold.com

(Image courtsey scottkelby.com)

If you don't know who Joe McNally is then STOP READING AND VISIT http://joemcnally.com/blog. Joe is one of my greatest ghost mentors ever and has taught me so much just on paper and on the inter- web that I truly think my head would explode if I ever met him. Granted I haven't read it yet this book is supposed to be the next best thing since sliced bread. If you thought Joe's first book was good, you HAVE GOT to get this one. This will be more instructional on how to get studio quality light from small flashes but I'm sure it will have tons of "Joe" in it. I don't have much to say about it as it kinda sells its self. If you want to master the application of small strobes...this book is for you!!!