The flowers are in bloom all over town now, and down by the courthouse, they have a small selection of them. Last weekend I went down and spent some time photographing them. These flower caught my attention. I decided to shoot low and try to light the flower from the inside. To do this, I…
Read detailsA friend invited me along for a portrait shoot a couple of weeks back. We shot on a local farmstead using a 400 watts battery powered strobe with a 28″ beauty dish for much of the shoot. Below are 2 images from the shoot.
I made my way down to the lakefront for fireworks images on July 4th. I found myself closer than I anticipated, and had to rush to change lenses. I wanted to get more of the city lights and reflections in the background. With the changing of lenses, and switching from landscape to portrait orientation, I only got a portion of the city lights.
My wife has several flowers around the yard, and this week the first batch of lilies bloomed. I decided to take some photos of them, but really wanted the background to be dark in relation to the flowers themselves. To do this, I knew I had to use a flash to allow proper exposure on the flowers, but knock down the ambient exposure around them. After several versions, I found I liked the backgrounds completely blacked out, as this allowed the bright color of the flowers to pop.
During the setup and shoot, I realized that I couldn’t get both flowers in focus in a single image, even if I closed down the aperture to its smallest at f/22. To overcome this, I took 2 images, one of each flower manually focused. Then I took both images into Photoshop, and layered in the 2nd flower, allowing both flowers to be in focus in the final image.
The setup was fairly simple, I setup my flash with a 24″ softbox 12″-18″ away from the flowers, mimicking the angle and direction of the setting sun. Found my composition, then set the tripod up and attached the camera. Manually focused using Live View zoomed in 10x and made the exposures.
Read detailsA couple of weeks ago, my wife and I went to Duluth for a few days of hiking and relaxation. The weather was rain one day and nice the rest. The second morning there I ran down to Canal Park for sunrise images. It was a pretty quiet morning, very few people out around the lighthouse. But the seagulls were everywhere, as usual. A few of them rested on the streetlamps leading to the lighthouse, and I was able to silhouette them against the brightening sky.
I was able to spend a little time today photographing some of the details on my car. It is a Mini Cooper, and I have always liked the simplicity of the Mini Badge. I quickly locked onto the composition, as I liked how the lines of the grill added some light and angled lines to the image. My problems was with the flash. After struggling with using direct flash in a stripbox, I decided to add the grid, and bounce it off the ceiling of the garage. This gave a nice indirect, soft light source, but kept the light pattern a little thin, allowing it to fall off quickly. It took me a few shots to get it set properly, but once it was set, I was happy with the final results.
