I got together again with model Midas I Write (MM#1564051) for another shoot. He wanted to do something with an octopus tentacle coming out of his hair. He also has these cool star tattoos which we wanted to incorporate into the piece, so the name Poseidon just flowed out naturally from this.
Shooting Info
I shot this with a my Pentax K200D and my Tamron 28-75mm f2.8 lens. I wanted a relatively shallow depth of field so I set my aperture to f5.0, and then set up my light, an AB800 through my home-made silver beauty dish just out of the frame to camera right… about 3 o’clock. The power setting was fairly low… less than half-power because I wanted my background to go fairly gray (but not black) and I was using a relatively wide aperture.
And yes, that is a real octopus tentacle (technically it’s a leg, but tentacle sounds so much cooler). There’s a fantastic Asian Market down the road from me in the Seattle area and they sell all sorts of cool things like Octopus legs.
I was listening to a podcast today from a source that, in general, is an absolutely excellent source of info, inspiration, and business and technical know-how. His target audience for his technique tips is, primarily the entry-level shooter and he was talking about rules of composition, specifically the Rule of Thirds, and he unfortunately (and I’m sure unwittingly) spread some misinformation about this rule of composition. (more…)
This shoot was a long time coming. I first got the idea for it way back in November, and while I fairly quickly found Rachel Lovitt (MM#103362) for the role of Death, it took a good long while for our schedules to come together, but I couldn’t be happier about these. The concept was “Death does a glamour shoot with a Cerberus”, and Rachel pulled it off perfectly. Also a huge thanks goes out to my friends Wesa and Carl who pitched in at the last moment with Ronin as a back-up Cerberus.
Also, these were shot at the wonderful Earl Harper Studios in Seattle. They were fantastic there, and I highly recommend them!
Seeing as some people are concerned about nudity or for those who may be viewing this at work, I’ve put all the photos behind the jump. (more…)
This is pretty long-overdue, and I apologize. I wanted to show you guys how I got that cool effect on Daniel’s fashion shoot. Here’s my RAW, straight out of the camera photo brought in to lightroom.
As you can see, I specifically lit the scene with this post-processing technique in mind. If you take any old-photo and go through these steps you’ll get something stylistically the same, but it won’t have the same impact as something designed to be made this way. I did this by split-lighting my subject with hard lights that had no modifiers to soften the light. In this case two speedlight flashes at 3 and 9 o’clock to my subject. (more…)
For those of you who don’t know me, I cycle to and from work every day (well… almost every day). Today as I was cycling home I was just exhausted. I had worked a half-day over the weekend, not gotten much sleep last night, and had to go in an hour early today, so I was just pretty drained. I had been cycling the past several miles with lagging energy and sore muscles, slowly shifting to lighter and lighter gears to try and keep momentum.
In short I was lagging badly.
Then suddenly this cyclist whips by me at a good clip. I had passed her on the side of the path as she was chilling a few miles back, and she was chugging along.
I’m a fairly competitive guy, and I make it a personal goal to at least keep pace with people in front of me. I push and push till I just can’t do it anymore, and I thought “I’ve got it in me to go a ways at her pace”, so I switched my grip to the lower bars (I’ve got the “ram’s horn” style of street bike handles where you’ve got several options of grip) and started chugging along. After a fairly short amount of time I had caught up to her and was keeping pace with her quite handily.
Two minutes ago I could barely keep the slow pace I was going and now I was hauling tail and not even feeling it. Why? Because I had someone to push me.
And it’s the same way with photography. Reading blogs and taking classes and reading books is all well and good, but sometimes I need someone to come along and just fly by me to get me jazzed up and motivated. That’s why I love going to photo meetups or doing organized photostrolls. I get to see first-hand the work people are doing and how fast they’re flying past me, and it pushes me to be more creative. Not to be better than them, but to keep up. You see, I’m not competing with them. I’m competing against myself. They’re just the thing that gets me off my butt and gives me a target to shoot for.
So get out there and find someone. A friend, a Meetup group, a student, whatever. Just go out and find someone to shoot with. Someone who will push you to be better than you are.
I was reading a blog post by Kirk Tuck where he talks about pushing yourself out of the rut that others try to place you in with commercial work and trying to give the client what you think they want. All in all it’s an excellent article, but what struck me was this comment from one of the readers:
I have been a member of a camera club here in South Africa for the last year and a half, and for the last few months I have been bugged by one thing, I know what “look” they want and either shoot or choose my entries for club evenings based on that (to get max points) rather than submit the stuff I really like. Just this week I decided not to submit pics at the club anymore, it’s just a principle thing.
Last weekend I went out to do a fashion shoot with Daniel (aka Midas iWrite) (MM#1564051). We had a great time. I wanted to get a very masculine, harsh look to the series, and I think we achieved that very well. (more…)
I’m a big fan of Zack Arias, and if you’re interested in learning lighting, there’s few guys better suited to teaching great, simple lighting techniques than Zack. And best of all, he’s doing a FREE lighting class next weekend over at CreativeLive. It’s available free if you sign up to watch it live, or you can pre-order a downloadable copy for $79. A steal!
Hey, all… I know it’s not really cool to say this, but this is just a quick apology post. I haven’t posted so far this week. But I’ve been editing not one, but two shoots from the last few days, so very soon you’ll have at least 2 separate honest-to-goodness photo posts! And if you’re all good boys and girls I might even drop a tutorial into the mix. Actually… I promise I’ll include a tutorial of some of the Lightroom post-processing, cause I learned a cool trick that I’m using on a lot of one of the shoots. It’s very stylistic, so you don’t want to do it too much, but for the look I’m going for (which included the way I lit the scene) it works.
So, again, sorry for the lame “coming soon” post, but I promise it’ll be worth it.
