Would you buy, if offered, an iPad Photo Album instead of a regular printed album? This is something I’m considering offering this but I wanted to get some thoughts first. It would work pretty simply: instead of getting an album of prints, you’d get an iPad loaded with your images. This would work equally well for Family photo’s as it would for, say, a wedding album. So hit me up in the comments, even if you’re not in the market for this type of service, let me know what you think.

Thanks!

Megan has the tremendous gift of being able to “see” what you’re seeing behind the lens and can make the necessary adjustments without needing to be told.

Worked with Anna for the first time this outing. She seemed like she had a good time, and she worked the camera pretty well, she’s definitely aware of her pose and knows how not to look too stiff.

After about 20 minutes at this location, we headed back to the docks to end out the day. On our way the rain stopped and we took the opportunity to snap a few shots off the pier. Here’s my absolute favorite from the whole day:

Melissa was another “new to me” model. Great personality, and she’s another model that I barely had to give any direction to at all. I’m getting spoiled like that. Also, tremendously patient as she waited for me to bumble through several frames as I tried to get the sky just right and the “perfect” warmth to her skin. Went back and forth a couple times until I finally landed on this one. I like it a lot.

Also finally got to meet Laura Marino a stylist/make-up artist/hair stylist (I’m meeting some wonderful Renaissance Women thanks to the East Coast Artists group, it’s tremendously inspiring and humbling) whose photography I’ve been following since I joined the group. I’m over there sherpa-ing lighting gear all over the place all day, and she’s rocking the available light to amazing effect. She’s got great vision – you can tell from her images – told her I needed to work with her more, I’m insanely jealous of her styling.

Good day. Great people. I love my job.

Why RAW?

I shoot in RAW for a couple of reasons. First, disc space is dirt cheap these days and image size should not even be a factor in the decision. Besides, I’ve always felt that the more images on a card the scarier that situation gets. When (not if) that card fails you lose that many more images. The biggest size card I shoot at is an 8GB card and even that is scary to me.

Second reason I shoot RAW: information. RAW packs much more information into the file; all the information from the scene is there in the file. It gives latitude in processing, not laziness. If your photographer is shooting RAW for the sole purpose of being able to “fix it in post” you are not working with a professional photographer. Run, don’t walk, away from that situation. I don’t care what file format you shoot in, shoot to get it right in the camera. I hate post processing. I’d probably be a much better – not to mention efficient – photographer if I learned my Photoshop chops a bit better. But honestly, if I can’t get it just about right in Aperture and I need to do a lot of post to get it right, I failed. A little healing brush on blemishes, a Soft Light layer, maybe some High Pass sharpening or a touch of some Surface blur (thinking I’ll to a post processing post soon), that should be it. Done. If I gotta clone large portions of the image or throw 20 Actions on my images to make them look right then that’s an EPIC FAIL.

Third reason I shoot RAW: With RAW I can take the file from Aperture and convert it to a TIFF file as my working copy. TIFF is a lossless format, which means that I can open it, make changes, and save it as many times as I want to without it degrading in quality. JPEG, on the other hand, is a lossy format (which is why it’s so small) each time you open it and save the file, you lose a little information. That pretty much sells RAW for me, I don’t need any other reason.

But those are MY reasons. I’m not you. I’m not in your situation. Like any choice, there are advantages and disadvantages to each. It all comes down to understanding what you’re shooting, who you’re shooting for, and what you’re most comfortable with.

Kidding aside, dark, stormy weather just fits my style. Grungy, dark and moody. We did get plenty of sunshine during the early parts of the day, which posed a bit of a challenge as we chased cloud cover for the perfect diffused sunlight, but towards the end of the day we were getting some very rockin’ clouds. The wind threatened to blow my Beauty Dish – flash and all – into the water at one point, but the risk was worth it for the shots we got. After make-up (provided by Megan, the model/photographer/make-up artist Renaissance Woman), we walked for a bit to this old abandoned lighthouse. Big cement building. Lots of graffiti. Great place to start the day. Morgan was our first victim model. Had to get through the typical 30 minutes of nerves as I’m running “Whatamigonnado? whatamigonnado?” through my head over and over all while trying to maintain an outward appearance of calm, serenity and confidence. I’m getting better at this part, but still – for future reference: if you’re working with me, don’t tell me anything you expect me to remember for the first 30 minutes or so. I’m too busy fighting the inner demons. So we got some shots of Morgan in and around the lighthouse, before we went back to get Megan and Taylor who were finishing make-up. Got some decent shots of all three ladies up at the very top of the lighthouse. Huge props to all 3 for making the climb up a rusted ladder in a building full of cobwebs – that’s some dedication.

Next up, we headed down to the water nearby. The first biggest challenge was ahead of us: Killing the glaring afternoon sun. Me and Kelly had two different approaches to the problem: she rolled with it and filled in the shadows with a light touch of on camera flash with great success. I decided to arm-wrestle the sun by rigging two flashes, bare, onto a stand and nuke my model. Was so-so until I realized that one of my flashes wasn’t working thanks to a busted hotshoe bracket – which eventually decided that, while hanging out over a foot of water, was a GREAT time to finally snap completely. My flash gave one final goodbye “pop” before taking the big dunk. Which was nice of it – kind of a “So long, and thanks for all the fish.” While, I do think the sun won in our wrestling match, I did pull this image before I walked away, defeated:

Took a break for some food and a dunk in the lake before getting back to shooting. Pretty much stuck to the pier at this point before heading over to 3 Mile Island and getting a few last shots. I’ll shut up for now and just make good with the…er…goods:

Oh and for some behind the scenes action, take a look at Kelly’s Facebook page

• Nikon d300s with a 50mm 1.8 lens
• 1 Vivitar 285hv in an 18″ beauty dish
• Shutter speed: 1/250th @ f/5.6 (increased the f/stop to get some sharper images to ease the burden on your already taxed eyeballs, it isn’t easy looking at my ugly mug, much less a blurry ugly mug).
• The beauty dish was about arms length away from my face the whole time and feathered just slightly to my right.

You can see that at 19′, I haven’t quite gone black yet – it looked all black in the the viewfinder. If I’d have gone to about 22′ I’d have gotten full-on black. This really surprised me, I expected to hit black a lot sooner with the Beauty Dish than that. I think, looking back, the Beauty Dish goes darker a bit sooner than the umbrella, but the fall-off slows at about the same time as the umbrella so that I hit black at just about the same distance as the umbrella.

Next up: I’ll slap a grid onto my SB-600. I’ve got 2 sizes to try out. Looking forward to it.

Lieza - Boudoir Session - West Monroe, NY

I recently attended a Mentoring Session held by East Coast Artists, a group I’ve become involved with. While I’m not specifically interested in Boudoir photography, I felt that I still had a lot to learn from this session given that I shoot tattoos and often times people are in various states of undress during the shoot (I never shoot nudes, though). Well, I have to say, it was a great experience. I met several other photographers, a make-up artist/photographer/model (woah!) and a model. We all spent a good portion of the evening just chatting it up, talking shop. It’s very rare for me to get my geek on with other photographers, so this was a very special treat. I mean, when you hear phrases like “Have you seen the new Parabolic from Paul C. Buff?” and you actually know what that person is talking about, and can drool right along with them, that’s something very special.

Thought Process

And on to the images. The evening started out with everyone a bit jittery – we all snapped off a few frames and then quickly sat back down. As the evening progressed, though, you could tell we started to loosen up, as we all started taking more and more frames. I was really feeling in the groove when I took this shot and what I wanted was to try out Clamshell lighting. For an in-depth look at Clamshell lighting, as well as some setup shots, check out this Lighting Essentials post. A quickie run-down: you take one light in an umbrella and put it on camera axis above models eye level. Then you take a second light in an umbrella and put it below the models eye level. You (the photographer) shoot through a tiny hole in between the two umbrellas. This type of light fills in a lot of the hard shadows that you tend to get when only using one light source, and creates just a beautiful type of light. I particularly like the double catch-light in the eyes. This is another type of light that is just really difficult to describe well; there’s just something about it. I think it has to do with the way it sculpts the models jaw. It’s beautiful without drawing attention to itself. The fedora (so cool – I need one of those as a prop) and the pose were entirely the models idea. I’ll be honest: I don’t know what the exact aesthetic is for boudoir images. Are head shots cool? Or should they be more bust length, 3/4, full length shots? I don’t care. To me it’s about making the person in front of the camera look, yes, but also *feel* good about themselves. I’ve asked a lot of people how to pull this off and I get the same answer every time: talk talk talk. Tell them they’re doing awesome, even (and especially!) when they’re not. Compliments are good, but go easy and be careful. “Your eyes are beautiful.” = creepy. “The way you’re holding your arm looks great!” is better.

Technical Stuff

I was using my Nikon d300s with a 50mm lens (this is one situation that I would have loved to have an 85mm – I was really up in this models grill for this shot). I shot it at 1/250th at f/6.3; ISO 100. We had the good fortune, thanks to Kelly, the studio owner and founder of East Coast Artists, to be using her Alien Bee 800′s and I believe we were shooting at around 1/8th or 1/16th power.

Post Processing

Just the basics here: applied a Soft Light Blending Layer, cleaned up some blemishes, and used the Surface Blur filter to soften the skin. On the post processing: I hate post on these types of images. It’s expected that you do a lot of post in images like these to really make them “beautiful”: no hair out of place, no pores showing, skin is clean and glowing, etc. In other words, more fake than the average photo (maybe I’ll write another post on my personal photographic ethics – no image is “pure” but glamour and fashion take the post processing a little too far, in my opinion. The person should still look like themselves when I’m done). And I just don’t feel right getting rid of scars, changing the hair color so it shines more, going all “Barbie Doll” on the skin. It kinda gives me the creeps doing that stuff.

A few more from this shoot:

Lieza - Zebra Chair - Boudoir Mentoring Shoot - West Monroe NY

Lieza - Boudoir Mentoring Session - West Monroe, NY

In case it wasn’t apparent, I really dig when I can get models to look off camera and go to their own little happy place in their heads. I just enjoy those types of images. It (to me) feels a little more intimate as it almost seems as if you’re looking in on a moment and the model doesn’t know you’re there. But that’s just me.

Phew! Finally got my computer back (had to get a completely new one, the last one was a dud – the 27″ iMacs are great, but the first ones to come out were riddled problems), and I’ve had time to shoot a few times (at least one of which I’ll be adding to the blog in the next couple of days). But before I get to that, I wanted to shoot an experiment with my various modifiers and see how far back I had to get from my white seamless before I could get a solid black. This is a pretty neat experiment and one I recommend doing for yourself whenever you pick up a new modifier. I’ve been thinking about building myself a studio over the past few weeks and I wanted to know how much room would be optimal (optimal, and then, of course, realistic) and here’s the results of the first test.

The first test was with my 60″ umbrella, which throws light everywhere and would require me to get the farthest back. The light-to-subject (me) distance did not change, but I would scoot the setup away from the background 1.5′ (the number of feet are written on a white board which I’m holding up) at a time and take a picture and see how much things changed. This is also helpful for when I want to get a specific shade of grey out of the white seamless, then I’ll know exactly how far away I need my subject. I won’t post all the images, but most of the major changes. Also, once I got a bit away from the background, the changes got more and more subtle (probably due to that pesky Inverse Square law) so I started shifting forward by greater amounts. One final word on these pictures: I’m terrible at self-portraits, so most of these are a bit blurry. I don’t feel that that is all that important for this series. What’s important is the change of shade in the background.

My setup:

• Nikon d300s with a 50mm 1.8 lens
• 1 Vivitar 285hv in a 60″ shoot-thru umbrella
• a large reflector on the opposite side of my face
• Shutter speed: 1/250th @ f/2.5

What I also learned, is that I can get about 13′ away from my background for a headshot without getting the sides of the background paper in. And you can see, this gets my background pretty dark.

Keep an eye out for more of these kinds of experiments. This stuff is tedious, but it’s stuff that you really need to know. Knowing your equipment inside and out is the key to really being able to get your client to relax. If you’re bumbling with your equipment, you start to get nervous and it shows, and it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

Got questions? Wanna see how a certain modifier looks under the same experiment? I got more coming, but hit me up in the comments if you’ve got a specific request. Thanks for reading!

The bugs were bad, the light was great, the backyard was phenomenal, so a net win for this session – really happy with how these came out, and I can’t wait to show the parents.

Thought Process

This time I decided to back up a bit and get a waist up shot. So it was a pretty easy choice to grab my 28mm lens. I wanted to get myself, but I also wanted to include plenty of my surroundings. The time of this shot is about 8pm – there was still plenty of light and I knew I wanted to tone the background down a bit, so I knew I would need a flash in order to control the light on 2 different levels. I grabbed my DIY Beauty dish – which is pretty much my go-to light modifier these days. It softens the light up a bit, but it’s still very controlled, very directional, and creates very nice shadow areas, which I love. Like I said before, I like the look of directional light, so I only grabbed on light. It might have been nice to maybe have a bit of a reflector on the camera right side of me, just to fill in the shadows, but I was alone at the time and I don’t own a reflector stand so that pretty much nixed that idea.

Camera Settings

I think I ended up underexposing the sky by about 1 to 1.5 stops, in order to get a deeper color. The flash was camera left, about 3 feet away and a few inches above me, set at 1/4 power. Since I’m using a slightly wide-angle lens, I needed to lean in to the camera just a bit in order to compensate for a bit of distortion that made my arm closest to the camera look huge. Which I suppose could have been a flattering effect in some sense, it wasn’t really what I was going for. More “regular ol’ me”, less “Quasimodo”.

Post-Processing

In Photoshop Elements (Photoshop does way more than I need – I’m settling for Elements until I’m shooting magazine covers regularly. Elements is a GREAT program and it’s only like $70), I added touched up my face and shirt a bit, then added a layer of High Pass Filter and changed the layer blending mode to “Soft Light”, which sharpened the image a bit and gave the light a bit more punch. I also added another layer and changed the blending mode to “Overlay” then dropped the opacity down to about 25% to 50% to bump up the contrast a bit.

When all was said and down, I have to say, I really like this image. I’m looking forward to shooting some more mixed light portraits this season.

Got any questions? Drop a comment and I’ll answer it as best as I can!

Anyway, please try to bear with me over the next few weeks as I try to clean things up and make things nice and tidy. Also, if you find something that seems a bit wonky, send me an email or leave me a comment. Thanks!