Tag Archives: Photography

Beauty Lighting and Head Shots

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Saturday, I watched a video of Peter Hurley doing head shots of various people. He took some amazing shots, but the video was really about his “process.” Debbie was doing a bunch of things and heard it more than watched it. She hated Hurley. He was loud and abrasive and even somewhat abusive with these people. He would say things like “You’re eyes aren’t the same size. Turn your head so the beady one is closer to the camera.” but, he did do something quite interesting.
He had a chart called “How Does Your Inner Child Feel Today?”. It is a bunch of faces that correspond to emotions. He would look at it and randomly choose one of the emotions. He would say, “Show me innocent.” He explained that the expression he got might or might not be something interesting that he could photograph, but he said that the person would always realize they made a silly face and break out with a huge smile.
OK so, today I decided to try some beauty lighting. I powered my beauty dish with the Polaroid PL135 as the key light with a reflector underneath in a clam shell orientation. I added a Qflash T4d as a hair light. I had to power both down as low as they would go to shoot at iso 100 and 1/100, f/2.8 with my 85mm lens.

So, I told Helen to give me Joy.

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Then, I asked for wistful

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OK. Rather plastic.  So, I sat down.

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Serious.

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Apprehensive

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Anticipation

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Relief that this is over.

 

Hico

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I had a free afternoon, and I had been told that there were lots of really interesting places in Hico.  Hico is a small town on Hwy 6.  It is apparently the home of Billy the Kid because there is a statue of him in the middle of town, and apparently a museum as well.  I drove around the town and saw lots of interesting locations.

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There were alleys behind buildings that had back doors like this.  It was really cool.

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I can imagine these as great places for a bridal shoot.

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This shell of an old building had tons of character.

HDR Images

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High Dynamic Range photography is a process that combines elements from several images and produces a single picture that has increased detail in both the shadows and highlights.  I was impressed by a picture that someone else took, and asked him about it.  He told me how he did it, and I have been investigating the process.

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In some cases, the resulting picture is not too different from a regular one, it just has more detail.  The picture above was generated from a picture I took of Galveston Bay a couple weeks ago. It looks pretty much like a normal picture, only a little more detail and more vibrant.

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By modifying some of the parameters of the photograph, the resulting image has a somewhat more abstract or artistic characteristic. This picture has some characteristics that make it look more like a painting.

Belton Junk Yard

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There is a junk yard in Belton that specializes in Classic Cars.  The Temple Photography Meetup Group held a group shoot there last Saturday.

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To me, these represent the certainty of decay.  All of these were once bright, shiny, and new.  Now they are in various stages of decay.

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There were far too many cars there that brought back memories – cars I owned, cars owned by someone I knew, cars I wanted.

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Fine Art Prints

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I have been intrigued by the idea of fine art prints.  A CreativeLive seminar with Doug Landreth explored how he goes about making them.  It was interesting, but there was not nearly enough explanation. In Photoshop, he overlays images with layers that he manipulates into patterns that add barely visible elements and textures to the image.  The result is quite good.

As a first step in looking at that, I took some of the pictures I took last week on Highway 6, and transformed them into Black and White.

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It turns out there are a variety of ways of producing Black and White images.  One is simply to reduce the color saturation of the image.  There are other “effects” in Aperture.  They somehow use selective filters in the operation. For these, the one that I liked the most used a Red filter.  I am not sure what that really means, but it had the effect of darkening areas of the sky until they were almost black.

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It is almost like using a polarizing filter. The rest seemed to exaggerate the starkness of the image.

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Looking at these calls to mind scenes from the old John Ford Westerns.

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Derelict Farm

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On my trip on Highway 6 to photograph trees, I happened to notice this old, derelict farm.  There is something about the interaction of the decaying of the structures and the vegetation around them that make for an interesting combination.

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Vision

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I just came back upon Don Giannatti’s “Project 52” web site.  I had seen the site several months ago, but it slipped from my memory.  I have been a member of the flickr group for a long time, but, I can’t remember the last time I actually visited the group page.  On this site, there is a weekly photography assignment. The assignments for this year start on February 1.  So, I looked at the 2012 assignments.

The first assignment is to create a Vision Statement.  This is basically a statement describing why it is that I take pictures.  As described on the web site, “Tell us with a single paragraph what you want to be able to do with your images. Tell us what you do without telling us you are a photographer. Accompany that message with a single image taken around your home.”

To me, the reason I enjoy photography is it differs from other modes of expression, and there is something that is transcendently stimulating when I see a really great image I have taken. In 2012, my Aperture Library has over 7700 images.  Every once in a while, as the image would come up on the screen, there was a moment of awe.  Kind of, “Oh boy.  That is good!”

It is becoming easier to take technically perfect images – those with proper exposure, composition, lighting, whatever.  I can look at those and think, “That’s a good image.”  But there is the added, intangible element that is included in an image that is really great.  I take photographs because I enjoy that feeling of producing a picture that is really great.

Now, what kind of image around the house can I make that illustrates that?

Best of 2012

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I have gone through the over 7000 images from this year and chosen five that I think are the best.  I am not going to rank them.  Rather, I will present them chronologically.

The first one is from Galveston.  Earlier this Spring, Debbie was walking on the beach and saw that someone had started to pile rocks on each other.  As other people came along, they created their own piles of rocks to the point where eventually, there were hundreds of piles of rocks.  I took this picture of one of the piles.  I used a strobe and softbox to help me make the sky a little darker and to help define the surfaces of the rocks.

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Earlier this Summer, Pat Jones asked me to serve as a second shooter at a wedding.  I enjoyed the process.  The wedding was at an interesting outdoor area in Roundrock.  As the sun was going down, we got the couple to walk with us. There was a place in the woods where the setting sun was coming through a break in the leaves of a tree.  I positioned them in the spot where the sun hit their faces and got this picture.

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For the Waco Wild West 100 Bike Ride, last year, I stood at the end of the Washington St, Bridge and tried to get pictures of the cyclists with the suspension bridge and the Hilton in the background. I got some similar shots this year, but noticed that the river was absolutely still.  So, I went down along the river and shot up at the cyclists on the bridge, with the reflection in the still water.

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Ashley Henager wanted to get some pics at an old house in Speegleville.  A couple days before, she contacted me and asked it we could change and shoot with her husband and son.  I loved the idea.  We shot at Midway Park.  Noah was as cute as could be, but he really wanted to get in the water. He kept trying to get away and get in the water, and at one point, the tug between them resulted in this picture.

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Finally, the last shoot with a model I did was with Heather Lynn Johnson.  I have already discussed the lighting issues, but this shot was really great.

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Galveston Pleasure Pier

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We went to Galveston for New Years.  The weather was pretty bad – cold and wet for most of the time.  Monday night, we decided to go the The Pleasure Pier for dinner.  I took my camera, and got a couple of pretty good night images of the pier.

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Both of these images were taken in the early evening.  I actually ended up underexposing with exposure compensation because the camera meter wanted to make the pictures brighter than it really was.

Iowa Snow

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SONY DSCWe went to Des Moines for Christmas.  They got about a foot of snow a few days before we got there, and I really thought it would less evident.  I didn’t think it would be gone, but the snow still adhered to trees and things more than I expected. That allowed me to get some good pics.

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OK. now full disclosure:  Both of these are after some serious photoshop manipulations.  For the first one, I created two layers.  The exposure on the bottom layer was about -2, and the exposure on the top layer was about +1.5.  I then masked the top layer and brushed out everything above the buildings.  For the second picture, I did a similar thing, only I made a gradient mask for the top layer going through about the center of the picture.