recent snapshots

recent snapshots

May 29, 2013

Check out my  pals for their interpretations on this theme: Fishing Guy, Katney, Imac and Lew.  We are each doing our own thing this week, just showing recent snapshots.  Go see what my friends have been up to.

There was a lot of fun stuff going on as I have been exploring light in these shots.  The header was an experiment to see how well I could separate his dark hair from the black background, without washing out the details from his fair complexion.

. . .

"Vadering."

 The trick shot where my daughter is using a force choke on my son, that was a combination of the right time of day (dusk) as the backlight, plus an over-head streetlight to give nice highlights in the hair, and on-camera flash for front fill.  He jumped from the concrete base of the streetlight (off-camera) to give the illusion that he had been lifted from the ground.  She is on her knees to exaggerate the height, and I shot the pic on my belly.

musician's promo pic

 A musician friend needed to put a promo package together real quick for a new project, so I tried to get an artsy kind of portrait that mixes warm, natural colors for her person, and cooler tones on the wall. She was very cooperative as we tried a bunch of "scenes" and lots of tries with different lights.

graduating from 8th grade

 My newest portrait is one that we needed for the graduates' bulletin board at church.  He's moving up from 8th grade.  This was taken with one off-camera flash high and to my left, and I held a second flash on the other side of the tree to illuminate the background.

forbidden fruit

Apples get a bad rap.  The Bible doesn't say that Adam and Eve ate an apple, just that it was fruit from the knowledge of good and evil.  I'm sure we don't have access to that same fruit anymore.

Friday was purt near perfect, weatherwise.  It was one of those afternoons, when it seemed a shame to remain indoors, and just about any excuse to get outside sounded reasonable.  But things truly were slow at the office, so I made a judicious application of a couple vacation hours.  When I got home, I put air in the bicycle tires and went riding around with my thirteen year-old son.  Since we were out in the early afternoon, it felt like we had the whole town to ourselves.  We even took advantage of trying to kill ourselves at a skate park, since no one else was there.  No extreme stunts, really.  We rode the ramps, but avoided the more dangerous jumps.

On our way back home, I saw how the light caught this apple tree.  It was like someone powered up a string of red lights!  So, when we put the bicycles away, I immediately grabbed the camera and took my son back to that apple tree.  It was on private property, so I rang the bell and asked permission to take pics on their driveway.  The man of the house was fine with it, but after a while, his wife came out and asked a bunch of questions because I think she wondered if we were up to no good.  "Are you a professional?  What is this for?" etc.  I can't blame her; nobody wants to be taken advantage of.  I showed her some of the photos, and how I was mainly interested in the red apples and deep, blue sky.  I was glad to be carrying a polarizing filter for that blue sky!

Then, I tried something different.  I positioned myself behind an apple, and directly in line with the sun.  It would have been a silhouette, but I flipped the flash up to catch the apple's color.  There was absolutely no blue in that sky.  The sun's light completely blew out the highlights around the apple.

I thanked the strangers for allowing me to snap a few photos, then called my boss to thank her for letting me get out on such short notice.  I'm glad I asked their permission, and I'm glad they both said yes.

s2

Part of the fun of a DSLR is that your camera can be an accomplice when you want to break the rules.  Sure, I like the simplicity of using a compact Point & Shoot on automatic settings, but there is something special about the response you get from playing with all these lovely manual options!

This portrait of my son (S2) was done by using a high ISO plus the flash.  I bounced the flash up at a 45 degree angle, so that I could also wash out the wall behind him.  Then, I cleaned it up just a little and tweaked the color for an effect that looks more like an illustration than a photo.  I hope you like it.