Kelly Color

New website

2010-12-07T16:03:00.003-07:00

Sacks of flour and dirt

2010-11-23T16:40:00.002-07:00

Taking pictures of newborn babies is like taking pictures of sacks of flour. Sacks of flour don't have fragile necks like newborns but the every thing else is similar. If I was asked to shoot pictures of sacks of flour I might do the same as this newborn below.

Beauty dish above with my strip bank popping a bit of light into the face. My gray seamless replaced my wife's drapes that I thought would look nice, they didn't.

Same thunder gray but the subject is a bit older. Thought it would be fun to put some twigs and what not in her hair but by the time I got around to it it was dark and snow was covering every thing. My wife's decor worked nicely. Makeup is a bit earthy too, maybe we should have rubbed a bit of dirt on her face.

Beauty dish up top. Strip bank for fill under chin and maybe 2 stops lower than beauty dish. Two 10 degree diffused lights on both sides. Interesting, right?

Honey

2010-11-16T08:45:00.000-07:00

Some times it is fun to try new things. Four light setup. Beauty dish right in front of her forehead. Strip bank right under the beauty dish with a small hole between the two lights for my lens. Two 10 degree gridded lights on either side of her. The gridded lights also had some diffuse gels to soften the light even more.

The Thunder Gray seamless had a splash of light coming from the beauty dish which made it nice. I tried a separate light on the background with an orange gel but that didn't look the way I wanted it to. I thought the orange gel would go well with the amber color of the honey but it didn't. The honey is just raw honey that had a darker tone than most honeys I have seen. The amber color of the honey makes this shot. It warms the photo and adds some awesome shimmer and pazaz to the photo.

I didn't have any assistant because my assistant in actually the model so we had to do this alone. I setup the camera for remote shoot and the focus was spot on and on manual. I began taking photos and dumping the honey while my model did her thing. Doing her things consists of trying to not react to the honey oozing down her face. She did a wonderful job.

Salt Swimmers

2010-11-09T16:01:00.001-07:00

My beauty dish is awesome! I thought it would be fun to do a shoot on the Bonneville Salt Flats with some high school varsity swimmers.

I knew the Salt flats became lakes every year but I assumed that was in the winter or spring. We were hoping to go to a new location and shoot with the bright white sand. As you can see that did not happen. So we shot in brown, muddy salt.

I had the beauty dish just above their heads with a bare light camera left. As you can see we had some high cloud cover which let in enough light at 1/200s @ f8 with an ISO of 320 to lighten the subjects camera right. I did have to watch the light more closely because of the sun changes. I would much prefer a blue sky full sun day than a cloudy day.

That stool sank 2 or 3 inches into the mud every time they sat on it. The temperature was perfect for a shoot. It was perfect for me but a bit cold if you were only wearing a swimming suit. I should have brought out a wading pool and a diving board. I ran out of room in my car for the wading pool and I definitely did not have room for a diving board.

One thing that came in very handy was my Lowell Big Boom and Sekonic meter. That boom held the beauty dish just off frame and out of the way. Plus it is heavy duty which made it nice to not worry with any breezes that happened to come through. The meter made it easy to check my zones for exposure and contrast.

Bored of writing.

It is amazing what can be done with lighting. The light camera left put highlights and shadows in the perfect places to make you al think this guy is buff. His muscles were not enhanced at all in photoshop or any other program, just lighting.

It is nice to bring your kids to be used as distractions for the subjects.

Beauty Dish

2010-10-27T16:31:00.000-06:00

New Elinchrom 27 inch Beauty Dish.
Elinchrom EL 26181 Rotalux Junior Recta.
And testing my Sekonic L-758DR.

My Muse (persons who inspire the creation of literature and the arts) Chase Rogers was more than happy to help me out. I did do some post processing on these photos. Some had to have some power sockets removed from the wall, some were cropped and all were sized for the web. That is all I did.

The thing I was most excited about was my light meter. I took two readings at the beginning of the shoot. That was all I had to do. At first I was shooting just Chase and the pictures were exposed nicely. At the end of the shoot I wrapped his head with the paper towel and the images were still exposed perfectly. There was no worry that my meter would be messed because I was metering the light from the strobes not the light bouncing of the subject.

I was also able to check the Ansel Adams zone system before I shot to make sure I had as much of the dynamic range possible for these shots. After calibrating my meter to my 5D II it was a snap.

The light and color are so beautiful in these photos. I aimed the beauty dish so the main spray hit the top of his head or a bit above. This allowed for the truly soft wrap around light to expose his face in a pleasing way.

One thing I have been doing lately to further my photographic eye is to look through my wifes Harper's Bazaar magazines. As I am looking through and I come across some posing in a fun way I take my permanent marker and draw a stick figure on the ad to represent the bones and joints of the model. This helps me visualize the position the models is in.

Chase found a photo idea he wants to try.

Here we go again

2010-09-09T08:10:00.000-06:00

I have been asked many times to post again on this blog. Here you go.

Bonneville Salt Flats State Park: Never ending wind. Great for the models hair. Not great for my sun swatting wife and father-in-law. I need a Sun-Swatter.

Added some grass to the shots, thought it would look cool. I don't care for the grass. I do like her hair being blown in the wind. Nice. She is a dancer and I took photos of her leaping about. Didn't like those as much.

Shutter accidentally open too long. Kind of cool any way. That sun was bright in her eyes in case you couldn't tell.

Not the Salt Flats any more. Secret Garden. Took my Vagabond II to power the lights for the backdrop.

More dancers but hanging out at a farm this time. Not happy with most pictures but these three were kind of fun.

Just a fun photo idea.

Blogging

2010-07-29T10:22:00.000-06:00

I am so bored of blogging.

Strobist 2

2010-05-27T12:18:00.000-06:00

Canon fixed and returned my lights to me just in time for me to practice using them during a family trip to Island Park. Realizing the strobes track record I was a bit cautious as I setup and took down my lights. I can happily report no errors during the whole trip. We were blessed with much rain and some snow while we were there but when I had the chance I setup a shoot to play around.
Any photo ideas that came to mind were tried. I found a chainsaw and an old jacket and thought it would be fun to incorporate those into some photos.
I used three lights. One light was warmed with 1/2 CTO and shining on the logs camera right. I actually had a shoot through camera right and a bare strobe camera left.
Same setup for this photo.
Then I thought it would be fun to have some one jump on a four wheeler and ride through some mud puddles. Those pictures turned out ok but this one was really fun.
I had three bare strobes at this point. One straight across from me which you can see coming out of his forehead. One camera left and one camera right. I think the strobe camera right failed to shoot on this one because the batteries had died.
My in-laws are big card/boardgame people and I wanted to take a picture that represented that aspect of the trip. The best way to do that was to setup my strobes throughout the room pointed at the ceiling and wait for them to gather.
I think this picture represents the family trips more than any thing else. I think I could use another light in the kitchen behind my Father in-law.
As I was perusing the cabins closets for photo props I happened upon two sets of waders. "There has to be some thing I can do with these" I thought. So I did. My brother In-Law is leaving in June to serve a mission for the LDS church. I had asked him to bring up his suit and we could take some pictures of him before he goes. So I asked him to put the waders on and grab a fishing pole.
Shoot through camera right. Bare strobe behind him and another camera left. The strobe camera left added just a hint of fill and it looks nice. Just looking at this picture and I knew some thing was missing. If he is to be a "fisher of men" he needs some water.
Much Better. His little sister was with us but without waders so I put her on the nearby dock.
I liked the water idea so the next day I had him put on his suit again and we launched one of the boats at the cabin.
It started to snow so this shoot was not long. I had two strobes taped into the hull of the boat. One illuminating his knees and hands and the other coming from behind to illuminate the front of the boat. I then had my Brother in-law standing on the dock with a strobe pointed at his head. Who knows why he was reading his scriptures in an old boat on a lake in the snow, but who cares. It was fun learning the lights and doing some fun photography.

Strobist

2010-05-04T15:51:00.000-06:00

I am no David Hobby nor am I Joe McNally. Now that I have that out of the way I would like to talk about the newest development at work. One day I might be in the OR taking pictures of some spine or brain surgery. The next day I might be taking pictures of the people responsible for doing the surgery. I have come to realize that I need a portable light kit that makes it easier to get the light I want where I want it.
That is where the strobist comes in. I purchased some 580EX II's, Pocketwizard FlexTT5's, and the trimmings. They all fit nicely in a slim long case. At the same time Dustin purchased himself some robot stilts. I thought this was a perfect opertunity to try some of the TT5's cool functions.
This is Dustin jumping around his shipping dock on his robot stilts. I have 4 strobes surrounding him on manual power 1/1. I wanted to light him wherever he bounced. The above photo was taken with an aperture of 2.8 at 1/3200 shutter. The ISO was at 50. That is some serious awesomeness. The sync speed for my 5d Mark II is 1/200. 1/3200 is rocking. He is bouncing around in full sun.
The other day I took four portraits with these lights and after wards Chase and I were cleaning up and we got the idea to put the strobes in the umbrella. We played around with that for a while and decided it would look pretty cool outside.
This photo was shot with the same settings as the picture above. Chase was in full sun for these shots but it is hard to see the sun. With the two strobes in the umbrella I have two more strobes on some stands camera right.
These Pocket Wizards are a lot of fun. But then tragedy happened. Three strobes are dead. They will all fire their pre flash but not their real flash. The pre flash is bright enough to blind some one but there is not a single trace of flash in the exposure. Crazy! In manual mode the flash will shoot a full dump of light at any setting. I could drop the light down to 1/128 and it will still do a full dump.
This issue on top of the already stupid RF issue was a bit much to handle. I had come to terms having to put a sock on my strobe for any reception but this had become ridiculous. After looking into the strobe issue I found that something had killed some inter workings and they needed to go back to Canon for surgery of their own. So the strobes are on their way and I have a photoshoot tomorrow. Time to be a bit more creative. You have to admit that a shutter speed of 1/3200 is pretty cool. Now if I could just get some strobes to go with it.

Available Light

2010-04-06T08:37:00.000-06:00

I like shooting with available light. When I say available light I am referring to any light I can get. Whether it be the sun, or strobes, or a flashlight I want it. Each light source produces a different look and then there is a myriad of different looks within each light type. This is an example using sunlight.
Dr. Dailey is on a bridge between the University of Utah Hospital and the Neurosciences Center. The bridge is all glass and provides an excellent place to find a lot of light. This photo was taken right when the sun was setting behind the hospital which created a really soft warm light. You can see that warm light on the left side of his face. In contrast the blue tinted windows and shadow side of his face has a striking blue hue to it.
The photo was taken in studio with my strobes.

Dr. Riaz needed a portrait because he was elected as Chair of General Neurology Section of the American Academy of Neurology (2010-2012). You can see the differences in light between the two photos. Incidentally, if you click on the link that takes you to Dr. Riaz's web page you will see another photo of mine. There was a lot that went into that photo that I might talk about later but I used a strobe and ambient light for that photo. Any way, both examples above were appropriate for the purpose of the photo for which they were taken. I have actually heard people say that they will only shoot with man made light or only with God made light. That is a great way to limit your photography and creativity.

Pure White

2010-03-04T09:28:00.000-07:00

Getting a pure white backdrop for your portraits is super simple. The issue most people have is exposure. Essentially all you need to do is expose the background to be brighter than the subject.
To take these kind of photos one of the things you need to be conscious about is the light that might bounce off the background onto your subject. Plenty of room is required and the amount of room you need depends on your lighting and subject.
Exposure become a bit tricky lighting a full body shot as apposed to a head shot or 3/4. One trick that I have learned to get the exposure and to add the reflection is plexiglass. In the previous photos you can see the reflection nicely which comes from the Plexiglas. The Plexiglas also helps expose the floor the subject is standing on. With the Plexiglas your not getting the light gray floor that you have to photoshop to white, which never looks as good.
I really like the look of these pure white photos. The subject really pops and they feel fun and light.

Ring Flash

2010-02-08T13:03:00.001-07:00

I have had an AlienBees ABR800 Ringflash for a bit over a year and up till now I haven't really used it for the purpose for which it was built. The other day I decided I should play with the flash to see what I could do. Going along with this shallow depth of field photography I have been into lately I decided that I should do the same with these test shots. I was using the 70-200L at 2.8 with my shutter at 1/160 and my ISO at 50. I controlled the exposure with the output of my flash unit. It was a bit backward but I kind of like how they turned out.

The shallow depth of field is great but I wanted a lot more than that. It is cool that his ears our blurred but I wanted all of him blurry except his eyes. A tilt shift would be cool for this purpose I guess or maybe a lens baby. A cheaper option would be the Canon 50mm f1.8II lens. There a 50mm with better glass but I wanted a cheaper option. I think the 1.8 would be really nice. I wonder if the 50mm would be so short that the ring flash would look weird.
One thing I like about the ring flash is the light is produces. Very even, flat looking light but it also adds a drop off around the edges which is interesting. In the picture above he moved his head slightly to the right so he had a bit of shadow which created some depth and added some interest.
In this photo he was straight on which is flatter but you can still see drop off on the edges of things like his nose and cheeks. I think it is a very cool way to light and I think it adds to the look of these photos. I do not like the catch lights however. They are boring and predictable. I was thinking about how I could change that and I think if I use a large umbrella right behind me instead of a ringflash it would add the catch lights that would be interesting but I might lose the interesting lighting. I also added grain to the photos which I love because it adds some texture to the blurry photos.
If I had a greater f stop to work with I might get an image like this.
Same setup but I took this photo into Photoshop and added a Gaussian blur over the whole picture but the eyes. I makes it look a bit better but it is hard to mimic the bokeh from a beautifully opened aperture.

Nikkor Greatness

2010-02-04T18:22:00.000-07:00

I was asked to photograph a surgery that went well into the night. I was pretty excited about this case because I was going to test my Nikkor Lens with out the battery pack using just the surgical spotlights. The first decision to make was magnification. The surgery was a spine surgery and in this case the incision was 5 or 6 inches. I wanted to be about a foot away from the incision site and I wanted the whole working area to fill my sensor. Most of the time I would throw my 24-70 on, set my resolution to full raw and shoot. Then I would crop out every thing I didn't need and have my image. This time I didn't want to crop my images, I wanted them to be perfect right out of the box.
I screwed on 1/2x and the 1/4x magnifiers and took some test shots in my office to see where we were at. Perfect!
These pictures are right out of the box with nothing done to them but a slight vignette and resized but not cropped. The two magnifiers were perfect to get the shot I wanted. Another aspect of these photos I love is the color rendition. The color on these are beautiful.
While I was waiting for the next photo op I took some random pictures of the screws. Spine screws are always beautiful.
The color on these photos are so beautiful. Again, a vignette and resizing were the only things done to these images. Using the Medical Nikkor is a bit different from my other lenses. I talked about these differences in another post but as a reminder the aperture is changed on the lens itself. I had to have the aperture opened up all the way and my ISO at 5000 to get the pictures of the screws. The colors are beautiful.
This was the last shot of the surgery before they sewed the dura back together. The detail is amazing considering the working area I had. Under the spot lights I was shooting with the aperture wide open at f5.6 with an ISO of 1600 and my shutter at 1/400.
Here are some pictures from an indoor rodeo. Low lighting and fast animals.
I was shooting at f2.8, 1/125 with an ISO of 3200. I could have used a quicker shutter and so I should have bumped up my ISO to 5000 or something around there. It would have worked out perfectly then. Next time.

f2.8

2010-01-07T09:38:00.000-07:00

Some times whilst shooting portraits I want every thing to blur out except for the subject.
This is a good example of what I wanted. Notice how every thing except Karter is out of focus. Just open up your aperture as much as it goes. Pretty simple. My lens happens to open up to 2.8 so I set my aperture there. The problem I had was that I wanted more than simply to shoot some pictures at f2.8. I wanted a certain light "quality" in the images. You can see the two highlights on the either side of Karter. To get that I setup two strobes on either side. Then I added a large umbrella just camera right for a bit of a fill on the face.
In this shot my strobe on the right didn't fire. I am missing that reflection that I wanted. When shooting at f2.8 I am letting a lot of light into the camera. This is a problem whilst shooting with strobes because the light can easily blow things out. Aside from dropping the power of my strobes as far down as they could go I also put on my polarizing filter. This dropped my light by 1.5 stops, roughly. It made it so I could actually take some pictures with my strobes.
The other issue with shooting so open is that the depth of field is very small. You can see evidence of this with the picture above. Little men move around a lot so to get those eyes crisp proved a bit difficult. In the photo above his nose is in focus but not his eyes which totally bombed this otherwise perfect photo. Luckily his mother loved the photo regardless.
Then there are times when this setup provides just what I need for the photo I want. This is one of my favorite from the series. Eyes are crisp (or eye lashes), lights are working, and every thing but Jace is blurred out. You can barely see some rim light camera right on his ear.
Some neutral density filters would work well in a situation like this to reduce the light coming in to the camera. Of course it is always nice to have some help at a shoot.

Popular Science

2009-10-16T12:57:00.000-06:00

This epilepsy grid photo made its way into the November 2009 issue of Popular Science. Now I am wondering how it got there.

Update: The online version is now up and you can find the article here.

Macro

2009-10-15T16:46:00.000-06:00

This is a picture I took in my office as a test. This is a tiny section of fabric lining the top of my camera cleaning bag. I was testing a new lens that I received when the Neurosurgery department moved their labs to the CNC. The lens is a Nikkor Medical 200mm prime. This is a second generation lens and the thing that is awesome about this lens is that a lot of the lens functions are controlled on the lens itself. You can read all about it here, or here.

As you can see on those other pages this lens has a ring flash built right into the end of it. The flash creates beautiful shadow less photos of cool things like this spider that was hanging out on a railing outside. I have no idea what kind of spider this is but I do know that it was fast. The focal distance is miniscule and so every time this spider would twitch it would mess everything up. My breathing didn’t help as I was trying to focus either. To focus with lens you use your feet. It is a prime lens so there is no zoom but it does have magnifier glass things you screw on the end of the lens.

You get different results from the different magnifiers. This shell was taken with the 1x magnifier. This next photo is some random weeds that I shot with the 2x screwed onto the 1x to create 3x. It is cool to see the little fibers coming of the weed stems. Because this lens has a ring flash built into it the lens comes with a battery pack. This over the shoulder battery pack needs 8 D cell batteries to work. It has a switch on it to control the power output. There are two output options ¼ and full.

This leaf was hanging out in a puddle in direct sunlight. I shot this picture with the power set to ¼ and it nicely filled in any harsh shadows created by the sun. I did the same with this picture I took of a thing chilling in the shadow of a building.

This lens has literally opened up a new world for me that has always been here but I did not recognize it. This is an apple stem on the apple I ate today for lunch. I love this picture because of the detail in the stem. Even more than the detail, I love the gradient looking background. The background is my office phone that was hit with just enough light from the flash to make it look cool.

This last photo is a mystery photo, do you know what it is? Hint: I also ate this for lunch today.

Jeffrey Bastar

2009-09-24T07:58:00.000-06:00

The CNIM is a big deal for people who have the opportunity to be operated on. It is a test that certifies IOM techs. There is a group of people out there that monitor nerve functionality and other technical things during a surgery to assist surgeons. These people are know as Intraoperative Monitoring Technicians. My good friend Ken Ashby just happens to be one of them. Jeffery Bastar is another IOM tech here at the University. He just passed the CNIM the other day. His department was so proud of him they asked me to take some photos of him for whatever marketing was coming up. Here is what we came up with.

Blue seamless with two side lights for highlights on either side, background light for a nice gradient, and a single umbrella for the main. I also added a reflector camera right for some fill. I like the look of the blue on blue with the highlights. What adds the most to the photos are his awesome shoes. I think they are pretty cool.
These photos don't show us much or tell us much about him. I thought some good photos would be him in the OR but the OR rooms were full so we ended up in the hall. Still good and you get the idea of where he is.

For these photos I set my exposure for the ambient light and dropped my flash -1 1/2 or some where around there for just enough fill for his eyes. I like the "natural" look you get from shooting this way. An added bonus is the minimal amount of gear. Very nice.

Lab and Products

2009-09-09T09:39:00.000-06:00

Some friends of ours are entrepreneurs in the field of baby bathing products. They wanted Jace to be their model for one of their products. This is the first time I have shot product photos and I learned some things that might help next time. These pictures looked more like portraits than product shots. I like how the backdrop turned out. Jace is in the tongue stage where he always has his tongue out licking things.

Some times when things slow down at work I go upstairs to take pictures of random things in one of the neurosurgery labs. The last time I did this I had three of the scientists helping me with different concoctions.
Of course we had to make a mess.
The lab people are awesome and we have had a lot of fun. One 580EXII camera left with a reflector camera right for a a little fill. Don't ask me what the chemicals are.

Clinical Neurosciences Center

2009-08-27T10:08:00.000-06:00

Over the last two weeks I had two shoots here at the Clinical Neurosciences Center. I was tasked to take a portrait of every doctor in Neuro Radiology, Neurology, and Neurosurgery. The only issue I had to work with was how I should set up my lights so I would have minimum need to adjust them. I just wanted the busy doctor's to come in sit down smile and leave in under 3 minutes. I set up two soft boxes at 45, a hair light behind and camera right, and laid a large reflector in front of the subject on the floor to bounce some light up for fill. It worked pretty well and I only adjusted my setup one or two times.
I am not of fan of my 90's backdrop but whatever. Speaking of backdrops Pictureline has some cool new backdrops from drop it MODERN that are pretty retro cool. Pictureline also has their seamless on the cheap.
Funny story: Whilst taking some pictures during all of this one of my strobes started smoking, a lot. It was awesome but after turning it off for a minute it stopped and did not return.

New camera

2009-08-03T09:48:00.000-06:00

The 5D mark II is an awesome camera. A couple of weeks ago I was able to get one at work along with a few lenses. One of the lenses has not yet come in but that is an issue for a different post, along with my issues with Inkleys. It was now time to play and become familiar with the camera and the abilities of the new lenses.
Chase was lit using a big east facing window behind me. Looks awesome. ISO 2000 with 1/320 and f/3.2. Any ISO over 400 with the old xti rendered the photo unusable. This was with an ISO of 2000, incredible. Then I took it to the Grand Tetons.
I am not well versed in landscape photography so taking these photos was a great learning experience. I was not equipped completely for landscape photography either. I really needed some graduated ND filters. I had to hope for a pretty even exposure and then fix the exposure in lightroom. This photo was my only attempt at a sunset picture. The clouds were nice, and after the exposure fixes the photo turned out ok, I guess. This photo had an ISO of 50 with 1/80 at f/3.2. I do not know what I was thinking when I set my f-stop to 3.2 but there it is. I usually had the f-stop at f/22 for the depth of field but not with this one. Lame.
This one was better at ISO 400 with 1/100 at f/22. Taggart lake was a beautiful lake to see and hike to. It would have been really nice to hike up there before dawn to take some pictures but 5:00am was the earliest I could drag my self out of bed.
My brother in law and I did make it out to Mormon Row for this classic Tetons photo. I was not wearing shoes so by the time the sun hit that old barn my toes were numb. Worth it though because this is my favorite shot of the day. There were a few other photographers there that added to the enjoyable time. To my left was an Italian dentist with his very expensive and extensive photo gear collection. He let me use his 2 stop graduated ND filter. It was awesome and really helped with my photos. I shot this one at ISO 125 with 1/8 sec at f/22. I really like the colors of the sun hitting the mountains and the barn. A couple of things would have made this photo that much better though, a few more clouds and maybe a bison or some thing roaming through. Maybe a bear eating a bison, whatever. The colors are muted some after uploading them to my blog but the print is really nice.
Awesome camera and lenses. Taggart lake was taken with the 16-35mm sweetness. Really awesome gear.

Baby Jace

2009-05-04T20:53:00.000-06:00

Back in May I talked about using a coffee filter for some cheap color balance material. I still think it is a cheap, easy way to get your photos balanced. I have recently acquired a new tool that also allows me to color balance easily but not as cheaply. Photovision has created a Digital Calibration Target that works extremely well as a tool for color balancing your photos during the shoot or in post. The target has two other great functions that make it a must in my camera bag. The target also makes it uber easy to get your photos exposed the way you want and the back side is a silver reflector.

To get your color balance right you just fill your scene with the target and use the resulting picture as your custom balance reference. To show you how to use the target for exposure I have snagged a screen shot of a picture I had taken.
I had my lovely assistant hold my target in the scene where the subject is going to be. I put the white part closest to the main source and took the picture. When using the target as a tool for exposure the thing you need to pay attention to is the histogram. Whilst looking at the histogram you can see the white, black, and gray bars spiking appropriately. A lot of the time I like to push my highlights to almost blown out so I push my highlights in my histogram all the way to the right. Of course not all pictures are exposed the same but for a lot of my pictures I push the highlights. Just make sure your histogram on your camera is showing what you want it to show and shoot. Awesome.

Here are some pictures I did of my son the other day using my target.
We setup a jungle scene because his room is all decorated this way, just not so abundant. We bought Most of the props from Tai Pan. Also fun to note is that I kept my polarizing filter on and had my lights really low so I could set my aperture to f3.2. That created nice Bokeh in front of my subject and behind him. I like the way it turned out.
I like to put a heat pad where the little baby will be to warm things up and make the baby comfortable. I should have placed the heat pad right underneath the blanket my boy was resting on so it could have been on him the whole time. Another great tip is to put a little bouncer chair vibrating thing in the basket to help sooth the baby. That last one was not my idea but it comes from The Baby Wisperer, John Ridgeway.

This is what we came up with. We actually took off his clothes and diaper for a lot of these shots but I liked this one the most. I love the lion face on his bum.

We also did a few of him on some towels. I love my boy, and I love my Photovision target.

Sterile Funke

2009-03-30T10:29:00.000-06:00

The other day I had the opportunity to do a shoot with Dr. Michael Funke of the University of Utah. He is the master of the MEG (Magnetoencephalography) machine in the Department of Neurology.Taking a picture of him beside his MEG was nice for the Gray Matters publication but I needed to do some thing a little more personal. Naturally the next shot should be him in his MEG machine.I thought a sterile look was best for these pictures with him. The room was not much bigger than the MEG machine itself so there was not much room to shoot with. If you read the wiki article about the MEG machine you would now know that it uses very sensitive instruments to do what it does. Because of those sensitive instruments I was not able to use any strobes in the room. Right in front of the MEG machine is a 1 foot square whole in the wall that I was shooting from. Camera right had a humongous vault like door that allowed the light in from my alien bees strobe.
The room was all white inside so that light from the strobe bounced around lighting every thing up. The lighting ended up being kind of flat because of that bouncy light but It worked out well. I think the flat light also added to the sterile look I was going for. I would have liked the cables moved to complete the sterile look but I couldn't move them and removing them in post was more work than I was able to put into these images, so I tightened the image.
Awesome. This is Dr. Michael Funke and his MEG machine.

Sun Lighting

2009-03-18T13:45:00.000-06:00

Adjacent to the park and ride I use at the mouth of Weber Canyon is an abandoned parking lot that has been begging for my attention for a long time. It has not been used for quite some time which was apparent from the tall weeds growing all over it. Most every day whilst driving by I would think that photographs taken on that parking lot would look pretty cool.
I talked my sister in-law to come model for these pictures and I think over all I got what I wanted. The snow has melted and the vegetation is not yet springing up so things still look golden dead. With this in mind I thought golden, warm light would look really nice. We actually had some clouds in the sky but the sun was able to break through every so often and it looked great.
With me shooting into the sun I had my assistant with a nice silver reflector camera right to fill in the silhouette that was created. I love the golden light that is enveloping her in the first picture.

Isn't that parking lot awesome looking!

The sun had disappeared in this last shot so the crazy blown out hair light was gone but the lighting still looks good. To create the look I was going for I also did color correction in Lightroom.

Baby dreams

2009-02-28T09:28:00.000-07:00

After my wife and I found out she was pregnant I began thinking of what kind of photo shoot I should do for her maternity pictures. I was diligent and I scribbled down different ideas of what I should do.
When it all happened I did the diagram on the bottom right. I rented a backdrop from Scenic Backdrops with my mind filled with grandeur. They have some beautiful backdrops that can be used for many different things. There is one problem with them though, they are tiny. 5X6 is a very small space. You can actually see their prices on the page from my sketch book. The issue I was having was getting every thing to fit in the image.
This is what I came up with.
I wanted her to enveloped in baby items hanging all around her. You can see from these photos that I didn't get very good coverage. There was actually one really good picture but her head had a binki right in front of it.
To camera left I had built a very large white diffuser and had my Alienbees Ringflash lighting it up. I like the light it sprayed on her. It was also spraying light on to the backdrop so I made my self a scrim with some pvc pipes, cement, paint buckets, and some black cloth. It worked well to protect my backdrop from any killer light. I had a hair light coming from behind the backdrop and camera right to create that seperation I needed. To camera right I had a strobe with a softbox for a fill. After seeing the results I was getting I decided to take the cover off of my softbox to add contrast. Just a "pop" of contrast. It worked really well.

I did have to do some post on these pictures in Lightroom. On my cameras histogram my highlights were right where I wanted them, squeezing the right. When I imported them into Lightroom the exposure was low. I can't figure out why they would be exposed so nicely in my camera but the exposure dies on import. So I did expose these images in Lightroom properly for my post processing. I also fixed the natural lines under her eyes. One sweet function of Lightroom is the ability to soften skin. It does this by reducing clarity in the image. You can actually brush it on and it makes the skin soft with skin texture still intact. I did apply this edit. Sweet!

No Baby stomach but I like this picture. She spent a long time on her makeup and it turned out really nice in these pictures.

MRI Post Process

2009-02-24T10:57:00.000-07:00

The other day I was asked to take some emergency pictures of the new MRI suite, the MAGNETOM Verio 3T. The marketing department was sending some invitations to an open house for the new suite and they wanted some pictures for the invitation.
A few months ago I was asked to take pictures of this very same MRI machine when they were moving it in the building. I thought it was such a beautiful machine and my mind was dreaming about all the different photoshoots I could do with the machine.
Now common knowledge concerning an MRI machine is that it has hugungus magnets in it, hence the name. Well I knew that but I didn't quite realize what that meant for my photoshoots. It took the installation people about a week to get it up and running, meanwhile I was finalizing my photoshoot ideas. I even took some recon photo's for these shoots I was planning.

Then the bomb was dropped. There is no metal allowed in the room and neither is Kelly.
"Magnet is always on." My camera gear is not welcome into the MRI suite. My photoshoot dreams were destroyed in 1 millisecond of time. There was no way around it plus I had no idea what the magnets would do to my camera.
Well, now they are coming to me asking to do take some pictures quickly for this invitation. I knew two things: My strobes and what not are not invited and I have to stand outside the room in the open doorway. Awsome! "The lighting is going to be beautiful, I know it" I said to myself.

These last two pictures are the result of the shoot. To get these images I took my raw files into Adobe Camera Raw and fixed them up. I fixed the color and exposure of the images and then had to fix up the exposure on the faces of our models. I took each of these photos at f8 with my ISO at 100 for .6 of a second. It worked out alright in the end.
One of the ideas I had before I found out about the whole magnet thing was to have a strobe blasting light through the tube area giving the model a beautiful rim light. I also thought it would be awesome to have Steve Stevens, M.D. lying on the bed with just his head sticking out with me ontop of the machine looking down on him. Of course he would be in the whole hospital robe getup. Maybe next time.

Expose for the snow

2009-02-16T09:09:00.000-07:00

The reason it has been so long since my last post is because I don't like posting every photo shoot I do. Doing that is boring and pointless. Having said that most of my posts have been pointless, but I digress. We have been hit with some awesome snow storms as of late which has provided some fun opportunities for photography. A common problem with photos taken with an abundance of snow in the scene is that the cameras sensor meters the snow to 50% gray, which produces some nasty looking pictures.

To get your photos exposed properly right our of the camera you need to tell your camera to over expose your photos. The best thing I have found is to set your camera to Manual and ignore your meter.

The other day I took my son sledding in some hills behind our house with some friends. The sky was overcast and I wanted shots of the sledding action. With the overcast condition and my desire to catch the speed sledding I set my shutter to 1/250s with my aperture at f9. With the aperture and shutter set I set my ISO at 200 to get the speed I wanted.

It looks like these two were cut out of another picture and pasted in the air of another picture but they were definitely flying through the air with out the help of Photoshop. It was an awesome hill and an awesome jump. By the way, that sled they are in is actually one of those plastic totes for ice fishing or what have you. It makes the best sled ever.
I was shooting jpegs for the burst speed and because there is no need for post on pictures like these. The pictures were perfectly exposed in the camera so no post was done on any of these pictures.

Flat light and directional light

2009-01-23T09:53:00.000-07:00

When I am out shooting people I like to use whatever means possible to create a beautiful picture. Some times "available" light creates the mood I am looking for in a photo. Oft times I will use something to modify the light in the scene to create the look I have in my mind.

In this first photo the subject was playing on an abandoned truck beside the highway. The truck was under a carport/trashed barn which took away the harshness of direct sunlight. You can see in this picture that the lighting is flat on his face and surrounding area.
All we did for the next photo was to add a silver reflector camera left.
It adds punch to the picture. See how the reflector gives his face form and how it adds contrast to the whole scene. It also made the colors pop, which was nice.

Star bursts and Bokeh

2008-12-19T10:00:00.000-07:00

Bokeh is Japanese for "blurred or fuzzy" and I wanted to show bokeh in a pretty way. My 3 year old son wanted to take pictures of his monster trucks but I thought the Christmas tree would be a better subject. My son won so we set up the camera on the tripod for some pictures of his monster trucks. I wish I had one of those pictures to show you but they are no more. At 3 he is a better photographer than most.

After the monster truck photo shoot he let me use my camera to start my project. I set up my camera with .5s at f/2.8 to get the smallest DOF I could.
My focus is on the Christmas ball in the middle of the tree and you can see the bokeh effect in the foreground and the background. At this point I decided to change my settings to 4s at f/9 to see the effect it would have on my bokeh.
You can see the foreground is still blurred but the background is in focus and looking nice. I did notice one thing that surprised me. If you look at the lights in the first picture and compare them to this last picture you can see a bit of star bursts coming from the lights. That's cute. Seeing this I wanted to close down my aperture as far as I can to f/22 to see what would be the results. As expected my exposure was pretty long at 30s.
As you can see there is no bokeh in the photo but those star bursts are out of control cute.

Photography sketchbook

2008-12-16T13:16:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while I come across a photo that I like and I think to myself; "I really like the lighting in that photo, I want to try that for myself". Inevitably I forget all about it and it never happens. To remedy this problem I have started a photography journal wherein I jot down the photography and lighting setup I think I should use. Since starting this I have been able to learn a lot about light.
For this picture I had nailed one of my strobes into my wife's wall right above my head, and that's all. I put up a black background that totally disappeared in the picture. Naturally my shoes were already off and I grabbed my wife's piano bench to sit on. My inspiration for this picture was from Martin Prihod. He used a beauty dish above the head of his subjects which created a nice fall off on his back drops. His subjects were also wearing their shoes which is ok, I guess. He was throwing more light than I was which opened up his subjects which I like. As I was taking these pictures I was writing down my notes in my little notebook so I can remember what I had learned down the road. I really like the wood floor in this picture, it adds a bit of warmth to the picture.
Here is an outtake of my son playing around. My lights are funny because some times the sync speed is right on but then it fizzles and nothing captures. Here you can see the light from camera left barely hitting my son as the camera shot, the strobe above him didn't even fire. He loves taking pictures.
Another setup idea I had sketched out was one I borrowed from Greg Funnell where he has a behind the scenes look of his shoot with Colin Firth. This setup is great for wrapping the light no matter the direction of the subject. So my son and I set up my two soft boxes at 45 to try the setup ourselves. Our results are nice but there is one difference I noticed, Greg has a nice light fall off on his back ground but when I tried it my fabric background didn't look nice. I would like to buy a roll of gray paper and try again, I have a roll of blue that I might try later. The other problem I have is my fat face when I smile, but we had a great time.
My son really likes taking pictures and so he was snapping away whilst I was still setting up. I like this picture because the strobe flashing into the camera is cool. I was going to use that light as a hair light for one of our test shots. As you can see my head needed a light to bring it back from the dark abyss it was sucked into.
I really like having my sketchbook around so I can try things like this. I recommend every one to get one for their ideas.

Artis zee Biplane system

2008-12-01T09:10:00.000-07:00

For this issue of Gray Matters one of the articles talks about the Artis zee Biplane Neuro Angiography machine. It just so happens that the University of Utah Hospital has one of these bad boys and we were permited to "play" with it for a half an hour for a photo shoot with it.
This picture had a unique requirement in that it had to fit into a very small and long section of the magazine layout. All pertinent information needed to be in a thin area. Luckily the bed was long and so I think it worked out well.
For our lighting I brought in my strobes because I wanted certain areas lit for particular emphasis. The first thing I wanted lit was the machine itself because of the subject of the article. I also wanted my model lit because I thought it would at a bit of warmth to the photos and exam machines need all the warmth we can give them. For all of these pictures I actually didn't use my strobes but I used an overhead light that is built on to the machine. I used it because later in the shoot I wanted a much slower shutter speed.
For this shot I have the exam light hitting both the machine and face of the model so I stayed with the one light. The light was crazy intense so I had to remove some stops. In the end I removed about 3 stops of light using a clear plastic garbage bag. It diffused the light and reduced the intensity, what a find. The panels were working two fold. First, they obviously added to the scenes authenticity and interest but they also were there to cover the door that you will see was conveniently in the wrong place.
This picture shows why I wanted the slow shutter speed. Dr. Stevens manned the machine and kindly rotated the sensor thingies to create this sweet looking photo. I think this photo properly showed the motion of the machine which adds to the article but also looks really cool.
I really liked this picture because I think the machine stands out more and the movement is much clearer, but that door! To capture the moving machine I used a technique called 2nd curtain. I still had the exam light properly exposed but I added a Canon speedlite 430EX to the top of my camera. I pointed the speedllite up toward the machine and set it to second curtain. Instead of the flash going off when the shutter opens it goes off right before the shutter closes. Then you freeze the object in motion after the movement. Very cool.

Molecular Basis of Parkinson’s Disease

2008-11-26T08:09:00.000-07:00

I have the awesome opportunity to shoot pictures for a quarterly publication called Gray Matters. I wanted to show some pictures from that shoot because of the lighting setup I decided to use.
Pictured here are three researchers for the Pulst Lab in the Clinical Neurosciences Center at The University of Utah. The man in the wheelchair is Dr. Duong Huynh, Ph.D., the man in the bow tie is Dr. Stefan Pulst, M.D. who is the Chair of the Department of Neurology at the University of Utah, and the third gentleman is Dr. Daniel Scoles, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Neurology.

Dr. Huynh is featured in the winter issue of Gray Matters describing the trials he has gone through in life and how he arrived here at the University of Utah. I would recomend you pick up a copy and read about him.

Any way, I needed a picture of the three scientists whilst at the same time showing an example of the work Dr. Huynh is doing. Apparently the image on the screen of the computer is something awesome so this is the route we went. What I like most about this picture is my light setup. I have my ABR800 with an umbrella camera left that is wrapping light around the scientists. Nothing special there, in fact it is a bit boring. So I added a bare flash behind the scientists to create some depth. I think it added a spot of interest to a flat picture. I got this idea from the man himself David Hobby.

I tried the same light setup with just Dr. Huynh and one of his lab assistants but the light wasn't doing much around the rim but it was lighting up that office behind them. This was shot at 1/80 at f6.3
This last photo shows the rim light nicely tracing the contours of his head, now if I could just go back in time and insist on shooting somewhere other than in front of his office. The point here is to show this new lighting idea and I think it looked nice.

Ricks Shoot Out

2008-11-18T10:00:00.000-07:00

The other day I had the opportunity to do a fall shoot with the Ricks family. We ended up taking the pictures behind Lagoon in Farmington Utah. I like taking pictures there because there is a lot of nice foliage and couple of cool looking bridges.

In this first picture the sun was coming in strong from camera right. Luckily the trees provided a nice shady space that allowed for easier light manipulation. I had my beautiful bride holding my 42 inch reflector camera left bouncing some of that beautiful light onto the Ricks family. You can actually see some hard light making it through the trees and landing on the arm of the dad.
Another feature of this location are some nice rock setups. This picture has mom with the two boys perched nicely in the shade of some trees on a large rock. This rock is just to the north of the nicest bridge. Deeper in the woods it was trickier to get some nice light to bounce with my reflectors so I pulled out my flash and bounced it off the reflector onto the family. I am pretty sure my flash was dialed down to 1/8 or something like that.
Using the silver side of my reflector I was able to draw out more light from this shady area with this picture. Dad and son were hanging out on the bridge and they decided it was time for the best picture of the afternoon. You can see the catch lights from the reflector, camera right. I had my ISO set to 400 with my aperture at 4.5 and my shutter at 1/100s. I think it turned out ok and they were pleased.
We had a lot of fun doing this shoot and near the end we just went nuts with the camera so we had a lot of pictures. The only thing I would have changed was the time we took the pictures. If we had been a week or two earlier we would have had more colors in the backgrounds. It was still a nice time.

Some Jack-o-Lanterns

2008-10-20T08:04:00.000-06:00

On Saturday my wife and her sister wanted some fall portraits done of their boys, more pictures in front of colorful trees again. To be honest I am bored of the same fall pictures in front of colorful trees. Regardless, we set out to document another year of the boys.
As luck would have it whilst we were driving to Noel's house we passed a pumpkin patch. A farmer was selling his pumpkins by the side of the road and he displayed his wares on huge bales of hay. It was the find of the century because there were no colorful trees around to spoil the photos. It didn't take much to convince the ladies that destiny had brought us to that pumpkin patch that day.
Karter's cousin was perfect for every picture I took of him. Here are two samples of some really good ones of Iaasic.
For this picture to turn out as it did I zoomed out to 24mm on my lens and then I got really close to Iaasic. He thought it was great and started laughing at me, perfect! So I snag a few photos in this position.
The sun was very bright right now which created enough light in the shadows that I was able to have my fstop at 2.8 for the depth of field to present bokeh and have my shutter at 1/400th of a second. Awesomely fast. Of course blogger messes up the pictures when it shrinks them so if you click on the images you will get a better look.
Now the difference between Iasic and my son Karter is that Karter doesn't smile in pictures I take of him. When he sees me coming at him with my camera and lens he just says "here we go again" and walks off. Let's just say it is getting harder to get some nice pictures of him, it makes his mom sad.
To show you his soberness I have uploaded two pictures of him from the shoot. If you look close enough you can actually see his distain for getting his picture taken by his dad. He would much rather be behind the camera taking the pictures. I think he might become a little photographer himself and start contributing to this blog.

On a teqnical note, for these pictures I used a bit of exposer compensation after dialing in my aperture. Some of my shots were maddly over exposed but most turned out nice a bright, and colorful. Now if overly compensating for the exposure would give my son a brighter outlook on life it would have been awesome.

Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon... and The Fall

2008-10-15T21:51:00.000-06:00

It has been a while since I could put up a new post but here is one. Actually it looks as though it has been exactly 2 months. A couple Sundays ago whilst we were waiting for church I pulled out my camera, just for kicks. Here are three pictures that came from that afternoon.
Today after I got home from work I had a bit of time so I decided to waddle out to the back yard to see how the weeds were fairing considering this last cold spell. Having gone out back I found my tomato and pepper plants more beautiful than they had been all summer. Maybe the pictures don't do them justice so you are more than welcome to come over to see for yourself.

Doctor work

2008-08-15T13:35:00.001-06:00

The guy on the left is L. Eric Huang, M.D., Ph.D. with the University of Utah Department of Neurosurgery. I was on assignment to shoot him in his lab for a new neurosciences publication called Gray Matters. He is being featured in this, the inaugural issue, because of some of his break through research he is conducting. He decided the lack of oxygen is closely related to the growth of new tumor cells. To be honest it is hard to explain what he is doing but you can go to the departments website and read all about it.

Before the shoot I read up on what he is doing hoping it would help me come up with ideas on how to show his awesomeness. It didn't work. To describe his work Dr. Huang uses words like tumorigenesis, myocardial ischemia, and angiogenesis. This didn't help either.

We came up with three different solutions, the first two he accepted and we shot but the third was a bust. One of the solutions is above. Doesn't this pictures scream "molecular mechanisms of hypoxia-induced tumor progression". No, not really. I like the picture though.

I had my huge umbrella camera left and took some shots.
The second solution was to include some computer screens that showed diagrams of this and that. Having done that before we set out and accomplished our goal. Scientists have messy desks.

What I really wanted to do was to take a picture of Dr. Huang holding a large 3d model of some kind of molecule and then we would strap an oxygen mask connected to an oxygen tank on to the molecule. He didn't have a large 3d model of a molecule so that was a no go. Maybe one day I will get my hands on one and do a reshoot.

My other assignment was to shoot Dr. Anne G. Osborn M.D., world famous Neuroradiologist. In fact her textbook on Neuroradiology is the definitive work on the subject. One thing I have noticed is that radiologists are like bats, their reading rooms are obviously dark and they sit in their reading rooms looking at their images. There is a lot of no lights in their lives. With this in mind I wanted to do the obvious and shoot her in front of some of her favorite images with the room being dark.

Ok, that was a lie. Truth be told I wanted to do some thing totally different but I was very afraid to ask because she is uber busy and I didn't want to get yelled at and cry. I wanted to take a picture of her in a hospital gown coming out of an MRI machine. Me with my camera on top of the machine looking down on her as she slides out. That would have been an awesome picture.

Pressed for time I had her sitting in front of her bank of screens, threw up a small soft box on camera right and shot away. The biggest problem I had with this shoot was that she was working and would turn around for a second and let me snap a photo.

This got the job done but it would have been much cooler with her coming out of an MRI machine. She is a scientist too, look at her desk. Actually these pictures crop out most of the mess. Here is another shot of her working.

2008-08-04T10:28:00.000-06:00

The other day I did a photo shoot of some of the cutest peanut butter cups I have ever seen. One of the administrative assistants had made some lady bugs out of chocolate and peanut butter. Instead of eating it my first thought was to shoot it in some floral arrangements.

For these shots I used my 430EX, 55 inch reflector, and my 22 inch reflector. I had fun and it broke up my day.

Neurosurgery Photography

2008-07-31T07:35:00.000-06:00

There are all sorts of photographers out there. Some photographers, like Annie Leibovitz, are well known and get to take pictures of very famous people. Whilst other photographers such as myself have the opportunity to take pictures of any thing we can. Currently I get a few people that come into my studio for portraits. You can check out my gallery here.

The rest of my day is taken up with my full time job as the Media Director for the department of Neurosurgery at the University of Utah. This job gets me into places that not a lot of photographers get to go. I bet Annie Leibovits could easily get in the OR to take pictures if she wanted to.

I spend a lot of time in the OR for Cranial, Spine, and Peripheral Nerve surgeries. I have a huge collection of video and photos from the OR so I thought I would start sharing some of my favorites.

The doctors have many different options when it comes to lighting and it all depends on the procedure they are doing and the approach they are taking. In this first picture Dr. House and Dr. Binning are illuminated by the overhead lights. The room lights are on but for this shot I spot metered the head of Dr. House and of course that underexposed every thing else.
I really like the dramatic effect those concentrated lights produce in this image. It's also nice that there is light on the side of Dr. Houses face. It makes it really nice.

This is an image of the brain while a subdural grid is placed. Basically these grids help the doctors define where in the brain seizures are coming from. These kinds of images are some of my favorite.

When I take a picture like these last two I set my camera to aperture mode. Those over head lights you see in the first image are pointed straight at the brain which gives me a ton of light to work with. I usually set the aperture to f10 to capture as much in focus brains as I can. That usually sets my shutter at around 1/125 of a sec. Plenty fast for hand held above a brain. I also set my ISO to 200 just for that extra kick of speed it provides. I imagine I can go down to f8 or maybe a stop lower to keep things in focus but for now my mind is set on f10. I have taken a couple at an angle with the f-stop at 2.8. That was not useful for the doctor but it made for a fun picture. I should try to find that.

One other thing I want to try is my circular polarizing filter. I think that will do wonders with those reflections coming of the discs and plastic of the grid.
I should look for some images without the grids because the brain is an incredibly beautiful subject for photography. Stay tuned for that. This close up shot shows a greater perspective to what is going on. That's the doctors finger in the bottom right corner.

So of all of the types of photographers out there my little space in this world is in the OR where my subjects are very cooperative and the lighting is always interesting. If you want to see some awesome surgery pictures you need to get you hands on a book called The Sacred Heart. It's on Amazon. It is a collections of photos from the OR of many different types of surgeries from a great medical photographer Max Aguilera-Hellweg. You can check out his website here. (Warning, his website is kind of painful to be on but he has a lot of awesome pictures.)

A Midsummer Night's Shootout

2008-07-23T08:11:00.000-06:00

Simply put, I am a light sleeper. If my son moves in the night I wake up. Last night I was wakened by the sound of an electric current of 40 kiloamperes (kA) ripping through the night sky. That was awesome. Howling wind, torrential downpour, wind gusts ripping my Rubbermaid shed to pieces. I had to get up and make sure every thing was still intact and that my wife and son were ok.

After doing my husband and fatherly duties I climbed back in bed and watched the light show dancing on my ceiling. Whilst thinking about the rain that was going to save my dead lawn I was struck with a crazy thought. "I should grab my tripod and camera." Like any other normal person I was up and going at the thought.

I set up in my bathroom and removed the screen for a clear shot and because if I am going to be up at 1:00 A.M. I might as well make as much noise as possible. My poor wife.

This was the first picture I took. I set my shutter to 30 seconds and my aperture at f/9.0. I am glad I got this shot because the show really died down after this one. I really like the purple throughout this image. I hope you can see that on your screens. This picture came out of my camera as a dual tone. Just beautiful.At this point I wanted to lighten the pictures up for some more detail so I opened up my aperture to f/4.5. I then set my shutter to bulb, I thought I would just hold it open till I saw some lightning shoot off.

Amazing I was thinking this much at 1:00 in the A.M. Now I don't have a shutter release and usually when shooting with your shutter on bulb you want that but I think these turned out great. Having said that a shutter release would have been nice. So I kept the shutter open for 72 seconds and had the aperture at f/4.5 for this picture. You can start to see movement in the clouds and a lot more color.
With the same aperture and the shutter still with its bulb setting I took this next shot. As you can see the lightning strike came sooner than the previous picture. The shutter was open for 29 seconds. I really like this picture.
The lightning strikes had slowed down greatly at this point but there was still a lot of lightning going through the clouds. At this point I was starting to realize what I was doing and what time of the day it really was, so I decided to close up shop. But not till after I hold the shutter open for a ridiculous amount of time in hopes of snagging a couple of strikes in one image. That didn't happen but I really like this last shot because of the movement in the picture.
This picture was shot with 104 seconds at f/4.5. The lightning flippin through the clouds lit up the sky nicely with orange and purple. In the full size image you can also start to see color in the foreground of the image. It is kind of cool. Not only is there a lot of motion in the beautiful clouds but you can also see movement in the trees. It really was quite a storm to behold.

So last night we were blessed with not only rain for my dead lawn but also a beautiful fireworks display, unrivaled by any thing man can make.

"Do you want fries with that?" Of course I do!

2008-07-02T18:11:00.001-06:00

I was hanging out home tonight with two things on my mind. The first was Canons Photography in the Parks Photo Contest. Ever since I first read about the contest I have thought hard about what I was going to submit as my entries. I have not done much with landscape photography but I am excited for the challenge.

The second thing that was on my mind was dinner. Hamburgers specifically. I love hamburgers. As I was getting my affects together for my burger I thought it a good idea to grab some light from my studio and my camera.

With the patty frying I set up my first shots. Large 60 inch umbrella camera right and a silver reflector camera left. I have never taken portraits of food before but it makes sense to combine these two great loves of mine.

After I assembled the burger I took some more shots. This one has the Large white umbrella camera left and now one of my gold reflectors camera right. I really like the warmth the gold reflector added to the bun.

What's a burger with out fries? No good. So I baked some of my favorite Walmart brand fries and called it good.

Now I admit that I am no Lou Manna but I did have a lot of fun doing this shoot. I also learned a couple of things for my next shoot. Like maybe show more meat, and add more light to bring out more of the textures. After looking at these images I think I would also want to clean my counter first.

If any of you know any techniques that will help me with food photography please leave it in the comments. For the National Park contest I am planning on heading up to Island Park in Idaho in August. For any pointers with that please post them.

Manwill Shoot Out

2008-06-23T09:56:00.000-06:00

I got together with two other photographers on Saturday to play around with our camera equipment. We invited a neighbor family over to be our models. They enjoyed it because they got free pictures.

Here are some of my favorites. I am partial to the white images. I especially liked the white shirts with the white backdrop. Their faces just exploded off the photo.

We had a lot of fun. If you like taking pictures we should probably get together.

Color on the cheap

2008-05-23T10:19:00.000-06:00

Color is a pretty big deal in photography. We spend a lot of time and money time and money trying to get the color in our photos perfect. When configuring your work flow for color one of the first places to start is with the color balance in your camera.

Most cameras come with White Balance presets that you can easily and quickly switch around to get the color you desire. If you desire more control over your cameras color you will want to color balance it per situation you are in. My camera has a Custom White Balance setting that allows me to do just as it says.

There are multiple ways of balancing your cameras white balance. One option is to use a tool like ExpoDisc. You can check it out here.

Another solution cost a fraction of the price you would pay for the ExpoDisc. In fact it costs about less than a penny. Instead of and expensive ExpoDisc use a coffee filter. I learned this trick from one of my favorite DIY websites, DIYPhotography.net. Check out the post here.

It's easy. Strap one of those coffee filters onto the end of your lens, point your camera at the light source, and take the picture. You now have the perfect image to custom white balance your camera with.

Well after reading this I definitely wanted to try it and I found the results interesting. I wonder if some coffee filters are better than others. I have finally found time to post some test shots I took.

This first image is the image I used to white balance my camera with. My office has fluorescent lights. (about 4,000K)

It actually looks really brown.

This is the picture I took with the camera set with the custom balance. The color is actually pretty close to how it actually looks.

That is a beautiful container of salt.

This image was shot with the exact same configuration but the white balance was set to the auto setting. It is a little on the warm side.

This picture was shot on the Fluorescent setting. It has more orange than the auto.

I think the images speak for themselves with this test. I have never used an ExpoDisc and I am sure they do a beautiful job color balancing your camera. But the coffee filter is a bit cheaper. If you get a chance to try this out please post them in your comment so we all can see.

You can also check out my gallery page here.

Playing with portraits

2008-05-09T09:38:00.000-06:00

I have a few other pictures I would like to post from my last shoot. I took the opportunity to get a little creative with the post processing of a couple images. I really like how they turned out.

With this picture I really wanted to add to the worn down, old, and dirty feeling of the picture. Turning it to B&W and blowing out some highlights did just that. I also added a bit of yellows to the image overall.

I have some rolling hills just behind my house that have always been in my mind as a place I would love to take some portraits. So for these engagements I did just that.

The bride and groom said I could take a few minutes and take them back there for this shot. They didn't quite have the vision I did but now they can see where I was going with this series. What a fun picture. This is not the picture they are going to use for their invitations but I love it.

Here is another image from our engagement series. This graffiti wall gets a lot of use with photographers and I am one of them. It is located around 400 s and Sate st. in Salt Lake City, Utah. The graffiti actually changes quite often so it is fun to see what is new on there. Any way this is one of the better shots we took there.

And finally another bridal from the Monday bridal session. We really wanted to go out to the Bonneville Salt Flats but as we were driving out there we knew we wouldn't make it. Instead of the Salt Flats we stopped at Saltair. Saltair is a lake side resort from back in the day. I have a picture of my grandmother hanging out there as a kid. Any way we stopped there and took some shots as a the sun was going down. It was a lot of fun to run around setting up in the salty mud for this shot. The lighting was very pretty and till fill her face and the shadow side of her dress I used two silver reflectors.

Bridals in sunny utah

2008-05-06T12:13:00.000-06:00

Wow! I just spent two days taking bridal portraits. This monster portrait session almost killed me but it was a lot of fun. On Saturday we took our bride down to the Garden Park Ward in Salt Lake. It is the most unique LDS meeting house I have ever been too. It was beautiful.

We went to City Creek Park, the LDS chapel, and a very cool abandoned warehouse hiding by the refineries off Beck Street in North Salt Lake.

Here are a few samples from the shoot. I will post some from the second shoot and from their engagements.

I tried to use proper lighting on all of these shots. Never did I just take the picture with the bride under shadow. We always had reflectors or my 60 inch umbrella to add good light. I think they turned out pretty good.

I will have more uploaded to my gallery here.

White Portraits

2008-04-15T07:24:00.000-06:00

The other day I had the opportunity to do a couple photo shoots in my studio using my white back drop. For some reason doing white backdrops was really hard for me but I think the portraits turned out really good.

One thing I think I will do differently next time is put the subject on a platform that is around 1 to 2 feet tall. I think that would eliminate some of the problems I was having with half of the picture being whited out and the other half not.

The Only way this boys mother could get him to hang out on the chair for the picture was to give him candy. She has a lot of pictures of her two boys with candy.

Just the day before this shoot this little girl went to a wedding and saw a portrait of the bride with her bouquet in front of her face. So that was the picture she wanted most in this session. I recommend using some thing other than tulips, the petals were huge.

Location Portraits

2008-04-14T07:54:00.000-06:00

On Saturday I had the opportunity to both practice some outdoor lighting techniques and teach them at the same time. Saturday was beautifully bright, warm day. Perfect for destroying location portraits, unless you know how to control the light.

I learned this technique from Jeff Smith's Lighting for Outdoor & Location Portrait Photography book. You can check it our here from Amazon. You can check out his website here. Any way we set up at our location outside at 10:00 in the morning and stopped around 12:00.

To get the lighting decent I created a shadow above the subject using a white reflector. That allowed light to come in but removed the harsh shadows that were coming from the sun. I then put a black scrim camera right by the subject. This created shadow on the left side of the subjects face.

This is what that setup looks like. You can see we don't have harsh shadows and she is lit pretty well except we are getting shadows that are not pleasing to look at. Here eyes are really dark and this does not look like a portrait.

To add a bit more light to the subject and create the look we want I added a white reflector under the subject that filled in all of the shadows and especially around her eyes.

The first thing I notice are the catch lights in her eyes from adding the reflector. The shadows on the face are now all gone or softened nicely and her eyes are brighter.

One thing I think I would try next time is to take another reflector camera left and up a bit to add a catch light at 10:00. I think that would look more natural and be a bit more pleasing to me.

Adding the reflector camera left would also darken the shadow created by the black scrim camera right and I think that would be nice too.

Whilst we were waiting and setting up my beautiful assistant and son were my subjects. It is hard to get a good picture with Karters eyes open because he loves to do his cheesy face when the camera is out.

Colour and lighting weekend

2008-04-07T08:22:00.000-06:00

This weekend I had some time and the sun was actually shining so I took Karter outside to run around. I also took my camera and a shiny gold/silver reflector. I like using this shiny reflector when the sun hides behind the clouds. It adds enough light and punch to the subject to do a beautiful job lighting the face.

This first image I am using the silver side lighting up the shadow that would normally make his face really dark. Doing this has brought out more detail in his face. You can see those wrinkles on his forehead that come from him yelling at his sled.

With this picture I used the gold side of the reflector. It brightened up the image so you can see his face but also added a bit of warmth to the image.

(The light coming off of this reflector was not very bright because the sun was hiding behind the clouds. Karter is squinting because he hams up the camera every time. If he just stood there or did a normal smile we would see some beautiful catch lights that the reflector would create for us. But I do love it when he hams it up.)

After the wind picked up I left Karter outside for dead and came in to see my beautiful wife sitting at the table reading. The lighting on her face was perfect so I took the classic Rembrant. We have two big north facing windows camera right that was filling the room with the best soft light.

For more of a glamour shot I could have placed a reflector camera left and had some soft fill. I like the look of this one though.

My favorite part of this image was her eyes. You can see in this black and white how bright her eyes were with that lighting. She also has some beautiful catch lights, just from those big windows.

Madison Shoot Out

2008-04-03T08:47:00.000-06:00

On the 19th of March I had a great Senior Shoot with Madison. She was a lot of fun to work with.

This is my favorite picture from the shoot. It was the perfect bright sunny spring day in Utah.

With it being a bright sunny day this shot was in the perfect place because there was a beautiful bright white wall off camera right that was illuminating her perfectly.

You can check out my gallery for more images.

Gallery