Photowalking Utah studio event 2011

This year I and Scott Smith hosted a setup for Photowalking Utah 2011 studio event (second year). I wanted to post a follow up of the lighting setup as well as some notes on the result from each light.

I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about technique (or my lack thereof), but rather just give a show and tell version of what each piece of lighting contributes to the overall image.

One of the things I like to do is to look at an image and try to dissect the light by looking at the highlights, shadows etc. If you are the same, the skip down to the bottom of the post to see the final result.

The image is the result of three strobes and one large reflector for fill (a very simple and common setup).

The light setup:



Images showing the progression of adding the different light sources. First off an image showing the result of the main Octabox (47") lighting the subject only:

Next the addition of the background light. A gridded strobe on a grey seamless roll of paper.

Next an image showing the result of adding the rim light. The gridded beauty dish adds that extra bit of light on the hair and the side of the face to separate the subject from the background.

Finally the addition of a large 48" X 96" reflector for fill.

Happy shooting!

Exploding lightbulb theme

A composite image from the light bulb shoot I did with Scott Smith. There are a few more in the works, but though I should share a photo before I go onto other things I feel I need to share.

Shooting exploding lightbulbs

The shoot occurred a while back, but I have recently begun editing the images (I will save end results for a later post). I wanted to highlight on something that Scott brought up in his post at his website. We started out using studio strobes, but quickly switched to speed lights for the shoot. The reason being the much shorter flash duration of speed lights enabled us to freeze the light bulbs exploding. I have images below that show the difference between the speed lights and strobes (notice the pellet used to destroy the bulbs, in the strobe version it appears as an orange blur).

The images we captured are actually long exposure images (one image is a 6.3 second exposure). flash was used to capture action (photography is about the light after all). If you would like to see what the bulbs looked like while exploding, I suggest you hit the link above and head on over to Scott's website. He has some excellent captures of the bulbs exploding.

Image captured using strobes

Image captured using speedlights

Vacation in the Bahamas

We just returned from a cruise to the Bahamas. We boarded a cruise ship in Miami, and headed first stop, Key West. I never realized how big cruise ships are...

This is the port of Miama just as we were leaving.

I really didn't get to take that many photos. The second stop was in Nassau, where we did some snorkeling. The snorkeling was probably the highlight of the trip, but I never did puchase an underwater housing for my camera, and the film camera we had that was water tight, died as I tried to load it with a new roll of film the morning we were leaving.

The trip was actually part of a Scentsy retreat for Anji that I was lucky enough to tag along. We met with some new and old Scentsy friends.