lighting

Fun with Flash and Friends - Cinematic Lighting

One of my friends was starting to put together idea for her project she needed to submit to film schools she was applying for, one of which (for USC) was to submit a series of six photos that told a story. There couldn't be any description of the plot or characters. The entire idea should be easy to understand by simply looking at the images submitted. I offered to help her with her concept of telling a story of...well I'll let you figure it out, since that was the point of the project. She wanted to not only not use words though, she wanted to not even have faces, so we brainstormed sort of a storyboard and shot as close to the waist down as we could. The other criteria of the project was that the images had to not be edited, couldn't even get the slightest brushing in Photoshop, so these images are straight out of camera. We used 5 Nikon speedlights to sculpt the light as much as we could in real life (and shot after dark to avoid having to fight the sun), which took a little while, but was totally worth it.

 

She got in by the way...


Maserati Good Times - Nikon D300S Test of Video and Stills

My D300S arrived yesterday, and I felt compelled to go out and give it a run for it's money, buy testing out video quality of fast moving objects (driving with it showed a bit of rolling shutter problems, but acceptable until something comes along that doesn't have that problem) and low light performance. I completely forgot to set the default type of photos to RAW, so the images in the video and posted below are straight-out-of-camera JPEGs, I simply brought the ones posted into Lightroom to resize and add the watermark. Hope this is at least a little interesting to you, I definitely had fun, and was surprised no cops showed up to ask me what I was doing laying on the ground next to a nice Maserati with a bunch of flashes gripped onto sign posts and railings.

 

Check out the video below or click this link to view the higher resolution version: 

 

 

 

Smithsonian Shoot

The other day I went to hang out in DC and give a little hands-on training to a new photographer, Jermaine. I hadn't been to the Smithsonian in FOREVER, so we hit up the Natural History Museum to give him some challenging indoor light to get under control. After the museums closed (way too early if you ask me) we went out on the Mall and took some exterior shots of the other museums and the Capitol. Here's a couple from the day.


Little off camera flash for an environmental portrait of a new photog

This is a 15 second exposure, to make most of the crowd "disappear"

News Crew reporting on the Holocaust Museum shootings that day

Unfortunately the day we went was the day the shooting happened in the Holocaust Museum