Havasupai Falls Trip

I finally got a few minutes last weekend to look through some of the pictures and videos from the trip to Havasupai Falls by the Grand Canyon. It was a blast except for the 2500 miles of driving. Actually the drive south through Utah, Arizona and Nevada was beautiful. Most of the following pictures were taken with my iPhone.

The land looks like its out of a road runner cartoon

The Hoover Dam was a sight to see. Such a massive structure. They are building an overpass so that cars will no longer go over the dam.

Inacio, one of the hiking team. -Also an excellent brewer of beer.

We stayed at the Cavern Inn Motel the first night. We packed and repacked the backpacks. It was sort of a "do or die" on what we would take with us on the 10 mile hike into the canyon.

It's getting late so I will post more of the trip tomorrow...

Photo.net Photo of the Week

I got a short email from the administrators at photo.net that I got the photo of the week. This is kinda of cool in that I have seen some stunning POW's and always wished I could have just a little bit of the skill-set of the many talented photogs on that great site.
This was a shot taken in the middle of getting some portfolio and audition pictures for Jaimi McGuire. I remember the idea came when she was putting on her pointe shoes and was sort of shoving her toes in while holding herself up with her hands. -It is really only possible to ballance for a second or so. Jaimi pulled it off by looking relaxed for that split second.

Ryan Callan was off to the side handholding a mono light with a medium softbox low to the ground. The white seamless had some water drip on it from a leaky roof the night before so the lower left has some bad haphazard photoshop done to it.

The Ideas in my Head

This was an idea I had rolling around my brain for possible dance portraits for the Theatre Ballet Company. While we eventually opted for a simpler head shot instead of going with the silhouette theme, it was a fun learning experience.

The first ideas was to try to make you do a double take and with a mirrored version of the main dancer. Is that how a shadow works? Is this Photoshop? Or would it be subtle and the viewer would go "cool photo!"

My main light was a large softbox overhead and another monolight to the left, high and behind to get a little separation. I used a Nikon SB-900 speed light and fired it way off to my right placed on the ground with a snoot to keep it from spilling all over the background. I gelled it with a 1/2 CTO.

It was harder then I thought to get good consistent results in camera. The shadow subject needs to face straight on to the light (SB900) and not the camera. The light needed to go way back. -About 25 feet. The closer the subject to the wall, the smaller and more defined the shadow of the dancer. To get the timing for jumps I framed the shadow dancer so I could see them in the view finder and clicked at the peak action, cropping them out in the final image.

Thanks Adrienne, Ashley and Mackenzie for you patience and the smiles.

6 Pro Photographers Share Their Most Guarded Digital Secrets

Here is a cool article on maclife.com. I always find it interesting what plug-ins others use. I am a big fan of the Imagenomic Portraiture plug in. Its has saved me a ton of time. Mike Sweeney has a great point about plug-ins in general. You should set it where you think it looks good, and then back it off a little. I try to practices this with most corrections and even with adjustment masks.

Taylor does his best Hendrix

Taylor was great! Like a lot of my portrait sessions, I start out simple and easy. Get the yearbook shot and make mom happy. From there, who knows what will happen. He brought his guitar to the shoot and we left it in its case to get the obligatory yearbook photo. After a bit we pulled out the guitar and got some nice shots.

I was already looking around for some lighter fluid though after seeing a shot of Jimi Hendrix the other day dousing his guitar while on stage. "Hey Taylor, are you game?" Doesn't matter... I was already setting up the lights. After a couple of tweaks I came up with this...

I was trying to create a stage feel with a couple of mono lights, I left them ungelled thinking that I would make the final image black and white. Stage lights tend to have gels or color filters in front of the lights to add color effects to change the look or feel of a concert. This shot was taken at Ballet Arts Academy across the street from my studio when it was the Fat Tuesdays club...

After Taylor shot down my idea of actually lighting his guitar on fire, I took the shot I had in the can and googled around for flame tutorials on the web. After five minutes I made this simple flame pattern...

Added it to the original file

I changed the flame layer's adjustment mask to "screen" which dropped the black background.

The flames needed some boost in contrast. I duplicated that layer a few times and played with a couple of the layers with a curve adjustment. I added some lens blur to the foreground and background to give a shallower depth of field.

The shot I saw recently was in black and white. Added some noise and tweaked the black and white conversion to hold on to the red and yellow flames.

No one was burned in the making of this photograph. I added a CTO (color temperature orange) gel to a nikon speedlight to add a little warmth to the face from the fake flames...

Yearbook Pictures Due

High School Seniors
Its that time! If you have not picked the yearbook photo yet, please take a look and send me the filename. I'll take care of the rest. There is no charge for this.

Take advantage of a 15% discount between now and December 1st and order your pictures ala carte. Package discounts will limit you to 2 to 4 pictures for the entire package. The discount will let you order whatever you want and at a better deal then my best package price.

Photo of the Week

Ashley wanted to get some pictures with her best friend a few weeks ago. While I usually avoid shooting at River Front Park, I got a chance to ride the carousel.

I found out that I am a little prone to montion siickness when riding a carousel shooting from a horse over the shoulder while going up and down and round and round... Set the camera in manual mode or shutter priority at 1/30th of a second. The flash from the camera is set to rear sync and will freeze what it hits, while everything else will blur. The camera flash was in TTL mode to automatically set the power to expose and freeze the two subjects.

My New Blog

Welcome to my blog. I am not sure where I will take this. I've never been much of a writer, so maybe I'll just post a bunch of pictures with a little bit of text you don't have to read... This could be a sounding board where I can throw out some of my ideas in picture form and see what you guys like. Leave some comments and click on the little RSS button in the address bar. We'll see what happens...

-Scott

My New Blog

Welcome to my blog. I am not sure where I will take this. I've never been much of a writer, so maybe I'll just post a bunch of pictures with a little bit of text you don't have to read... This could be a sounding board where I can throw out some of my ideas in picture form and see what you guys like. Leave some comments and click on the little RSS button in the address bar. We'll see what happens...

-Scott