Just some Fun

I was just messing around a bit this evening with a cloud photo I took a few days ago. I mirrored the cloud and cropped it for the look I wanted and then played around with the filters in photoshop and really liked what the plastic wrap filter did to it. So here it is. I did a whole bunch of other stuff before I got to this point, like converting to black and white and then using a duotone on it. I got the darker looks from using multiply on one layer and then using a layer mask to make the center even darker.

I'm too tired to look up the camera specs, plus the computer is reacting to the big file this became in photoshop and is running a bit slow.

Hope you enjoy my "artful" endeavor.

Black and White

I like black and white. This is from the shoot I did of my daughter and grandson a few days ago. As good as I think it looks on screen, it printed up even better on some Hahnemuhle Fine Art Baryta.

I converted to black and white in Photoshop using the black and white adjustment, then switched it to grayscale and used a quadtone present to get some richness to the image.

Specs: Canon 30D, 17-85 lens @ 38 mm (which is about a 61mm equivalent with the 1.6 crop factor), 1/60 @ f5, ISO 100.

Lighting info: I set up in a room upstairs in my daughter's house. Camera right had a window with light coming in so I used my 5 in 1 reflector using just the diffuser to let some softer light shine through. Behind the camera was another window that had light streaming in. I draped a white bedsheet over my daughters bowflex to soften that light. Then I used a Lastolite Ezybox Hotshoe softbox with my Vivitar flash shooting through it.

Who is a Real Photographer?

No picture today, been busy doing other stuff like printing some 4x6s for my daughter and in between, installing some transition pieces on the new flooring I recently put down.

There is a great post by David duChemin on the definition of a photographer and some great comments following. It's a good read and raises an interesting subject.

Here's some further thoughts on it. As I mentioned above, I installed some flooring recently. It maybe doesn't make me a flooring expert but certainly a DIYer.

When I worked in the warehouse at the mill I told my kids I was a professional driver. Technically, I was because I got paid to drive around the warehouse getting paper rolls for loading. Certainly not on the level of a Formula One driver, but what defines professional versus amateur? Mainly, in my opinion, getting paid for it. The term doesn't define the skill or skill level. An amateur golfer/football player/photographer/floorer may well have the same skill levels or higher that the pros do, but don't get paid for it.

I consider myself an amateur photographer, a hobbyist, whatever. I have been trying to take it to a higher level by learning about lighting, etc. and buying additional equipment. But, I'm not really interested, at this point, in making it all a business with all the pressure, etc.

Just some additional thoughts.

Seth Triptych

I've been busy the last few days but I had thought that these three shots of my grandson Seth would make a good triptych and I mentioned it to my wife and she thought it would be a great gift for a baby shower for my daughter. So, I threw it together and sized it to basically a 16x20 size and printed it out and put it in a frame I had sitting around. My daughter loved it and I was quite happy with how it all turned out.

I was thinking last night that I could have fancied up the text and done it in color, etc. but I like the basic black text. Suits the black background, I think.

Photoshop makes it all quite easy for this simple one.

It's a great hobby!

Pocket Wizards and a Self-Portrait

The pocket wizards that I've had on order for some time finally arrived the other day and here they are, taken in natural light through an open door, sitting on a white piece of normal paper.

All they do for me at the moment is get rid of the cord which isn't that big a deal when shooting in close proximity to the subject or when the camera is on a tripod. But it will be nice to be shed of the cord.

Even though I don't have a TTL flash, which means I can't take full advantage of these puppies, the small size and the ability to mount the transmitter and receiver directly to the camera or flash is a great plus and is probably what sold me.

I set up my Lastolite Ezybox Hotshoe softbox today to take some shots of the only model I could find available, me. I did have some trouble getting the TT5 set up because the shoe is offset a bit and it was just a bit difficult to get everything to work. I'll have to make some kind of mods to the Ezybox system to facilitate this but I still managed to get it working okay.



So, here is one of the shots I took. I bought this straw fedora for $10 a couple of weeks ago solely because I wanted to take some pics of me wearing it. I really wanted some sunglasses to wear as well but couldn't find any cheap ones that I liked. (I normally wear glasses so don't have any sunglasses.

It took me awhile to get the lighting the way I liked and most of the shots were opposite to this one. I changed up just for a few with the flash on camera left. One Vivitar flash through a Stofen Omnibounce and then through the Ezybox on Camera left. On Camera right I had a 30" reflector propped up on a highchair to bounce some light onto the left side of my face.

The background was a wrinkled white sheet and I had another Vivitar flash attached to a slave firing behind it. This blew out most of the wrinkles and the couple remaining were dealt with in Photoshop. A bit of adjustment was done in Camera Raw and a bit of softening of my old skin in Photoshop and I cropped it to a square format.

The PocketWizards worked flawlessly. I thought I had a problem towards the end of my shoot when the odd time the flash wouldn't fire but then I discovered that the batteries were pretty much done in the flash.

Other Specs: Canon 30D, 70-200 lens @ 70mm, 1/250 @ f6.3, ISO 100, Manual mode.

Family Photo Shoot

My daughter wanted some more formal pictures of her and her husband, Bryce and their new son, Seth so we did a shoot last night.

This one is just a fun one taken when Bryce took the soother out of Seth's mouth and put it in his mouth. I thought it would be fun to apply some Topaz Adjust filter work to it and this is what came out.

I like it.

The photos were all taken using one light off camera through my new Lastolite Ezybox softbox using a Vivitar flash.

Grandson Seth Quadtone

I took this picture just the other day. I had my wife (Grandma) walk over to the window to get light on Seth's face and took 4 shots, two which turned out.

Since I've been playing with duotones and tritones and quadtones, I applied a quadtone preset in Photoshop to this shot.

It all comes down to personal preference. I like this one.

Specs: Canon 30D, 70-200 lens @ 89mm, 1/30 @ f6.3.