I loved how these flowers looked sitting in their vase by our front door.  I decided to set up my trusty flower photo station in the kitchen and  use the macro lens to try to capture their brilliant colors.  I did not notice this grouping of three pink flowers while shooting the frame.  However, when I was post processing the picture, I opted for a tight crop on the grouping once I noticed it.

Tonight I went back to photographing the Vietnamese doll that my dad brought home from overseas for my mom while he was in the service years ago.  This time around I was using the 100mm f/2.8L Macro lens and a single Speedlite to capture the scene.  The 100mm f/2.8L Macro lens by Canon is quite a good portrait lens in addition to a fabulous macro lens.  The 100mm focal lens is perfect for compressing the backgrounds of portraits and can help capture even the finest of details in objects.  I highly recommend the lens to all Canon shooters.

This is a typical snack for me at night while I am away from home and staying in a hotel.  These vegetable gyoza are relatively healthy and low in calories.  They are also quite colorful.  I decided to try and capture them in a photograph tonight.  I used a single, remotely triggered, flash bouncing into two of the white pillows from the bed to light the scene.

I guess you can tell what was laying around the hotel room tonight?!

The details surrounding this photography of Leila, our one year old yorkiepin, have escaped me.  By looking at the metadata, I see that I used flash coupled with a shallow depth of field and my 50mm lens.  The background has been blurred so beautifully by the 50mm, its tough for me to even figure out where I took this photograph inside our house!  If I had to venture a guess though, it was taken in the basement/home theater.  How I managed to light Leila with a flash and still shoot at 1/13 of a second with such a sharp result is beyond me.  I like when I surprise myself like this!

Today I can say I had my first real gig as a photographer.  My friend asked if I could help him out by taking a corporate head shot for his boss’ web site.  Of course I told him it would not be a problem and that it was  perfect timing as I am heading to my company’s winter meeting to do head shots of all my coworkers later in the week.  The setup for this shot was three small strobes.  One in a soft box at camera right as the key, one in a reflective umbrella on camera left as the fill and a third gridded and pointed up at the background from behind the subject.  It turns out that the intended fill light became the key.  I guess I am still learning the ETTL and ratios functions in the Canon system.  However, even though they got switched on me, I like the overall picture.  The lighting is clean and there is good separation from the background.  Maybe next time I will leave just a bit more head room in the shot to allow for future clients to be able to frame their images.

Our friends had an 80′s party tonight to celebrate a thirtieth birthday.  We decided to take some high-key galmor shots to help remember the event.  I broke out the white seamless paper and set up three flashes to achieve the almost completely blanked out background, a.k.a. high-key, photograph.  Two flashes were used to light the subjects, one high and camera right and one high and camera left.  Both flashes were equipped with a reflective umbrella and tilted down at forty five degrees to get complete coverage.  The third flash was behind the subjects at camera right.  It was only a few inches away from the background and aimed in such a way so the light was feathered across the background.  I did this to avoid a hot-spot from appearing on the seamless papear close to the where the flash head was on the right side of the frame.  To prevent any of the light from the background flash from getting on the subjects or into the camera lens, I used a gobo on it.  While not a perfect high-key photograph, I think it is not bad at all for a first attempt at this type of shoot.

I was walking around the house tonight looking for an interesting subject for the project when I wandered out into the garage and found this snow shovel casting an interesting shadow.  The note my fiancee left on the shovel made it an even more compelling subject.  I had the camera set on aperture priority mode and the ISO set to Auto.  The camera needed to use ISO 2500 in order to get the exposure.  While I am still not pleased with the low light performance of the Canon 7D body in general, I was pleasantly surprised with the outcome of this high ISO shot.

In post processing I applied a Lightroom preset to get the dark vignetting and orange-ish tones.

I added a third flash to my arsenal in preparation for my company’s corporate head shots in February.  I ask Jaclyn, my fiancee, to be my model so that I could test out the setup with the third light. I also wanted to make sure I would be able to handle the handful of people in my company who wear glasses.  By placing the key and fill lights more towards the sides of the frame instead of closer to the lens, I was able to prevent the reflections of the lights in Jaclyn’s glasses.  The setup that I used tonight will most likely be the exact setup I use for the photo shoot in a couple of weeks.

My fiancee was given some flowers on her last day of work by one of her coworkers.  I decided to put the flowers in front of the portrait backdrop and snap some shots with the softbox and reflector.  I am really impressed with how the shots came out.  This photograph, in particular, has some great tones and sharp details.  The purple flowers and the yellow rose are my favorite parts of the photograph.  The gray background does appear in frame as it was off to camera right at this angle.