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!

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.

To unwind from a hectic day at work today, I poured myself a small drink to enjoy while my fiancee and I watched some television together.  I brought my camera bag with me down into the basement in case any bright ideas came to me while we were relaxing (no pun intended).  I did not even get to take a sip of my drink yet when I thought of an idea to bottom light the brandy sniffer glass.  The glass coffee table top was finally going to be put to a good use rather than constantly getting dirty.

I whipped out the 430 EX II flash and set it up below the glass table top so that it fired directly up into the base of the drinking glass.  I do not remember if I was using manual mode, or if I was using ETTL with flash compensation.  More recently I have found myself using ETTL to control the power of the strobe for me.  I have found that setting the camera on manual mode and letting the ETTL system set the flash power has resulted in very satisfying images much sooner in my shoots when compared against having to set the flash powers manually.  I plan to continue working in both manual flash and ETTL flash, but I believe it is a good approach to know both methods well.

It has been a very busy few weeks since my last posting.  I have completed my first two official photo shoots for clients and been traveling here, there, and everywhere.  I also ran into an issue with posting to the blog from Flickr.  The issue has since been resolved and now I plan to try and get caught up with the project once again.  Do not fear, I have been taking a picture every day of the project.  I am just incredibly backlogged with editing the photos, uploading them to Flickr, and creating the posts here on the blog.  Without further a-du…

This shot was set up using a single bare bulb strobe.  I bounced the light off of the white-walled kitchen island at camera left.  I really like the details seen in the throw rug and Mela’s fur.

I read a blog post several weeks ago about a fun type of photo which lends itself to being taken in hotels.  The best way to describe these types of photographs is “bed jump” pictures.  It all sounds so simple: set the camera on the timer setting and then time jump on or onto the bed to coincide with the shutter releasing.  This is exactly what I tried to do tonight.  I set the camera up on a tripod and used a bare-bulb flash bounced off of the ceiling.  After each of my first few jumps, I took the time to remake the bed as best as I could.  It did not take me long to grow tired of this routine.  I settled on just touching up the sheets between attempts going forward.  It took me about twenty-five to thirty attempts until I was certain that I had a useable shot in camera.  My 50mm f/1.8 lens limited how much of the scene I could fit into the frame.  However, I like the end result.  I named the photo “Bed Jump: Attempt 1″ because I know, for certain, this will not be the last time I attempt a bed jump type photograph.  As soon as I have a wider lens with me during an overnight hotel stay, I will be bed jumping once again.

In an attempt to get caught back up with the nearly 3 weeks of blog posts that I am behind, I will be keeping the next few weeks text entries rather short.

Today’s photograph is an emulation of a card in the Strobist Favorites Gallery Vol. 1 Trade Secret Cards set.  Unfortunately, I do not have the cards in front of me as I write this blog post so I cannot share the details such as the original photographer or title.  However, I can tell you that the subject in the original piece of art work is a basketball rather then the dog toy feature in my version.

The lighting was archived by using a long shipping tube as a snoot to direct a point of light from a strobe directly down onto the ball.  To make sure I could show the details of the lower half of the ball, I placed a second strobe flat on the ground and pointed it at the front face.