I went on a photowalk tonight around the hotel to find something interesting for today’s photograph.  I was on the second floor of the hotel lobby when I spotted this light fixture hanging over the check in desk below.  I snapped a few shots and hoped for the best.

It was not until I brought the photograph into Photoshop and started to play around with my new Wacom tablet and onOne PhotoTool 2 package that I was able to unlock the potential of this image.  The first effect I applied was the upward ghosting of the light.  This is most easily seen right above the light shades as a sort of lit fog.  My next step was to add a defocus effect around the outside edges.  The Wacom tablet and pen came in handy here when I needed to mask out the effect from the left-most and right-most lights on the fixture.  The pen allowed me to work quickly but accurately to make sure the defocusing effect did not impair these two lights.  Lastly, I applied the film frame around the image.  I picked this particular frame because it adds an eerie feeling to the old style chandelier.

I know I said no more pictures of the tree.  That is why I am going to call this a picture of an ornament, and definitely not the Christmas tree.  It is very difficult to ignore our huge tree in the house when I have no ideas coming to me late at night.

The post processing gives this picture its magic.  I used a Matt Kloskowshi Lightroom preset called Matt’s Lomo Effect (Strong Blur).  There have been several days when I tried applying this preset to a picture, but it never looked right until today.

I came prepared to Christmas morning over at my fiancee’s sister’s house for some “major” photography.  I loaded up the trunk of the car with more gear than I thought I would need to capture the moments of the day.  I took my tripod, two light stands, two umbrellas, and most of the flash modifiers from my gear collection.  I had about thirty minutes to get set up before the kids woke up to tear into the gifts.

I wound up using two strobes, each extended as high as they would go on their respective light stand.  Both flashes had a stofen-type light spreader on its head to send the light out in every direction.  I wanted the flashes to act as if they were light bulbs hanging from the ceiling.

I placed the flashes set on their stands in the back corners of the room and positioned their heads so that they were pointed and tilted to the center of the ceiling.  I then worked on determining my camera exposure and flash power settings.  I set the camera to manual mode and locked the aperture, shutter speed, and ISO settings to where I wanted them.  I walked around the room and took pictures of the back of my hand to see what type of light the strobes were producing.  By doing this chimping, I was able to determine the proper power for my strobes.  Thanks to the Canon 7D body, I was easily able to make the changes to the flash power using the menus in the camera body.

Today’s picture is just one of the many I was able to capture using this setup.  I would have liked to have a bit more shutter speed then I wound up with, but my flashes were already set at 1/2 power.  At 1/2 power, I was able to fire off about a frame every two to three seconds and get the light coverage I needed.  I could have increased the aperture, but I would have given up more depth of field.   The other option was to increase the ISO, but I knew from experience that at ISO 800 and above, the noise generated by the 7D sensor is not easy to remove.  So while all of my shots were not keepers mainly because of motion blur, I was able to get some great shots of the day’s joyous events.

Yesterday I had some new gear delivered.  The new gear consisted of a gray background, thirty inch reflector disc and a reflector disc light stand holder.  I wanted to play around with the light disc tonight and thought that using it in the basement to control the light from the recessed lighting would be a good exercise.  I set the mug up on the dry bar and played around with the reflector disc until I liked the lighting.

In post production, I used Nik Silver Efex Pro to apply an antiqued look to the photograph.  I felt it was appropriate due to the age of the mug.

The autumn wreath on the back of our front door has been calling out to me over the past few weeks to take its picture.  I finally got around to it tonight.  I used my 70-200mm lens and zoomed in as far as it would go in order to get a tight closeup of some of the leafs on the wreath.  Out of the three lens that my fiancee and I own, the 70-200mm lens lets us get the closest closeup.  However, we have to stand at least six to eight feet away from the subject in order to get it in focus.  The lack of a good macro or close up lens has me reevaluating, once again, whether or not my next lens purchase will be a 100mm macro or a 24-70mm / 24-105mm all-purpose.  I have thought about purchasing an extension tube to use with my current lens, but I would much rather have a dedicated macro lens that lets in much more light.

I brought today’s photograph into Photoshop so that I could play around with Topaz Adjust presets on it.  Ultimately, I picked a present which enhanced the fine details in the fake leafs and made the colors pop.  As a last step, I applied a slight darkening vignette.