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 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.

I am pretty sure this will be the last Christmas tree photo during the project.  I am not going to promise anything, but I will try.  You never know what opportunities may come when we take down the tree in a week or two.   I am hoping that we take the tree down in the next week or two instead of leaving it up until sometime in February or March like we did last year!

With this picture, I wanted to capture the finished masterpiece that my fiancee put together this year for our tree.  While last year’s, Virginia Tech themed tree still remains my favorite, this one is a close second.  We never were able to figure out why half of a strand of lights completely went out the day after putting the decorations on.  We decided to live with it instead of pulling off all the ornaments and stringing a new set of lights.

I used two flashes for this picture.  Each one was set up on a flash stand and coupled with a reflective umbrella.  I placed one umbrella and strobe combination atfar camera right and one far camera left.  Both were set to a height roughly the size of the tree.  The umbrellas were then pointed down at about forty-five degrees.  If I had to estimate, each rig was about ten to twelve feet away from the base of the tree.  I wanted to ensure that the light would spread evenly across all visible parts of the tree.  I had to play around with the direction of the umbrellas to eliminate the spectral highlights on the walls of the room as much as possible.

In the end, I was able to produce today’s image.  The ISO got a bit higher than I normally like to shoot with.  In order to get more light out of my flashes, I was “forced” to raise my ISO so that I could keep the other elements of the photograph as I liked them.  For example, I did not want to increase my aperture from f/11.  If I allowed more light in by increasing my aperture from f/11 to, say f/8, I would have lost the star-bursting effect on the tree lights.  I also did not want to slow my shutter speed down much more than 1/2 second.  At 1/2 second, I was able to achieve a believable balance between the white light of the flashes and the yellow-colored light from the tree.  If I slowed the shutter down to 1 second, I risked letting the yellow-colored light from the tree contaminate the rest of the light in the room and making it look more artificial.