What Is The Best Camera?

Now more than ever the debate over megapixels, dynamic range, color balance, etc. is raging in the marketplace. We are being overloaded with camera data and being lured into the habit of 'pixel-peeping' to see really how good the camera we want/need/have is.

I recently read an article written by Chase Jarvis who said the best camera is the one you have with you. Well, when I came upon the scene above the camera I had with me was my 5 year old, 3 megapixel piece of crap half-dead point and shoot. What to do? Why, take a photo, of course!

The technical quality of this image may be shitty when viewed at full resolution, but you know what? I came home with a cool photo nonetheless.

Smoke 'em if ya got 'em! Metaphorically of course ;-)

To see more of my work visit my commercial photography website.

Bedtime Reading

As a commercial photographer I rarely capture those fleeting moments that photojournalistic photographers are such experts at recording. Rather I create moments that never existed; I fabricate reality to tell stories that never happened.

This shot is different - he was really in bed and the scene was really lit this way as opposed to my creating a complex lighting scheme to replicate the light a child might read in bed by.

I got lucky this time and am interested in periodically incorporating a more photojournalistic approach to making photographs - sometimes its nice to reflect on an actual moment or experience that really happened in my life as opposed to the stream of fiction I usually create to demonstrate an idea, product, or service.

To see more of my work visit my commercial photography website.

Home and Garden

As an artist and photographer, I repeatedly push myself both creatively and technically. For this image, I wanted to create something that had a Better Homes & Gardens type of imagery - something light and ethereal; an image that could be used to support an article about gardening or yard improvement.

I think I achieved that with this backlit image of a landscape detail.

Strobist Info:
N/A - all natural light (backlit by the late afternoon sun)

To see more of my work visit my commercial photography website.

Little Girls Have Big Eyes

I recently hosted a photography party at my house. The idea was to get a group of photographers together to prepare and subsequently photograph appetizers. I had the best intentions complete with recipe ideas and lighting concepts all worked out in my head beforehand to make some great food photographs . . .

. . . so it only makes sense that I would neither prepare nor photograph any food - but I got a shot of a little girl. ;-) Oh well, the best laid plans . . .

Strobist Info
1 SB900 behind a shoot-through umbrella high and camera left.

To see more of my work visit my commercial photography website.

Corporate Headshot

I made a series of Corporate Portraits this morning. I am rather pleased that I was able to use creative lighting techniques to turn this fluorescently lit office into a more inviting environment.

Strobist Info:
1 SB800 behind shoot-through umbrella camera right
1 SB900 camera left and bounced off the ceiling for fill
1 SB800 behind the frosted glass aimed at the black wall behind the "C" with a CTO gel to warm it up
1 SB800 camera right and behind subject for rim/edge/texture

To see more of my work visit my commercial photography website.

Lower Case "i"

I have a Corporate Headshot type portrait session this afternoon and wanted to mess around a little with some lighting and such.

This shot is actually outside at 9:00 a.m. (granted, it's in the shade but it is still outside nonetheless). I chose an exposure that would send the ambient light down very dark to make the background very low key. The lighting is coming from one umbrella and one bare speedlight. I fired both with Nikon's wireless system (which I am pretty stoked about because the strobe behind the umbrella was successfully triggered despite line-of-site being blocked by the umbrella).

Strobist Info
1 SB800 behind shoot-through umbrella camera right and high
1 SB800 camera left and behind subject
Both fired by on-camera SB900 (set NOT to contribute to the exposure but only to trigger the off-camera flashes.

To see more of my work visit my commercial photography website.

Camera Phone: Part 1 of . . . ?

I've been toying a lot lately with the idea of whether or not to include photographs I take with my phone into my stream of blog posts. Consider this one an experiment.

Would love to hear your thoughts in the comment section.

To see more of my work visit my commercial photography website.

Chihuly Glass

Chihuly: The Nature of Glass is the traveling art installation of Dale Chihuly that is currently nearing the end of its term here in Phoenix at the Desert Botanical Garden.

This long exposure night photograph is HDR processed using the highlight and shadow detail from separate multiple bracketed images. This process allows images to display a wider range of highlight and shadow detail than can be captured by a camera's chip in single exposure.

To see more of my work visit my commercial photography website.

Enough Speedlights and Kids; Not Enough Time

I had an idea for this picture and this isn't it. You see, I ran out of time. Gee, does that ever happen to photographers?!? Naaaahhhh! ;-)

In my minds-eye I pictured the red light on the background, hard side lighting coming from slightly behind the children, and an underexposed fill light to open up the shadows. I barely got the background and side lighting set up when I heard grandparents starting to say their 'good-byes' - I knew I was out of time.

The biggest problem I still had to solve was adding the fill light for the children which had to be completely blocked from contaminating the red light on the background (the red would have turned pink if contaminated by white light). I knew the exercise of blocking the fill light was going to take some creative thinking and unfortunately I now no longer had the luxury of time.

The result? No fill light. But I couldn't use the edge lights where they were because since they were behind the children there was only an edge light on them and no frontal detail. So my lightning fast solution was simply to pull the edge lights from behind to in front of the kids and cross-light them. This gave me enough light to reveal their faces but at the expense of very hard shadows.

Oh well - time was not on my side and even though my solution was less than perfect, I was still able to get a shot I could use (albeit not exactly what I had in mind). You gotta be able to think on your feet and change directions pretty quickly as a photographer - the world won't hold still for you, that's for sure.

To see more of my work visit my commercial photography website.

3 Speedlights; 1 Softbox

I have been very interested in all types of light modifiers for a long time now. Despite having a small army of snoots, grids, gobos, umbrellas, gels, etc. the one big hole in my lighting inventory was a softbox . . . well, at least until now.

But the problem with softboxes is they are designed to be mounted to big powerful monolights using special speedrings, not my small portable Speedlights. So after some thought I devised a way to mount and use 3 Speedlights with 1 softbox.

Paul Morton (mortonphotographic) and I made this short video tutorial showing how to accomplish this.



To see more of my work visit my commercial photography website.