Shoot: TGR The Gymnastics Revolution

In my former life I was a competitive gymnast. What that means is that even after you have completed your journey through the different levels of the sport, it always remains a part of you in some way. For me, the sport remains a part of me in several ways. I teach an adult class once a week at The Gymnastics Revolution (TGR), I encourage my kids to take part in the sport, and still work out to the level that my body will allow.

As much as I miss the old days of competitive gymnastics, one advantage of retirement is that I now have the time to pursue other passions like photography. In an effort to bring my two passions together and also help out the gym that treats me more like family than just some former gymnast who teaches in exchange for a chance to workout, I decided to photograph the gym owner's son. I proposed to make some quality images and print one of them as a large wall cling to display on the gym wall. We would also offer this to other parents in the gym with part of the proceeds benefiting the gym. She loved the idea. Now we had to set up a time to come in and do the shoot.

Fialho Fashion House (Part 2)

Once again I was asked by my good friend Lea Fialho of  Fialho Fashion House, to photograph her latest collection. This is her collection for the Spring of 2011 which revolves around a theme of (appropriately for spring) flowers.

On our last shoot we went with a single model and a simple set up. This time around Lea wanted to use her actual customers as models to show that her clothes were not just designed to look good on models. The setting was also a little more elaborate. We got permission to shoot at the hangar of one of the residents of the aero community were Lea lives. This hangar housed 3 airplanes including a fabulous pink biplane. Being a plane buff myself, it was very exciting to be able to shoot in these surrounding.

Darcy Goicochea from South Florida Makeup Artistry was the makeup artist in charge of making the ladies look their best. This multi-talented makeup artist not only did a great job with the makeup but also styled some great looking hair. I can't even begin to express how important it is to have a good makeup artist at your shoot. It not only cuts your post processing time but it also goes a long way in establishing a professional quality in your images.

Fialho Fashion House (Part 1)

My first real (pronounced: paid) photography assignment came from a talented designer named Lea Fialho. When I was desperately looking for new ways to improve my photography, I joined several photography meetup groups through the meetup.com site. I also joined a fashion meetup group in the hopes of becoming more familiar with the world of fashion and perhaps land a few model / fashion shoots. As I looked through the member profiles on the group I came across Lea and her curious website Bustyque.com. I thought it was such a cool name that I just had to check it out. Her bio on her site said she was also Brazilian, and from Rio de Janeiro. I couldn't let this coincidence go by without some sort of comment, so I sent her a greeting through the meetup group congratulating her on her designs and introducing myself. She politely answered my greeting and that was that.

Well, several months went by and one day I get an email from Lea asking if I could shoot her look book for her. The photographer who had shot her website images was out of the country and she needed images ASAP to meet an entry deadline for DC Fashion Week in Washington DC! Wow! Talk about opportunity knocking. I just could not pass on this. "Of course I can shoot your look book, just tell me when." She said she needed to shoot right away and had a model already lined up so I just had to show up. This was a very good thing because I now had time to find out what this "look book" thing was...

Shoot: Michelle Hope

It's been a while since I last posted. I have been very busy at work and have very little time to get on here to post. I hope to be able to post more often soon.

Here is a post I have been meaning to do for a while. It was my first session with a model from the site Model Mayhem. I have been a member of Model Mayhem for a while now, but have not had much luck setting up shoots with any of the models there. I'll leave that story for another post. Now let's get to Michelle.

The Tiny Turbopump

Intro

Last week I was asked by one the program leads at work to shoot some pictures of a tiny little turbopump used to pump cryogenic hydrogen to cool optical equipment in satellites. This thing is a shaft with a radial compressor etched on one end and a radial turbine etched on the other end. The shaft is supported by 2 hydrodynamic bearings and one hydrostatic thrust bearing. Operational conditions involve rotational speeds of about 1 million RPMs. Interesting stuff for sure, but as far as photography is concerned, all that high technology boils down to several small shiny metal parts. The shots were to be added to a promotional poster for display at an upcoming conference. There was not much time to work on it since on the day he asked me for the shots, the deadline was set to "yesterday". Lucky for him I always take my camera equipment to work with me...you know...just in case...

Thought Process

OK, as I mentioned before, this was a shot of small shiny metal parts and it needed to be done right there in the office and be delivered to the graphic designer who was putting the poster together by that evening. The equipment at hand was:

• my D70s
• 50mm f1.8 and the 17-70mm f3.5-4.5 (kit lens)
• SB800
• anything I could find around the office

I decided to use the 50mm just because it was already mounted on the body. I wanted to find a shiny black background because I thought that would contrast well with the metal parts. Now the issue is how to light it. As luck would have one of my colleagues had brought in a large white poster board for another promotional shot he had taken the day before. That's when it hit me. I could bounce the SB800 off the poster board to get a nice soft fill to light all the parts evenly. Then I could use the bounce card built into the flash to throw some light from the opposite side and create some highlights. All I needed now was the black shiny surface. Again, as luck would have it, the standard issue filing cabinet at the office is black and metal which makes it nearly the perfect dark shiny surface.

Execution

I placed the parts on top of the cabinet and used my camera bag (which is black) to prop up the white poster board at an angle over the parts. I placed the SB800 angled towards the poster board and extended the bounce card. The image below shows the setup.

I used the on board flash to trigger the SB800 in manual mode set at 1/8 power. The camera was set at F5.6 and 1/80 s at ISO 200 (manual mode).

Here are the results

Discussion

I was very pleased with the results of this shoot. For the first time I got results that looked like the kind of thing you'd see at strobist.com. Looking back I think I would have picked a higher shutter speed to make the black background darker. The images above had to have the background darkened in post processing. Let's see if the next assignment will come out as good as this one.