Shoot: A Day With Carla

So my friend Carla said she would love to get some new pictures to put up on her facebook page. This request came right as I was coming out of my photography 'drought', and just after I attended the excellent Lighting Essentials workshop so it was a perfect opportunity to experiment and have a low pressure, fun shoot to get back into the flow of things.

I met Carla through my girlfriend who has known her since she was a little baby. While I'm on this subject, let me just take a moment so say how important it is to have a supportive spouse, girlfriend, parent, bff, or whomever to keep you going. My wonderful girlfriend has been so supportive of my photography that I certainly wouldn't be where I am today without her. She was along all the way during this day and was a great help with location ideas and as the stylist for the shoot.

Lets get on with the shoot now.

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...

How Quickly We Rust

This summer I took a little break from work and shooting and used the time to catch up a bit on my personal life. In all I think it was about 3-4 weeks away from a camera in any serious sense. Towards the end of my break, I was starting to itch for my camera again. I set up a shoot with friend and model Diane Hope and got my friend Juan to come along and help out. It felt good to have the camera in hand again, but at the same time it felt really awkward. I felt kind of...lost. It's a good thing that I decided to do a "fun" shoot with friends after taking such a long time off instead of diving right in to something where I could really disappoint a paying client!

Well, it wasn't all bad. I was definitely rusty and took a while to get into the swing of things, but it eventually came back. After this shoot I was warmed up and ready to start clicking away again!

The Fruit Shoot

 

We have been getting some exciting talent coming to the studio meetups these days. Lots of people are realizing what a great opportunity these meetups are to hone in their skills. Not only do we get some great models to work with, but now makeup artists are also contributing. Everyone gets something out of it, everyone learns and everyone has a great time.

Now that I have gone on yet another tangent about how great the meetups are, let me tell you about this one particular meetup. I had been in contact with Michelle Tiffany, a makeup artist I met through Model Mayhem and convinced her to come to one of the meetups. She enjoyed it so much that when I asked her to come again, she agreed on the spot. I told her I wanted to do something a little off-the-wall. My idea was to shoot models with certain fruits and have their makeup reflect the fruit they would be holding.

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.

A Day at the Beach

I pretty much take my camera wherever I go, and two weekends ago it really paid off. We arrived and selected a nice spot to settle down, catch some rays and make sand castles with our son. Soon a group of guys arrived with their skimboards and started skimboarding right in front of us. They actually almost ran us over a couple of times. They seemed to know what they were doing, so I thought: what a great opportunity to get some action shots. This is not something I have done often, so it was going to be good practice. I walked up and asked if they wold mind if I took some pictures of them. They said sure so I grabbed the camera and dove in.




The Setup

Here is the setup. I tried to shoot with the sun at my back so as to not blow the sky when exposing the skimboarder. I used the 18-70mm lens because it's my longest lens and with the bright sun, max lens aperture was not an issue. I set the camera on shutter priority at 1/500 s since there was plenty of sun. Focus was set to continuous and metering to center-weighted. I shot in burst mode to make sure I got some keepers.

Execution

When the skimboarder started his run, I locked on with the center focus point and followed him until he hit the wave. Then I hit the shutter and followed him until he stopped. This method seemed to work well and I got at least 3 keepers. I wish I had a longer lens so I could get closer to the action. I also think that I should have picked a faster shutter speed in order to blurr the background a bit more.

Results