Sojourns

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Sea Gazing

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The Artist

I had the good fortune today of photographing my friend Peter and his beautiful new Gibson Hummingbird Artist guitar.  I can only hope that my photographic skills are equal to his talent and the craftsmanship and sound of this guitar.  Just a fantastic experience and great afternoon’s playtime behind the viewfinder.  Thanks, Peter!

Check out my Flikr photostream for more of this wonderful instrument!

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Team Believe-Achieve

I am working on a head shot mock-up for the multisports team I race for.  This is our second year in existence and we’ve got a lot of new members.  One of the things we didn’t get quite right last year was our media presence, due in large part to the absence of team photographs for much of the year.  We did a late year photo shoot but by then we couldn’t capitalize.  So this year since I’ve already got this Project 365 going, I’ll be working on some standard media head shots and social media photos for the team.

This was a standard two-umbrella shot against a white seamless background and with a white fill board just under the frame in front.  The subject is offset to give space for type copy.  I had a gold reflector in the right side umbrella which I don’t think I’d use again in this instance since it muddied up the white on that side a bit.

One oddity I found in post processing was that when I saved for the web in Photoshop after adding the type copy and logo, I got an odd color cast to the image.  I went back to Aperture, which had the Photoshop version embedded at that point and found that the saved .jpg came out exactly as the Photoshop .psd file looked so that is the version I used here.  I went back to the Photoshop “Save for Web….” dialog and made sure I had checked “convert to sRGB” and found it was properly checked.  Unchecking the box made the color even worse.  I’ve not experienced that before in my workflow.  If anyone has any ideas, I’m all ears!

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Intensity

Its January and well into the training period for 2010 racing season.  This month has brought weather and motivation challenges that have left me lagging well behind last year’s preparation.  I am finding my strength in teammates and running partners this year.  This is a new approach for me….and a welcome one at that.

This 365 photo project will be a challenge to fit in with training, racing, family, work, and sleep.  I suspect that, as with the guitar, I will find a lot of subject matter in my multisport lifestyle.  Today’s photo is a new social site avatar, among other things.  The composition is well-trodden in those circles, but effective nonetheless.  Most photographers with a modicum of experience can take the same photo.  I like the intensity that comes through in these images.  All of the negative space keeps the eye on the subject while the extreme off-center subject creates tension.

Lesson for the day:  Be mindful of large reflective surfaces as they will show EVERYTHING.  The first frames I took tonight showed the piles of photo equipment and toys in the background.  I ended up stringing the black background sheet across behind and to the side of the camera.

Exhale

“Peace comes from within.  Do not seek it without.”  Guatama Siddharta

Complements

What do I think about on cold, rainy, winter days?  Springtime, of course!  I long for sunny, warm days when I can get back out on my bike and ride for hours.  With that in mind it didn’t take long to settle on a subject for the day.

This was an easy shoot.  One strobe into a Photek Softlighter II from front, camera left and one strobe gelled deep blue against the white seamless background.  I grabbed the EF 28-105mm zoom because of its close focusing abilities to allow a nice, tight composition.  Set everything to manual, dial in the strobe ratio and EV and click off a few frames.  Then just some light post-processing with curves, sharpening, and crop to 8×10 format to produce the photo you see here.  I spent less than 20 minutes from concept to dropping the photo on this blog entry.

Joy

Every kid should have a trampoline.  Or a friend with a trampoline.  So sayeth Mrs. Sojourns!  We bought our boys a trampoline for Christmas and they’ve instantly become the most popular kids in the neighborhood.  Oh to be a kid again.  They can jump for hours on end!

A perfect opportunity to try some shooting outdoors in bright sunlight.  I ball-bungeed a 580 EX II strobe with a 1/4 CTO to one of the netting uprights on camera right.  I set the camera white balance to “cloudy” and triggered with Canon’s ST-E2.  While I normally shoot with both camera and flashes on manual, today I decided to use ETTL flash and Shutter Priority because I didn’t want to have to climb off the roof to adjust the strobe settings.  With ETTL I could dial the strobe up or down without moving from my shooting position.  I also used AI Servo focusing to try to keep up with the fast-jumping boys.  All-in-all, this turned out pretty well and I had a couple of keepers in a relatively few shutter clicks.

Lesson for the day:  When shooting in this situation with these settings, it may be best to avoid blue shirts.  The other boy had a blue shirt on and he ended up with blue skin tones despite the 1/4 CTO on the strobe.  I suppose I could have also tossed on a 1/2 or 3/4 CTO instead, but that would have meant climbing off the roof.

Contentment

A close family friend has asked me to take some photographs of her older cats.  I’ve never taken planned animal portraits of any kind so I thought I should practice on our own very sweet, docile cats, Jack and Daisy.  They are so easy to please and usually will put up with what ever the hoomins wantses.  Plus they are so cute and camera friendly in snapshots.  It couldn’t be too hard to get a good picture of them.

Lesson number one in pet photographs:  You aren’t going to get a lot of shots at getting it right, so make sure each exposure is a good one.  I got exactly….ONE….shutter click before they both headed for the hills.  Hmmmmmm!?!?

Becoming something like a REAL photographer is going to be harder than I thought.

“You still have much to learn, Grasshopper.”  Kung Fu

Malajusted

Hands can tell you a lot about a person.  Hands wear our daily duty with perseverance and patience like a comfortable, old, timeworn cloak.  With our hands we create or destroy.  With our hands we comfort or compel.  With our hands we rescue or cast away.  In times of need our hands build bridges.  In times of plenty our hands harvest the bounty.  What did your hands do today?

“Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” Martin Luther King, Jr.