update 4:35pm 2/28/12:

Of course as soon as I post the above message it appears that I’m having some nameserver issues. D’oh! And it also seems I’m having some image issues with the posts. ~sigh~ bear with me while I get this stuff straightened out. Sorry!

update 6:50pm 2/28/12:

I blame the network at my job. Everything is good to go!

2011 was a very difficult year and really prevented me from posting more, but I will be doing a lot more work this year and definitely posting a lot more. I should be able to do some more basic gear reviews and I have an exciting announcement that I’ll post about in the coming weeks!

I intend to make this blog a lot more interactive. I hope to bring a lot of education here though myself and possibly some guest posts on a variety of topics from lighting to editing. If you are interested in contributing please let me know! I’ll also be moving this site to a new hosting company, the blog will be significantly faster once the switch is made.

The site design has changed, a bit cleaner and easier on the eyes now. The option to have posts emailed to you has also been added, I hope you will sign up and be a part of the conversation with all the new posts that will be coming out this year.

If there is anything you would like to see here, please let me know about that as well, I’m always looking for input and new ideas. Also, I’m not on Twitter anymore, but I hope you will join me over on Google+!

Thanks!

It breaks my heart to announce that a friend, both business and personal, has passed away. His name was Jeff Ouimette, the partner of a friend of mine whom I worked with at my day job up until recently when they relocated to the South. I haven’t known Jeff as long as some of his long time friends have, it’s only been about two years, but we had a major impact on each other over that short time. I firmly believe he had a greater impact on me than I on him, but we both mutually benefited from what we each brought to the table. He was striking out on his own to pursue his passion of candy and chocolate making, and at the same time I was working on pursuing my passion for photography as more than a hobby. So, my coworker Bob approached me one day and asked if I would take some photos of the products (chocolates, etc) for the website they were going to launch and I quickly agreed. Over the next year and a half I did eleven shoots for them, free of charge, and it was one of the best photography decisions I have ever made.

This is my tribute to Jeff and how he helped me grow as a photographer.

My very first shoot with Jeff was on November 4, 2009, and I had no idea what Lightroom was, how to use Photoshop, or even what White Balance was. I was shooting with a Nikon D60 and the 18-55mm kit lens it came with, I was the man. They were so pumped to have me there, but I had literally no idea what I was doing. Bob had experience with Photoshop (honestly, I had a little, but not much) so after I was finished shooting I just download the images to his computer and called it a day. Easy! It was terrible, it really was. The images were garbage, I was using available light and doing really long exposures with…. no idea what white balance was (going to say WB from now on). Obviously I could go back and adjust the WB on the images now, but I wanted to show you what I started out as, and I am going to progress through the shoots and post some from each one.

Here are images from my very first shoot on 11/4/2009:

I told you! They are terrible! Needless to say, we kept working at it.

Here are images from the next shoot on 11/23/2009, there is a slight improvement….

… I take that back, these were horrible too! Here are some of the settings I was using for the images above: 3sec @ f/20, ISO 100, Aperture Priority… I couldn’t understand why these images weren’t coming out “awesome”… I had an awesome camera, so what was I doing wrong? The answer:  Almost Everything. I was literally doing almost everything incorrectly. Ok, the D60 with the kit lens, that is forgivable because I could get photos now using that gear and it would be close to what I can shoot now, but not quite where my 5D Mark II quality is. The two biggest things I learned that I was doing wrong was not having enough light and not shooting in manual!

There is something you need to understand about having your camera on the auto or semi-auto modes: Your camera is designed to get a balanced exposure but not blowing out the highlights, it literally tries to make middle gray (18% gray, as most of you know) out of whites in the frame of view. If you aren’t shooting in Manual mode on your camera, do this: Get your camera, switch it to M, and put tape over the dial so you never change it again. You are in control of what you want to make, why are you letting your camera make the decision about what your exposure should be for you? YOU SHOULDN’T. Yes, it’s more work to shoot in Manual, but I guarantee you will learn more about your craft and become a better photographer. Guarantee. You will make mistakes, I certainly have, but it will become second nature for you to quickly adjust your shutter and aperture at the blink of an eye. I will talk about light a little further down this post.

The next shoot I did was right after I got my Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 24-70 f/2.8 USM and Canon 580 EX II speedlite gear at the beginning of December 2009. I knew I was all set! Holy crap, I had a great camera, I was ready to take professional photos, watch out world I’m taking you over! Here they are!

Dog-safe white chocolate. No, those aren’t for humans.

What the heck?! Why didn’t the photos come out awesome!? I just spent $2,800 on the camera and another $1,400 on the lens, what gives!? APERTURE PRIORITY SUCKS NO MATTER WHAT CAMERA YOU USE. These images were mostly 1/40sec (give or take) at f/2.8 and ISO 250. For products, you can’t necessarily shoot wide open unless it’s supposed to be intentionally blurry throughout nearly the entire image. This was very wrong.

This was also the first time I took a portrait in a setting like this. I had always taken photos of people but it wasn’t quite as posed or intentional. This is what I got on that day:

That’s pretty bad. You may be saying “hey, just fix the WB and this image would be passable.” but it’s not, and you know it isn’t. the room was only lit by an overhead light and a floor lamp aimed at the ceiling in the corner, so the light was only coming from above, look at the shadows under his eyes. This is a terrible image, but I wanted to show it because this is the reality of what I was struggling with. They specifically requested I take some portraits so they could put it on the website. This didn’t make the cut. You can’t run a business like this, nobody will want to pay for this! (Keep reading, you will see some drastic improvements… just be patient.)

Ok great, so I spent thousands of dollars on gear that wasn’t taking professional photos, the images weren’t coming out as I thought they would, and shooting wide open was stupid for this type of photography (most food photography is perfect shot wide open, this was for a website and needed to be in focus!), so what the hell was I doing wrong? I still just couldn’t understand, at the time.

The next shoot was on 2/3/10, getting ready to shoot Valentine’s chocolates. I used my camera a lot between this shoot and the previous and decided that I was going to try increasing the ISO even more to see how it would be. I was worried at the time about using anything over 100 for long exposures, there was no rhyme or reason why, that’s just what I was doing. I increased it to 400, and even 800, and was a bit happier with what I got in return.

Ok, so I still wasn’t getting the right color to my images, but later I would understand more about WB. But at this point I was feeling more confident about what angle to shoot the products at, and how to group them. This was a big improvement for me, and I remember feeling a lot more confident that evening about what I was doing. I was using Photoshop a lot more at this point and trying to figure out how to make adjustments so the entire plate and background were white, but it still wasn’t exactly where I needed it to be, I still couldn’t grasp the WB part of the equation. I was shooting on Auto WB all the time, by the way. This was under Tungsten light so that’s why it’s very warm in all the images.

It was after this shoot that I got an opportunity of a lifetime. I have been on Twitter for quite a while and one day I saw that Jack Hollingsworth needed a social media person to tweet while he was doing a promo shoot on Cape Cod (where I grew up!) to connect with his followers regarding what we were doing at any given time during the day. I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to see what an established photographer was doing and also hopefully meet some other area photographers. This turned into one of the single best experiences I have had. Meeting Jack was great, but I gained some friends from that weekend. Brian Matiash, Ben Eckstein (he’s a video guy), and the owner of Lens Pro To Go, Paul Friedman. Brian has proven to be an extremely valuable resource, I cannot stress to you how much of an impact he had on my understand of exposure and WB. He taught me how to use the Xrite Color Checker Passport to take custom WB’s and sync WB across multiple images using Adobe Lightroom (I’ll be calling Lightroom LR from now on). After that weekend on the Cape I really started to research WB online to learn more about it, and I couldn’t believe it took me that long to realize what I was doing wrong. WB is easy. It’s really easy. It gets a bit more complicated when you start to mix color temperatures in an image, like Tungsten and speedlite in an image, that’s when you start to use gel’s for your speedlite… more on that in another post.

So, I took what I learned from Brian and on the web and this is what I got….

Whoa! That looks a little better! Want to know what I did here? I added light. I finally decided to use my speedlite to add light to the fairly dark room. Once I saw the image on the back of the camera I knew that I had finally gotten “it”. I finally created the look that I was going for. The image above had some edits done to it, mostly just masking out the edge of the plate like you see below, but very little was done aside from that. My goal was to make the product look as if it were just sitting on the web page, not that it was sitting on a plate on a table. Oh yeah, and look at the WB, it’s perfect! Want to know what I did? I took a custom WB before I took the image using the Color Checker Passport and it was spot on.  Here are a couple more unedited versions from that day. By the way, I also started shooting in RAW after my weekend on the Cape, in addition to using Lightroom to process the RAW files.

The table cloth is actually a light cream color, it wasn’t plain white. I got to the point where I had a quick work flow down to brighten that part of the image and make it look like it wasn’t a plate on the table cloth at all. The images above I had my speedlite on camera, but aimed up away from the product, it was bouncing off the ceiling.

A really interesting thing happened after this shoot, I attended an open house at Boston University’s Center for Digital Imaging Arts (CDIA) in Waltham, MA because they have a Professional Photography certificate program that I was really interested in after hearing about it from two of the photographers on the Cape shoot. This was another life-changing decision. I enrolled and started at the end of May 2010 and began learning things exponentially faster than I had been when doing things trial and error and at my own pace, ie WHITE BALANCE.

I’m going to pull this all back into perspective: It’s because of Jeff that I kept pushing myself to figure out what I was doing wrong so I could get the photos right for him. I wanted to better myself, so I went on that trip to the Cape for the weekend and connected with others and learned what they were doing, which I then put into application at Jeff’s place and created the images above. I went to school because I learned that, through shooting for Jeff, I truly loved photography and thought I had a real chance at making a living off it. So I learned, and I learned a lot. I am still in the program, graduating at the end of January 2012, and I cannot explain to you how much better of a photographer I am now than I was in November 2009. But what I can do is show you more photos.

This was the first shoot I did for Jeff after learning some off-camera lighting techniques in school. I setup the speedlite on a little stand behind a collapsable diffuser to soften the light but keep it directional. I also, finally, shot in MANUAL (my speedlite was in manual as well). Doing this helped me to keep the light coming from the same direction, the consistency is what I wanted. Here are the photos from the 11/9/10 shoot I did for Jeff:

My photography had reached a new level. I was finally able to control both my camera and the light to create the image that I wanted to create, rather than what the camera wanted to make for me. I was in control. When you take control, you have the capacity to make just about anything you want. It took me almost a year to provide photos to Jeff that I thought were worthy of a website, they used the previous images I gave them, but after this shoot they promptly changed out the images, we re-shot a lot of the chocolates at that session.

I finally did it.

I firmly believe that because of Jeff and Bob asking me to photograph the chocolates at that point, that I am the photographer I am today. Yes, it was a series of events that lead to certain things, but the one event that started it all was that one question by them. That is what started my friendship with Jeff, as I was already friends with Bob because of work.

Jeff and I would talk about our passions, chocolate for him and photography for myself, and we would each listen very attentively to each other as we would go into the minutia of how things work or why the white chocolate really is chocolate and people don’t believe it. We really made a connection and whenever he would call because a new season was nearly upon us and they needed to update the website, my answer was always “Absolutely.” I would give them the photos, they would give me chocolates, you couldn’t ask for a better trade of services. It wasn’t about the money, it was about bettering myself and creating beautiful images for this company to help them grow.

Second to last shoot: November 23, 2010. The December holiday season was almost there and Jeff wanted to showcase the variety of fudges that he had started to make, so we did a number of those in addition to some Christmas themed platters and non-pareil filled glass trees. (scroll up to the very first shoot I did to see my first try at these pain-in-the-neck to shoot trees) [side note, I did one more shoot for Jeff on 3/10/11 for Easter, it was pretty uneventful and went by very quickly. This second to last shoot I am talking about now was very influential and.... well, keep reading.] At this point I had purchased my very first studio strobe, an Alien Bee B800 and the Paul Buff Cyber Sync wireless trigger and receiver, this was my first time using them for a job. In addition to that, I brought a ProFoto two monolight kit in case I needed some more light…. more on that after these images of the products:

That is quite an improvement over what I first shot. All three of those trees were done in one shot, they were not done separately then put together into one image, I am proud to say. This is just another example of me pushing myself to provide quality work to these guys, it took me a little while to get the trees right, but I had a studio lighting class right before this shoot and learned how to shoot glass, conveniently, and it worked like a charm.

There was one last thing about this shoot that was going to be awesome, they wanted me too try taking a portrait of Jeff again. This time, I knew exactly what I was going to do and took out one of the ProFoto lights to use as a second fill light with a 2′x2′ softbox on it. My AB800 had a 3′x4′ on it that I was using as my main light. I’m not going to show all the images, or even a few of them from the portrait part of the session. I only want to show the one image that I find to be the most powerful and truly representative of who Jeff really is. Please scroll down and look at this image for a few moments, and say a prayer (please) for all the friends and family who no longer have this amazing man in their lives:

Jeff, because of you I am a better photographer. I have never been able to thank you for that, but I am fortunate that I was able to say goodbye to you the day before you and Bob moved. I am lucky that I was able to know you, you were a truly good man and would do anything to help anybody. Your laugh was genuine, your heart was always in the right place, and you made the best chocolates I have ever tasted. It broke my heart to see all of your friends and family crying at your funeral service today. I was one of them. I know you are in a better place now watching over us. Thank you, Jeff.

With a heavy heart,

Keegan

I had a lot of ideas for this project, first I was going to shoot a couple on the beach around sunset with a cooler or tub with the beer in it but decided against that. Then I was thinking about making the tub really prominent in the image and show just the legs of the couple entering from the side of the image, but decided against that too. So the next class I simply shot the bottles in a tub with a ton of ice in the studio. I got some really great images that I was very happy with, a few shots cropped in close and some of the entire tub with all the beer bottles visible. Below is the shot I used in the final image.

Shot in the studio

This was a pretty simple lighting setup. I used a total of three ProFoto studio strobes for this. One was on the floor behind the table aimed up at the wall (note the white to gray gradient), one was at camera right with a ten degree grid behind the table aimed at the bottles to create some separation. The key light was at camera right in front of the table with a twenty degree grid on it. I also used a hefty amount of water in a spray bottle to make the tub and bottles sweat even more, I’m really happy with how this came out. This above image is raw out of the camera, no edits at all. I took another capture immediately after this but turned the key light off to get a darker exposure of the bottles in case I needed it to darken the labels in Photoshop later. Fortunately, I didn’t need that image. I did that for all the shots because the ice was melting rather rapidly and the bottles were settling and moving, gotta move quick with ice!

So, I had the studio shot of the product, now all I needed was a finalized idea for the rest of the shot. I was having a hard time getting a couple who was available on short notice that Saturday morning of class for a shoot that evening since Sunday was going to be bad weather. I ended up calling my sister down on Cape Cod who helped me out in my Studio Portrait II class before, hoping she could help me out again. She said “Sorry I can’t, we are going out on the boat at 1 today.” I replied, “WE SURE ARE!” I had a quick chat with my teacher about a shot I was envisioning, with the help of my family out on the boat, over on Martha’s Vineyard for a late afternoon shot. He agreed and off I went, right away! It was very exciting that it came together so quickly, I’m so glad I called my sister that day.

So I went home, picked up my wife, and hit the road down to Cape Cod. My family came back to the dock to pick us up around 4pm after (FINALLY) getting down to Falmouth. We zipped over to the Vineyard and pulled into Tashmoo harbor, dropped anchor, and just relaxed with a couple of Landshark’s, it was an absolutely perfect day. During that time, I was trying to come up with a lifestyle shot of my family all over the boat, some on the bow, on deck, and on the swim platform off the back of the boat. We setup the grill (yup, grillin’ on the boat), passed some Landshark’s around, and I took the biggest risk yet with my camera… I got in a tube and paddled out away from the boat. I was so scared of destroying my equipment! (side note: I have insurance on my gear. You should too.) I took the tubing tube, which has a bottom to it, laid down in it, put a big beach towel over me, put a trash bag inside another trash bag, and put the camera inside of those on my lap then covered it with the towel, I didn’t want any water splashing on it. I attached the tow line to the back of the boat and paddled out a bit (I had done this already a couple of times to prepare my shot and set up my family members, making sure it would work before going out there with my gear.) and I started snapping away. I knew almost immediately that this shot wasn’t going to work, unfortunately. Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice and a beautiful location, but it wasn’t what I was envisioning. Here is my favorite shot from that batch:

Not the shot I hoped it would be.

There’s a lot that didn’t work here. The scale of the people in the image is far too small, you would have to squint to see their expressions if this were an ad in a magazine, and as we discussed in class on the final night this image would be better suited to sell the boat, not the beer.

I wasn’t deterred, though. After this shot I had them pull me in slowly and, after eating some amazing bbq, started snapping away because the sun had begun to set. I asked my sister to do some posting at the back of the boat and then it happened, I got the exact expression from her that I was hoping for. She looked relaxed, content, and happy. That was what I was envisioning for this project from the very beginning. As soon as I snapped this image I knew I was all set for my project.

Before

After

I did quite a bit of work to the image. Fixed her hair a bit, brightened teeth, did some work on her skin and did some softening, cleaned up the cushion, removed the battery door on the right side of the image. I also made some minor adjustments to the clouds and sky. An adjustment layer was used on her and the boat to brighten it up a bit and I did an adjustment layer for the water and sky to increase the contrasts a little and pump up the color.

After doing the work above, I started messing with how I have seen beer ads in magazines in the past. I tried extending the overall image by adding a black bar on the right and putting the bottles against the black background, but it didn’t look very good. I then decided to simply drop the bottles in the bottom left corner, mask out most of the bottles and tub, and add a similar colored gradient behind that part of the image to create some separation from the picture of my sister so it was obvious they weren’t from the same image. Here is what I ended up using from the studio image.

Portion I used for final image.

I masked out the tiny bit of bottle on the left and the bottle on the right, I thought the two in the foreground were very well placed and lit and would work perfectly for what I was trying to accomplish. In retrospect, maybe having my sister hold the bottle straight up rather than at an angle would have been better, but I’m still happy with this regardless.

Finally, I downloaded some computer backgrounds from the Landshark website so I could get a higher resolution version of the logo. Again, I masked out what I didn’t need and dropped it into the final image. I added the gradient behind the bottles last using the eyedropper to get a sample of yellow directly from the beer. I am so proud of how this project came together, I worked so hard on this! So, here is the final image. (click for larger version)

Final image submitted for Photo Illustration class. Landshark Lager Advertisement.

This image is intended to be used as a two page spread in a magazine for Landshark as a class project. I did not get permission to use the Landshark logo or product and will in no way make money from this, it was simply for a school project. It will not actually be used in a magazine.

So there it is, the total breakdown from beginning to end of how this project came together, was executed, edited, and finalized. Oh and “It’s a lifestyle” is not Landshark’s tagline, my wife came up with that as we were discussing the placement of the Landshark logo. She’s the best!

What are your thoughts? Was I close for my first project or totally off the mark? Please share below!

Gear list: Canon 5D Mark II camera for all shots.

For studio:  Sigma 70-200 2.8 APO EX DG OS HSM lens, ProFoto studio kits, Pocket Wizards.

For location shoot: Canon 24-70mm 2.8L USM. That’s it! No additional lighting was used on location.

I am absolutely thrilled with the work I was able to create! We had assignments for each shooting class to give us a structure to go along with. The first shooting night we needed to just do a head shot, a nice and tight crop to the image. The second night was to create a full length shot, in addition to head shots if we wanted to. The third shooting day was about incorporating motion into the image. We didn’t necessarily have to submit our final images as those, just our very best whatever they happened to be for each model. I was fortunate with timing and was able to shoot a total of five models over the three shooting days.

Working with the models was a very wonderful experience, they were all great to work with and were very happy to be there. After all, they were getting free professional images for their portfolios, and so were we, it was just refreshing to have someone in front of the camera who really wanted to be there and exuded the sort of confidence I was looking for. After each shooting class I felt very confident with the work I created, I was efficient and feel that I made high quality images the models will love. Are they the most advanced and creative images ever, no there is plenty of room to improve, but I really feel that this is a fantastic start! Lets break it down…

This is Asia, she had the most unbelievably quiet confidence about her! She was the very first model I photographed and it was only because she was waiting to have her makeup changed to work with another photographer. I asked her to let me take a few photos of her against this blue background and she was happy to oblige, this is one of my favorite photos from the entire class. Oh by the way, she’s a Patriots cheerleader and going to medical school, +100 cool points.

Asia

Next up was Christine, an experienced model who knew exactly what she wanted to do. We really connected and she helped me create some stunning images, I was totally blown away. The blue background was chosen specifically because we were going to photographing her (I was working with my classmates Aimee and Gia), it really made her red hair pop! (We had Asia step in while Christine was having her makeup done) I had a very hard time narrowing down which of Christine’s images to use as my final, but when it came down to it, I couldn’t choose any other except this one. Her piercing eyes, expression and attitude really grab your attention in this image. I would love to work with Christine again, it was such a wonderful experience!

Christine

That concluded the first night of shooting. After each shooting class, the next class was dedicated to showing up to 20 of our images from the shooting class so we could discuss what we did right, wrong, and how to improve for the next one. Our teacher was the uber talented Rob Van Petten and he taught us so much over those two modules, I took so many notes and hung on pretty much every word he said. I really wish we had him for more classes, he’s an amazing teacher!

The second shooting night I was only able to work with one model due to a time constraint, but I am very happy with what I ended up with. The first night only female models showed up, and as much as I love to shoot the ladies, I wanted the experience of photographing a male model and I also wanted to make sure I had an image of a guy to work on when it came to retouching since they should be approached slightly differently than retouching a woman.

Justin had only been modeling for a few months when he came in, he had a really laid back demeanor and was great to work with. He had a california surfer bum sort of vibe to him that worked well with the color scheme I was hoping to use. I wanted to go for a look where I was trying to sell the clothes, and I think I was able to achieve exactly what my goal was. He was the model I needed to photograph at full length, and I did, but I really loved this photo and went with this as my final for him.

Justin

On the third day of shooting, a Saturday, I was fortunate to shoot two models. I wanted to go outside since it was a beautiful day but I really wanted to reign in the sun since it was right around 1pm and the sun was terribly harsh that day. I decided to use speedlites and shoot on high speed sync to really cut down the ambient light and create a dark and dramatic mood for the model I was really looking forward to shooting, Dana. This girl is really going to go far with modeling, even Rob was really impressed with her. My main thing was getting out of the studio, I wanted to use a textured background that wasn’t just paper or muslin. I found this big shrub in the parking lot and thought it would create a great foresty-ish background and using the speedlites I was able to make it dark and mysterious. The more I use speedlites creatively the more I love them! I had a total of four, one on my camera to trigger the other three, she was lit by only three. One key light at camera right, a kicker at camera left and one aimed at the shrub to highlight it a bit. This was the day we needed to incorporate motion, Gia helped me out and waved a piece of foam core like a mad woman to create the wind. A number of these images stood out to me, but this image was exactly what I wanted to capture, she was incredible to work with!

Dana

And finally, as I was getting ready to call it quits for the day I was told that Charlotte was just hanging around waiting for someone else to finish, so I had her step right up! This was the simplest setup, a bare strobe on the wall behind her and a beauty dish for the main light. I was getting plenty of bounce off the white wall at camera left, there was no need for a fill light. Charlotte was so sweet and really into it, she too is relatively new to modeling but she has the biggest most gorgeous eyes and nearly flawless skin, she was really great! There was a big-ass fan (a BAF, if you will) available and I used that to get her hair going, I really love this image because of her matter-of-fact attitude she had here!

Charlotte

I used ProFoto studio packs (except for Dana’s image, those were all Canon 580EX II speedlite’s on high speed sync), Pocket Wizards, a number of modifiers including beauty dish, soft box, strip light and grid as well as bounce cards for fill. All the images were shot with my Canon 5D Mark II and Sigma 70-200 2.8 APO EX DG OS HSM telephoto lens. This lens has been awesome!

So what do you think? I’d love some constructive feedback.

Thanks!

This is Dave my classmate, we used a parking lot light here and a gold reflector for fill on camera right. You can tell how warm (YELLOW) this light is because of how blue the background is, in addition to it being dusk. Quite a difference.

Dave, parking lot light with gold reflector

Here are a few of my classmates working on their portraits using storefront lighting from a nearby convenience store. I thought this was just an interesting shot of my classmates, this wasn’t part of the assignment. Just observed it

My classmates working on the available light task

This next photo was from the same night, our teacher just wanted us to practice balancing speedlite with ambient light as well as the color temperature. In this particular image I had to use sooooooo much CTO (color temperature orange) to warm up the speedlite because whatever freak of nature lights the City of Waltham uses for their parking lot lights they are absurdly orange. I believe it was a full AND a half cut of CTO, it was ridiculous! Anyway, used a reflective umbrella and triggered the speedlite with the mini/flex Pocket Wizard TLL trigger and receiver (which I really dislike, for the record, they are my classmates) on a light stand. This clearly isn’t the greatest image ever, but it’s a great example of balancing ambient light with speedlite and balancing the color temperature using gels.

Balancing ambient light with speedlite and gel for color temperature

The photo below is from the same night as the ones above, we were able to get one last task done before quitting time. We needed to incorporate a location around the building our school is in, so we setup shop on one of the stairways there. I used high speed sync on my Canon 580EX II speedlite for this image, I wanted a really quick falloff from the light and just show a couple of stairs up and down from where Steve was sitting. I wanted it harsh, as if it was a spotlight on him, and I think it came out great! I’m a really big fan of high speed sync, you can really great a lot of drama in an image if you do it right. I only adjusted the white balance on this image, I did not darken any part of this image in Photoshop of Lightroom, this is straight out of the camera.

Steve lit by single 580EX II speedlite on high speed sync

Our next class we had a nice woman with her two kids come in to have their portraits taken. We split up into pairs and setup shop in one of the apartments in our building that the school owns which also has a roof deck. Steve and I setup shop outside before the sun went down, we used Profoto lights and modifiers for these images. We only had a few minutes to shoot each and had to move very fast because there are 8 photographers total, we also wanted to try and make this as real life as possible with shooting on location. Here are a couple of my images from that night.

Simple portrait against brick wall

Mother and children

After we photographed the family we needed to work on another task: prove you know how to manipulate ambient light in camera without affecting your portrait exposure. Doing this is really all about memorizing your f stops and shutter speeds… as well as ISO. With this first image I got a proper exposure for Steve (camera settings are in the caption, pay attention to them!) and really reduced the ambient light by shooting at 1/125sec, and since it was very dark out and the light was pretty dim inside (he was standing in front of a window) this really cut down the ambient light. (By the way, these images are straight out of the camera, only rotated a bit to straighten the image, no post processing at all on these. Only Canon 5D Mark II goodness here!)

Very little ambient: ISO 250, f/5.6, 1/125sec

Now pay attention to the difference in the camera settings for this next image. The exposure for Steve is the same but I had to make some drastic changes including increasing the ISO and significantly slowing the shutter speed.

Much more ambient: ISO 800, f/5.6, 1/25sec

The easiest way to remember how to control the ambient light when using strobe/speedlite is to watch your shutter speed. Opening up the aperture to 2.8 from 5.6 would not have increased the ambient light by this much, you need to increase the duration of the exposure to let in that low light, that’s why slowing down the shutter speed and increasing the ISO allowed for that much more ambient light.

I included this last image to further the point. There was a building behind Steve that had a bunch of lights on, probably 100-150 yards away, but you can’t see them because of the way I exposed this image. ISO 100, f/5.6, 1/125sec didn’t allow for any ambient light, just this single 1′x4′ strip light.

ISO 100, f/5.6, 1/125sec

And finally, the last image. This was the final project for this module, well technically we had two Location Portraiture modules back to back, but this was the final for the second one. I needed to photograph somebody who wasn’t in my class or that I photographed before and we needed to use some sort of additional, modified light, out on a location of our choice. I thought for quite awhile about this, and I’m glad it worked out the way it did. A friend of mine, Mike, was generous enough to let me photograph him one day. We did this shoot on Prospect Hill in Waltham, MA and shot for about an hour, hour and a half tops. I actually already posted about the shoot with Mike before, right when I launched this blog, because I was so excited with the results.

The image below, the one I submitted as my final, was a luck of the draw, last hurrah image from that day. I had been very happy with the results of what I was getting and then it started to POUR on us, like, angry pouring on us. We got back to the car, thankfully we weren’t too far away, and then it immediately stopped raining and the sun came out so brightly, it was so odd. That’s when I noticed this little grassy hill that Mike has behind him, it was in a direction we didn’t originally go in when we parked the car and it turned out to be a great backdrop for this portrait. I used a bare 580EX II speedlite (triggered by another 580EX II) on high speed sync with these camera settings: ISO 100, f/4.5, 1/1250sec using my Sigma 70-200 at 70mm (LOVE that lens!). I had to darken the background a bit and brighten Mike just a bit, but I got it so close to what I wanted in camera, I really didn’t do much work to the image! Considering that this image was taken right around 1pm and I was able to overpower the sun using one tiny speedlite, I am very proud of what I accomplished with this image. So, here it is….

Mike - Final Portrait

I did and I didn’t learn a lot in this class. I was able to practice the concepts I had knowledge of but not a lot of practice with, and that I think was the most helpful thing these two modules provided to me. What do you think? Did you learn anything from this post? Share in the comments!

I am not like some other folks. I cherish my days off and do my very best to relax, all day. Many, many people are in Boston right now getting ready to watch the fireworks, but I am relaxing in my reclining chair watching those people on TV. My wife and I have been relaxing all day, and I couldn’t be happier. I’m glad those people are out enjoying themselves, but it doesn’t make them any more patriotic than us! I won’t have to sit in traffic for 2 hours trying to get home. Ha!

Part of my plans for the 4th was to make one of my very favorite meals: PULLED PORK. I love pulled pork so very much, I always have and always will. It’s a dish that can be made very simply or elaborately, but regardless, it’s almost always good. I fall right in the middle, I put a lot into it but always leave just a little bit of room for improvement. I use the classic Boston Butt cut, trim off some of the excess fat and coat it with freshly ground pepper and salt, some paprika, chili powder, and garlic powder. Depending on the size of the cut, I will sometimes slice it into a couple or few pieces to speed up cooking and to prevent it from getting dry on the outside. I’ll put it into the crock pot with some more ingredients: about a tablespoon of fresh minced garlic, chopped red onion (used to use sweet onion but flavor was just too powerful), and the final ingredient…. BOSTON LAGER! Rather than using water in the crock pot, I have found that cooking with beer gives a much more complex flavor to the dish than water can, I really enjoy it. I have tried using other beers, but Boston Lager is just right: just enough hop, not too dark or light, and has a wonderfully complex taste. It’s perfect.

Today’s batch of pulled pork was just as awesome as I’d hope it would be! I set it to cook for 8 hours but I have found it’s cooked perfectly after 7 hours. It pulls apart so easily with two forks, toss it all in a bowl, mix in some of my favorite bbq sauce – Sweet Baby Ray’s – and you’re done! (Aside: Sweet Baby Ray’s is, by far, the best bbq sauce on earth. Don’t even try to tell me it’s not. You know it is.) We had some amazing corn bread along with this and that was all we needed. Such a great meal!

Best pulled pork EVER.

For those interested, here is the setup. I used my Canon 5D Mark II, Sigma 70-200 f/2.8 APO EX DG OS HSM (longest. name. ever.), and Paul Buff Cyber Sync wireless trigger and receiver. At camera right I had my Alien Bee B800 strobe fired into an umbrella as my key light and on a stand at camera left in the back I used my Canon 580EX II speedlite to create some separation and add some light to the top of the bun. Shot at ISO 100, f/3.5, 1/125th sec, 200mm. The strobe was set to 1/8th power and the speedlite was at 1/64th with a stofen diffuser on the front, I didn’t want any sort of harsh light and I believe I achieved that. I shot this on my dining room table. Love this photo!

I later shot this with my 24-70mm @70mm and 2.8, but there really just wasn’t enough of the pork in focus. I was going for a softer look and not wanting everything in focus, it worked perfectly in the above image but I just wasn’t happy with the aperture that wide open. At that time I had also moved the key light to light the pork from the side and I really liked that, but again not enough of it being in focus was an issue for me.

What do you think? Did you cook a special meal that you photographed as well? Share in the comments!

I was there for the first class, we spoke about the differences between the different modes (I’m a Canon shooter, I have a 580 EX II Speedlite) E-TTL, Multi and Manual. Examples were given, explanations for why your photos don’t come out the way you think they should, and demonstrations, of course. Matt really makes it easy to understand how these very complicated little lights work and how to get the most out of them.

The last class that I missed was a Saturday and we were supposed to be working on a shoot, but I had a wedding to photograph that day. I explained to Matt that I’d be using my speedlite extensively and he agreed that it could count as my shoot. I ended up submitting this photo for that day:

Brendan & Janet's Wedding Reception - fill flash

If you aren’t familiar with using a speedlite for fill flash, pay attention to this. Some people don’t understand that exposing for the couple is completely different than exposing for the background. When I was exposing for the couple, this is what happens to the background:

Brendan & Janet Wedding Reception - no fill flash

It gets completely blown out! The opposite is if you expose for the background the couple is too dark to see. The solution: expose for one and add light to the other. In this case, I can’t add light to the Boston skyline, so I exposed for that and added flash to get a proper exposure on Brendan and Janet (who are an AMAZING couple, by the way!). The first photo was taken using my Canon 5D Mark II with my Canon 24-70mm 2.8L USM at 1/125s at f/10, ISO 200. When using your flash on Manual (actually I think it’s any mode) it doesn’t record in the meta data what your power was set at. I believe I was somewhere around 1/8th or 1/16th power for this set of first dance photos once I switched to using my speedlite. I bounced the speedlite off the ceiling in the first photo, the deck of this ship is partially covered and that’s where we were, aiming the flash directly at them would not have resulted in the softer light that you see here.

Anyway, Matt happy with my photo because I clearly demonstrated my ability to work quickly under pressure, shooting in full manual mode (both camera and speedlite) and being able to accomplish this balancing of exposures. I’m very proud that I am able to do this work, you generally need quite a bit of practice to get it right quickly, and I’m fortunate that I have had the opportunity to photograph this wedding, but also many others where balancing the exposures is so important to the end result. Sure, at times having the background blown out is nice, but I wanted to show the city skyline since the couple opted to have their reception on the harbor cruise ship, don’t you think they’d want to be able to SEE the skyline in the photos!? That’s what I thought. This is important stuff.

Now, on to the final shoot for this class. We were tasked with using a minimum of two speedlites for our final shot, more lights would not be frowned upon. My idea for my last shot was to duplicate what I had done in the previous class, Studio Portrait Photography II, where I had to (with Steve) setup an entire portrait studio, shoot, and break down all within an hour. I was very happy with the portrait I was able to take of Steve, you will see that below my speedlite photo for comparison. I wanted to show that you can, more often than not, create the same exact photos using speedlites as you can with studio strobes. As a recap, we used Profoto studio packs and modifiers for the portrait class.

For my speedlite setup, I used three lights instead of the four (didn’t think of that until now, I duplicated with one less light!) I used previously. I used Pocket Wizards to trigger them, all three were 580 EX II’s. One was setup on the floor behind Steve on a tiny stand, it had a mini “beauty dish” modifier on it with the center disk removed, here is the progression of adding lights to get it right:

Background light only

The next photo below I added a speedlite on a light stand, no modifier was used the head was bare, around shoulder height, as a kicker to create separation from the background:

Background light + kicker

The photo below I added the third and final speedlite. This was a little bit of a ghetto rig, but it worked GREAT! Matt helped me with this since we used a Profoto 3′x4′ softbox which clearly isn’t designed for a speedlite. I put a monster clamp on top of a lightstand and then put the metal holder part you would normally slip over the Profoto strobe head but instead clamped it to the stand and just rested the speedlite in the opening on top of the monster clamp. I wish I had taken a photo of this rig! I used some gaffer’s tape to secure the speedlite so it wouldn’t fall out. For this speedlite I used the built in diffuser that slides out and flips down over the light to help spread out the light and soften it even more in that big softbox. Here is the addition of the third speedlite:

Background light + kicker+ key light

It was really dark so after increasing the speedlite to full power and pulling the softbox in much closer to Steve, this is the final image I ended up with and I couldn’t be happier!

Strobe portrait duplicated using only speedlites

Here is a comparison of the photo from my portrait class with the strobes next to the speedlites portrait. I realize the backgrounds are different, the paper I used in the previous class was gone! I couldn’t find it anywhere! Anyway, look at the shadows, the kicker, the direction of the light, the quality of the light. If I didn’t go through all of this explaining would you be able to tell which is strobe and which is speedlite? Probably not!

Strobe on left, speedlite on right

So, what do you think? Are you comfortable using speedlites? Do you prefer strobes? Lets talk about it in the comments!

So, this module built upon what we learned about duplicating sunlight in the studio and using the “traditional” four light setup for portraits. We moved on from photographing each other to bringing in friends and family to photograph them, in every single class. Normally we would shoot in one class, edit the next class, shoot, edit, and so on, or shoot 2, edit, shoot 2, etc. This time we shot in every. Single. Class. Except for the very last night we presented our best work and critiqued them, as we do in every module. I was having a hard time getting people to come in for me since most of my family lives down on the Cape and we shot mostly on Monday and Wednesday evenings, it was difficult for me to get people to shoot! But eventually I did, my sister was able to come up to Waltham for the night and I also got two of my very first clients, Emma and Kevin (the very first wedding I photographed on my own!) to come in for a shoot as well. It really worked out well and I’m very happy with the portraits I took!

This is Maegan, Erin’s sister, who was nice enough to come in for Erin, and I was fortunate to photograph her as well. These were shot with a combination of continuous light (from camera right) and a gelled profoto strobe for fill which was behind me at camera left with just the zoom reflector. Here are a couple of my favorites:

It was really interesting using a combination of strobe and continuous light, but as long as you balance the color temperatures editing is easy. Oh and there was a scrim (diffusion panel) in front of the hot light, it was just too harsh without it.

Here are the photos of my sister Kammy who came up to visit. I used four strobes in this one and I wanted really soft light so I used a 3′x4′ softbox at camera right, a 2′x2′ softbox just to my left and above (camera left), an umbrella not fully opened on a boom for the hair light and a strobe with a grid as the background light. Here are some of my favorites:

With this photo above and the one below, I lowered the power proportionally on both packs (each pack has 2 heads) and opened up the aperture to get a little blur and softer look to her hair and shoulders while keeping her eyes sharp, very happy with it.

These are the photos of my friends Emma and Kevin, as I mentioned their wedding is the first I shot by myself, they have been so good to me and truly appreciate my work. I love each and every one of the couples I have shot weddings for, but these two really mean a lot to me!

Another part of this class was working on lighting multiple people in an image. All four images have one 3′x4′ key light in close to the camera, a 1′x4′ strip box on either side near the background aimed at the sides of Emma and Kevin to create separation, and a background light with a grid, I believe.

On the last Saturday of this module (we have class 9-5 every other Saturday), both Erin and I didn’t have our models coming in until the afternoon (that is when Emma and Kevin, above, came in) we had some down time in the morning so Erin asked if I would take some photos of her using the Elinchrom Ranger Ring Flash. I personally am not a big fan of ring flash, I think it’s too harsh. It’s also a pain because if you move closer to your subject you have changed the power output proportional to the subject, so you either need to increase/decrease the power or adjust your aperture, it’s quite a pain if you are trying to shoot and are not on a tripod. Erin is happy with them, and that’s what counts, but I haven’t used it since. We also used a 1′x4′ softbox at camera left as a kicker to provide some separation, no background light since the ring flash creates this peculiar shadow all around the subject. Am I happy with them? Yeah, I guess, but it worked with Erin, this won’t work with everyone. You can be the judge….

And finally, this was the test at the end of the module. We had to split off into pairs and complete a four light setup with a background, shoot, and break down all within one hour in a small room that we never shoot in. It was quite a challenge, but Steve and I pulled it off in 45 or 50 minutes. This was an excellent challenge and really put our team working skills and efficiency to the test. We did a great job, we even had time to do two lighting setups a piece. I am showing just the one that I submitted as my final portrait for class below, and I am a huge fan of it. Actually, this image is going to surface in my next post about our Speedlite module… stay tuned. This photo had a 3′x4′ softbox as the key light at camera left, an umbrella as the fill just to camera right for fill, a 1′x4′ on camera right as the kicker, and a grid on the background light which was on the floor aimed up at the blue paper for the background. VERY happy with this!

So, what do you think? Are any of these methods of lighting the usual way you shoot portraits? Do you use a completely different setup? Lets talk about it.

The primary focus of this class was to expand upon what we learned about light in our Intro to Light and Product and Still Life Studio Lighting classes. And as the name of the class would suggest, our focus was exclusively on learning about proper portrait lighting and basic posing for men and women. We had Jack Foley for this (and Studio Portrait Photography II, a post that will be written soon) and I think he and I both share the same taste in lighting styles, everyone is a little different and some don’t completely agree and that’s fine, but I really took a lot away from this and the next class.

We worked on using a hot light (continuous light) to duplicate the appearance of a sun in the studio then moved on to using strobes. We started with one softbox as the key light, then added a fill light, then a background light, then a kicker/hair light to complete the “traditional” four light setup. For this module we only photographed each other. I really loved learning about adding the kicker and background lights, when used the right way you can really add a lot of dimension and create separation from the background.

Here are a couple of favorites from the continuous lighting exercise we did, this is my classmate Erin:

Continuous light, no modifier

Continuous light with diffusion panel

Here are some examples of when we switched to strobe from continuous light, again our school uses Profoto packs and modifiers. This is my classmate Aimee:

Single softbox as key light

Key + fill light, both softboxes. Cloned out 2nd catch light in eyes.

Here is the progression of adding lights for the “traditional” four light setup. Softboxes were used for the key and fill lights, the background light has a grid and I believe we used an umbrella on a boom for the hair/kicker light. This is Steve:

Key + fill

Key + fill + hair/kicker

Key + fill + hair/kicker + background

I take back what I said about only photographing each other in this module now that I’m looking back in my Lightroom catalog, the last shooting class we had people come in but on that night we used my camera tethered to Steve’s laptop, I cannot remember which photos I shot and which were his. That’s ok, there will be examples in my next post!

What do you think, did I do ok? I feel like I started off very strong with portrait photography, that being said, I still have plenty to learn.

Note: We have had more classes photographing people since I took this and I have gotten better!