Location Lighting Wrap Up Post

So this is my final post of my location lighting class. I had a lot of fun in the class but it kind of made me realize what I was missing in most of my previous portraiture. It isn't more light but more control of my light. As much as I like natural lighting there is only so much natural light can do. My main goal with these lights were to create a fill light and balance out the natural light which is a goal I accomplished pretty well. The only thing I wish I did was use more of the larger lighting packs and played more with beauty dishes compared to umbrellas and bare bulb. I wish I had more time to update though the last semester but I am going to try to update on an almost weekly basis again from now on. I was extremely busy this semester which is part of the reason for the lack of updates and the lack of sleep I have been getting. I have improved my color pallet which I am extremely happy about but I don't feel like I made enough progress in other areas.

I also need to scan in my other two project or take images of them to show you guys my awesome gold leafed portraits and my shrink wrapped strange food items. Both of these projects are in books but the strange food items are pretty funny.

Anyway I am going to be doing some new projects soon so keep your eyes peeled!

A small update

 For my readers that don't follow my flickr feed here is a small update of what I have been doing digitally. I have a bunch of cyanotypes I am going to be making a post about soon but I have been busy in all of my shooting classes this semester which totally killed my new years resolution of an update a week. I am going to try to get back on that track to help keep myself better organized. I did do a couple of really cool things as well recently like build a room in my condo for coating paper and prep of liquid emulsion and tin types. I have been playing with the idea of working with fuji-lifts and fuji transfers since I picked up a day lab and a new instant film camera but I haven't had the time or slide film to do it with yet.

Anyway I been focusing a lot more on color now and trying to make my compositions a bit more interesting and different than what I have been in the past. In order to grow I must change what I am doing a bit and improve. I have found a good couple of ways to do this in post production but for some reason figuring out color has become increasingly more difficult the more I learn it. I have found ways to get the colors how I would like but I am still fine tuning the details in this process. Since each photograph is different this can sometimes lead to a massive photoshop document if I want to keep certain things looking one way. So far though I have made this semester a rousing success in terms of progressing my education in modeling shoots and in color theory even though I don't have a color class pushing myself to learn and understand it more is going to hep me long term. Which is what I want anyway, long term knowledge.

Location Lighting Class

So since I failed my resolution on updating once per week when school kicked in I decided now since I am working on more finished photographs instead of everything that I seem to cook up I can hopefully bring more of a quality posts.

 At any rate I started my location lighting class which is awesome and my first assignment which is shown on the right. This shot was done with the 530 exII as the master and a 430 ex on photo right for the other light source bouncing off the ceiling. Longer exposure to burn in more of the ambient light behind me. Other than that I just had them as a bare bulb. No special modifiers on them since the 430 was just laying on its back.

  The location for this particular photo was in an old church my school bought and was using for a lecture hall. I do have some more images from the shoot but none of them stand out to me very much. I will be making another post shortly with some of the film I shot last semester because there are two images in particular that I really like that I haven't been able to get online yet. Since my alt process class started as well I will have some more film prints coming out. The most recent shots are from a pinhole camera to a giant film negative. I need to clean them then print them on some fiber paper before showing off the images. The pinhole camera was made out of a tea tin so it was a pretty fun little experiment. There will be more on that and I might make an DIY pinhole camera post in the future. Hopefully I don't get swamped and can actually go through with it unlike the infrared tutorial. Which I do have the majority of the images but I am trying to get the proper film for it. Just so there will be a good base on how the final effect is suppost to look unlike how people are making it out to look. If I get my Mark 3 before I have the chance to order and shoot the film I will probably just send my 50d out to get modded into an infrared only camera which would work as well.

At any rate let me know how you guys like the image on here or on flickr! It would be great to start getting more input on what I been doing.

Brenizer Method

 So these images are rather old now, they were shot back when I still lived in Downtown San Francisco. The end of last Spring is closer to the time they were shot. I think but these were shot with my 85mm f/1.8. What is cool though is that the depth of field is much more than a 1.8 generally is. This is because of the Brenizer effect. Basically it is panorama portraits which when stitched together are these HUGE images that depending on how decent your computer might take about a half hour to process.

These were fun shoots all together but there are multiple things I would change about each one of these images. Minor background things for a lot of the images but small lighting techniques as well.

Traditional Darkroom Final

So for my final in my darkroom class at the Academy I had free reign to do whatever I pleased. So long I had an artist statement and some other stuff I didn't pay too much attention to and should probably look back to see what else I have to do.  Anyway these are some of the prints I have made for the class. Keep in mind these are all hand printed on RC paper so it isn't fiber like I used to print on but it is still pretty nice. I would have rather printed on fiber to be honest but I just don't have the time to constantly print on it. Hopefully I will in the near future but as of right now I have been too busy. Oh yeah, and the film it was shot on was this.

General Update and Some Portraits

   So it has been a long time since my last post. I want to blame this on me being busy with work and having mainly printing classes this semester which is partially the case. The other part is that I have been extremely unhappy with my old Canon 50D. I have been shooting a lot of film but sadly since I have moved and gotten rid of my older film scanner I been waiting on a desk I ordered that never came in since the website I ordered it from never completed the transaction even though I got a delivery date. Eventually I will get a new film scanner though and show off some newer stuff from the past couple of months but I am unsure of which one to get. Before I had the Epson v300 but I am probably going for the v600 model now. So eventually there will be some nice film scans of my older medium format images that I never been able to get online, let alone printed because I shot them extremely thin. There will be some awesome stuff up in the future and it will be glorious.

   Recently I have gotten a few emails every so often about the stuff I have been using. So starting now I will be linking the items I am playing around with in the blog so you can see the stuff I am talking about or thinking of getting for myself. So don't fret about the links they will just take you to the product on the Adorama website.

  So there are a couple of things I am slowly beginning to work on now that I have began to drastically improve my use of any high end printer. The first is my straight up image quality. Which wasn't "bad" before but it has improved to the point where I am dissatisfied with a lot of the stuff I have done in the past which is really a step in the wrong direction for me. The only recent images I have made in the last couple of months on digital are the two in this post. The first one of my friend Johanna and the second of Mahkayla.

   The image of Johanna was shot on my ol' 50D which still has a good quality to it but it isn't anything I am satisfied with, since I know it could be much cleaner if it wasn't for the noise I get at the mid range ISO's on it. It was taken using my 85mm lens, and honestly looks great because of it. The other image of Mahkayla is using the holga lens, for a Canon EF mount. You are able to get them in the different mounts depending on your own camera system but I actually found out that using this digitally is almost as fun as shooting with a real holga. The lens is awesome considering it is a chunk of slightly over priced plastic. Eventually I will start having images with my new Lensbaby Composer that I bought myself for my birthday but I am so picky with the images I have taken for it that it is unreal. For some reason I can't get my focus dead on even with being able to pick my sweet spot. The Composer is a lot easier to use than The Muse but I just am not willing to not use f/2.8 I guess.

Modeling Shoot in Sonoma

     So my people photography class went on a trip to Sonoma to do a small modeling shoot in this landscaping/garden art gallery place. The name of it alludes me at the moment but I think it is Park 121but it was a super fun time. The models I had were great and I had a delicious hamburger there as well. The landscapes were amazing considering how small they were but I was able to get some pretty interesting shots!

As for the blog it isn't dead, I just been working and summer school has been moving so fast I haven't had a whole lot of time to do much else beyond sleep and editing. So with my first larger break I wanted to get these up. Soon I will have other images since I been doing a lot of work in street photography and have some cool shots that will go up hopefully within the next 7 days or so of that and you guys can see what I have been doing.

So until next time when I have a larger up date I will have to see you guys later!

Slight Differences

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Well I decided it would be a good time for a semi non school related post. One of these I might be using for homework in the near future but this post is mainly for the show of slight differences in two similar photos.

The photoshoot idea was dressing as a crow. Like I said before this might end up being used for a school assignment but I am unsure of it as my other shoots might be better and might be more appealing to the viewer.  So time will tell for that, but the model is my wonderful girlfriend Mahkayla and I think both images of her are stunning. I do like the second image more for various reasons but I am curious on what my readers think of the two shots. If you would like please tell me which image is your favorite and why.

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Assignment 1 - PH 100

So here is my first assignment for PH100 at AAU. It was basically free range with no editing. It was just suppose to have proper exposure so I decided to play with my macro lens. I haven't had a lot of practice using this as a macro lens but I feel like I was able to get a good texture quality with it with a strong depth of field which is really nice. I am going to start uploading all my assignments on here along with my personal work and other things to catalog everything that I have been doing. This is just the only boring portion telling you guys what I am doing.

So the first image was of my new wonderful friend Mahkayla's jeans, the second image is of my foot. Yes, I know it is a nice fancy wrinkly foot but my feet are strong. The third is of my favorite pair of pants.  These are just a preview of my first assignment but there will be more and more interesting class work a head.