From Mesa to San Francisco

So recently I went down to Mesa, Arizona to pick up my car from my mother since I haven't had a place to park it up here in San Francisco. So naturally I brought my trusty old 50d along for the ride. After a couple hours on an airplane and a short drive I was in Arizona again after being out of the state for about a year. Since I just got my brand spankin' new 50mm 1.4 I couldn't resist the urge to use it constantly as my kit lens for the journey. Now I started using the lens just recently for a concert in my last post featuring Critical Bliss but this si the first time I got to use the lens with a decent lighting situation, and honestly it preformed with an amazing ease that I was not expecting for a lens of it's price. The first image here is of Mahkayla in a book store on Venice Beach, which to me the depth of field is spot on and there are a few small things I would fix if it was a studio shot or not so much as a snap shot like the hair leading to her eye on the right and the small hot spot in the lower left hand corner but other than that which are my fault really the quality of the image is stunning.

Soon I am going to be starting on a small project called "In my Garage" where I will be photographing items under a studio light set up of what items I have found in my garage that I am cleaning in my new place here in San Francisco. I think it has the potential to be really cool, I am starting to figure out how I am going to be shooting the project but I am probably just going to clear a space in the garage and shoot it from top down or eye level to the items. Since it will be a small series on still lives it should be a pretty interesting shoot.

Secret Assignment

So my recent assignment for class was a themed around "secrets" so we wrote a bunch of stuff on paper and turned it in and there were a lot of things about not having money or being poor but a couple caught my attention that I had to do. The first being " I like to dress like a crow and yell at people at 4 am out of taxi cabs". I thought woah this is great but because of some class limitations I wouldn't be able to do a direct translation so I did dress like a crow and cut out some of the rest of it. The second secret that caught my attention was a person apparently wants to be a cannibal. Or at least try human flesh in the class, not sure if that one is a blatant lie or if it is true but the second image is a take on cannibalism. Hopefully my allusion in the image comes across well but I know it will make people think and I feel it is pretty smart in a couple of ways. I won't go into too much detail on it but if you want please leave a comment about what you think it is alluding to.

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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Casual Portraits

So I had my studio lights up today to do a little bit of re-shooting for the Sensuality assignment which more images will appear from that soon. Right after that small amount of images that were taken for the re-shoot I decided to do a bit of casual portraits of her. That weren't of trying to chow down food as grossly as possibly.

Keeping with my class standards that I am going to try to keep from now on I will be using square format as I am quite fond of it. With this as a constant practice I hope to become quite comfortable with the square format. Anyway this is Mahkayla, she is my wonderful new friend in San Francisco, she has never appeared on the blog until now but you will end up seeing more of her in the future.

So this is just a general portrait study for the square format. Since it is digital it isn't considered medium format but I will be shooting more 120mm film once I get a way to scan the shots down here. Hopefully in the near future I will have the equipment.