It Figures...

Sunday, June 5, 2011

Weekend with the iPhone

Some days I just want to wander around with my iPhone instead of a big camera kit. This weekend brought out some abstracts, some flowers (at home and at a local nursery) and some koi. Not much to say about these, so I'll just present them...

The lead image was processed on the iPhone with Instgram. The other images were edited in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

Nice Night for Flying

Last night (June 4, 2011) SANCA (the School of Acrobatics & New Circus Arts) held their Summer Fly Show, featuring their Junior Fly Team, along with the adult and intermediate teen flying trapeze students. They have a great facility in the Georgetown section of Seattle that provided a nice overall soft light. When I first got called in for this assignment I was worried that I might have to use electronic flash. But the longer summer days and the white tent provided me with enough light to capture these images.

You can help SANCA on June 23rd by making donations via the Seattle Foundation Give Big website. On June 23 all donations will be extended.

More photos available at http://photos.cornicello.com/sanca_fly

All images taken with a Canon 7D and 100mm f/2.0 lens. Exposure 1/500 @ f/4.5, ISO 1600.

Head Shot Fun

I finished up last month getting to photograph a couple of wonderful actors, Heidi and Elke. Both very fun to work with and willing to let me experiment with some lighting solutions. For Heidi, I started out with a ring light flash, then moved to a beauty dish setup, and finished up with a combination of medium softbox and beauty dish. Those came out looking like this...

Alien Bees Ring Light 85mm lens

Beauty Dish 85mm lens

Softbox and Beauty Dish 135mm lens

The next day brought a session with Elke that you can see below. For these I used a 24x36" softbox for the portrait and first t-shirt image. Then moved to the Alien Bees 80" silver PLM for the processed image. And back to a softbox for the photo of Elke's new tattoo.

Softbox 135mm lens

Softbox 24-105mm lens

Alien Bees Silver PLM 24-105mm lens

Softbox 24-105mm lens

Call or email me if you are in need of new head shots!

All photos on this post taken with a Canon 5DmkII camera with a 85/1.8, 135L/2.0, or 24-105L/4 IS lens.

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Photo Center Northwest Creative Photography Seminar

I've spent the last 10 Wednesday evenings (40 hours) assisting Rosanne Olson in her Creative Seminar class at the Photo Center Northwest. This was a class for advanced students focusing on lighting, portraiture, and still life images.

Rosanne is a great teacher, passionate and dedicated to her students. And the students were all wonderful, too. A win-win situation for all, as my day job employer (Adobe) has a "dollars for doers" program where donates cash to the Photo Center, a 501(c)(3 organization, for every 10 hours I volunteer there.

We started the sessions off with teaching about still life with mixed lighting (strobe, hot lights, daylight). Then moved on to natural light portraits. Then mixed light portraits. We worked both indoors and outdoors (when we could, it seems like there was a major rain storm almost every Wednesday this past spring in Seattle).

In addition to assisting and taking part in the class conversations, I also took a few photos during one class when we had models come in to work with us. Here are some samples. For the studio photos I opted to use the modeling lamps from the strobes instead of the flash so as not to interfere too much with the students.

Mandy
Small softbox, modeling lamp only (no strobe)

Lily
Small softbox, modeling lamp only

Chad
Medium softbox, modeling lamp only

Robert
Medium softbox, modeling lamp only


Chantel Window light

One of the models returned a couple of weeks later for a session on mixing on-camera flash with evening light. For this photo I had my flash mounted on the camera, but pointed it to my left where Meryl (student in the class) was holding a 2x3' piece of white foam-core to bounce the light onto the subject, Robert. The aim of this class was to use aperture to control the exposure on the subject and shutter speed to control the ambient/background exposure. See an old blog post on mixing strobe and daylight for more info.

Robert
Canon 550ex flash on camera, pointed towards the
left and bounced off a piece of white foam-core

Detail from the above photo where you can see
Meryl holding the foam-core in the catchlight
in Robert's eye. The white dot in the middle
of the eye is the on-camera flash

I'm planning to be back at PCNW this summer for Patricia Ridenour's Form and Figure Class.

All images in this post were taken with a Canon 5DmkII and a Canon 85mm f/1.8 lens.

Recent projects - maternity

Lately my life has been a mixture of photographing assignments and teaching. I've fallen behind on updating the blog with assignment photos. So I'm here today to remedy that. I'm starting off with a recent maternity session with a beautiful aerialist, Rebekah.

We did two sessions. First we met at my studio for some standard portraits seen here. Basic lighting was a Chimera Medium softbox to her right. Camera was a Canon 5D mk II with the Canon 70-200L f/4 IS lens.

A week or so later we got together at Versatile Arts studio in Greenwood to take some photos in a suspended sling. Again, a Canon 5D mkII, this time with the 24-105L f/4IS lens. Main light (to her right) was a60" Photek Softlighter II* and there was also a rear/kicker light on her left in a Westcott 12x50" strip bank.

Beautiful baby Max was born on May 17.

*The 60" Softlighter II is one of my favorite light modifiers. Easy to set up, low cost, quality build. I call it the "thrifty photographer's octabank" (but the Softlighter has 10 panels, not 8). It is basically a 60" umbrella with a diffusion screen on the front. The light bounces off the umbrella surface and then passes through the diffusion. A combination of reflected and diffused. Lovely light. It also has an umbrella shaft that comes apart so that you can move the light in as close as you want it without having that shaft interfere with the photo. The only thing it can't do that an octabank or softbox does is to serve as the background of an image. The lamp and stand would show in the middle of the surface. Sounds like a future blog post will be about the Softlighter.