Attack of the Clones, Redux

One of the things my buddy Brian and I like to do is clone ourselves at night using long exposure times and handheld flashes. Neither photos were multiple exposures, nor were they created by combining several photos during post-processing. The first shot was by standing and firing off the flash at myself (by pressing the test button) in four different spots along the walkway. The second shot was created in a similar fashion, except I augmented his handheld flash with my flash. You can my flashes all around his knees. Because I was constantly moving, you can't really see me in the photo. To read more about this technique, go here.

Coveting Brian's Night Shots

Exposure: 52.5mm focal length, 30 sec, f/9, ISO 100, 11:57pm. After Herie and Gene's engagement shoot, I went back to Stanfurd University later that night with my buddy Brian to take some night shots. I think his are a lot better: better colors, more detail, etc. I'm jealous. Photography is not a contest...but I still want a REMATCH! :-) You can see some of his shots here and here.

More Creamy Creamy Bokeh

To end my series of posts from Herie and Gene's save-the-date/engagement shoot, I want to show another example of great bokeh. I love the way the background is defocused which draws attention to the Herie and Gene. If you want to learn more about bokeh, start here.

Be Ready To Abandon Your Plan

When we took the engagement shoot into the classroom, I set up my flash on a light stand and behind a shoot-through umbrella. I wanted some soft directional lighting. I didn't like the results. Instead of wasting everyone's time futzing around with my equipment, I abandoned the effort and just put the flash on my camera hot shoe and bounced the light off the ceiling. I'm certainly not giving up on lighting subjects using an off-camera flash, but I need to practice more before trying it on important photo shoots. Just for fun, here's a shot Basile took of me setting up the umbrella.

Lesson Learned: No Hiding

I was very happy with these shots of Herie and Gene (especially the one above). When I showed them to my friend Amy, I could barely contain my pride. She took one look and said, "Gene's parents aren't going to like these photos, because they can't see their son." Pishhhhhh...that was the sound of my ego deflating. I thought I was being artsy, but who cares about art when you can't see the groom's face?

Merry Christmas From Sacramento!

Merry Christmas everyone! I spent the day with the family in Sacramento. We had a delicious prime rib dinner. I tried to get everyone together for a group photo, but the response was cold, so I settled for some random shots. I really like the one above of my mom and me (taken by my brother). When my subjects don't want to cooperate, I take what I can. :-)

Photoshop To The Rescue Again

Sometimes I like to tweak the exposure of small portions of a photo, e.g. darken highlighted areas or bring out details in the shadows. There are many methods of doing this in Photoshop (and other programs), but I currently only know of two: 1. Joey L's method of working with two layers in Photoshop. 2. Photoshop's dodge and burn tool. On the left, Gene was overexposed. I used Joey L's method and created two layers in Photoshop. In the first layer, Gene was properly exposed (but Herie was underexposed). The second layer was the exact opposite, Herie was properly exposed, while Gene was overexposed. I then removed Gene's face from the second layer, so that his correctly exposed face showed through. For more details, read this.

In this example, I dodged his hair, and the hair above her forehead. I burned the camera-left side of his face (note splotchiness, my bad!), his neck, and parts of her hair.

If you're viewing this on a browser other than Safari, you might notice that the photos on the right look more warm. This is a color space issue. The photos on the left were saved in the ProPhoto RGB color space, while the ones on the right were saved in Adobe RGB. Check out this post for more details.