Had a great time shooting my first wedding of the season last weekend here in Portland. The bride was beautiful and fantastic and thoroughly loved having her picture taken!

I love the emotions in these shots… real, genuine love and exuberance!

My daughter’s first audition headshot, the first of many more I hope! For children and adult actor & theater head shots please call the studio @ 503 768-9878.

Rummaging around up in the studio attic looking for something else one night, I ran across an old dear friend. We met in 1977, my junior year at ASU and while it was a little awkward at first, we soon learned how to make it happen and man, we did it! I graduated :)

So many rolls of film have gone through this camera that I sometimes laugh when I see one of these or similar cameras being used as a “vintage camera” nowadays in a wedding or fashion shoot :) If that’s your thing, that’s cool, but I remember when the real camera actually meant something. A step up from 35mm and “you now need a bigger negative carrier”. That sort of thing. It’s really neat that you include them in your shots as kind of an implied quality.

Man, I loved that camera can’t wait to take another look in the neg files to what gems (if any!) are there. I know there’s thousands of candidates!

This was shot in the very simple studio-in-a-box technique. I took a 16x16x16″ box, laid it on one side and cut out the remaining three sides, leaving 1″ of cardboard on either side. The inside was spray-painted flat black and tissue paper was taped over the openings. This diffused the speedlite’s light and created those large soft highlights. This is a great technique to use when shooting small products for catalogues, eBay or Etsy sales.

Since I was set up already shooting a tech assignment, I laid down a piece of black tile in the set and let speedlites do the rest. It was great spending time with an old trusted friend!

Helping me out for a book project on Lighting, my friend Kathryn (a fine photographer herself) and her daughter Adrienne came to the studio and posed for several different portrait lighting styles: butterfly, split, loop, Rembrandt, etc. and kept their energy up throughout the shoot! At the end I wanted to make a shot just for them  and this one became my favorite. I think what I really like about this portrait is their expressions, almost those “Mona Lisa smiles”, serious but friendly. If you spend a  lot of time looking through lenses at people you will become attuned to very subtle difference in looks, expressions, postures and poses. I love the gentle hand Kathryn lays on her daughters shoulder, protective yet not firm, a strong bond that will never diminish.

Mother’s Day is a great time for portraits, either for moms themselves or as a gift for your favorite Mom! Come in by yourself or with your Mom for a portrait session or call the studio at 503 768-9878 and purchase a gift certificate. Mother’s day is Sunday May 13th, 2012 :)

We had a great time discussing lighting theory, placement and my favorite ~ modifiers! The demo was a preamble to my full-day lighting workshop at Stage 13 on May 12th.

It is so rare that a photographer gets to see what they look like when they are working so it was really cool that Danny Abrego of Portland Reign Photography sent me these pics of me! Thanks, Danny :)

Here I’m shooting with my homemade DIY Speedlite Ringflash to add some soft fill for the more powerful Alien Bees studio strobes.

We’ll be exploring this and way more lighting techniques in the full-day Lighting & Portraiture Workshop May 12th at Stage 13 in NW Portland. Find out more info here or here. Hope to see you there!

Providence Medical Center called recently for some new portraits of two of their doctors who were going to be going out and speaking at medical conferences. They needed shots together and portraits alone. So, early on a  Sunday evening when the hospital was quiet, we nearly had the whole lobby to ourselves which made picking locations quite easy. They didn’t have a whole lot of time so I took along Canon Speedlites instead of my studio strobes to stay nimble and shoot fast.

I have begun to shoot a lot more horizontal portraits and in a lot looser fashion. This has been fun and I am excited to see the results. It keeps my peripheral vision engaged and allows me to see compositions and settings that I might not have noticed before when I was going in to “just do a headshot”. I’m enthused to see where this new direction takes me and present three of my favorites here!

My client from Thailand was in the States picking up this wedding/engagement ring from his custom jeweler and wanted some hot images of it before he carted it off to the Kingdom formerly known as Siam and origin of all that yummy food! He also brought over to the studio some authentic Thai figurines he wanted me to work into some of the compositions and it was a challenge because of the differences of scale between the ring and the assorted sculptures.

At $12K for the large diamond, around $3K for the smaller two and about $1K for the setting, and shooting without a Brinks guard, I was never so happy as to get this assignment out the door!

So my favorite financial planner was in the studio yesterday for an updated photo for his website and various social media uses. We talked beforehand about the feel and emotional impact he wanted the images to convey.  He said: Accessibility, confidence, warmth. And from that, it was my job to interpret it into a visual representation. At that point, decisions are made; lens selection, background selection, RAW or jpeg? (Of course RAW, just kidding!) lighting set-up, shutter-speed, f/stop, white balance, reflector, grids, gels, etc, the list goes on. And yet, it’s all so cool when it comes together, like building a puzzle on a deadline :)

tnt

(till next time)

What do you get when you bring thirteen naturopathic doctors into the studio, after hours, for a group shot for their collective website? If you stick with it long enough, the above shot! We started off with some simple groupings and as we shot some interesting forms started to take shape, much like arranging musical notes on a scale. After a dozen or so shots, I’d have them rearrange themselves then make my compositional tweaks. We ended up shooting about 8 or 9 groupings.

After the final shots, when I knew we had it in the can (memory card?) I let them do what ever they wanted for fun. That’s when all the personalities came out and I really like this one for all the different expressions. It’s always a good idea to have a final fun shot like this when shooting certain groups in the studio or on location. Even better when they bring the beer and pizza!