High Key Portrait

My daughter, Ashley, likes this shot of herself and uses it as her profile picture on Face book. I shot this with one flash fired through an umbrella at camera left pointing down at about 45 degrees. I would have liked a second flash to blow out the background and eliminate the shadow that you can still see. As it is, I used a curves adjustment in Photo Shop to achieve this high key effect and a mask to retain the proper exposure on the subject.

I Really need more lighting equipment, but my wife tells me I had best save my extra cash for some projects she has in mind; a new greenhouse for instance. Bowens have a nice 400 WS kit with two 200WS units that can be used either with AC or battery. I could use this in conjunction with my two shoe mount flashes to have a 4 light system that would allow a main light, fill light, hair light and one more for the background. Of course I would need a wireless trigger system and a few other accoutrements ...oh well! If I think on it long enough I will find a way.

Edgy effect

These are some experiments of a look that you may recognize from some CD covers and fashion shots. It even can be applied to some scenic images and I will be scouting for some rustic broken down fences and old rusty, abandoned cars to try this on.

Here is a shot of my son, Rob, and you can see the original of this image below for comparison. Also an old weathered shed that I had originally printed using a watercolour effect. I am not sure which I prefer.

My son wanted some pictures of himself ...so off to UNBC this morning and shot off a few frames. The difficulty was that while I had an off camera flash bounced off an umbrella, his eye sockets were still in shadow and his eyes were showing black instead of green.

Enter Photoshop and voila! Problem solved. Really need a reflector to bounce some light up into the face and fill in those shadows

Cottonwood Park - April 2008

Just back from a walk in Cottonwood Park, not much to see at this time of year, but I wanted to see what it was like since I hadn't been there since November. I have another post showing some shots from that November walk, just to show the difference in the look of wet trees and foliage compared to these shots. In particular compare the two similar shots of tree bark ...when wet it looks almost abstract.

Cottonwood Park - Novemer 2007

Here are some images from my walk in the park in November. I love the saturated look of the images when wet.