Colbie Caillat Concert

Being a professional photographer is mostly fun. No doubt about it. I had a pleasure of photographing a nice young lady, Colbie Caillat at her concert the other night in Livermore.  She was very pleasant with the fans who met her before the concert and she put on a very nice show.  I recognized only about five songs from her set but my guess is that I'm not in her primary demographics either. She played a couple of songs from her upcoming album, All of You (Releases July 12th, 2011) and those sounded as good as anything she has done in the past.  My guess is, that it will do very well. As with all concerts, the photographer can only shoot during the first two songs - so you have to shoot fast and just about everything you see.  Most of these images were shot a Nikon D3S at about 3200 ISO - 200mm F/2 Lens with 1.7 converter. Here are a few:

Making Dough

Photography has brought me a lot in my career - the most recent is my dipping my toes in the video world.  With some working knowledge of lighting, I had to learn about sound and how to edit.  While I am no means a high end "filmmaker" yet - I'm working on it.  I learned a lot about sound from a little booklet from by Ty Ford called the Audio Bootcamp Field Guide. While I'm far from mastering sound - I feel that it is poor sound that permeates most online videos - I'm going to try and change that for my work. To that end I just finished a video production for an Outdoor Cooking event called the Big Green Egg Fest.  Since I give demonstrations of how to make bread at this annul event - I ended up making a video, step-by-step on how to make this Cinnamon Swirl Bread on the outdoor cooker.

Producing video is not a simple matter - but add to that to I'm in it!  Makes it that much more difficult.  I'll post more videos as I produce them (less me - more creative, I promise) so you will be able to get your first look here on the blog.

Here is the video:

Evolution of a Shot

Most of my photographs for clients don't end up as we start.  There is almost always an evolution to the images.  Here is an example: One of the services that this client offers is janitorial service.  So they wanted to have three of their workers on one of their trucks looking like they were working. So here is how we started:

As you can see, it doesn't look like anyone is working, there is too much "stuff" in the back of the truck and the light was not that good with the washed out background around the truck.  So the first thing we did, is to move the truck inside where we could control the light. As much as I try to be on location at the proper time of day there always comes a time that the outdoor light isn't working.

We have now added a light in the back of the truck to light up the interior better and also added a soft light in front and removed loads of things out of the truck.

After we add the workers back in we will need to do some Photoshop work on the final image.

Some of the changes we made was to remove the license plate (copy a portion of the frame of the truck and pasted it over the plate) remove one of our light cords, remove debris that was stuck to the floor of the truck, remove a red strap that kind of caught the viewer's eye.

Here is the final image, coverted into black and white, using Nik Silver eFex II.  In this program you can control the contrast of the image and sharpen areas that need the extra structure.

Textures and Portable Flash

Since photographing products are a common request, I can say over my career I have photographed quite a variety. From toasters to washers and dryers to jewelry to bedspreads, I've done quite a bit.  On this particular day we were photographing designer pillows.  These are all hand-made from a small company in Fairfax, CA, Twig and Cricket. Our challenge was to show the texture in the product as it was in a natural surroundings of a home in Oakland, CA.

Nothing like a great shot of my bald head.

The lighting was pretty simple.  Start with a nice overcast day in the early morning so light is filtering through all the windows.  I added a small strobe, a battery operated SB-800 on a wireless trigger, to hit the subject with a just a tick of fill light.  This was shot with a very shallow depth of field to bring out the texture in the napkins.

Again, we used daylight from the windows and a portable flash with a slight warming gel to light up the front of the pillows.

We photographed the whole line of pillows in the same set-up so the owner could use what she wanted in different parts of the web site.

Warm light added with portable flash.

We set up and shot several outdoor photographs early that morning. Since the light was flat, we added a portable Nikon SB-800 with a warming gel off to the right to add some texture and give it that morning glow.

Dancing In a Daydream

One of my most popular images I have ever shot, took only a few seconds to set up. The story behind this shot I created years ago is simple.  I was on vacation in Carmel with my wife and I had just bought a new lens and was down on the beach working with it one day.  I saw this tiny  little girl having a great time at the beach.  She would walk down to the water and back up as the waves came gently in.  She spent about a minute near the water's edge and went back to her family.

I thought that would make a good photograph so I went up to her dad and asked if I could take a couple of shots of her daughter.  I gave him my card and told him to contact me and I would send him some prints in an exchange for a signed model release. He asked if I wanted her to change he clothes or anything and I said no, I want to just recreate was I saw a few minutes earlier.

The girl followed me down to the water's edge and I shot about five frames.   I got what I wanted on the first frame and then took a couple of back up shots. Forty-five seconds, tops.

When I came back home and processed the images, I knew I had something special.  A few weeks later I was contacted by the father of the little girl and I sent him some prints and he sent me a signed model release.

I have since won several awards with this image both on local level and on a national level.  One my most popular and it took less than a minute with almost no set up.  I titled it: Dancing In A Daydream for competition.