Photographic Exercise
As far as activities go, photography is pretty benign. Aside from lugging the gear around, there's generally not much physical exertion to be had on a shoot---not on the part of the photographer, anyways---and it's certainly far from perilous. My last shoot at Lewis Park, however, turned out to be the exception to the rule. Admittedly, I never truly feared for my life, and none of my muscles ached the next day, but I definitely did a lot more shoving and clinging and climbing than I've ever done for a photograph before.
Christmas Portrait, Part II
Continued from Christmas Portrait, Part I.
For this year's Christmas portrait, I put my girlfriend inside a snow globe. In the last entry I talked about the hard part: photographing the snow globe. Today's entry covers photographing Danie and actually getting her into the globe, which was really more drudgery than anything.
Christmas Portrait, Part I
Last year I made a Christmas portrait of my girlfriend, and we've decided to make a yearly tradition of it. Last year's was a simple affair, just a standard headshot with a Santa hat and a red-gelled background. This year we've decided to go for something much more involved, and I'm going to be compositing two photos together. I won't reveal my plan until the composition is finished (that should be up in a blog post tomorrow morning), but I'll start out by walking through the creation of one of the photos I needed: a snow globe.
Building a Mini Softbox
For a shoot I'll be doing soon, I need a big-ish light source a little more directional than my usual umbrella, so I decided to throw together a little posterboard softbox. I thought I'd have it together in a snap and move on to shooting my subject tonight, but it turned out to be a much, much more time-consuming endeavor than I'd intended. In the process I came up with some templates for the pieces and thought I'd share them, along with a little review and some instructions.
Splash
I haven't gotten a chance to shoot anything recently, and my screencasting plans have fallen by the wayside thanks to technical problems, so today I decided to dig up some photos from an older shoot and write a post about it.
A little over three years ago, I shot my friend David's senior portraits. We were both competitive divers at the time (although the "competitive" part was debatable in my case), and he wanted a set of diving portraits, so I went with him to practice one day to shoot. I had a 300mm f/2.8 lens checked out (one of the perks of editing the school's yearbook), and I planned to put it to good use. I thought we'd get there a good hour before the sun went down, during which time I'd make some nice available light shots with the 300, and then once the sun set I'd play around a little bit with some lights.