Building on the previous post about portrait lighting, I wanted to include something on a more dramatic lighting setup I used for a set of high school theatre headshots.

For this shoot, the goal was to have a series of senior student headshots to hang on the “senior wall” in the lobby during the run of the show. While each person is certainly unique, I usually like to have series headshots like these following the same style. In this case, I decided to use a piece of the existing set for the photos. The set relied heavily on scaffolding and industrial-style elements, and the show had a steampunk theme throughout. I thought that a bit of scaffolding with the stairs would provide a good place to set up some dramatic lighting while also providing some interesting scenery elements and a place for the subjects to sit (always an important detail!). For the past few years, I had done headshots on white seamless for this group, and they worked quite well. This show was a little more edgy, though, and I really wanted some of that to show in the photos.

For the lighting setup, I used three Nikon SB900′s, fired with the Nikon Creative Lighting System in TTL mode. I used two Manfrotto Super Clamps to hang two supporting flashes where I wanted them, and my friend the little Manfrotto collapsible stand I mentioned in the previous post for the key light. I had one super clamp with an SB900 with diffusion dome and a “rock and roll pink” (Rosco R346) hanging behind the seating position on the stairs, aimed at the back of the subject’s head. This was to provide a pop of colorful rim lighting in the subject’s hair. From up and to camera right, I hung another SB900 with diffusion dome and a deep blue (also Rosco, but I’m not sure which one I used–I think it was R83). The key light had my standard warming gel (R03), and was firing into a LumiQuest SoftBox III, which is an awesome little mini-softbox diffusion modifier. Using the SoftBox III allowed me to get the light more focused on the subject, without having a lot of spill. The shoot-through umbrella is an awesome light diffuser, but it throws light everywhere. Using a small softbox gave me a lot more control. Using such a small diffuser meant that I had to get it fairly close to the subject to avoid having it become a hard light source, which would have created some nasty shadows. Since these were headshots, that was easy to do, especially with the small light stand.

The lights were test-fired until I got the balance I wanted. The hair/rim light was firing with no power change. The blue light was firing at about -2, and the key was firing about about -0.3. With a fixed scene and TTL control of lighting, I could shoot with everything pretty locked-down, and the flash exposure would follow. The whole session was shot at ISO 200, f/2.8, 1/125s. When I got home, I realized I could (and probably should) have shot at around f/4 or f/5.6 to give me a little more depth of field. That still would have thrown the background elements out, without sacrificing subject focus. There were a couple of shots where I wasn’t pleased with how some extremities would go out of focus because they were just a little out of that plane. I’m always learning!

Here is the original shot from the post heading, and a second shot from the same session for an example of how this worked with other subjects.

Yes, this is technique number 253.1. Well, not really. There are so many techniques that it really doesn’t make sense to try to name or number all of them. In this post, though, I’ll be talking a little bit about a fairly standard (and easy) technique for getting off-camera lighting when taking portraits “on the go.” The method I used here works great for outings where one might have a second person to help out as the crew (or, as some people call them, voice-activated light stands), but I’ve also done it when it is just me.

I prefer to have off-camera light when I’m shooting a portrait and using lights. That means that the flash has to come off of the camera, which in turn means it needs to go somewhere! That somewhere for me is usually a portable light stand that folds into a fairly compact form. At the top is a swivel fitting with a mounting slot for an umbrella and a cold shoe for a portable flash (a.k.a. speedlight). I use the Frio cold shoes, a super-portable collapsible light stand and umbrella fitting by Manfrotto, and a shoot-through umbrella from Paul C. Buff. To fire the flash, I use either PocketWizards or my camera’s remote flash control system (I shoot Nikon and use Nikon SB900 speedlights, so I can use the Nikon Creative Lighting System for wireless TTL control of my lights). When it is all put together, the whole system (including my wife playing the part of the voice-activated light stand) looks kinda like the photo on the right. The stand in use in that photo is a slightly different stand. It is a Paul C. Buff stand that is a little larger, but is more stable and can go a good bit higher than the little Manfrotto stand. I knew we were going to be shooting in Oakland for the session where this photo was taken, and I knew it was going to be a little windy and I might want some extra height for some shots. In fact, I shot another photo to the camera right of this shot, with the subject sitting on the wall of the Mellon Institute where there are no steps. That’s probably a seven-foot drop. I shot from the ground, and this particular stand had enough reach to get my light in line with his head for the shot.

When I’m setting up for a shoot, one of the first shots I make with either an assistant or a willing subject is a shot with the color check card. I use the X-Rite Passport system, but there are many that do the same thing. A long while ago, I got frustrated trying to get my monitor calibrated to reality, and decided I needed to adopt a more formal color workflow. It is perfectly possible to get great results without going this far down the rabbit hole, but I found that this makes my work more consistent and therefore makes my life easier. The way this system works is that I take the photo with the color chart in it, and send it to a plug-in in Lightroom that creates a color profile for the camera. I can then apply this color calibration to all of the photos from the shoot. This assures some amount of consistency. I also use an X-Rite monitor calibration tool to calibrate my monitor every month, so I know that what I see should be what I get!

I use lights in all sorts of conditions, from bright sun to night, but how I use them changes. This particular post is going to look at a shot where I used powerful light during the day to overcome ambient lighting for a more dramatic and controlled shot. So let’s take a look at the shot again:

This is a photo from a senior session I did in Allegheny Cemetery. The lighting for this shoot was pretty simple, but it helped to make what could have been a pretty drab photo into something with a lot of depth. Here’s an example of a shot with existing light (and no serious post-processing, just for the record):

By itself, this isn’t a bad shot. However, we can make things a little more dramatic by stopping-down about three stops to drop out some of the ambient light. That helps to lessen the impact of the background, and also makes the flash more prominent in the overall lighting effect in the shot. For this particular shoot, I was using the shoot-through umbrella with the flash on a stand, just as in the example photo. The flash was a Nikon SB900, with the diffuser dome in place and a cut of Rosco R03 color gel on the flash head (R03 is called “bastard amber,” and adds a little warmth to the flash). I used a PocketWizard to fire the flash remotely, and controlled flash power manually. For the featured shot, flash power was at 1/4 to get the desired exposure. The end result utilized just one light through an umbrella, but we also had the ambient daylight still somewhat present in the shot, so shadows didn’t go completely dark. The umbrella helps to seriously diffuse the light, softening the shadows and facial features and adding an overall pleasing glow to the subject’s hair. I don’t have a shot where I pulled back on the scene, but the umbrella was just out of frame and up to camera left. The quality of ambient light was diffused open shadow, as there was consistent cloud cover over the area.

After the shoot, the photos were edited and processed. This particular photo had the contrast bumped-up a bit, lens correction applied, some skin softening and spot removal, and a little sharpening in the eyes.

I try to look at my work with a critical eye, and noticed later that there was a light shadow over her right eye (camera left), due to her hair coming across her face in front of the light. With the extra-diffused nature of light from a shoot-through umbrella, I could live with the shadow, since her eye on that side didn’t go completely dark. In fact, one can still see the catchlight in that eye. If the shadow had been too dramatic, this photo likely would have found itself on the cutting room floor.

I hope that maybe this inspires some ideas. Go make some portraits!

Over the past few years, I’ve read several tutorials on how to build artistic renditions of photographs. I have used several techniques that I picked-up through other tutorials and experimentation to develop the cover image at the top of this post. In this entry, I’ll walk you through the steps that I took to build this image. It is a fairly simple process that lends itself well to experimentation and extension.

The first thing we need are a couple of source images. Specifically, we need the photograph that we want to use and a texture:

Once we’ve got some source images, we need to do a few things to our photograph. Already done in Lightroom before I exported it to Photoshop was a simple crop. This particular photograph was a complete candid moment during a portrait shoot, and I happened to take it in landscape orientation. That wouldn’t do, so I did a simple square crop before exporting. The next thing I wanted to do was to add a little brightness to the subject’s face. This was shot with available light only, and there is no fill hitting her face. This will not do, so I added a quick adjustment layer and a layer mask to brighten the face. I could have done this with the dodge tool, but it was faster for me to add an adjustment layer, make my changes until I liked the subject’s face, and then add a quick mask so that the adjustment applied there and feathered-off gracefully.

Here’s the Exposure adjustment layer I used. The mask was a simple radial gradient centered on her face. The image here shows the result of the adjustment layer and mask applied.

Next, I selected the original photo layer and the adjustment layer and did a merge to a new layer (hold down alt/option while doing the merge, or shortcut command-option-E/control-alt-E). Then I made a second copy of the resulting layer for use later (command-J/control-J).

I took the first copy of the layer and applied the “Find Edges” filter. That gave me this:

I used a quick adjustment to the levels on the layer (Image->Adjust->Levels or command-L/control-L) and bumped the black input up a little to darken some of the detail lines. There are some other artifacts here that I figured I might have to clean up later, like the dark band under the subject’s eyes, and maybe some of the stuff in the background. An astute observer will also notice that the layer looks like it has been shifted to the right a bit. That is true–I moved the layer to the right later in the process to align it on the background texture, but I took the screenshots after I was finished. Oops. Here’s the levels adjustment I did:

Now we’re ready to do some of the fun stuff. First up is to put our background texture layer underneath this “edges” layer, and turn it on. Then we’re going to set the blend mode of the edges layer to “Color Burn,” which effectively darkens the texture colors and gives us something like a sketch on our cover texture:

Now you’ll probably see why I decided to move the edges layer to the right–I wanted the image centered on the open cover space, ignoring the “binding” on the left.

So we’ve got a good start here, but there’s still some more work to do. First, I sometimes like to use a gradient layer set to “Soft Light” blend to smoothly brighten the image and texture a bit:

This was just another simple radial gradient on a new layer, drawn in white->black, and then that layer was set to soft light blend mode.

With the basic cover graphic layout finished, I wanted to add the text. I added a few separate sets of text so that I could selectively modify them as I went. The made-up title I used is, “The Story of a Girl.” Yes, lame, but it fit in the space that I had available. I increased the height of the “T” in “The” to create the beginning of a frame for the title.

Next, I added “Story.”

Aligned where I wanted it, I then wanted to do something else to this word to create another frame element. I wanted to elongate the tail of the Y to form a horizontal detail. To do this, I first turned the text into a path:

After I had the text as a path, I zoomed-in and used the pen tool to add a couple of points, and the select tool to move the points and create the stretched tail.

With the tail the way I wanted it, I used the “fill path with foreground color” command in the Paths panel to fill the path with the title red color I was using. I then added the next part of the title and aligned that on the extended tail.

Now to add the final title piece. For “Girl,” I increased the point size of “G” and used that to hook around the tail of the Y.

The final thing I added to the text was a layer style on all of the text layers. You’re already seeing the effects of it here, as I was adding it as I went. It’s a simple bevel with the light angle changed to be centered where the subject’s face is, and with a more dramatic gloss curve.

The last thing that I’m going to do here is add some color back into the subject’s image. This is where that extra copy of the subject layer that I made earlier comes in handy. That layer comes to the front, and is set to hard light at about 70% opacity. I then added a layer mask and inverted it, effectively masking the whole image. Then, with a large, soft-edged brush, I painted some color back into the subject’s face, arms, and upper part of her dress. The end result of that mask looked like this:

Finally, giving us this image:

The last thing I did was to create a merged copy of all visible layers, in case I wanted to do anything further with the finished image. Finally, I saved the master with all of its layers, and created a flattened copy for use in my project. The flattened copy is much smaller and retains the lossless image format. I could have used a “Save for Web” or just done a Save As to get a JPEG, but I prefer to keep my masters in the best format I can, and export JPEGs only when I need them for something (like this blog post, for instance).

I hope this was somewhat useful. Please feel free to drop a comment or contact me if you have any questions.

I know that things have been quiet here lately, and I’m trying to remedy that. I’m a little behind in posting some good stuff! In late October, as Autumn was in full-force in the Pittsburgh area, I had the opportunity to take some senior portraits of the lovely Meredith.

I met Meredith a few years ago while doing some theatre tech work with the Riverview School District. We have consistently run into each other at various arts events in Pittsburgh. I guess she liked what she saw in my photos, and earlier this year she asked if I would take her senior portraits. I was completely thrilled. Besides being quite pretty, Meredith is a lot of fun to work with. She wanted to do them in the Fall. I couldn’t wait.

After talking back-and-forth for a little bit about what she wanted, the suggestion of Allegheny Cemetery came up as a possible location. I was hooked. I had always wanted to shoot something there. Meredith wanted some shots with her violin (“Aaron”) and some on her own, and I was more than happy to oblige.

Allegheny Cemetery has a ton of great locations. It helps that the place is huge, and much of its architecture is what I like to call “industrial-age gothic.” If you have the opportunity, definitely check it out as a location. The opening shot and the one above were both shot around the gatehouse on Penn Ave. The opening shot was through the beautiful iron gates. Above was on the inside part of the gatehouse, where there are these large porticos with decorative tile floors and ceilings.

Jenny came along to assist, of course. It was a good thing, too. We had originally scheduled to do this shoot the day prior, but canceled because Pittsburgh was getting buffeted by some serious sustained winds. By the next day, things had calmed-down somewhat and we went ahead with the shoot. There were still some periods of heavy wind, though, so Jenny helped me to wrangle my umbrella and light stands and not have anything flying across the cemetery.

We did a few different things with lighting on this shoot. Some shots were mostly natural with some fill from an SB900 into a shoot-through umbrella. Some were about half-and-half natural and flash. We also did some–like the shot above–that were mostly flash. I use a cut of 1/4 CTO gel on my flash when using it as a key, like I did on these shots. It helps to warm things up just a touch. With all of the clouds on this shooting day, it worked quite well. It really helps to make Meredith’s violin glow, too, for a little extra dose of awesome.

Speaking of Meredith’s violin, there was one point where we had to walk around the gatehouse to get back inside. We had been shooting through that pretty iron gate, with Meredith inside and Jenny and myself outside. Jenny and I gathered our gear and started to head around the gatehouse. As we did, we started to hear some music. At first, I thought this was a little scary–we were walking back into a cemetery, the wind was starting to blow hard again, and now we were hearing an old celtic melody drifting through the air. When we came around the corner of the gatehouse, we found the source (see above). Meredith is one of those people who doesn’t just play the violin. It becomes a part of their mind for a little while, and we got to experience some of that. It was a really awesome moment. We managed to stay quiet and get a few shots while we listened to her play for a couple of minutes. The shoot was already fabulous and we were getting close to wrapping-up, so this was just icing on the cake.

On our way out, we stopped at a small set of ponds to grab some additional shots. Remember when I was saying earlier that Meredith was fun to work with? I think this shot captured her attitude perfectly. The whole morning was filled with laughter and photography. It was a great morning. Thank you, Meredith, for allowing us to make some photographs of you. And thank you to Meredith’s Mom for the Allegheny Cemetery suggestion–that was a stroke of genius!

We also put a slideshow together, which is linked below. Thanks for a great day, Meredith, and happy senior year!

After a little hiatus due in part to sixteen million other things happening at the same time, I’m pleased to release the next episode in my odd little series called, “The Scene and the Snapshot.” Here in the third episode, we take a look at one of our favorite Lake Huron public beaches on the M134 in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. There are several public beaches in the stretch of M134 north of Hessel. This happens to be one of our favorites, due in part to the neat little island just a short distance off-shore. Depending on the lake levels, it is often possible to walk on the sandbar to the island. When we visited in July of this year, though, the lake was a little higher than it has been on previous trips, and Jenny was up to her neck before she got to the island. There’s always next year!

A special bonus on this particular outing was the presence of my award-winning videographer and photographer Dad, who contributed some slides and video for this and a future Michigan-based Scene and Snapshot episode. Thanks for being awesome, Dad.

There is a special section of the Dryrose Creative website to collect this content, and describe the theory behind the series a little bit more. Check it out at The Scene and the Snapshot. Comments are appreciated via email, facebook, twitter, here, vimeo… pretty much wherever you’d like. The link to the images is available at the link above. Here’s the video, though, to help you avoid some extra clicking:

The Scene and the Snapshot: Episode Three from Jonathan Woytek on Vimeo.

Another edition of The Scene and the Snapshot, from the shores of Lake Huron on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. This particular spot is at a small public beach on M134. There are several beaches along the stretch of road north of Hessel, but this is one of our favorites.

I have been shooting some 120-format film recently, and finally had the chance to develop some of it a couple of weeks ago. My Dad and I had a big film developing party in my parents’ basement. I brought out my new “film processing kit in a box” to run it through its paces. My Dad brought his stainless tanks. We had a blast. We developed something like six rolls of 35mm, and four or five rolls of 120. It has been a long time since I did that, and we had a great time. There was one old roll of Tmax 35mm that lost its emulsion in the tank. I’m not sure what happened there, but my Dad was loading that reel and said that it felt really brittle. It may have been heat-damaged or something. There were a few shots on there that were salvageable, but the rest of it was toast.

The shot above was taken during the Three Rivers Arts Festival in Pittsburgh. Jenny and I like to go every year and check out some of the music. We usually go on a Skyblast night, so after listening to lots of music and checking out artsy things, we’ll wander over to the city side of the North Shore across from PNC Park and watch the fireworks.

I’ve been using 500px for posting some of my personal work. You can find more of my recent medium-format black and white work here. Also, another one of my favorite shots from an earlier outing in Washington, DC (also testing the 500px embedding stuff):

Engrossed by Jonathan Woytek

It has been a really, really long time since I used a fully analog light meter. I recently picked up a Sekonic L-398m:

No batteries. No real maintenance. It works like a slide rule for photographers. The light sensor (under the dome) generates a small current across its terminals. The current is measured and displayed in footcandles on the meter at the top. One then sets the rotary dial so that the pointer indicates the same number as on the meter. Once everything is set, the combination of aperture and shutter speed can be read on the rest of the dial. ISO is set by rotating the inner dial. The metal-looking thing in the very center is the button that activates the meter for a reading. Once the button is released, the meter maintains its last-read position to make reading the meter easier. If one wants to dial-in exposure compensation, the main dial can be rotated to point one of the + or – indicators at the footcandles indicated, instead of at the main pointer. It’s really easy to use, once one gets the hang of it. Additionally, if you don’t know your reciprocals yet, you’ll learn them really fast using one of these.

Reading the meter in its setting above, it shows 1/250s at f/1.4. But wait,  you don’t have a f/1.4 lens? The best you can do is f/4? OK, easy–1/30s, and you better start hoping that you have a tripod nearby, or a really steady shooting stance. In digital land, you can often just crank-up your ISO to compensate. In film land, unless you are shooting a camera with interchangeable film backs AND have a film back loaded with faster film, you’re out of luck.

While testing this meter, I did a few comparisons with the meter in the D90, which was the closest camera at-hand at the time. The indicated readings were pretty darn close, with pretty much just a 1/3 stop difference between them. Arguably, I actually like the meter’s exposure reading better than the camera’s!

First up, the L-398m reading: 1/30s at f/5.6:

Next up, the camera’s exposure reading: 1/15s at f/5.6:

I shot some more 120 film over the weekend, using the 398 as the exposure meter. I can’t wait to see how they turn-out!

New Joy: Film

Seems strange, doesn’t it? Why on earth is film a new joy? With the support of my wonderful wife, I recently went crazy and bought a Mamiya RZ67 camera:

This is a medium-format camera that shoots 120-size roll film (or 220-size, if one gets a 220 magazine) with a 6×7 frame size (that’s about 6cm x 7cm, technically 56mm x 70mm; for reference, 35mm film frame size is 36mm x 24mm). These negatives are HUGE compared to a 35mm camera. That means a lot of things. In a technical sense, it means shallower depth-of-field, higher resolution, and therefore larger possible enlargements. Medium format film has been used in the commercial photography world for a long, long time. In fact, cameras like my RZ67 here are still in common use, sometimes with film and sometimes with digital backs.

This camera is in no way small. It is not heavy, but it is certainly not small. It probably weighs around the same as my D700 with 24-70mm lens and flash. It isn’t something that you’re going to use to go shooting in stealth-mode, or sneak-up on someone. It has a flip-up waist-level viewfinder. The image is a mirror-image of the scene, so everything moves in unexpected ways when moving the camera. The shutter button is on the bottom. There is no “automatic” on this camera. The lens has a single control for aperture. There is a big, chunky knob on the right side of the camera for setting shutter speed (in whole-stop increments only, from 8 seconds up to 1/400 second). The front of the camera is actually the front edge of a set of bellows–focus is controlled by the two big, chunky knobs on the bottom-front of the camera, which extend or retract the bellows. The viewfinder has a “focus assist” mode–slide a small lever and a center magnifier lens swings up into place for your viewing pleasure.

The camera shoots about 10 frames on a roll of 120 film. Need a vertical-style portrait? Flip a lever and rotate the film back 90 degrees. The viewfinder has a set of mechanical flaps that close-in to indicate the now-vertical orientation of the film. Back to landscape? rotate 90 degrees in the other direction, and the guides automatically retract and new guides deploy for the landscape format preview in the viewfinder.

This isn’t new. There isn’t a thing new about the camera, other than maybe the film I’m putting in it. I bought it used. It was well cared-for, but it isn’t new.

What is new about it is that the use of this camera and shooting in this format is completely new to me. I’ve never done it. I shot my first 6×7 frame on Saturday, June 4, 2011. I then proceeded to shoot more. I don’t know what I’m doing yet. When I got a new DSLR a few years ago, I had to read the manual to learn about some of the more complicated features. But, when I looked through the viewfinder, I understood what I saw. I knew the focal lengths, I knew the depth-of-field, I knew the aspect ratio. I knew that the autofocus would get a decent focus even if I didn’t touch the menus. I knew that the in-camera meter was crazy accurate by itself. I knew that when I took my first frame with it, I could press the “play” button on the back and see what I got. I understood the 35mm camera. I understood shooting digital.

Old Joy: Film

Wait, what? Yeah, it’s an old joy, too. I grew up shooting film. One day, my Dad taught me how to use his old Pentax, and I learned how to shoot in manual. That Pentax didn’t give you a choice–you shot manual or you didn’t shoot. I wanted to shoot, so I learned how to make images. It has a simple needle meter–”+” side was overexposed, “-” side was underexposed. How much? Who knows. I went to high school and shot a lot of film for the yearbook. I was still shooting color. I’d shoot the film and take it to a regular drug store lab for developing and prints. Then my Dad taught me how to develop my own film and make my own prints from black and white film. I remember being a little kid in the darkroom with him. Back then, the darkroom was the one bathroom in our house in Cooperstown, with black plastic in strategic places to keep out any leaking light. I remember those days–my Dad and sometimes my Uncle Andy developing film and making black and white and color prints. I recall being allowed to help roll the drum back and forth on the counter to develop color prints. It was awesome.

Moving on to college, I got access to a better darkroom at the school. I shot a lot of film for the yearbook, and a lot of film for myself. One of the theatre groups found out that I did photos, and they asked me to help take their headshots. If only I knew then just a tiny bit of the stuff that I know now, they would have had some great headshots. I suppose they sufficed, though, because they kept asking me back. And I kept shooting–more practice, more time in the magic darkroom. Most of the yearbook shooters would turn their exposed film back into the yearbook office and be done, but I wanted to see what I got. I wanted to make the prints and be in control of what I gave them–I didn’t want to leave them with a shot that I knew would need some dodge-and-burn, which was impossible to do in their standard print method. I’d go in to (the now-razed) Des Places Hall with a sack full of film and be there from two o’clock in the afternoon until two o’clock in the morning. I’d come home with several new pages of negatives in my binder and a few folders of prints. I’m happy that I kept some of those prints, and I kept all of the negatives that I could.

These are happy memories for me. This is why film is also an old joy for me. It’s a little special when the shutter clicks and you know you just chemically altered some plastic with the same plain old light that you look at every day. Not being able to see what one just captured can be nerve-wracking for someone who has grown up with digital, and the ability to peek at each frame immediately after it is taken. I shot film for years, and I had to learn good technique to do it. If I’m shooting cleanly, then I’m reasonably confident that I have a usable exposure on that film. I don’t know exactly what it looks like, but I know I got something.

That brings me back to this new camera here. I’ve never shot this format. I’m shooting a film I’ve never shot before (Ilford Delta 3200, which I’m rating at 1600 at the moment). I’ve never shot this camera. When I walk up to someone on the street and ask if I can take their photo, explaining that this is a new camera that I’m trying to learn, I am 100% serious. I have no idea if I’m going to get a usable frame of them. Maybe I’ll find my meter is out of calibration with reality. Or maybe I blew the exposure because I didn’t meter it accurately, or I guessed at a change because I didn’t have time to re-meter the scene before the shot. If I was used to the format and the film, I would know better how to compensate. One thing that shooting and developing one’s own film will do: One will become quickly aware of how to fix exposure problems before they happen, so one doesn’t spend 25 minutes with two rolls of film in a developing tank, agitating for ten seconds every minute, then running through a stop bath for another several minutes, and only then finding out that one’s camera was still set to the shutter speed from the bright-sun sports shoot, and none of the medium-light headshots came out.

I’m so excited to be shooting film again (I pulled-out the trusty N6006 from my days in college shooting yearbook stuff, and have had some Tmax in it for the past few weeks). I’m even more excited to be shooting this new medium format camera. I can’t wait to see what I get. Maybe it’s all junk. Maybe there are a few gems. I don’t know, and I won’t know until I do the work. I’m excited to add some medium format shots to the portrait shoots I do. I’m just excited again, which makes me happy.

Surprises: The Unexpected Portrait

Sometimes, it’s the shot that one doesn’t expect that becomes one’s favorite from a shoot. That’s the deal with the shot at the top of this post. This was from a set of headshots that I was doing for New Kensington / Arnold’s Valley High School drama group this Spring. This girl has beautiful eyes, and they showed up wonderfully in many of the straight-up headshots that I got that day. This was one of those ‘tweener shots. I was asking most of the kids to do a standard smiley pose, and would then ask them to get a serious face, just for some variety. This particular girl would hold her serious face for about 3/10 of a second, and then bust-out in laughter. In one of those in-between moments, this is what I saw: Genuine laughter, and an expression that could have never possibly been posed. This is why I like to shoot portraits. This is a moment that makes me smile every time I see it.

Hopefully, I’ll have some scans from my first RZ67 shots here soon. I’m probably going to need to get a new scanner to scan them, but we’ll see. Until then..

You’re now wedded! And we have the photos (and video!!!) to prove it! I’m still busy importing video and starting to cull photos, but here is a quick sampler from today’s festivities.

Jenny and I are out in Philadelphia for her sister Katie’s wedding. Katie and her fiance asked us to take their engagement photos over Thanksgiving. They later asked us to also take their wedding photos, and we were thrilled! Tonight was the rehearsal and dinner. Here are just a few images from tonight.

First, a couple of the happy couple….

Figuring out what to do when:

And, of course, all of the sisters in their rehearsal finery: