Take for instance this blog.  This blog had lots of activity between 2006-2008 and then it became pretty much dormant in 2009, as a reflection of my other professional activity changes.  I have started to retake it again in 2010, together with my activity on twitter, Facebook and flickr. Well, despite the blog neglect in 2009, many of its posts still attract an audience.  This is mostly because those posts are positioned well in Google and other search engines.  Those posts attract dozens of visits every day.  In contrast a popular tweet might attract a good number of hits in one or two days, maximum.  After that it simply gets lots in the long stream of tweets.  Even people who visit my personal tweeter page directly hardly click past the last 4-5 tweets. 

In another words, I do not buy into the argument that twitter is killing blogs.  Twitter is a great service and has allowed me to stay in touch with my network in a very efficient way.  However, as a way to publish information it still has its challenges.  I have had dome of my articles RT'd by many good friends and still the traffic ouf of those RTs is pretty low.  All of this might change as tweets get incorporated into search engines more preeminently, but for now the tweets are cool, but short lived. 

Here is the link for ricardocarreon.com.

First of all, in most portraits you will want to achieve different levels of light on the face of your photographic subject.  This creates some shadows which make the picture look tri-dimensional.  If you make your light very even on the face you will make the face of your subject look flat.  There is some movement towards even lighting nowadays, especially in fashion and editorial portraits, but you will see that in that case, the volume on the facial features might be achieved with make up or any other means. 

If you are shooting with studio lighting, the way you achieve different levels of light is by placing one lamp at a higher power or closer to the subject (this is called the main light) and a second light at lower power or far from the subject (this is called fill light).

If you are new to photography a simpler way to achive this for practicing is to place your subject close to a large window that lets natural light in.  Position your subject in a way that the light coming from the window lights part of the face (it can be most of the face actually) and part of the face and body have shadows.  Experiment with different angles on your model (relative to the window) and different camera positions.  You should expose to the light on the brighter side of your model (that is, expose to the main light).  Be careful that the light differential between the illuminated side and the dark side is not too big, because that can create problems.  A light differential of 1.5 points is very good between the main light and the fill light, because that creates a 3:1 contrast ratio that looks very good in the resulting image.

Here is an example of this.  The Model on the shot is Finnish Top Model Olivia Kortelainen.  We shot this entirely with natural light coming out of the window.

Any photography questions please leave a comment or contact me in twitter at ricardocarreon.

Here are two photos from Kodoq Katie, you can see all photos published on my Kodoq flickr set.

Kodoq black later dress

Kodoq Katie black latex dress floor shot

Credits:

Model: Kodoq, MM# 70561

Make Up Artist:
Cemille

Wardrobe:
backstreet.fi

Post-processing:
Ivan Matuck

Shot at Magito Studios, Helsinki, Finland

I guess I can come with a bunch of excuses for not updating this on a regular basis, but I am not going to go there.  I have focused my web content publication on my photos and I post a few times a week on flickr.  My flickr stream has been very sucessful with more than 4 Million visitors to date on my photos, sets and flickr stream.  It averages more than 7,000 visits per day, sometimes exceeding more than 10,000.  If you like my photos, please visit my flickr stream for the most up to date photos.

I have decided to come back to this blog and use it as a companion for my photo activities.  There are many wonderful stories about my photography that are hard to tell on flickr or on a quick twitter message...  So, I will be focusing my blog activities going forward on my photography.  I hope you all like it.  Thanks for your continued support.

 More picture to come soon.

This scene caught my attention while walking through the beach at Lagoinha beach at the north end of Florianopolis.  Five people, each different and each in different activities were standing close, but actually making completely different things.  The kid in the front is particularly oblivious to the rest of the people playing with his board.

See more pictures of people at the beach at my Beach Candids flickr set.

Now it's time to start up again.  I have joined Comptel, a Finnish Company that is a leader in the field of software to support operations for Telcos.  I am running the operations for the company in the Americas.  My job continues to require me to travel through the Americas and I get to experience interesting situations and capture many wonderful photos of our continent as a side benefit.  I am also in much more contact with Europe, having a chance to visit several places in the old continent in the last couple of months.

I will go ahead and try to make come changes to the blog.  For one thing, I will include more of my photos that have become hugely popular in flickr.  My flickr pages and photos now have surpassed the 2 Million visit mark and are visited by an average of more than six thousand people per day.  If you want to access my flickr page go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/carreon . I recently had a chance to visit Mobile World Congress in Barcelona so you can find many great photos there. 

In summary, I am happy to restart updating my blog now with many new things to share in my life.  I hope you all continue to join me and send me your feedback.  See you all around.

Greetings from Turku, Finland.