Just as quickly as it started, Polaroid Week Fall 2009 is over. It was such an inspiring week for me. There were so many awesome images showing up in the ‘Roid Week Flickr group that I was constantly refreshing the group page all day at work anxiously awaiting the next cool shot. Seeing all those amazing photos really made me want to skip out on work and go out and burn through more film.

Here is a Flickr gallery of some of my absolute favorite Polaroids from other photographers :

And here are a few favorites from my own shots this past week. These were all shot on a Polaroid SX-70 and expired Artistic TZ film, both of which I absolutely love.

A sunset as viewed from the Kirkland marina:

First outing with my SX-70:

My co-worker Todd dressed as an organ grinder monkey at our company Halloween party:

An awesome classic Valiant in Wallingford:

And some very early Christmas lights:

I’m sad that Polaroid Week is over, but another one is coming up in the spring. I can’t wait!

It’s time for the fall installment of ‘Roid Week 2009. I recently got an awesome deal on a clean and functional Polaroid SX-70 on eBay and some Artistic TZ film from PolaPremium, and I’m having a lot of fun shooting with the new gear. I have a bunch of photos scanned in and ready for upload. Head on over to my Flickr photostream to check them out as I post a few every day this week.

After months sitting in a storage container, I finally busted out my Run-DMC Mezco figures and set them up for a Project365 shot. When I first saw these figures advertised who-knows-how-long-ago, I knew I had to have them. I grew up listening to Run-DMC, and, to this day, that is the kind of rap and hip-hop that I love the most.

Anyway, back to the photo. To be frank, I didn’t have any idea what I wanted to do for my shot on Day 101. I paced around the apartment trying to brainstorm something that would be interesting to photograph and be a good lighting exercise. I decided to rummage through a couple of storage bins in our studio and rediscovered some awesome toys I had put away for safe-keeping. These Run-DMC figures jumped out immediately, and I went to work setting up the shot.

Here’s a photo of the setup:

I tried several variations of one- and two-light setups: one bright key from up high, one key from the front and a bright backlight, balanced key light and gelled backlight for flare, etc. None of those really worked 100% for me. I settled on a relatively simple one-light plus bounce setup in the end.

The main light is an SB-600 in a Lumiquest Softbox III at camera right. I put a 1/4 CTO gel on it to warm it up a bit to match the ambient track lighting. I brought the light in really close, so it would work like a big light source relative to the small size of the figures.

I stuck a piece of white cardboard at camera left to provide some bounce light. It worked to fill in the shadow areas created by the figures’ hats, and it added some nice hard side-lighting on the sides of the figures’ faces (most evident on the left side of DMC’s face).

For the post work, I pumped up the contrast, shifted the white balance to introduce more blue into the highlights, and darkened up the background a little bit. I also increased the exposure and sharpness on DMC’s face just to make him stand out more than the others.

Now that I’ve found my Run-DMC figures, I might have to revisit some of my older toys and shoot some pics of them.

Anyone who follows me on Twitter or Facebook knows that I regularly post updates and photos related to what I eat and drink. Normally, I focus on the final plated meal (no matter how sloppy it might be), but, over the past week or so, I decided to turn my attention to just the vegetable elements.

I sort of gave myself an assignment to shoot high-quality food photos that could be used in food blogs. I follow several different ones and had great examples of nice food photos that I could use as inspiration.

First up, a pile of asparagus that accompanied some steamed chili sea bass:

Next, baby bok choy that was blanched and served on top of dumpling noodle soup:

And here’s a butternut squash that was diced up for red curry beef:

And then some frozen corn that was used in double corn polenta:

All of these photos were shot on our kitchen island using one big soft light source as the key light and sometimes a secondary fill light/bounce card. Here is an example setup shot:

Looking back over the shots, I feel like I fulfilled my assignment to shoot food blog worthy photos. Even if these aren’t picked up anywhere, I’m happy with how these shots turned out. I know I can knock out these types of photos again if I needed to.

For a recent Project365 shot, I decided to try to photograph water drop reflections using a technique I had seen somewhere on the great interwebs. I haven’t been able to track down the exact tutorial, because I can’t remember who did it. However, I did remember the main gist of the setup and riffed on it.

Setting up the shot took a bit of patience. Using a small spoon, I placed each individual water drop on the bottom of a cookie sheet. I tried several different arrangements. Some were too uniform. Some had too many giant blobs. Some were too spread out. Finally, after 20 minutes of messing around, I found the right placement for the water drops (also, my hands were getting a bit shaky and I really wanted to get the shot done).

The reflections in the water drops were created using a gobo taped onto a Lumiquest Softbox III. The gobo wasn’t fancy at all, just a quick Sharpie drawing of a sad face on plain white paper. The only trick here was that the gobo had to be attached upside down in order for the reflection to appear right side up when shooting from the opposite side of the light. How did I know this? Because I originally attached the gobo right side up, and the reflections appeared upside down. So, I flipped it and voila!

The final image had some post work done: cropping, boosting contrast, cloning out “blemishes” on the cookie sheet, and a little bit of white balance shift (the original image was too warm). It’s all pretty standard post work for me.

To say that I’m happy with the final image is an understatement. I’m ecstatic that it actually worked out the way I imagined it.

Even though I’m practicing my off-camera lighting every day, I’m still most comfortable shooting in natural light. This portrait of a co-worker’s daughter, taken at my company’s summer picnic last week, is a great example of why I love natural light so much. Broad, soft light. No need to worry about white balance between the strobe and ambient light. No lights flashing in the subject’s face. No setup time.

Shooting this portrait took all of a minute. My co-worker came up to me as the picnic was wrapping up and asked me to take a quick shot of his daughter and her awesome face paint. We were under the shade of a big tent, creating absolutely perfect soft lighting conditions. I grabbed my D300 with a 55-200mm lens attached, zoomed in on her face, composed the image against the concrete floor (she was pretty short) and snapped two shots, pausing briefly to check the sharpness of her eyes on each shot.

Looking through my shots later, I was surprised at how well this photo turned out. It was sharp and bright, and I got the perfect smile and look from her. A bit of post to boost brightness and contrast and push the white balance a little more blue made it even better.

Regardless of what I thought of the photo, I didn’t shoot it for myself. I gave the photo to my co-worker later, and he absolutely loved it. And that makes me very happy.

I really like this portrait of Margaret that I took this weekend. We have a nice north-facing view of Westlake from the deck of our new apartment, and the city lights make for really cool bokeh. I wanted to use those lights as an interesting background for a portrait, and Margaret was kind enough, once again, to pose for me.

Here’s the breakdown of this shot:

I wanted shallow depth of field and round bokeh lights, so I set my 85mm lens to Æ’/1.8. Shutter speed was 1/80 with the ISO at 400, allowing more of the background light to show up in the frame.

At camera left, there’s a Nikon SB-600 at 1/16 power in a shoot-through umbrella providing the key light on Margaret’s face and hair. There’s also a CTO gel on the SB-600 to warm it up a bit; my D300’s white balance was set to Tungsten to keep the background lights from turning too orange.

At camera right is a Canon 430EXII at 1/64 power in a Lumiquest Softbox III providing some side lighting. The softbox was used to kill some of the light, because, even at 1/64 power, the bare flash was too bright. There’s no gel on the flash, so the light looks blue with the white balance set to Tungsten. I like the cool contrast to the warm key light.

Straight out of camera, the image was mostly there. I tweaked the colors for a little bit more warmth than what the RAW file had and added my usual mix of bumping the contrast, sharpening the image, and boosting saturation. I also composited in a few more light circles from another shot to fill in some of the blank areas of the frame. Yeah, it’s not completely true to the original image, but I wanted more lights back there. My image, my editing decisions.

I’m very happy with the final photo. It looks exactly how I imagined it would look when I was planning out the shot. Thanks to Margaret again for being my model!

I got some flowers for the new apartment a couple of days ago (btw, I moved over the weekend). They’re big and colorful and fun to photograph. Here are a couple of shots I took as part of Project 365 (daily photo project, for those who don’t know what that is):

I didn’t realize it at the time, but these two photos were good exercises in balancing ambient light with strobes. I wasn’t thinking, “OK, I want the subject to stand out more than the background. I need to underexpose the ambient by X number of stops, put a gel on the flash, set my camera to this f/stop and this shutter speed…” It was more like, “This is a pretty flower. I want to take a picture of it. Oh, everything is too bright. Let’s reduce flash power. The background isn’t right. What if I made the it darker by reducing the shutter speed? Oooo… pretty!”

The first photo was taken at 8:15 PM on my back deck. As you can see in the setup shot below, I setup a flash in a shoot-through umbrella and held the flower up against the sky. I underexposed the sky a bit to make sure it was a deeper, darker shade of blue than what it actually was. Once the light hit the flower, the orange would really pop. I did some additional color and contrast work in Lightroom for an even more saturated look.

The second photo’s lighting setup is very similar. I had a flash in a shoot-through at camera right. I wanted some nice bokeh’d lights in the background, so I opened up my 50mm lens to Æ’/1.4. Flash power was set to 1/64 (as low as my SB-600 will go) to prevent overexposing the flowers. Shutter speed was at 1/200 to allow in some ambient light and ISO at 400 to up the flash intensity a tad (1/64 really isn’t that much light, even at Æ’/1.4). Finally, I put a CTO gel on the flash and set my camera white balance to Tungsten to balance the orange-ish interior ambient light. Additional color tweaking was done in Lightroom to add green tones to make the yellows and oranges really stand out.

While I realize these two photos are not new ideas, I had not actually tried to shoot them before. It was definitely a good learning experience to go through the thought process of breaking down the shot, firing off test pops, and making notes on the settings for later use. I just added a couple more items to my lighting bag of tricks.

Just felt like sharing some recent portraits of my favorite model. Margaret’s been kind enough (and patient enough) to be a model for many of my recent Project 365 shots, and she’s also been trying to do something different with each photo. Sometimes she gives me a pretty smile. Sometimes it’s a goofy face. Sometimes I just get an eye. It’s always fun to photograph her.

I’ve got plenty more shots of Margaret in my Flickr photostream.

Today was a record-setting day for Seattle. For the first time ever, the temperature got above 100° making it the hottest day ever in Seattle history. Officially, the temperature as measured at Sea-Tac was 103°. Most of Seattle got into the lower 100s with a couple of places breaking 110°. In Kirkland, where my office is located, it was 106°. It. Was. Hot. At least it wasn’t humid. That would’ve been the death of me.

It didn’t feel that great in the apartment either. It was stuffy, warm, and had no airflow. We set up 3 fans to circulate the air and provide some coolness. The best thing to do, though, was stand in front of the freezer. That felt soooo good. So good that I had to take a photo of it for Project 365.

The lighting setup for this was pretty simple. Just a single bare Nikon SB-600 inside the freezer pointed up at the back to bounce around the white interior and create a giant soft light source. I put my Panasonic LX3 on a tripod, set the exposure to Æ’/2.8 and 1/80th at ISO 80, and set the self-timer. Not complex at all. Only thing I wish I had was some steam coming from the freezer, but I didn’t have any dry ice handy for instant smoke.

It felt so good standing in front of the freezer that I almost didn’t want to sit down and edit the photo. At least we had popsicles to help cool me down.