Light At The End of The Tunnel
May 19th, 2011
One of the features of the place I took Brooketo shoot when she was here is an old railroad tunnel. It provides some interesting lighting opportunities. And it gave me a place to do another fisheye shot that doesn’t look all that “fishy.” It’s fun exploring the characteristics of a new lens and learning what can be done with it. A little light fill flash made all the tones in this one come together.
Brooke is on her way to France now. I’ll miss her this summer…I’d have surely looked for more chances to shoot with her if she were on the same continent. But she’ll have a wonderful experience and will be back in the fall…and I’m already working on some plans for then.
Meanwhile there are some other wonderful models who are nearby and I’ll be working with them in the near future. I’m starting to get dug out of the hole I found myself in when I got home from Florida. I hope in a week or so to be all caught up and be better able to look toward future projects and be constantly trying to just catch up.
I could use a couple more models for the local projects I have coming up over the summer…so if any Ohio models are reading this and want to volunteer, send me an e-mail and let’s talk.
And I should mention that this weekend is the Seattle Erotic Art Festival. I have work on display at the festival and in the festival store. Thanks to all the other travel I’ve been doing, I wasn’t able to plan a trip out to Seattle to attend the festival. I hope next year will turn out to finally be the year that I get to go to SEAF. But if you are out that way, you shouldn’t miss this festival. And if you go look for my photo on the wall and let me know what you think. And say hello to my friend, Mariah Carle, who is teaching a couple workshops at the festival.
Off The Road At Last
May 15th, 2011
I love to travel. But for the past two weeks it’s been pretty much constant travel and I’m really ready to stop and hang out at home for a bit. I’m taking a day off today, after finally getting back home to stay for a while last night. Tomorrow I’ll get to work trying to catch up on things. But you were in need of an update here on the blog, so I’m going ahead with that today.
Here are a couple more photos of Brooke Lynne from our shoot last month in scenes from my youth. Brooke is leaving in just a few days to go to France for the summer where she will be modeling for painters. I’ll miss her, but will be looking forward to working with her again when she returns in the fall…and she is sure to have a wonderful adventure over the summer. So I’m sending good thoughts her way as she prepares to depart.
As is is finally warming up around Ohio I hope to start setting up more outdoor shoots in the next few weeks. If it ever stops raining it would help…but I have a few ideas to take advantage of the volume of water that must be going over the local waterfalls while this record rain is going on. I just need to line up a few victi…er…models who don’t mind getting very wet and cold. I’m sure I’ll be able to find some volunteers.
I don’t think I’ll be posting any snapshots from Disney World…sorry Lin…but I’ll just say that it was every bit the abomination I expected it to be. My daughter has been informed that if she wants to go back with my grandson and any future, not yet arrived, grandchildren I’ll be happy to get them the condo in Orlando, but I won’t be coming along. The thing that amazes me is that so many millions of people are willing to pay the extortionate cost of spending time being abused at Disney. As someone who studied marketing and spent a great deal of my working years in public relations I appreciate the incredible success of the marketing that is Disney. And the way the place is very carefully structured to extract the maximum amount of cash from each visitor is masterful. But I’ll never subject myself to it again under any circumstances.
We Interrupt This Blog…
May 7th, 2011
…for a personal message. I’m in Florida on a family vacation for the magna cum laude graduation of my younger daughter from the University of Tampa. That’s her with her boyfriend in the photo above as she arrived at her seat following the processional.
My other daughter, her husband and my grandson are also with us. I’ll be ending a life-long boycott Monday when I go along with all of them, my ex-wife, who is the mother of my children, and my wife to visit Disney World. Grandfather duties override my general distaste for places like Disney.
To add a minor photo note to this post, that photo above is a crop of a very tiny part of the image area of a shot made with my D7000 and my 80-200 f/2.8 at 6400 ISO. It was dark in that arena. And I was a long, long way away.
Here are my daughter and her nephew:
And finally a shot of the graduate with her fossil of a father. Both these photos were taken with the Canon S90. My wife did the shot with me in it.
In the next post I’ll return to our regularly scheduled naked chicks on rocks. But every once in a while it’s important to mark the major events of real life. I’m a very proud father. And I’m loving my role as “paw-paw” with my grandson.
More on the rocks
May 5th, 2011
After wandering through the old canal lock and stopping to smell the flowers Brooke and I came upon this lovely cliff face and stopped for a few more photos. Again, I had always known there were photos here to be taken, but the combination of this location with all its memories for me and my favorite model in the world…it was a very good day.
I’m traveling on a family trip right now, so I don’t know how much more posting I’ll be doing for the next week or so, but I’ll probably find time to share some more photos from this shoot when the family events allow.
Spring Flowers
May 2nd, 2011
The wild flowers were starting to bloom when Brooke and I were out taking photos near my childhood home. This patch of “Blue Bells” was particularly nice, so we decided to try to make some photos there. Wild flowers with nudes seldom work, but I think these came out ok.
What I’m finding interesting is the range of things I’m able to use my new cheapie fisheye lens for. The photo at the top was taken with my regular zoom lens at 32mm…or pretty close to a normal focal length for the APS sized sensor on my D7000. The photo at the bottom, on the other hand, was shot with my 8mm fisheye. I did a little cropping to improve the composition, but it isn’t all that far from a full frame photo.
I think you can see that by being just a little careful about the composition and location of various elements of the photo, that lens comes across much more as an ultra-wide angle lens than as a fisheye. I like that. I’m enjoying getting familiar with the characteristics of this lens and finding more and more things that I can do with it.
But, whatever lens I use, Brooke still shines through in all her loveliness. Many more from this day of shooting to come.
It’s A Lock…
April 27th, 2011
…An old canal lock, that is. A canal used to run through this old area near my childhood home. The remains of one of the locks is still there. Natural rocks can make a great background for figure photos, but man-made rocks can work as well.
I spent most of the day yesterday editing just this one day of shooting with Brooke. I chose 48 photos out of what we shot that day. I’m usually happy to have 2 or 3 successful photos from a day of work. This sort of thing is why I love working with Brooke so much. Well, that and the fact that she is such a delightful young woman.
So, expect to be seeing a lot more of Brooke in this location over then next couple weeks. Here’s another from the lock:
Home on the Rocks
April 23rd, 2011
Brooke is here visiting. That makes me happy. I work with quite a few wonderful models. They are all special, but Brooke is more special than any other model I’ve ever worked with. She’s my favorite. I guess I shouldn’t say that and I hope that none of my other models feel bad because I’ve said that, but it’s true and I really can’t hide how I feel. Brooke just totally understands what I’m trying to do with my work and we work together as a team with almost no need to explain anything. Brooke gets it. Add to that the fact that she is beautiful, talented and very pleasant to be around…well, I’m having a very good week.
The first day she was here we did the photo above, along with a lot of other work that you’ll be seeing here soon. This was a special shoot. I returned to the scenes of my youth to do these photos. This was a place where I hiked around and canoed when I was a kid. I camped here with a boy scout troop that I decided not to stay with. I’d been camping on my own for years…I think I was 8 or 9 when I started grabbing a blanket and wandering out into the woods to spend the night. When I went there with the boy scout troop that I thought I was going to join…well they made camping such a miserable experience that I knew right away that I didn’t want them ruining my time out in woods.
This location was private property back then, but everyone used it as a park. Later it was made into a nature preserve, and there is still a nature preserve there, but the good parts, for reasons unknown to me, have been once again declared private property. There was a sign announcing that fact, but not prohibiting entry, so we went to the good places. I would have gone anyway.
When I was a newspaper photographer for the local daily the canoe livery that rented canoes on the river near this cliff hired me to shoot photos for a brochure. The owner took me down the river in his canoe and I shot photos. One of the photos was a very nice shot of the cliff near this photo overlooking the river. That night some guys who went to high school with me were camping on top of the cliff. They got drunk, as was the custom. In the middle of the night one of them got up to take a leak and, in the dark, walked off that cliff and fell to his death in the river. My photo of the cliff from below ran on page one in the next day’s newspaper.
This visit to this beautiful spot was a lot happier. The light was perfect and the weather was tolerable, though Brooke did get a little chilled eventually. But the photos look like some of the best things Brooke and I have done together. It’s good to go home again, even if you never really can. All those years ago I knew there were photos to be made here. Long ago I did shoot some fashion photos there for the newspaper. But it is a place that is just perfect for the kind of figure work I do. It feels good to go back there and do what needed to be done.
Thank you Brooke. You are the greatest.
More to come.
Another Answer
April 21st, 2011
After all that stuff about techniques to fix photos taken in “challenging” light, there is really a very different approach that is the one I most often use and that is much more likely to succeed, if I can manage it. It’s much better to simply find the place where the light I’m struggling with is doing something that looks good anyway. When I can do that there is no special processing required for the photo and the result is almost always much more the kind of photo I am looking for in my work.
Sometimes the location doesn’t allow this, as was the case with the waterfalls where I was shooting Angie. But other times I get lucky. That’s what happened when Char Rose and I went to a little stream to see what we could find. I think we found something quite beautiful, despite another day of sunshine. Thank you Char for a great shoot and a great location.
This is a very busy week in a very good way. Brooke is visiting and we’ve been shooting and having a great time. You’ll see the results here soon. It will be worth waiting for.
Software Alternatives
April 18th, 2011
I’ve been working on finding better ways to post-process photos done in bright sunlight. I think I’m beginning to improve the results. I talked with my old friend, Tim Black, about my problems and he suggested I try the Nikon software to process the RAW files. I’ve had bad experiences with Nikon’s software in the past, so I generally have a rule not to even load it on my computers. Nikon makes great cameras and really shitty software. That’s my opinion and the opinion of many reviewers.
In the past when I did load Nikon software I found it very difficult to use, very buggy, very slow, just really crappy. But at Tim’s suggestion I went ahead and loaded the ViewNX2 software that came with my D7000. I have to report that I still don’t find it to be a very good program. It’s hard to use and really stupid in some of the ways it operates. But it does seem to do a pretty good job of processing the RAW files once you struggle through the shitty interface.
So I started over with these two photos and I’m a lot happier with the final result than I was before just processing them in Camera Raw and PhotoShop. For these files I first opened them in NX2 and worked with the tools there, including Nikon’s D-lighting control, which works very well. Then I saved them as TIFF files and opened them in PhotoShop to work with them some more, using layers to make more localized adjustments.
I’m reasonably satisfied with the results. Not the best photos I’ve ever taken, by a long shot, but fairly acceptable quality given the difficult lighting situation.
Of course, Angie is her usual beautiful self here. She did a great job. I wish the light would have been more cooperative, but that’s the luck of the draw when you work outdoors. As I like to say, there isn’t good light and bad light, only easy light and challenging light. This was challenging light and I’m afraid I wasn’t quite up to the challenge that day. But I’m learning skills to help with this kind of light and maybe I’ll be able to make something better in this kind of light one of these days. Thanks Angie for helping me work on this and for being the first frozen naked model of the spring.
By the way, the photo below was taken with my 8mm fisheye lens. I like that it doesn’t look all that “fisheye-like.” It’s straight out of the camera with no distortion adjustments.
Spring Has Sprung
April 15th, 2011
I know it’s spring here in Ohio because I’ve already shot the first frozen model of the year here. Thanks to Angie we slipped out to our favorite local waterfall for a shoot earlier this week. We got a later start than we had hoped for, and, of course, the sun was out full force, so I got to play around a bit with the ways my D7000 can deal with high contrast.
I’m still learning the ins and outs of this new camera, but it does have quite a bit more capability when it comes to difficult light. It’s amazing in low light, as I’ve seen when shooting dance performances. And it’s much better with direct sunlight than any past digital camera. I’ve learned things I can do in the camera and others in software after the fact to get more control of the extreme contrast that direct sun creates. But I don’t think I’ve got it quite right yet. The tonal range in this photo is pretty good. I don’t think there are any blown out highlights or empty shadows, at least none that are a problem for the photo to work well. But I’m still not quite happy with the overall look of the photo. It has a sort of “digital” look that is not quite what I’m after.
I suppose if I actually took a class on PhotoShop, or even finished reading the book on it that I’ve had for more than a year now, I might be able to do a little better job. I’m completely self-taught with PhotoShop and all I generally do is minor adjustments similiar to what I’d have done in a wet darkroom in the old days. Plus occasional cleanup of minor distractions that I would not have been able to deal with in the past with film. But situations like this require more work and I think a bit more skill than I currently possess.
One thing I’ve started doing with all photos like this is starting in Camera Raw before moving to PhotoShop itself. I do that even with jpegs, though I’ve started always shooting RAW files when I find myself in a difficult lighting situation like this one. The tools in Camera Raw allow a lot of adjustments that are very helpful with high contrast. And I’ve also used the highlight/shadow tool in PhotoShop. But I still don’t think I’m there yet. Maybe I need to take a trip up to Minneapolis and get my friend Stephen Haynes to try to teach me a thing or two about PhotoShop. He knows more about it than I can ever hope to learn.
I’ve done three shoots this week and been busy with other, non-photo things. Lots more shooting planned for the coming week. You’ll soon see results here.
