Graceful Athena
September 4th, 2008
I don’t really have time to write today. I’m catching a plane in a little while. I hope to have internet access while I’m traveling, so I’ll post more when I can.
Meanwhile, enjoy this photo of the lovely and graceful Athena from last Friday’s shoot.
More when I can.
Steely Phoenix
September 1st, 2008
Life has been busy and it looks to continue to be for the next few weeks. But I managed to fit in a good shoot with a couple favorite models in Dayton on Friday before the holiday weekend started. Here’s one quick pick from that shoot. That’s Phoenix Kelley showing the contrast between her fine figure and some steel plates in a studio.
I’ll have a few more to post from this shoot over the next few posts and I’ll probably be going back over the things I shot on the trip out west and the Tampa trip to find some other photos to post from those. But with the schedule I have ahead of me for the next 3 weeks or so, I’ll make no promises about how many or how frequently I’ll be able to post new things here. But stop by now and then and see what I’ve managed to do.
Tampa and Computer Problems
August 27th, 2008
The two subjects of this post are not related.
That’s pixel in her back yard in Tampa last week. Lighting courtesy of Tropical Storm Fay. Pixel was great to work with and we did several interesting things in addition to having her run around naked in her back yard.
I haven’t posted for a few days because of the computer problems. On Tuesday I went to my studio with a full day of work ahead of me…mostly editing and printing photos. I turned on the computer and it said there was a new update to install. As usual, I told it to go ahead. Big mistake this time. It was installing Service Pack 3 for Windows XP. After the install my computer would not even boot up. Just a black screen. So I lost that day of work for the most part.
After getting home I sent a message to Microsoft tech support about the problem. Yesterday, as promised, there was a response to my message. Of course, the response was nonsensical and of no help at all. But it did have a link to tech support which offered free chat support for SP 3 problems. I took my laptop in to the studio, hooked it up to the internet connection there and tried the chat support. I ended up spending the entire afternoon in chat with an excellent tech support person who worked through the problem and got SP3 uninstalled so my computer will work again. They also sent me an e-mail with install instructions. I think I’ll wait a while before I try that, though. I just don’t have time for this right now.
Jo Jo and Fay
August 22nd, 2008
I’m in Tampa. Came down here to get my daughter started on her sophomore year at University of Tampa. Tropical Storm Fay seems to have been avoiding us on this trip. We drove through Jacksonville before Fay arrived, just catching a little rain from the fringe of the storm. Since we’ve been in Tampa Fay as gone up the east coast of Florida and now turned west, both times keeping us just on the fringe of the rain and wind.
Well, I had some spare time today, so I got up at 4:30 a.m. and drove out to Clearwater to pick up the amazing model, JoJo Suicide and head for the beach. We were on the beach at dawn and Fay was churning things up. We got wet from the rain and the wind, but we also got some photos. JoJo is a great model, a fine person and a lot of fun to work with.
There’s more to share from my Tampa visit, including another very different shoot with another model…but for now I just had to share JoJo and Fay.
Sheba of the Mountains
August 20th, 2008
Here’s another shot of Sheba at Silvergate, just outside of Yellowstone National Park. This was in an area that had burned several years ago in a fire that nearly reached the town of Silvergate. You can see the forest coming back to life. The fire actually produced some new beauty and refreshed the forest. And, thankfully, it spared the town of log buildings, thanks to the work of dedicated fire fighters. Sheba adds a nice touch of a different, contrasting sort of beauty…at least to my eye.
I’m on the road again, posting from Tampa, Florida today. Drove through the fringes of Tropical Storm Fay today, but it wasn’t bad at all. I’m here bringing my daughter to college to start her sophomore year. I may be able to do some more posting while I’m here…at least I’ll try as time allows.
Flower Child
August 16th, 2008
Went to a local lake at dawn today with the lovely Athena who has recently started figure modeling and had promised to pose for me if she ever did that. I’ve known Athena for a while. She is a truly lovely person and a very talented photographer in addition to being a fine model. She’s a pleasure to work with.
I knew about this field of sunflowers near the lake and had been wanting to take a model there, so when Athena volunteered to do a shoot I knew where I wanted to go. The dawn light and the mist rising over the lake in the background gave me just the added kick to the photo that I had hoped for.
This was a very productive shoot. You’ll be seeing a few other shots from this morning soon. And, I’m still editing new photos from the trip with Brooke. More of those coming soon too.
Brooke in the hay
August 13th, 2008
Here’s another shot of Brooke on the stack of hay bales we saw along the way to the Badlands. We saw a lot of these stacks of large bales and I knew there were some photos there if we found the right one. We were lucky that when we found a stack that we could use, it was old bales with this darker color, which worked very well as a background for Brooke’s skin tones. It was also far enough from the road, yet still accessible and oriented in the right way so that we could shoot there without causing wrecks on the highway. And the light was working the way I wanted it as well. All the pieces just fell into place.
Of course, Brooke did her usual fantastic job of posing, working her pose to be a perfect counterpoint to her surroundings. The tones, the textures, the colors…it all just came together here just as I wanted it. Sometimes things work out.
R|J in Red
August 11th, 2008
I’m finally getting a little caught up on things since getting back from the trip. So now I’m starting to go back through all the photos I shot along the way. This was by far the most successful photo trip I’ve ever taken. Everything just seemed to work out extremely well with wonderful models and great locations (Carhenge being the exception that proves the rule).
So here’s another from the first stop on the trip with beautiful and fun RJ at a cabin on her family’s farm.
There are so many successful photos from this trip that I really don’t know what I’m going to do with all of them. I may create a new section on my web site to post more of them. Lots of editing to do first. You’ll see some of them here as I work my way through.
More from Carhenge
August 8th, 2008
We shot more than just the nighttime photo while we were at Carhenge. We got there before it got dark to look the place over. Shooting was difficult because it is now so exposed and there were people around, including the clerk in the gift shop.
Carhenge at night
August 6th, 2008
I went to Carhenge on this past trip specifically to take this photo that I had been wanting to shoot since I first saw the place more than 20 years ago. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out as I had planned it. I’m not completely happy with the result, but I’m sharing it so I can tell you about how it was made and the pitfalls I fell into along the way.
The basic idea, which has been done with this subject by many other photographers, is to shoot it at night using a hand-held strobe to light each car individually. My twist, of course, was to have Brooke pose beside the cars, moving from one to another as I fired the flash. I still think it could make a fine photo, but I did not succeed in getting that photo this time, entirely because of my own technical problems. Since I don’t plan to return to Carhenge because of the way it has been ruined, maybe someone else will pick up this idea and do a better job.
I planned to shoot both film and digital. For film I brought along my old reliable Nikon F. It has a shutter setting that most modern cameras lack: “T” which is perfect for this situation. On the Nikon F when set at “T” you push the shutter button and the shutter stays open until you wind the film to close it. Very simple. No need to worry about locking cable releases or other stuff to keep the time exposure going. And there’s no battery in the Nikon F…it’s a simple, reliable, mechanical camera, so no worry about battery failure during a long time exposure.
The photo you see here was shot on film with the Nikon F. One long time exposure in the dark night with me and Brooke walking around, her posing and me firing the Vivitar 283 to light up each pose. I also cheated a bit and used photoshop to add bits from another frame that had some better poses and exposures of the cars. If you look close you’ll probably be able to figure out where I did that, since my skills at that sort of thing in photoshop are rudimentary at best.
There are problems with this approach. The main one is ghosting where the flash overlaps with a previous firing and creates a double exposure, so that Brooke appears to be partially transparent, with the background showing through her body. I had hoped to overcome that problem by doing digital exposures at the same time as the film exposures.
In order to make that work with my D200 I needed a remote triggering system. So, just for this photo, I plunked down almost $1,000 for three Pocket Wizards and a ridiculously overpriced camera cord to let them trigger my D200. I’ll never buy anything from Cord Camera in Columbus again since I discovered they charged me almost exactly double the normal price for that cord…but they were the only place that had one, since they were on backorder everywhere else, even the major dealers in NYC.
OK…so I got all this stuff together and hauled it along on this trip…and I tested it in the studio before leaving to make sure it all worked. Then I get to the location and set the two cameras up on tripods side by side and start trying to make the photo. The Nikon F is set on “T” so it is recording each flash on film. The D200 is hooked up to a Pocket Wizard. The 283 is hooked to a Pocket Wizard. And I’m using the third PW to fire a sequence. The way this is supposed to work is that I push the button on one PW which fires the camera. The PW on the camera then waits for a synch pulse from the D200 and when it gets it the camera PW transmits to the PW on the 283, firing it in synch with the shutter on the D200. My plan was to do an exposure using the D200’s multi-exposure mode to capture 10 flashes on one file, then to do another exposure, or rather series of exposures, capturing each firing of the flash on a separate file. That way I could assemble all those individual files as layers in photoshop to produce the final photo with, hopefully, no ghosting.
All sounds good…but it didn’t work. The PWs weren’t firing the flash. I’d sometimes get one flash, then they wouldn’t work on the second exposure. I did a lot of running back and forth to the camera to try to figure out what was wrong. Finally I realized that the D200 was turning itself off before I was ready to make the exposure. I had the wrong cord. There’s a different cord that has a feature that keeps the camera from powering down. That cord wasn’t available at all when I was putting the kit together.
So, all I got was the film. And I’ve had 8×12 prints made and have scanned those prints to produce the photo above. I’m not real happy with the quality of the result and I’m not sure if it is a problem with the quality of the prints or the scans, or if the negatives are just not all that good. I’ll play with them some more, but meanwhile I thought I’d share the result so far with you.
