Machina

A little timeout from photography-focused posts, this one is about my other passion... coffee! Espresso, in particular. This is my new PID-controlled espresso machine with a commercial (E61) group.

I did take the picture, though. Black and white in Aperture 2.1 and then duotoned in PS CS3.

Love that chrome!

Dance

This feel like a dance to me... a dance of nature and motion and line and shape.

I'm really digging more muted color processing these days. This was done in Aperture 2.1 with an interesting combo of way negative vibrance with a little saturation boost. Since vibrance affects some colors more than others, the combo of the two can have a pretty interesting effect.

Border added in CS3.

Downtown, Cloudy Morning

The framing of this shot (and the additional frame added in post) is really appealing to me. It was also another opportunity to make a duotone (tritone in this case).

A little more fog would've been nice, but oh well. It was cloudy (you can see the low clouds around the tops of the buildings).

B&W in Aperture 2.1, tritone and framing in CS3.

Dewdrops

I love how this came out... the flower was a perfect fit for the frame, and the deep purples and rich greens just pop, especially off of a white page. Adding a white border effect gave it a little character.

EOS 40D, 1/30 @ f/4, 17-40mm f/4 L

Processed in Aperture 2.1, border in PhotoFrame in CS3.

Birthday Cake

I'm not sure why I didn't blog this long ago... this is one of my absolute favorite images of everything I've taken.

The only light in the shot is coming from the candles... it's amazing that we have cameras that can capture this. Granted, if you had set up a shot like this, had a tripod, etc., you could pull it off. But to go from shooting a lighted room to shooting this in real time with good results is pretty amazing.

Shot with a 40D, 17-40mm f/4 L, 1/30 @ f/4, ISO 1600.

Brothers

Judah turned six months old last week! Hard to believe. Harder to believe, he's huge and incredibly mobile. Nothing is safe!

This was lit with two lights and a reflector: one small softbox directly overhead, one beauty dish to camera right, maybe 3 feet from the subjects, and a gold reflector to camera left for some fill. The background is seamless paper.

This was tritoned in Photoshop CS3 after doing most of the processing in Aperture 2.1.

I love their eyes here, they pop right out, and the overall shape of the subject.

Life

I've been so busy with non-photography things that I've hardly paid attention to this blog or Flickr or anything (but I did make the Houston Photobloggers meetup!)

I'm looking forward to a bit lighter load and more time for photo shoots in the next month or two.

500th: Houston, Texas

This is my 500th photo on Flickr. That seems like a lot and not very many all at once.

This was photomerged in CS3 from 15 vertical frames into a 10,560 pixel image (width). BTW, CS3's photomerge is intensely good.

This isn't my favorite shot but the technique is so cool and you can end up with image that can print very, very large.

View this on black for best viewing.

Sea of Glass, Tritone

I'm finally happy with this image. I took this shot two years ago and processed it then but haven't visited it much since, and I was never happy with the processing.

The full set of adjustments here is long, but the basics are: curves to boost brightness and tweak contrast, +saturation to bring out the reds and yellows, -saturation to make the sea more gray and neutral, separate black and white conversions for everything above the horizon and everything below, and then a final tritone and curves adjustment to arrive here. And an 8x10 crop. Oh and near the beginning I removed a large support pole in the foreground. :)

Noir

I love this look and this image. I really wanted to try something different with the lighting, so the key light is a 16x20" softbox to the model's right, aimed across her face. Then I used two hard lights (grids), one to put a splash of light on the back of her hair, and one to fill just a little in front and cast a slight shadow against the background.

The goal was to keep some softness in her face while still creating a hard lighting look overall. I love the kiss of light from the softbox on her near cheek, and the barely visible shadow against the background. I may need to kick the shadow edge contrast up a bit.

Houston, from Houston

The moral of this story: carry your tripod! I didn't take it today... and as a result I had to hand-hold this (braced) at 1/6th to get the shot at a decent ISO (200), underexposing a bit. All but this one were too blurry.

But I love the shot, the setting sun made gorgeous golden light, reflecting off the buildings here.

Take your tripod!

House, Galveston, TX

There are some really beautiful houses in the Galveston neighborhood near the Strand... we had to park there to get to Dickens on the Strand, and I was really surprised to find all these incredible houses.

Something about this shot just felt vintage to me, so I went with a vintage/antique treatment.

Boy

I love this shot... the motion, the texture, the focus, the bokeh, etc. I wanted muted color tones, but not black and white. The muted tones allow the motion and texture to be the focus and not contrast or color. The emulsion border effect just adds to it IMO.

Maybe my favorite thing is the focus on his grip on the rock. It's the only thing in any real focus and brings out something raw or primal, in a subtle way. A boy hurling a stone is pretty universal, and to me that is most evident in his hand and grip.

ASAP Foto

I want to plug a local photo lab who printed this image for me. This is our midwife and our three boys, and we were giving this to her as a gift. I process all my images on Apple's 30" Cinema HD display (color managed of course), and this image was adjusted on that display.

Here's the point: the ASAP print looked exactly like the image on my screen. Exactly. I was shocked, I always worry about printing with shadows that could go too dark. The background here is not black, nor was it on the print. The colors were vibrant and precisely what I saw on screen. No loss of shadow detail or darkening of shadows.

Very impressive!

I'm so impressed that I'm going to see if they have an FTP service and I will set up Automator to push images to them if they do.

ASAP's details:
(281) 980-6071
3356 Highway 6
Sugar Land, TX 77478

Baby Blue

Well it couldn't have been too long before new camera + new baby = new studio shoot. :)

Shot with my new 40D and 17-40L, 1/250 @ f/16.

This was lit with three lights and a reflector... I was shooting just underneath a medium softbox, almost at ground level... there's a beauty dish overhead (over the scene), not far out of the frame, and then one 10-degree grid spot. To camera right is the gold side of a Litedisc. Lights triggered by a sync cord and optical slaves.

I did a little skin tone cleanup in Photoshop and a little blurring on the background to squish imperfections in the paper, but otherwise this is as shot.

New Babies

My Canon 40D arrived this week, as did our new baby boy!

I love the 40D, it's a huge upgrade from the 10D (about time). I now have the capacity to shoot far too many frames a second (6.5) for far too long (75 JPEGs). Of course I barely ever use the "motor drive" at all now, I probably won't suddenly have occasion to. But, it will make studio work much less frustrating. I won't be waiting for the camera anymore, I don't think.

For the birth, I put one of my monolights in the bedroom (we birthed at home), with a shoot through umbrella, aimed at about 45 degrees up. Thus most subjects had feathered direct light from the edge of the umbrella and bounced light off the ceiling. It worked pretty well as an unobtrusive, light-everything solution.

Escape

We had a Houston Flickr meetup yesterday and we went shooting downtown, along Main Street. This is the Montagu Hotel, an old hotel one block off Main which is scheduled for demolition (along with everything on its block) very soon.

I got to play with my 17-40 f/4 L and it was ideal for shooting this fire escape. I applied a tritone to this in Photoshop CS3 and then added the border effect, which parallels the ladder portion of the fire escape at the bottom. I also like the effect on the top border of the image... the border effect enhances the "into infinity" feel IMO.

I think this is one of my favorite images in a while.

Highlights

This is one of those images where I was happy with the original but it wasn't saying anything in particular. It would/will make a great stock image, but it wasn't particularly compelling as art.

Then I cropped it and that was an improvement, a simplification, focusing the clear attention on the model, but it was still not what I wanted. Then I made a high contrast tritone, and I was really grabbed by the highlights and contrast in her hair, and decided to mask out everything else.

Finally, I put the image on Flickr and didn't like the lack of any framing, so I added a border (I'm into border effects these days, can you tell?).

This was shot with five lights, arranged in sortof an arch around the front of her... the outer two lit the background and filled her sides, the inner two provided accents and shaping on her face, and the middle one was my (new!) ringflash at very low power, for some final fill.

Tower Triptych

For whatever reason, I'm really digging diptychs and triptychs (and series for that matter) these days. There's something interesting to me about multiple views of something, or even the same image, repeated in different ways, as seen here.

This is made up of three different processing approaches to one image, with some interesting border effects. I expect to print this one big and stick it on a wall somewhere.

The left is a saturated color processing, the middle black and white, and the right is a cyan, brown, and black tritone. The three together with the asymetrical border add up to more than any of the individual images, IMO.

The building is the Williams (formerly Transco) tower in Houston.

Moment

I really like this shot... it was fun to do something different... I shot this using my strobes as hotlights... i.e. with the modeling lamps only, no strobing. Since the modeling lights can track the strobe's power setting, I can adjust its output (though of the three, two were at full power).

The lamps are 150W quartz bulbs... to camera left, just out of the frame, one lamp is in a medium softbox (full power) and another, at half power, has a 20-degree grid on. To camera right, a silver umbrella with a full power lamp. The lights behind him are the way out-of-focus lights from my dining room chandelier.

The coolest thing here was the exposure... this was shot at f/2.8 on my 70-200 f/2.8 lens at 1/20th of a second, handheld. It's in focus, but not crispy sharp, I think that's a beautiful look.

This was loosely inspired by the recent Lightsource interview with Mark Robert Halper.