Merry Christmas!!!

Merry Christmas everyone! This has been a wonderful Christmas season and one that I have looked forward to more than in the past. I am just very appreciative of the wonderful family that I have! I’ve been married to my wonderful wife Denise for over 20 years (that is just amazing and sometimes hard to comprehend) and we have three great children Devin who is 11, Desirae who is 9 and Deanna who is 5. It has been a pretty great year and I hope it has been the same for you!

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Health and Medication...

Medications are turning to be a daily routine for many people to fight off infections, reduced the effects of diseases, and to generally keep them healthy. For some it is a routine that they have already been following for years and others it is a new necessity for their life. I was thinking about this earlier and decided to make this photograph to illustrate this theme.

So everyone, please take care of themselves, see your doctor’s regularly and make sure you do what you need to to keep yourself healthy! Hey the year is almost over and we have another one to start!

Candy Love...

I had the opportunity today to setup a studio shoot to do some table top work. My wife Denise had found these candies, pictured above, that she thought would make a really interesting photograph. She also has some other ideas that she thought we could do once we set everything up.

As you can see these particular peppermint candies are pretty darn colorful and kind of scream Christmas. We spent a bit of time building a little set and a mechanism to hold everything together. The key here was white foam core board, drum sticks (I know, it seems weird) and some painter’s take. This enabled us to keep everything in place while we setup and adjusted the shots.

The lighting was fairly simple with an Alien Bee AB800 above the camera (in line) point down toward the items as a fill light lifted above with one of my trusty Matthews C-Stand. The main light was another Alien Bee AB800 attached with a clamp to the lower section of a regular light stand shooting through an umbrella about 8 feet away. We again utilized tethering to make ensure we were getting the shots we wanted while we were shooting!

The pile of books...

My wife Denise came up with the idea of using her large collection of hard bound books as the back drop for a photo shoot.  She has always really enjoyed her books and she recently found some inspiration for an idea from a couple of sites on the net.  So today we rearranged everything to make room for this shoot.  As you can see from this image there are a lot of books needed to make this shot (and the many various we did today) a reality.

The first part of the shoot was bringing the books need from the back room and removing most of the dust covers so they wouldn't end up in the shot.  Then we spent a lot of time putting everything in the right place and taking a bunch of test shots to get everything just right!  Once everything was in place we started shooting.  The shot above was made toward the end of the session after we had done various situations with Devin and Deanna.

The lighting of this shot was fairly straight forward.  I placed a strobe high over head at a 45º angle increasing the distance from the subject to decrease the amount of light fall off.  I then placed a fill strobe directly in line with the camera with a medium sized shoot through umbrella to balance everything out.  I also shot tethered with Adobe Lightroom 3 which turned out to be critical to make sure everything was in the right place and lighted up correctly.

It was a really fun shoot and I think we made some really cool images!