1 comments Friday, February 23, 2007


The world outside is melting and it's absolutely wonderful. It's so nice to go outside and not feel the inside of your nose freeze. Sensationalist news stories of impending flash floods to the area due to melting snow have been the order of the last week. Sigh.

This photo was part of a self imposed assignment to capture the melting and thawing that is taking place. No one else is gonna push you to make work like yourself, self assignments are excellent motivators.


This image makes use of the Orton Effect. This technique was originally done with sandwiched slide film and harkens back to era of
Pictorialism. It is an attempt to evoke a mood and feeling within an image rather than a straight representation of the subject. I occasionally switch into this mode of working when my concepts and subjects are both being difficult. Tricks in a bag.

0 comments Monday, February 19, 2007

"Hey, your flash didn't go off!" I love hearing that. Most of the time. Except when I look down at my camera's screen and see a mostly black square.

In this shot I bounced my flash off the ceiling. Par for course during interior events with ceilings under 20ft tall or so. The subjects don't end up looking like deer caught in headlights and it's relatively easy to balance the ambient light. In this situation E-TTL works well. The camera is set on manual to set the ambient exposure, here about 1/2 stop under exposed. While the flash illuminates the subject.

Depending on the surface I'm bouncing my flash off of, ambient light conditions, and the subject bounce flash doesn't always produce the best skin tones. In such situation the on/off switch on the flash works wonders. Here I switched from Manual mode to Aperature priority and shot at f/4 without flash. It's a different look that might work in some situations. In this particular situation I'm slightly partial to the flash shot, but the boys expression is better in the ambient light shot. It happens.

0 comments Sunday, February 18, 2007



Concert Photography... dark pictures, neon lights, blurry pictures, looking up the performers noses, the hallmarks of concert pics. Lets step away from that for a minute and try something different.

The aim of this ongoing series is to share techniques and new looks for live music photography. On to the first photo. I introduced myself to the coordinators of the event where this image happened and they gave me free reign.. handy. Elevating yourself from the crowds perspective is a handy trick to kick up your concert pics a notch or two. For this photo I was on top of a low lying speaker. Face to face with the performers.

Lighting was dull and consisted of badly focused spots and occasionally colored strobes... hm. So I set a slow shutter speed in an attempt to capture a strobe burst or two and bounced my flash off an acoustic panel above the performers. Adding some vignetting in post production completes the look and draws attention to the brass man.

Stay tuned for more...

0 comments Monday, February 5, 2007

Saturday our Indianapolis Tornado Sirens suffered a smashing defeat to the very aggressive Fort Wayne Bomb Squad. Body checks were the order of the night and the jammers kept flying into the fans. Nevertheless the Tornado Sirens were a hoot to watch and hopefully will make a come back. Go Naptown Girls.

What do you know the Colts won the Super Bowl... Wow! Cool.