Here comes the rain again

It's day two of a pretty epic storm in the North Atlanta area and the rain today is relentless.  As photographers sometimes we dread rainy days (sometimes not).   On one part shooting outside becomes either impossible or a chore.  You really don't want to get your thousands of dollars worth of equipment inundated with torrents of water, and also putting bags or protective gear on your equipment becomes difficult.  On the other hand not many subjects find a rainy day to be a wonderful time to shoot outside.

In short there's a lot of strikes against shooting outside on a rainy day. Of course there's always exceptions, and in this case it's my friend Holly, the most bad ass model in the world.

Shooting at Studio GTC with Misty

Misty - Canon 5D Mark II, 70-200 2.8L IS - Gridded softbox above,
Parabolic 60' Umbrella left, and Gridded spot right.

A really cool thing about the photography program at Gwinnett Tech is that we have a huge studio available to shoot in.  How huge is it?  Well on one side we are building a pretty elaborate holiday set for our Holiday Portraits (Link up soon), but it's still big enough to shoot in the others side.

Ian and I took advantage of the studio today in our late lab.  Setting up some of my Norman lights we modified it with some of my favorite modifiers included a gridded beauty dish, a gridded soft-box, and a gridded spot light.

Interested in learning more? Check out this cool blog that explains the affects of modifiers on a light.  This is a great post also.

Of course with awesome light, you need awesome models.  Aglae (The MOTM) modeled for Ian, where aspiring model and pretty cool chica Misty modeled for me.  Check out some of the shots below, and a quick caption of how they were taken.

It was really nice to wipe the dust of an old favorite lens of mine, the Canon 85 1.2L II.  It's been a while since I've used it (it's mainly a wedding lens) and it reminded me of the old magic.

Canon Loyalty Program

I'm a Canon fan.  Have been since last century when my father gave me an amazing Camera called the AE-1.  So why the love?  Well here's one reason why.  Canon has a Loyalty Program, and it's really cool.

The basic summary of it is if you have an old Canon camera, like an old Rebel XT, or a Point and Shoot, you can trade it towards the purchase of a newer Canon camera (albiet refurbished) at a significant discount.  How discounted?  What about these prices.

Canon 5D Mark II - $1599.99
Canon 7D - $1087
Canon 50D - $720
Canon XSI - $399

Those prices are insane.  You get a 6 month warranty, and you pretty much get a killer slr camera that works really well. 

So want to know more about it?  Check out this amazing thread on fat wallet about it or Call Tech Support at 866-443-8002 or 800-828-4040 to get started.

Yeah...I'm a Canon fan.

Advance Portraiture | High Key

Here is another example taken from the High-Key portraiture assignment for our Advance Portraiture class.  More than likely I'm not going to use this image as my final print, but it was nice creating a glowing high key shot that would print really nicely on Epson velvet fine art.

Advance Portraiture Assignment 2 | Childrens Portrait

I had a little bit of a late start to the children portrait assignment for advance portraiture.  You would think my daughter Aislynn would be the ideal candidate to shoot, but like a good classmate I let Aisy bear model for another classmate.  On the same day my little child model wasn't available, and wouldn't be available until exactly a week later.  Boy it was worth the wait though. 

World, I would like to introduce to you Carson.  The only little one that nearly matches Aisy on the cuteness and awesomeness scale. Lets let the photos tell you about him, but by all means when a little boy comes in dressed as a shark, yeah you're gonna get great photos.

And of course since he looks like a kid also, here's Snyder

A Little car trouble

So I went to Atlanta to try shooting the 60D and my car was broken into.  Fortunately they only took my GPS, but you can imagine it placed a damper on shooting so the only image right now to put up is a iso3200 sample shot with the 60d and a 24 1.4L@ 1.4

Hopefully the day will end a little better tomorrow

From the archive |Summer 2010 Travel

Farmland and a desolate tree outside of Window Rock, AZ in the Navajo Nation

Imagine 14 days of skies as perfect as the picture above, driving around the southwestern United States just capturing everything that the eyes can feast one.  In the Summer of 2010 Ian, Tiffany and I did just that and it was a life changing experience.

Typical.  I swear I'm there, just behind the camera.  Grrr.

In mid July we drove from Atlanta to New Mexico to visit my parents home in Belen, NM. My parents moved out their in 2005 because of work,and I've fortunately been able to visit several times.  It was Tiffany's first time going anywhere west past Texas, and Ian hadn't been out this way since he was a pre-teen.  Going on a trip with other photographers always sound like a good idea, but you hear the horror stories of people who just can't get along because they are crammed in a car together for over 24 hours, they have different schedules and ideas, and also just in general personalities start clashing.  Ian and Tiffany were angels as travel partners, and it really rocked traveling out there with them. 

None the less, I really wanted to share some of the images I took during the trip.  We went to several places such as Meteor Crater, Window Rock, The Ice Caves, and some small place called the Grand Canyon.  Along with the images there will be a little excerpt about how cool the place was.

Advance Portraiture Assignment 1 | Pet Portraits

The first assignment for our Advance Portraiture class at school was pet portraiture.  While at first I was very much interested in taking a picture of Copper, my amazingly awesome cat, I ended up having this cool opportunity to photograph a sugar glider.  My friend Maryn has the cutest little sugar glider named Stella Luna (after some popular children book about a bat), and Stella was the perfect little model.  We ended up shooting for about 45 minutes and Stella posed for some super adorable photos.  It was really a unique experience shooting something so small and so delicate.  Here are some photographs.  Read after the jump about what I was going for, how I lit these shots, and what equipment was used.

Sarah and Obaid | A preview of my wedding photography

It's said that a photographer either loves wedding photography, or hates it.  I just happen to be one of those people who LOVE it.  By all means the first few weddings back in 2004~2005 were quite a source of stress, but after about 90 weddings now since then the worries have died down.  What hasn't died down though is the enthusiasm about shooting weddings.  Being able to mix the technical aspects of photography, the creativity demands, and most importantly the people skills really makes weddings a blast.

That being said I was asked to do my first Pakastani wedding a few months ago for Sarah and Obaid.  A 3 day event spanning from Saturday to Tuesday (of course you need a Monday to rest you know), the wedding was the ultimate deep end of cultural experience, shock, and amazement.  Located at three separate venues starting in Augusta, Georgia and ending in Atlanta, Georgia, the wedding was housed in absolutely spectacular locations with ornate stages and designs.  Over 400 people attended, some coming as far as England and Pakistan itself. 

In all my weddings shot it truly was a unique and amazing experience.  Here are some sample images from the wedding.  I would like to thank Tiffany Bayona, and Chris Oh.  Those two assisted me during the wedding and provided some excellent photographs of their own.