Family Service Center Auction Item

A framed print of the Bishop's Palace image above will be available Friday at the Family Service Center Benefit and Fundraiser in Galveston. It's a great organization doing very important work for children and families in need. I took the photo last Wednesday night -- 5 bracketed images merged in Adobe Photoshop, also known as HDR.

Sarah in Black and White

From our photo shoot in December, this is Sarah in black and white ... again the greyscale conversion was done with Nik Silver Efex. We wanted to separate Sarah from the dark background so we used a Nikon SB800 from behind aimed straight at the back of her head at medium ouput. Ended up using it like that for the better part of the day --- for good and bad. Light from the front was an SB900 shot through a Lastolite 24" EZYbox. I used some different postprocessing techniques on this one. The skin and face were retouched based on some things I've read recently by Joel Grimes -- noted contemporary portrait artist.

Kelly at Armand Bayou

This is from a photo shoot with Kelly Crabb that we did earlier this month. I struggled all day with white balance and direction of light that day. We introduced a gold reflector, which brought in some nice warmth, but ended up being very difficult to deal with in post processing -- balancing the skin tones vs the background. The photo above was taken without reflector, just a 24-inch Lastolite EZYbox with Nikon SB900 from high camera left. This is one of the few that I was generally happy with the direction of light. I thought the movement of light across the face and hair was pretty good -- dark to light to dark with a nice highlight from the sun giving some nice rim on the right edge. Nikon D200 at 85mm, f/4, 1/1600 sec, -.7 EV.

Lauren in Black and White

From our photo shoot in December, this is Lauren in high contrast black and white. Shot at f/2.2 --- and I have no idea why Larry and I chose to shoot these so shallow. It's not like we were trying to take out a distracting background. The whole day we were shooting against a black muslin. Since I've been taking portraits, getting both eyes in focus has been a constant marching order. At f/2.2 you can see eye in focus, eyebrow not so in focus. That is the delicate dance you do when you drop below f/2.8. Life on the edge of sharpness. I heard today that Nik is updating their Silver Efex Pro software, which I used here to do the black and white conversion. Every time I use this program I am amazed at the results; and I wonder what they could possibly do to improve it.

Blur

Playing with some intentional blur with camera movement. Tulips in January.