Lauren Senior Photos #3

I used a vintage treatment for this one of Lauren in a swing. 1/60 sec at f/25, panning.

Lauren Senior Photos #2

More high speed sync flash with Lauren -- 1/640 sec at f/4; flash from camera left. I liked the color combination here a lot so tried to push the colors a little to really emphasize that relationship. In post, I also tried to bring up the warm tones in the tops of the reeds in the background.

Lauren Senior Photos #1

I thought I'd post a few senior photos I did with Lauren recently. She just graduated from Clear Lake High School. During the session I used high-speed sync a lot, trying to knock down the ambient light. This image was shot at f/4 and 1/640 sec, light from an SB900 in a Lastolite EZYbox from camera right. I've also been studying some of the postprocessing techniques of Calvin Hollywood. He's known for a very textured, detailed style. Thought I'd try some of those techniques here, although I masked them off all skin tones so the texture would only affect the clothes and environment.

Pikes Peak

From our trip to Colorado in April -- this is Pikes Peak as viewed from Garden of the Gods Park near Colorado Springs in the early morning of April 11. Processed entirely in Nik HDR Efex. 1/320 sec at f/6.3, 90mm.

Chyree

Photo above is from a quick photo shoot I did this week with David LeMaster and Neal Kelsoe. This is David's sister, Chyree ... shot at Clear Lake Park Wednesday night. I was experimenting with shallow depth of field portraiture, an ongoing project of mine. I asked Chyree to stand in the middle of some tree branches and began playing with the filtered light from a parking lot behind her. Nikon D7000, f/1.4, cheated the sync up to 1/320 sec, with light from an SB900 through a Lastolite EZYbox from camera right. Black and white conversion done with Nik Silver Efex Pro, followed by a color tinting layer to soften the contrast and add some warmer tones.

Boulder Karma and Bokeh at f/5.6

The photo above was taken in Boulder, Colorado back in April. The portrait subject is Amy Tharp -- a Colorado native and author of a children's book that will be published soon. This was no planned portrait -- in fact, far from it. I was out walking along Boulder Creek shooting moving water, pretty much playing around with no real purpose, just killing time before sunset. Amy needed a head shot for the book she's writing, and just happened to be out walking near the same creek in Boulder. She approached me and asked if I'd take her photo. I asked if I could use my camera and did a mental rundown of about 5-6 things I would like to have when shooting a portrait -- fast portrait lens, speedlight with a remote trigger, softbox, some kind of diffusion for the sun, etc. Well, I had none of those things. I had a D7000, a 28-300 lens, and a pop-up flash -- not exactly awe-inspiring portrait gear. But this is when all those afternoons shooting impromptu portraits at Dickens on the Strand and the Renaissance Festival paid off. OK, I thought, let's make a portrait.
I threw everything on the camera into manual, shooting at f/5.6 to try and eek out some kind of out-of-focus background, placed Amy on a rock with the creek in the background with the sun providing some hair light, and used my pop-up flash as fill. Luckily, I found a place with some nice shade on her face, and the specular highlights from the water luckily turned into some nice bokeh at f/5.6. And the portrait was made. The image was double raw converted -- one warm version for Amy and a cool version for the water -- and both layers masked together in Photoshop.
It's funny how things happen when you have a camera in your hands. Sometimes you find yourself in the most unexpected situations -- in the center aisle of a church chapel in London as snow falls outside, on the back of a boat in the Gulf of Mexico hanging on for dear life, and knee deep in a snow bank in the Rocky Mountains. As a photographer, you curse the moments that you miss an opportunity, you become frustrated because all your images seem to look the same, and you take shot after shot knowing that the next one will be "the one." But ultimately photography can be a passport into so many things in life -- and this was truly one of those times that will be long remembered -- Boulder karma as Amy said.

Cathedral Rock

Cathedral Rock from the banks of Oak Creek, Sedona, Arizona. 1/160 sec at f/10, 50mm, polarized.