Dusk Photography (with Flash)


Location photography is all about showing your environment and making it look like someplace others want to visit. Location portraiture is all about getting great portraits and including a cool background (but not letting the environment dominate the shot). An easy way to get killer shots (and tone down the background in your portraits) is to shoot early in the morning or really close to sunset. Having a little less brightness in your background lets you bring out your own lights to take control of your final shot.

Whenever I walk into a location shoot I start by looking around and trying to figure out the story I want to tell with my final image. Sometimes I see my shot immediately and sometimes I have to search a bit to find my image. The bottom line is that you have to look past what’s in front of you and think about what it could become. For this blog entry I’ll be talking about how I get into the mindset of finding my shot and how I work through the process of setting up a shot using small flashes.

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Happy 4th of July!


No real blog entry today, Just a quick picture of some fireworks on the 4th of July.

This was shot with my camera mounted on a tripod and manually set for a 10 second exposure (at f11) back in 2009. Not much changes each year when it comes to the proper technique for shooting fireworks. If I was shooting some fireworks today I’d be doing pretty much the same thing I did 10 years ago (except back then I was still using film).

Happy 4th of July to everyone and I hope you all have a fun and safe holiday!

 

Photographing Shuttle Discovery (Part 3)


For my third (and final) entry on my experience photographing the arrival of Space Shuttle Discovery I thought I’d talk a bit about the history of this particular space shuttle and what it was like to see her arrive. I’ll share a few facts along with my best pictures from a great day of seeing history.

While I was at the National Air And Space Museum (Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center) I had an opportunity to meet a man named Robert A. Adamcik who wrote a great book about Discovery called “Voyages of Discovery”. I’ll be using that book to keep my facts correct in this blog entry.

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My All New Photography Blog


Welcome to my all new blog site.

Now that I’ve given up on using Photoshop, Flash, After Effects, Fireworks and Dreamweaver to create webpages I should have a much easier time keeping things up here.

I discovered the joys of posting on Google+ right around the time I started getting too busy to update HTML code for every new entry. Because Google+ is so easy (and fun) my blog totally suffered. But Photoshop World DC reminded me of the importance of keeping a blog in addition to being social. So I decided to start from scratch and this time I’m taking advantage of Word Press.

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