Chris Taylor's TD&P Blog

Click the photo above to launch a little web gallery for some pix from the day.

Jake went to the desert with my brother again this weekend. I ended up driving out there on Saturday to hang out with the boys. The weather was awesome until the 50mph wind gusts picked up at 4:00 this morning. I was pretty stoked with my boy. He had eaten crap earlier on Saturday before I got out there and was a little hesitant to get back on at first. After watching the other kids ride, he must’ve dug down and found some motivation. By 4:00 that afternoon, he was jumping! This is only his 2nd trip out there so I was pretty impressed that he was kickin’ ass out there.

The weekend was a blast. Kids riding bikes, campfire stories (my stomach is still hurting from laughing). The trip was great and the wind had died down by the morning so Jake and I had a chance to go ride for a bit before heading back home.

A big thanks goes out to my brother for taking Jake and teaching him and me how to ride. Heather, thanks for letting him use your bike. Cory for helping Jake find his inner motivation after taking a good tumble and for the campfire stories. I can’t wait to go out again.

I also had a chance to play with my remotely fired flash to get the image above. I was able to get a handful of good shots out of about 50 with the flash. Luckily, the boys had a good line that stayed intact for a while so I could keep flashing and snapping away to get these.

Until next time…

Here are some images from my playing around with daytime flash. Depending on where/what you are shooting, you have the potential to drain the crap out of your flash batteries. I was firing the 580EX at full power. I had a full cut of CTO on the flash. The reason for the full cut was because I was shooting at a custom white balance of 3000 to saturate the blue sky. The CTO gel allowed me to counter the custom white balance in order reproduce natural skin tones on the subjects.

Except for the Juniper tree in the background, I’m pretty stoked with these shots.

I created the gallery in html format so let me know how it works for non-flash devices (iPhone comes to mind). Thanks Rob for the post update reminding me of the html idea. I appreciate it.

Until next time…

Man, it’s been a while. A long while since I’ve posted. So what’s been going on with me since my last post? Lost my house (more like gave it up), moved the family to a rental, been working my arse off, and just plain keeping busy. Things are getting better now but I had to take a long break to kinda re-evaluate my life situation. I’m back into photographing; mainly the ninos. They are getting big so fast. I can’t believe the physical changes Jake has gone through this year and Jayden amazes me every day with her vocabulary and personality.

I’m getting ready for the Joe McNally seminar that’s coming to San Diego in December. I can’t wait. If there’s a photography book that I read a lot, his Hot Shoe Diaries is the one. I read something in that book almost daily. It’s amazing how much content is in that little book. I definitely recommend it to people that are interested in lighting.

Now for some images of the ninos (I apologize for the funky text layout. Evidently some things haven’t changed and some of the Wordpress layout stuff leaves a lot to be desired).

These were shot in the garage with my 580EX through an umbrella. I used a black piece of cloth for the background hung up on the garage door. Quick setup. It took me about 10 minutes to set up and dial in the flash settings and voila.

In the last couple weeks, we went to Julian in the rain and I took some pix along the way. The first stop was Dudley’s in Santa Ysabel. While we were getting in the car, I noticed the lone windmill in the distance and decided that would be a cool start. It was literally cool. The wind was blowing, the rain was falling, and Jayden got her first taste of why she doesn’t like the cold windy rainy weather.

The next stop was Julian where the rain continued. I took the next shot of Jayden along the same wall I got a shot of Jake a few years back.

I decided to crop this one a bit in the next photo for a 5×5 print.

My next post is going to have the slideshow that will make this viewing experience a little easier on your eyes. I wanted to at least post a few images from the last month. I have some more that will be going up tomorrow.

Until next time…

Rob and I had the pleasure of meeting Edina & Matthew as well as some of their family for a wedding session last week. It was a small wedding in advance of the reception they are planning on having at a later day. We met up with everyone at Hotel Del Coronado. I was shooting more of the candids while Rob was doing his thing. We made our way around the hotel grounds and then made our way to the beach where we could use our location lighting setup. The beach shots I took were taken with a candid approach. Rob was working his magic while I stood back and got some from another perspective. Eventually, we did use the umbrella+speedlite setup and Rob will display those images.

The event was a blast. Matthew’s folks and I talked about our cats and had quite a few laughs. Edina’s brother was a crackup and kept the afternoon entertaining. It was cool seeing Edina’s brother interact with his mom. Mom was all smiles that evening in spite of her being cold.

Congratulations to Edina & Matthew.

Click on the image to launch a gallery.

Until next time…

I had the pleasure again of working with Kim. This time, we set out for some more casual photos in La Jolla. I also wanted to play with some gels and camera color balance settings to achieve this look. I set up for a manual color balance of 3000 and ended up putting two cuts of Full CTO on the flash. Rob got to be my VAL (Voice Activated Light) for the afternoon. We ended up shooting for about an hour and then Kim had to boogie. I’m really diggin’ the gel/color balance mixes. In this shot, it really brings out the blue water and gives a nice backdrop to the warm tones in Kim’s upper portion.

Here’s another one of Kim sitting on the rock. This one is still using the two cuts of Full CTO. The goal here was to mimic the warmth of the setting sun.

Next up was Melanie. Rob had a chance to shoot some stock photos of Melanie a few weeks ago and she was a willing participant for play time. She just chilled out while we were stressing Kim out about her laptop while sitting on ledges about 20 feet to camera right. With Melanie, we walked down to where the waves were crashing up onto the rocks. This shot was my second favorite of the Melanie session. The first favorite ended up being trashed because her eyes were just slightly too out of focus. In that shot, I timed the waves crashing into the rocks and with the slow shutter speed (1/15), it looked really cool.

At this point, ISO was at 800, SS 1/15, f2.8. Needless to say, it was getting dark but still enough ambient was coming in. I don’t worry too much about shooting at 800 as Nik’s Define does a really good job of cleaning up the image when noise is crazy. The only thing I did to this image was salvage the clipping of the blacks and then ran a cross-processing filter.

This was my last shot for the night. We were getting ready to wrap up and Melanie was just hanging out from the shot above and I decided to grab a quick shot.

Hopefully Rob’s getting some good workouts from holding the lights so we can continue the fun.

It’s time to wrap up the evening. I have work in the day and then Rob and I are photographing a family session around this same spot.

Until next time…

Rob and I got a chance to get out and play with our lighting setups last Sunday. We set out for what was supposed to be a regular shoot when Mother Nature decided to rain on us. We were set up by Humphrey’s by the pier and the rain started to tinkle down on our setup. We ended up going to a parking garage where the staff was really cool and moved some stuff around so we could shoot. We had planned on Kim doing some fitness stuff and then she was going to change over to regular clothes but we ran out of time. We’re going to be doing part 2 this weekend and hopefully the forecast doesn’t abruptly change as it did last Sunday.

Kim brought a bunch of props actual workout items that we ended up using. Rob and I now have enough Pocket Wizards to set up various lighting setups, although I do need to get another flash. Looks like the 430EX II will be the next purchase. This setup was two lights; one rim to camera left and one fill light controlled by Rob. I wanted to showcase the guns on Kim and I was pretty stoked with the resistance band shots.

This shot was another variation of the above shot. Same setup as above. I’ve been Rob’s VAL (Voice Activated Light) for a while now and it’s pretty cool having him be my VAL (that almost sounds funky. Sounds like we’re each others valentin…. that really doesn’t sound good at all). Anyway, it’s really cool to have another photographer who knows how to move around the light as the model is changing angles for various poses.

Kim was great to work with and worked with us for quite a while. We ended up walking our booties off finding various locations. I will have more to post once we do our continuation shoot this Sunday.

That’s it for now. A quick post but once again, it’s 2:30 and it’s time to crash. Thanks for taking a peek and I hope you enjoy the photos.

Until next time…

I was watching a couple of videos this week on Kelby Training and decided to give tethered shooting a try. I have been going back and forth with the tethered shooting because I don’t normally like to have cables hanging from my camera that can be tripped over or worse yet, pull my equipment to the ground whether it be the laptop or the camera itself. I figure I will only be doing this on certain shoots until I look into the wireless transferring of images to the laptop.

The setup wasn’t too bad. I installed the Canon EOS Viewer from the CD that came with my 20D and then updated it to 2.7.3 from Canon’s website. I also installed the WIA driver (also downloaded from Canon’s site). I then proceeded with the preferences setup within the EOS Utility. I then setup Lightroom to watch the destination folder set up in the EOS Utility and I was capturing images within about 15 minutes.

I was going to post some screen shots but figured this guy (there’s supposed to be a link here but Wordpress is acting up tonight. Click on the link on the right labeled “Tethered Shooting”) had gone through the process so why turn a 5 minute post into an hour of work.

The next thing I need to get is a USB extension cable and I will be rockin’. I plan on using this setup in the studio in the near future. I have some ideas that need to be put to work.

Until next time…

Saturday night was the prep for a nice Easter Sunday. I finally saved up for my Pocket Wizards and was playing around with my 580EX shooting through an umbrella with the PW’s. All the lighting for these was one light bounced up to the ceiling. Poor Jake was down and out for the weekend. He was running a fever of 102 and was pretty much in sleep mode. Jayden was loving the Easter egg prep. She is getting so big. Jess was in charge of helping Jayden out while I was taking photos. There was only one mishap with Jayden and the dye but it wasn’t that bad.

The little contraption that Jess got was pretty cool. We started talking about the old wire ring that we used to use to dip eggs in the potent color mixes back in the day. Now they have this little thing that spins the egg around in the dye. Then when you have the base coat on, you pour in another color to get the swirly effect. Pretty cool. Jayden was beating the crap out of the button as she stood on the chair to get some leverage on the thing. It was quite funny watching her hammer this thing to smitherines. She finally realized that she got better results from just pushing the button in a rhythm.

This is a shot after she had her first Easter egg hunt of the day. This was her “golden” egg that had a barrel of bunnies instead of a barrel of monkeys. She then proceeded to feed me a lot of the chocolate items she received. After that, she swung on the big swing and felt her first earthquake. After that, she was done swinging for a while.

I posted a slideshow on my website. Just click here. The link will open up in a new window. Music is added to this one.

I hope you all had a nice Easter. Ours was nice and Jake started finally feeling better that night. He’s back to normal now and is currently playing Rock Band with his buddy while they’re on Spring Break.

Until next time…

The family and I took a trip to the Wild Animal Park. The initial intent was to go see the butterfly jungle but the line was about 2 hours long. Looks like we’ll be heading out there again during the week to avoid the long wait.

The weather was so freakin’ nice today. One of the nicest days of the year so far. The animals seemed to be enjoying the sun as well. We hung out with some friends and had a nice time.

I’ve posted a slideshow on my site. Just click the link and the slideshow will open in a new window. I don’t normally add sound to my slideshows but I did on this one to add some ambience. There is volume control or the choice to turn music on/off on the lower left of the slidwshow if you need to adjust the settings.

In the meantime, enjoy a few photos from the day. You can click on the images and they will open up bigger in a shadowbox.

Until next time…

Click on the image to the left to launch a gallery.

Tonight, I played around with creating a slideshow in Lightroom and making that slideshow launch within the shadowbox. These are going to be implemented more on my blog once I get a more streamlined approach.

In the meantime, enjoy the few photos that are being used as a test.

Until next time…