Chris Taylor's TD&P Blog

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…

Trying out a new plugin that essentially does the same as the lightbox plugin I installed except this one has more available customization. This one is Shadowbox JS. Let’s see how it works…

I like the new feature of allowing you to advance through the photos in a post without having to close each individual image. That alone is cool. I will try it out more once I start implementing video.

Speaking of video, I’m looking for someone to shoot some videos on the next shoot that I do. I think it will add some dynamics to what we are doing and will give people an understanding of how sessions can be.

I’m also playing with a feature in Photoshop CS4 called “zoomify.” I’ve seen some cool stuff done with this and hope to be able to use it sometime in the near future. Gives me a reason to go out and shoot some panoramas!

Until next time…

I updated some of the features of the site tonight as well as adding more info. The links at the top of this page “Who is TD&P” and the “Third Hand Photography” have been updated.

Feel free to browse around and take a look at the new information added.

I’ll be posting more images later this week.

Until next time…

My cousin Roxanne needed some photos of her daughter this last weekend. Roxanne’s agent is putting some stuff together to try and get Gabby into some ads for Forever 21.

Roxanne needed the session done fairly quick & processed even quicker so they could head up to L.A. this week. So I packed up the strobes and headed out for the session. Luckily, their living room is quite spacious so we were able to shoot in the house. I haven’t done many “clamshell” lighting setups so I figured this would be a good time to try it out set it up. Setup was fairly quick and I like the lighting. Processing included mainly taking care of the stray hairs that were made even more prevalent from the hair light. I also lightened up the eyes a bit to bring them out a little more.

Thanks to Rob for showing up to help out and provide the backgrounds. He was looking pretty haggard from Vegas and I’m surprised glad he showed up.

Get it right in camera

These 3/4 shots were the toughest part of the session. Why??? ‘Cause I am not comfortable posing hands. It’s another thing I plan on studying more and working with ’cause it is such a pain in the ass for me. The background was also creased and that took the longest time to edit in post. I ended up blurring the image and then created a layer mask to smooth out the creases. I didn’t realize how time consuming it was until I looked at the clock and realized it was 3a.m. Whew! Lesson learned in why getting it right at the camera is a time saver. I could’ve moved her farther away from the background but that would have made sense. I’m not too bright sometimes. Oh well. Lesson learned.

Things learned from this session:

Learn to pose hands
Creases are not fun to fix in PS
Our kids are growing up faster than we think

Thanks, Gabby & Roxanne for a fun session. Thanks also for your patience. I hope you enjoy the images and good luck in L.A. this week.

Until next time…