Chris Taylor's TD&P Blog

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…

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…

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…

I subscribed to Scott Kelby’s Online training earlier this month and the lessons I have watched so far are proving that the cost is worth the knowledge gained. I just finished watching RC’s (Rafael Concepcion) Wordpress training videos and thought I would play around with one of the plugins he mentioned.

The Lightbox 2 plugin adds a nice feature to images. You can click on the image and it will bring it up in the center of screen and overlay a darker mask over the rest of the blog. It makes it easier on the eyes to view an image this way so outside influences (other colors, text, etc…) are mitigated.

You can see the plugin in action by clicking on the image below in this post as well as the first two images in the Bridal Session post.

(I installed Lightbox 2 version 2.0.2. The new version seemed to be flaky so I “downgraded” to an earlier version that works).

Let me know what you think. I’m diggin’ it so far.

I will be posting some images later this week. I need to get some photos sent out to the lab for printing before posting them though. I gotz deadlines to meet.

Until next time…

Copyright 2009 Taylor Design & Photography

What kind of boring title is that? It’s late and I didn’t want to spend 30 minutes coming up with a cool title for this. I would rather spend the time getting the post up so let’s go.

It was time to bring out the lights tonight. I haven’t shot with my strobes in sometime and I have been reading this book by Joe McNally. Needless to say, it has sparked some fire under my arse to get my lights out.

The first step I took was setting up the rim light. Actually, the first step was dusting off the thick layer of dust that had accumulated on my strobes that are setup for product shots in the sunroom. I want to start by saying that I did not use my light meter to setup any of these. It was all done by look and feel. I probably could’ve saved about 30 exposures combined but I wanted to become one with the lights. As you can see from the shot below, this was a step by step process for purposes of this tutorial (the crap in the background will disappear soon). This one was shot at ISO 200; 1/200th @ f10.

Copyright 2009 Taylor Design & Photography

I planned on shooting the whole guitar so I backed up to get the full shot. Was I surprised. I wasn’t expecting the nuclear result I got below.

Copyright 2009 Taylor Design & Photography

And then there was light. To solve this issue, I placed a 2′ x 3′ black foamcore board to block the light from flaring up the lens. This is normally referred to as a GOBO (go between) or a flag. You will see the GOBO in the lower right hand corner of the next shot. Once the GOBO was in place, I was able to move on.

Copyright 2009 Taylor Design & Photography

With the GOBO in place, I also played around with the rim light power and the position of the rim light to keep light from spilling onto the background. The next shot was taken at ISO 200; 1/200th @ f18.

Copyright 2009 Taylor Design & Photography

Now I’m getting somewhere. It’s starting to come to life. Now it’s time to start adding the main light. I’ve read and watched demos about “feathering the light.” I rotated the main light head until the outer edge of the light was raking across the guitar. I didn’t want to hit the guitar straight on with light. I wanted to have a subtle gradient of light feathering off of the body. My main light has a grid on it which allows you to control the light rays a lot better than just bare bulb flash. They can also help with lens flare as you will see towards the end of this writeup. This next shot was taken at ISO 200; 1/200th @ f13 as are the remaining shots.

Copyright 2009 Taylor Design & Photography

The next step was to get rid of the eye sore in the background. I used some standard “A” clamps I bought from Lowe’s to hang the backdrop which is this velveteen material. I need to get a wider piece ’cause this one just ain’t wide enough. Notice the GOBO again in the frame blocking that crazy ass lens flare.

Copyright 2009 Taylor Design & Photography

That looks a lot better. The next step was to diffuse those nasty highlights coming from the rim light hitting the curved surface of the guitar body. Those are naaaaaaaasty but was an easy fix once I got my flip flops on to head out to the garage to grab my diffuser disc. The diffuser basically spreads out the light in a random way that breaks up the “hardness” of the light and makes it softer. You will notice the highlights are now rimming the body nicely.

Copyright 2009 Taylor Design & Photography

The only difference between the shot above and the final image posted at the beginning of this post is the burgundy curtain was turned black in the final image. All of these setup shots were imported into Lightroom and then re-sized in Photoshop. No other manipulation was done. No sir. No actions, no love. Just me and my gear. The next few shots below show the light positions and some helpful hints. Not only will these hopefully be helpful to you, it also allows me to document my setups for future shoots. They will also show you what happens when you put that grid on your light. Pretty crazy how these bad dogs work. They also show me that I need a studio if I want to get more lights involved.

Copyright 2009 Taylor Design & Photography

Copyright 2009 Taylor Design & Photography

Copyright 2009 Taylor Design & Photography

Well I hope you enjoyed this demo. I always appreciate it when people put their demos up to learn from. And a big thanks to Joe McNally for kicking me in the butt.

Until next time…

Painting with light is a fun technique that I had heard about a while ago from Scott Robert and Dave Black. Both had a write-up and a description of the tools they used for some of their shots. I ended up buying the same million candle power flashlight for $20 that Scott Robert had and that thing must have sat around for a while before I decided to try it out.

My post tonight was driven by Rob’s latest post where he included a photo he took of a lifeguard tower using the paint with light technique. I’ve seen this technique applied in various situations; from golf ball size objects to landscapes. I’m not saying to use the same million candle power flashlight for a golf ball size object but you can paint a lot of things with a “proper size” light.

The technique is fairly simple. I say fairly because the results are so dynamic that you can end up using the technique for hours while your wife and kids (and potentially the neighbors) are wondering what the heck you are doing. Some people might mistaken simple with quick so I added fairly.

Anyway…the technique is useful for many things. One of those things is when your exposure can’t capture what the amazing human eye can capture in a scene. For the shot below, I was exposing for the sky but the Juniper trees were waaaayyyyy under-exposed and showed up as silhouettes against the late night sky. To remedy the situation, I blasted the trees with the flashlight to bring them into view. The first time I did it, the photo looked weird because I was hitting the trees with light in a way that didn’t look natural. I ended up doing this technique for about 15 frames before I finally got the shot below.  Of course I’ve processed this one to my liking and I hope you enjoy the lovin’ I gave it.

This technique is not limited to just landscapes. Dave Black has done some really cool things with swinging golf clubs, golf balls, and other various subjects. I plan on using this technique some more because:

1)it’s different and cool

2)it beats the hell out of taking 5 exposures of a scene and then combining them in PS.

The original image:

All Images Copyright 2007 Taylor Design & Photography

And the final processed image:

All Images Copyright 2007 Taylor Design & Photography

This image was taken in 2007 on Halloween. Fitting considering October is almost here and another year is almost gone.

Until next time…

For this year’s festivities, we joined up with my buddy Greg and his wife Karla for a celebration at Oceanside Harbor. We usually go to Bradley Park but wanted to change it up a bit this year. I thought it was going to be crazy busy at the harbor but it was really nice as the Harbor Police had blocked off incoming traffic to control the masses.

For dinner, we had a BBQ with ribs, corn, hot dogs, and a bunch of other items that made us more than full. After we ate, Jess joined us as she had to work that day. She got there in time to enjoy the food and hang out for a bit before the fireworks started launching from Camp Pendleton. Below are a few of the pix from that night with camera settings for those that want to try photographing fireworks. The finals are edited a bit (selective cropping due to parking lot lights, color brought out in some of the shots, etc…)

All Images Copyright 2009 Taylor Design & Photography

70-200mm f/2.8 L IS mounted on 20D

130mm  ISO 100   f/11   1.6 sec

All Images Copyright 2009 Taylor Design & Photography

70-200mm f/2.8 L IS mounted on 20D

130mm  ISO 100   f/11   1.6 sec

All Images Copyright 2009 Taylor Design & Photography

70-200mm f/2.8 L IS mounted on 20D

130mm  ISO 100   f/11   1/4 sec

I ended up changing the shutter speed for the last image because it gets a lot brighter once multiple shots are exploding at once.

I had my camera/lens mounted on my tripod but didn’t use the shutter release cable this time. I was a little late getting set up so I didn’t take the time to get the cable release out of my bag. In this instance, you can use the timer but you are more than likely to get untimed shots. I actually was standing there pressing the shutter release.

Once you get an idea of where the main pops are and your exposure settings, you can pretty much leave the camera alone and continue releasing the shutter. (I employed this same technique while photographing lightning in Oklahoma while I was parked in a Wal-Mart parking lot waiting for Jess) The first shot above missed a little bit of the pop but I still like the shot. You also gain an understanding of when to release the shutter after a few mishaps. The cool thing about being set up after the first few pops is that you can still enjoy the show without looking through the viewfinder with each release. Right before the grand finale starts, they’ll do a pre big bang where you can decide what shutter speed works best so you are ready for the night’s conclusion.

Enjoy the photos. Until next time…