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…

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…

All Images Copyright 2009 Taylor Design & Photography

I had the pleasure of working with Jennifer and Jackie Ellis a couple weeks ago. Thanks to Rob and his hookups, we had the opportunity to use a business site where we can set up our equipment. The room is a little small but it is workable and it beats having to move my furniture around to set up lights. I think Rob has a setup shot that shows how small this room is. Anyway, Jennifer had a few outfits to try on and this blue dress was really cool. This is my favorite shot from the blue dress segment and one of my favorites from the whole shoot. I like shots where the model isn’t looking into the camera. Adds kind of a mystery to what she could be thinking (probably something like “Dude, take the shot already!”) We started the shoot with some outside shots while she was wearing a red dress but I wasn’t in the groove yet so Rob got a lot of those. I have some that came out that I might post this week (depending on my schedule). The studio shots were a lot of fun. I brought my gels that I hardly use and we ended up getting some neat shots. I was a little reluctant to use them but Rob decided to think outside the box.

For the processing, I went crazy with different ideas. I started with my typical approach and then played with some settings tonight while Jess and the kids went shopping. Here are a few of the same shot just processed differently.

All Images Copyright 2009 Taylor Design & Photography

All Images Copyright 2009 Taylor Design & Photography

All Images Copyright 2009 Taylor Design & Photography

All Images Copyright 2009 Taylor Design & Photography

It was a fun night and was the first time I had really shot since the semester ended. It feels so nice to get back in the groove. The girls were really cool and fun to work with and I hope to work again with them soon. For more of the same images with different processing, check out my main site.

Until next time…