Local Vampire hunter seeks......

I'd been wanting to do a cool cemetery image for a while and come to find out that Hillaree, along with her belly dancing exploits is into old horror movies. There have been a couple different interpretations of this image as to what she is actually doing in the cemetery but I think I am going to go with vampire hunter.

This image was done by underexposing the natural light by -1.3 stops and then a flash in a softbox camera right set to -0.7 to provide fill light and then a snooted flash camera left pointed right at Hillaree's face as the main light.

In praise of natural light.

If you've been a reader of this blog for any time you might have noticed I have almost gone out of my way to shoot images that require me to use artificial light. For years I worked with nothing but natural light and a lot of time it was kind of hit or miss with the quality of light and thats what attracts me to using artificial light, because I can manipulate it to get what I want. The down side is that I have to drag out extra gear and it takes longer which means you run the risk of missing some shots cause your fiddling with lights. So here are two images where I shot with just natural light on a dark overcast day.

The glowing ball works really well with belly dancing

This is just a taste of a shoot that I did today. Got some amazing images with a striking local belly dancer.

more to come.

Shoot it while you can.

Last night I went out and shot some photos down at the water carnival with Brandy. SInce the carnival is only here for the 4th of July weekend we had to get it right the first time. It had been a while since I had shot something like this but this time was going to go a lot smoother now that I was shooting digital. This is one of the best shots of the night. It was done with a flash in a softbox camera right tethered to the camera via a flash cord, I used a slow shutter speed close to a half second to get the lights to blur in the background.

I saw plenty of other people with cameras down there last night but no one else had lighting gear and a beautiful woman in a slinky red dress so I think we got something no one else has shot around here this year.

Some Belly Dance Images

This is Brandy, I started working with her this spring and we've been able to come up with some cool images. These are a few from our first shoot, I was really excited with the way these worked out!

Stop and smell the flowers.

One thing I have learned over the years and it can apply to just about every aspect of life and that is if you're too focused on your goals you can forget to look around and take things in. This really applies to photography, when I am moving between shots or even getting ready to leave the location I tend to still have at least one camera ready because you never know when something might present itself. This is one of those shots, my subject here was on her way to change and as she was walking out of the trees I noticed she was framed nicely by the branches. I had her stop and strike a pose and with a 3 frame burst I had one of my favorite shots from the day.

Its been a busy spring.

Its been kind of busy for me lately, a lot of you know that I have been working on getting a magazine off the ground so I have been letting the blog fall behind. One thing though is I have learned a new technique for post processing and when I do that I tend to go back through old images to see what I can come up with. This was shot last summer.