Flowers....Somewhat Macro

Well it's that time of year again and as you've probably noticed in the blog posts, the weather is generally cruddy in this part of the world in mid April. It usually rains more than it should and nice warm dry days are like teasers as they only come along once every 2 or 3 weeks or so. But however there are some good days and there are the occasional great days. On those days I try to take the opportunity to get out and take a ton of pics (such as my model shots I wrote about yesterday).

Most of these shoots are impromptu things with little to no planning. But recently my mom commissioned me to take some photos for her to hang in her newly redecorated room. I don't know if she hasn't realized who shes been living with all of these years or not but when you ask me to take photos you usually get....photos and in mass quantities.

I took this opportunity that she presented and turned it into my own little photo exploration project and attempted to seek out as many photos of flowers and general flora to pack a book with (which I have considered doing...that may be a summer project of mine this year). So far I've taken a significant amount but unfortunately with the rains we've received (as was expected) the flowers have been short to bloom this year. However, of the several hundred I did take I managed to crank out several pretty good ones.

This go round I attempted to use a significantly larger depth of field with these shots and even on one of them cranked it all the way down to f/22 (pictured right). Some of them work but some of them didn't so I think you'll see a smattering of both wide open and really broad depth of field.

I'm going to quit rambling for a while and let you bask in the sunshine of the flowers while I sit in the cold dark of my room and watch the rain outside.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

  

Outdoor Photo Shoots

So I'm new to shooting a model in any sense of the word and don't tend to try to do anything in the way of adequate studio lighting, not even 1 single off camera flash (although I have received a new SB-600 for my birthday a couple weeks ago!). So this whole thing is very very new to me as I usually shoot on the run and in just ambient light. So I knocked off one of those items off my list a couple weeks ago at the park near my home.

My girlfriend and shooting partner Lauren went down to the park to walk for a while but ended up doing a whole set of "model" shots using just the ambient light. This worked pretty well for me, however, and 5:15ish allows for some pretty adequate lighting regardless of not even having a flash. Although, now that I have the SB-600 I realize I would have liked to just add some fill on her face for a couple of shots. But all in all it worked really well from an impromptu standpoint.

Anyway to get back to the story at hand... we got to the park and walked out in to the widest open portion of the park and realized the light was perfect for a couple quick shots. So I just went ahead and pointed the camera at Lauren and took a shot....well then...that...looks...good? I was pretty impressed with the ambient that we had coming over the trees behind us which really softened it out. When I looked at the LCD and noticed that this quick shot I took looked pretty decent with absolutely no effort. Now I'm getting myself on a roll shooting. I told Lauren to walk toward the nearest group of 5 or 6 trees otherwise completely out in the open and had her do some poses while I took some shots. After a little while I turned around and realized that I had taken something like 200 photos in 15-20 minutes without the intention of actually doing it. Well it ended up working out for me again. I flipped through the shots while we were in the car on the way back and realized that I had some pretty good shots.

Came home a little later and sat down with the trusty Lightroom and their fantastic flagging feature and started with the intention of just picking out the ones that were half decent. Well that ended up being more than I had anticipated! Now when all was said and done I came out with about 12 that I was really happy with and have decided I need to make another attempt at this with some more preparation in the future.

Lauren and I are currently working on setting up a small shoot outdoors complete with costumes (in the sense of proper clothing for what we're trying to capture...regardless of the fact that we haven't decided what that look is yet) and some actual proper studio lighting. Now that I have one SB-600 I would like to purchase another and get at least a basic lighting kit for some quick and dirty lighting ability and hope that we can nail some great ambient light like last time to really crank out some quality stuff!

Here's a couple of the best photos from that impromptu shoot...