I shot a baby...on purpose

The other night I made a house call. A lady wanted a family portrait and a baby portrait.  Since (most) babies are cuter than families, I'm only posting the baby.  Shot with an EOS 40D, 18-55 IS @ 41mm, f/6.3, ISO 100, 1/80 sec., 550EX w/custom diffuser on rotating flash bracket set to ETTL.  Here is the after-1-hour-in-Gimp picture:

I like this final product. It seems as if the subject- excuse me- the baby is perfectly placed in the hands, and it seems the shot was perfectly composed.  Well it was and it wasn't.  It was a nice composition, but waay too distracting for my taste.  As you'll see from the original below, the picture was lacking something. That something was negative space that the finished product above provided.  It made the baby receive the proper attention. Here is the straight out of camera shot:

Lesson for the day: 'Sometimes tweaking is better than deleting.'

Looks can be deceiving!

My sweet LOOKING little girl, posing for a Christmas shot. She destroyed the setup a little while later...

He said 'YES"!

So, I took a purposeful walk downton yesterday.  My mission was to photograph some strangers. Johnstown, PA isn't the most camera friendly place. Why? I don't know. It's really nothing much to do here. I would love for somebody to come up to me and ask to take my picture and chat a little bit. Maybe I'm just weird.

Anyway, I saw this amazing athlete zipping around on a unicycle! A unicycle! How cool is that?! I had a empty memory card, fully charged batteries and a half pack of peanut butter cookies. I wasn't gonna let this opportunity pass me by. So, I gave it a shot.  I made eye contact with him and showed him the ever so obvious camera hanging from my neck and nodded my head..................... "Huh?" That's what he said because he was wearing headphones. I asked him if I could take a couple pictures of him and he agreed. Maybe I shouldn't have even said anything and just started shooting.  It seems like as soon as I asked him for his permission, he began a mad dash around the park on his human powered one wheeled vehicle.  It was kind of frustrating and fun trying to keep up with him but I got some cool shots.  I shot him with a 50mm 1.8 MKI and 40D.  Here is one of my favorites...

Before I got his picture, there was a woman absorbed in the daily news. She almost made me want to buy one for myself! I shot her with a 100-300 5.6L @ 300mm, f5.6.  I didn't ask her anything. Reach was on my side...

Get out and GET SHOOTING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I might tell you why I look like a ninja in my profile pic tomorrow...maybe not.

Tell her story

I just finished updating my Flickr site!!! Man, THAT was time consuming. I deleted alot of 'junk', and hopefully replaced it with something worth looking at.

About this picture... It was shot with a 40D and 85 1.8 @ 1.8 (duh).  That's all the facts I'm giving you about it.  I want YOU to tell her story. Who is she? Where is she going? Where is she coming from? Where is her umbrella? Did the rain stop or does she not care about getting wet? ETC, ETC...
I'll give the real scoop on her once you tell me what you think. Deal? Cool.

Maybe tomorrow I'll tell you why I look like a ninja in my profile pic...

Visitor

I had a little house guest a few weeks ago. I think I took about 100+ pics of him. Whatever it takes to get the shot!

 

Update your websites!!!

Today, I'm updating (or trying to update) all of my sites. I don't have many, but I need to keep 'em current. You do too. Sometimes we don't realize how many potential clients we lose by having an outdated website.  Your latest pics SHOULD be your best work. Meaning, every time you shoot, you should be getting better or more creative. I don't believe in reaching a plateau because there is always another style or genre of photography to delve into.  The more you can add to your arsenal, the better (at least it's that way for me).

I admire more photographers than you could imagine.  We are all artists, and we all have sooo much to offer to the world.  Nobody see things the way YOU see things.  You are unique.  You know what you like.  You know why you took a picture the way you did.  You know why you like a pic that somebody else took.  Why?  Because you're an artist, and you appreciate art. What does this have to do with my topic? I don't know. I have no idea at all.  I think I love my blog. I never really put much thought into them before. You can say whatever you want to say, for whatever reason you have.  It's kind of liberating.

Well, here is what I was looking at for the past couple of hours...

I use Yahoo Sitebuilder for my main site. It's pretty thorough.  I used to have slideshows and all kinds of things on there, but who wants  to wait for a slideshow to download before they can view your pics? (I'm not trashing Flickr's Photostream. I have to update my Flickr page next ;)) If it irritated ME to have to wait to view my own page, I could only imagine how potential clients felt.  Lesson learned.  Back to Flickr, I love it. I love the community. I love the work on there. I love the world of useful  information pertaining to this obsession people call photography.  Well, I'm off to the update race again... TTYL

Macguyver eat your heart out!

I made up my mind this morning.  Either I was going to fix the PC sync port on my cheap hotshoe flash, buy an adapter from flashzebra.com or break the flash and buy an even cheaper slave.  Well, I fixed it.  It was easier than I thought.  I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, but I did it.

I removed the shoe or foot or boot or whatever you want to call the piece of cheap plastic located at the bottom of the flash.  Anyway, once I took that off, I had to find out where the 3.5mm plug contacts the metal.  I figured that if it fired at one time, something had to come loose. So, I removed the little screws that secured the metal connectors to the plastic shoe and proceeded to bend them in the direction I thought they should go. It was a good guess. After sanding down the plastic where the 3.5mm plug goes, I gained about a millimeter or two more of insertion into the flash. The connection was solid.  It felt like the plug was catching on the metal in a good way. Only thing left to do at that point was to put the batteries back in and fire it up. I connected it to the camera, turned them both on, hit the shutter, and YES, I AM THE MAN!!! It worked.

I'm not always this boring (maybe), but this is all I did today, and I'm cool wit that. Peace.

I know this picture is totally unrelated to anything that I said, but so what. She's my wife, and I didn't have a picture of the formerly stupid, broken but still cheap flash I fixed today. Tomorrow might be better...

Oh yeah, about this pic, I shot it. I shot it with a CANON (I love Canon) 40D and 28-135 underrated IS.  I used a 550EX as master and a 420EX as slave (obviously).  The 550ex was positioned to the left of her with no diffuser.  The 420 was on the right with a white DIY foam-core bounce-card (I used hyphens 'cause this stupid thing was telling me that I mispelled da too werdz) attached.   She was portraying Mary Magdalene in a production called 'Bad Girls of the Bible'. You can see all of the cast members here: http://www.colinpattersonphotography.com/Events.html