Greedy Photo Hosts

Ok, so my photo site has officially canned my free account, leaving me without a place to put my work online. I'm working on relocating everything to flickr as we speak, but who knows how long that will take. I don't have a problem with paying for photo hosting, but I've got to say that i'm pretty irked that the place I've been using just 'pulled the plug' on free accounts. Not to mention, their service wasn't really even that good... I've had a flickr account (currently a freebe) for about a week now and I'm already happier :-) Flickr actually has groups for you to share your work with; something my old site was lacking completely. Anyway that's my rant for today. Hopefully the blog will have pretty pictures on it sometime next week. Until then, I've got nothing but big empty boxes with X's to share. :-(

A Few From the Past

So I'm a little bored at school today, and Emily has been complaining that I don't update this blog often enough. Therefore, I'm going to post up a few photos that I haven't looked at lately. The first two are some more portraits that I took using my 2-soft light setup. They're both of Emily, posing in her cheerleader uniform.

This first photo is your typical portrait style pose... Something you might expect from a senior photo shoot or the likes. I really liked this photo because I was able to catch a lot of detail on her face and the pom-pom in the front of the photo, but I had a small enough DOF to bokeh out the background and her feet. It ended up in a pretty nice effect.

The next one is Em being a little more aggressive with an airborne pose. Believe me, it took us several retakes of this one to get it framed and captured correctly, but it shows the versatility of the 2-light studio, as I caught the subject in motion, in the air and still exposed her properly and got the lighting prettymuch exactly where I wanted it to go.

The last photo today has nothing to do with lighting, other than this nice 9-shot pano of downtown Pittsburgh features plenty of natural night lighting. The shot looks impressive when viewed small like this, but if I blow it upto a normal size, you can tell that all of the shots were taken handheld on a windy night. That was last fall. Now that I have a good sturdy and tall tripod, I'd like to go back and try this shot again.... unfortunately, the weather hasn't been working with me.

That's all for today. Spring break is next week (yay) and whether I end up in Florida visiting friends or I end up sticking around Pitt, I know that I'll have some time to go take photos, so expect more new material here in a week or so.

New Member of the Family

Ok so I haven't had anytime to take photos since new years. School has been pretty brutal this semester and the weather has kept me cooped up inside. Finally, the other night I was able to take a few shots of our new cat Sidney. I don't have much time to write today, but here are two of the best pictues. They were taken w/ the FA50/1.4 and a hotshoe flash.

Some More Portraits

I don't have a whole lot to write for tonight's blog. With school back in session for this final semester (woohoo!) and all, I haven't had much time to devote toward photos lately. I have, however, spent some time on a few of last weekend's portraits. I've put three of them up here to share tonight.

This first photo of Bethany was printed (along with the photo of Emily from my last blogpost) at 8x10 and I plan on framing and giving the photo's to Beth's mom as a little thank you for giving me a new HP PhotoSmart 8250 printer for Christmas. I really like the way that this photo came out, dispite the clutter in the background (my makeshift studio was less than perfect).

Next is one featuring Emily. She was having fun with the photoshoot, and decided to go Sr. Portrait style on me with a chair and everything. I eliminated the distracting background from this photo in PS and just put her on a flat white background.

The final photo features both of my models for the day in a fun sisterly pose. While this photo is fun, there's nothing special about it really. If I had it to shoot all over again, I'd have gotten the tree the heck out of there.

I don't have any more ready at the moment, but I'll try to get another post up before too long (over the weekend would be nice).

My First Off-Camera Flash Photoshoot

Ok, so I finally picked up the equipment that I needed to get my flash gear off my camera. A couple of PC cables, three PC to HotShoe adapters and two sliver umbrellas (dollar store specials, no fancy photographic gear here) are what I had to purchase in order to sync my two legacy Sunpak flashes off my camera (put on the two tripods that I have). Being that this is New Years weekend and all, it's the ideal situation for a little family photoshoot.

My photoshoot started last night (before I had the umbrellas) with us playing around in my girlfriend's kitchen. This first photo is a shot of Mark, my girlfriend's father. Here I was using only one tripod and had the other flash laying on the counter. As you can see here, the lighting was a little harsh and overpowering, but the end result was still pretty good, and the two direct flashes washed out any shadow behind Mark pretty well. This was a fluke. For the majority of the photos I took last night, I wasn't able to eliminate the wall shadows behind my subjects by using direct flash.

These next two show my sweetheart Bethany and her little sister Emily, respectively. Here you can see more of the wall shadows that plagued me. I was able to get rid of some of it in my post-processing (I was using Picasa) but it's still clear from these that a direct flash just wasn't going to cut it.

So this morning I was off to get some equipment. First, we scrounged around the house for some umbrellas. The closest that I could find to white studio umbrellas was a single silver umbrella (used for catching rain, not flash photography). Much to my suprise, the silver umbrella actually reflected the flashed light pretty well, and it didn't cast an ugly color! So, I ran out to the dollar store and picked up another silver umbrella to match the one I already had.

From this photo of Emily, you can clearly see that the umbrellas made all of the difference in the world. This shot (and the others below) were set up with one flash on the subject's left (the right hand side of the photo) and another in front of the subject, on her right (so coming from the left of the photo). The main advantage here is that the face is illuminated by the front flash, while the area behind Emily is exposed by the back flash. You can still see just a hint of a shadow behind the xmas tree in the background, but that tree is sitting right against the wall, so eliminating all of the shadows would be nearly impossible.

This second shot of Emily, a mug, shows more of the advantage of the two-flash system. I really like this photo, except that Em's hair is casting a shadow over her right eye. I didn't even think about hair when I took the shot, but it's clearly something that I missed.

The final photos that I have to show you today are similar poses of Bethany. Here I got lucky with the hair issue, as Bethany's hair tends not to cover her eyes naturally. In both of these shots, you can definately tell that there are two light sources, as the one on the photograph's right shines brightly against Bethany's blonde hair, while the front/left strobe light's most of her face.

One of the biggest suprises of all these umbrella/soft strobe shots is the color balance. I was really suprised at how even the flash-color was coming off of a silver $4 umbrella. It kind of makes me wonder why the pro guys spend big bucks on their studio umbrellas.

That's all I have for this post. I'm sure that there will be much more of this to come (I'm absolutely loving this portrait thing), but short of analyzing every one of the 60 photos that I saved (many more were taken and deleted), I don't have anything more to share tonight.

Christmas Time Comes but Once a Year

I've only got three photos to show you from Christmas. The main focus of this Christmas' photography was flash. I took several exposures of the same scene (the second one shown) with different flash settings/levels to try to get the right mix of flash and ambient light. Also, my flash died suddenly after only two exposures on Christmas day, leaving me with only one usable photo. This is very unsettling.

This first photo is of my mother's Christmas tree. It was taken using natural light. Thing that I like about this photo are the nice contrast between the bright lights and the dark tree. Also, I feel like I did an adequate job of framing the photo. Unfortunately, the light distribution of the tree isn't very even, so the top of the tree is slightly under exposed. I really think that I can live with that, given the situation. Another thing that I noticed was that a 100% crop of the photo showed a lot of what looked like noise. It couldn't have been noise because I was shooting ISO 200, but who knows. I'm going to temporarily blame it on the kit lens.

This second photo is of the entire living room. Here is where I took several exposures of the identical scene using different amounts of flash. I really like the end product. I ended up using mainly natural light, and bouncing a weak flash off the right wall to 'fill' the darker right corner of the room. The result? I feel like it's an adequately even photo.

This last photo is where all of the trouble started. I took two frames of the ladies in this pose (the first shot, I forgot to set my white balance, so they turned out blue... rookie mistake). I imediately liked the result on the camera's LCD after this shot. It's a good thing that I liked it though, as the flash did not fire on the next pose, or any pose thereafter. This has happened to me once before where my old Sunpak flash just 'stops working' every once in a while. I don't know if it has to do with the batteries or what (pressing the test button still discharges the flash just fine). Anyhow, to make a long story short, I was forced to slap my FA50 f1.4 on and go to ISO 1600 for the remainder of my shots. That wouldn't have been the end of the world really, the DL takes pretty good photos even at that high of an ISO. Unfortunately, 50mm was WAY too long for anything but headshots, given the size of the room we were in. I needed something more like a 35mm or shorter to get the shots that I wanted (not that it mattered, the shots that i really 'wanted' were flash exposed shots). The moral of the story here? My Sunpak flash is less than trustworthy. I have been kicking around the idea of upgrading to a more 'modern' flash for a while now, but instead I think that I'm going to invest in some PC cables and try to do a little off-camera flash shooting.

My first Blogpost

This is my first blogpost. It's going to be short and sweet, as I'm pretty busy with other things right now. I opened this blog as a means to post my digital photography, and I intend to do just that.

Therefore, here is my first blogpost photo. This was taken behind my parents' house on Dec. 16. The gas company (I don't know which company) is putting a well in behind our place, so I went down there and took a few snaps. I really like the way that this photo turned out, so it gets the honour of being my first posted.

A little about myself: I am a 23 year old mechanical engineer. I'll be graduating with a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh in April 07 (so if you want to get technical, I'm not an engineer quite yet). I have been doing digital photography as a hobby since June of 2006. I use a Pentax *ist DL camera for nearly all of my photos. Most of my work is done outdoors, primarily of places and things, but I have done a few photoshoots of people.

The few shots of people that I do have are primarily of family and friends before/during dances. I won't post all of my portraits/candids here (that would take forever) but I will put up a few of my most recent.

Here are two photo's of my littlest brother, Darin. He's a ballroom dancer, and the photo on the left shows him getting his groove on with his partner Beth-Ann at a benefit dance. The right photo shows him with his homecoming date (Darin is a highschool freshman) to this year's homecoming dance.

One of the most exciting photo opportunities that I've had thus far was a 3-day trip across the Great Lakes on a sailboat. I've posted a few of my photos from that trip here below:

This photo was taken early one morning, and provides a nice view of our boat. I particularly like 'beam' of sunlight coming across the water in this photo. It adds a nice focus point to the photo, and it seperates the side of the photo with the boat from the side with just water.

This next photo is a two photo montage of an old ship leaving a channel. The lighting in the photo of the ship was pretty poor, so I replaced the background with a sunrise photo from earlier that morning. My personal opinion is that the product of the two photos ended up being my single best capture of the voyage.

Well I think that this is enough for a first post. I'll do my best to keep this blog as up-to-date as possible. If nothing else, I hope that posting here will help me to document my progress as a photographer over the coming months.