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).