Putting my best foot forward...

Photographing shoes, how hard could it be, right? Well, theoretically really not that hard. However, you get what you put in, and seeing that I wanted a good grade in the class I put “my best foot forward.” Get prepped, setting up, and shooting took a total of four hours. And the results proved to be fantastic! Bellow are images of the shoes and the setup. I do not show the setup to brag or to show off but rather for the average person to understand all the work that goes in to one image and that photography is just not simply “pushing a button.”

It's only a flesh wound!

I will be transparent with you guys. This semester is exhausting. For eight weeks I have had no life, other than work and school. But we are now drawing to an end, and I could not be happier. Although I could not have made it through without my wife, my parents, and my in-laws helping out so much, from babysitting to mowing the grass. I love them all, and I could not say thank you enough. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! … See I can’t.

Soft as a baby

Photographing fabric proved to be harder than expected. Not only was it harder than expected, I decided to add another level of difficulty to it by choosing to use my one year old son in the first image. To showcase fabric in its true essence you have to show it doing what it was made for. This is why I chose to use my son. This duck towel is a babies towel and it was a soft towel, so what better way to showcase this than to put it on a soft skin baby. I used a soft box on camera right as the main light to give soft shadows and filled in the shadows with a regular Speedotron head, that was on camera left and a Farrel light above.

Why did the chicken cross the road?... To see light stands

Image 1

Image 2

One of my classes I am working on a magazine project and I have chose to photograph a family and their farming legacy. It will consist of images of chickens in chicken houses, tobacco, and portraits of the family. This past week I photographed the chickens. I never knew that these birds were so curious. Walking into the chicken house with my tripod, light stand, and props the chickens understandable fled. But after I set things up I never would have thought about how curious they would be.  Slowly the group or flock of birds would gather around investigating my stand. The I noticed on some frames that my fill/background light didn’t fire but this was due to a chicken trying to figure out what my flash was. All in all a fun and humorous experience.

Image 1:

Shutter: 1/250

Aperture: 5.6

ISO: 400

Light: SB800

Image 2:

Shutter: 1/250

Aperture: 5.6

ISO: 400

Light modifier: SB600 and a Parabolic soft box

Making a splash

This past week we were given an assignment, to show motion in an image. A relatively simple assignment, however, if one ponders the thought of capturing motion in a single frozen frame then one realize the difficulty of the assignment. I chose to shoot an apple falling into a 60-gallon fish tank while I had the apple in one hand and the other on the shutter release button. I timed it so when the apple touched the water my shutter was released. The image you see required about 500 trials and error but I finally got it. Nonetheless, this photograph did not meet the requirements. This image was more of a stop motion rather then a motion image.

Shutter: 1/250

Aperture: 29 (No I’m not kidding)

ISO: 400

Light: SB600 and Water?