Portaits

It's been a while since I have been blogging, school and work are catching up with me. But I had an interesting assignment not this week for the Spartan Daily. I was assigned to take portraits of two photographers, Valerie Mendoza and Kirkman Amyx. Mendoza is an instructor at SJSU, while Amyx is a graduate student.

I am not always sure what to expect when I am shooting a photo of a fellow photographer. Sometimes I expect them to be picky and kind of like a backseat photographer. But both of my subjects were nothing of the sort. Mendoza didn't really have time, as we had about five minutes to shoot and Amyx was a patient man as we tried to find some kind of shot.

For Mendoza I went in with one SB-24 and bounced it off the wall to the left. I figured since we were not going to have much time I needed to shoot in her office. I wanted soft lighting from the side. Couldn't get any simpler. She was a natural at posing, didn't really have to tell her to do much. The thing I love about her photo, is how she cocks her head slightly at a similar angle to the crow in the photo above her. The Daily ran a different photo than this one.

Amyx's photo, which is different than what ran in the Daily, came right at the end. We had originally planned to shoot in small studio that was displaying his work, but didn't have a way into it. So we went to Plan B, which was to figure out a Plan C. We took several shots in a really ugly room before I took an idea from Strobist Guru David Hobby. Amyx does a lot of his work digitally, inclding the piece behind him in which he compiled 10,000 rolls of dice. I pretty much just used one flash to light his print in the back and computer light to light his face and the light on my cell phone for the front of his computer.

This assignment was all about being resourceful, with limited amount of time.

Judo

So I had an assignment for the Spartan Daily, and was hoping for to come away with some better pics. Last week was one of those weeks where the obvious couldn't be more oblivious to me. So I look back now wondering why I didn't do this or that.

I went into this assignment with an idea in mind of catching San Jose State Judo athlete Jeff Fong throwing someone with some hard light coming from the front and back and hopefully blacking out most of the background. I only half accomplished that, as I failed to get the back all blacked out. But it is still an interesting photo.

The Peak of my procrastination

Because I am who I am, I procrastinate a great deal. With the end of the year creeping up right now, I can not afford to do that. But I did. I am. Hopefully I have reached my peak, and will finally buckle down and get some stuff done. We'll see.

Anyways, I actual did do something productive while wasting time tonight. Finally got to test out my new SB-26, which worked like a dream. It is very cool having two flashes though it was a little tough to work around the optical slave. I need to get another Cactus receiver, which is also working like a dream.


My lighting set-up was one SB-24 to the camera right at 1/4 power and snooted. Behind the glass door was the SB-26 at 1/2 power with a red gel, which I got for free along with hundreds of other gels from Lee Filters. My settings were like 100 ASA at 1/25 and f/8 or something like that. I don't remember completely.

Not a bad way to procrastinate, but I still have a mountain of work ahead of me and not a whole lot of time.

Bay Area Strobist Meet-up

We had a fun time at this weekends Bay Area Meet-up. I think somewhere just under 20 people showed up, and we had four to five groups going all at once.

It was nice to see a lot of stuff that I have been reading about, put into practice. It was also nice to put a face to a lot of the members on the flickr group.

Another one is already in the works, which you can follow here.

South Bay Strobist Meet-up

Ok, as stated earlier there is a South Bay Strobist meet up in San Jose on February 9.

This a cool development on so many levels, but one of the coolest things is that it is being held in a church. There are 12 people already confirmed to attend and maybe a few more interested.

Check out the discussion here for more info.

I am still alive

I know it has been a while since I have posted, and I know that one of my resolutions was to post a lot more frequently, but school has started once again and my life on and off of the internet is in hibernation.

I did get away to a rainy San Luis Obispo this weekend, and made a Strobist minded purchase. I got an umbrella and to go along with it I order a set of Cactus V2 radio slaves from Midwest Photo Exchange.

You can expect a full report on those and info on a South bay Strobist meet-up in the near future.

Trying to hack it as a Stobist

So I am taking it slow, working my way into the world of off camera lighting. I started out a few months ago purchasing a SB-24 and a couple of light stands. I haven't stretched my strobing legs as much as I would like to, but I have started.

Here is a quick head shot that I did in the empty room-for-rent that neighbors mine. It's of the brand new member of the San Jose Stealth's dance team, Miss Ashley. She was a great model, and we had some fun shooting.

As you can see, my setup was one SB-24 to the left of me and one white poster board reflector. For the background I used a black blanket and I had her sitting on my computer chair. To tilt the flash a little, I used a stack of DVD cases. If that's not resourcing then I don't know what is.

Next, being the poor college art student I am, I'm going to give a shot at constructing my own soft box and run with that. I felt that with these photos, I had a little too hard light, even though I did have a diffuser on my flash. We'll see how that works.