Ann Diptych

A delightful woman named Ann came over to sit for me today and towards the end of the shoot I thought I’d try some close-up portraits of her face with her hair pulled back.  Ideally for what I was trying to do, I’d have some strip boxes, basically a narrow (6-10″) softbox that lets you have a soft band of light that you can control more easily.  I don’t have one, so this setup was thrown together.  On her left was a White Lightning strobe with a 60″ softliter, and on her right was a small alien bee 400 with a large softbox.  It was the best I could do.

Ok, so this is an example of the differences that light choices and camera settings and post processing can make to a very simple image.

The image on the left was shot with just the While Lightning firing.  Even at it’s lowest power and me at iso 100, I had to stop down to f/3.5 or something like that.

For the shot on the right I used only the modelling lamps on the the two strobes.  Basically using them as low power hot lights with 250W bulbs in them. It was shot at iso 400 wide open at f/1.2.  It’s hard to tell in the small web size, but nothing save her eyes and lips are in focus. There was window light coming into the apartment too, illuminating the gray paper behind her.  The upshot of this is that when you set the white balance for the tungsten color on her face, it shifts the sunlit gray paper to blue. Pretty cool, eh?

I was trying to finish this up by stating which one I prefer, but I end up going back and forth. They’re different, and I’m sure people will have their preference.  I thought we might as well talk some specifics of technique here while we’re at it.

Derek

Slice of the Sky

Tom

Polaroid Pogo

So it ain’t 55, but it’s something.  My friend Mary Elizabeth Williams stopped by today with a Polaroid Pogo that she’s reviewing for her radio show.  Imagine a battery powered photo printer about the size of couple decks of cards next to each other.  Plug it into your camera, or wirelessly over bluetooth from your phone, and you can print out “instant” (about 60 seconds) photos.

They’re small, about 1.5×2″ (they say they’re 2×3 but they’re not.  Very contrasty, not very color correct, but in my book they’re not supposed to look good. They look like mini polaroids.  Kinda like the mini bites at Cinnabon.

Retails for $99 and packs of 30 sheets of the instant paper go for about $12 from what I understand. The ‘ink’ is included in the paper. 

Is it reasonable to plug a 21MP 1DsIII into such a device?  Probably not, but it worked. Pretty easily and flawlessly actually.  Do I want one?  I haven’t placed and order, but if I were to get one as a present it could be kinda fun.  I’m not sure that there’s enough of a market of 15 year old girls to make it work long term, but I’ve been wrong before.

Oh and did I mention that they’re stickers too?

Cynthia

Charles

Here are a couple portraits I took of a man named Charles King for POZ magazine about two months ago. The issue came out last week, so I can share them with you. I was pretty happy with them.  They’re lit by a skylight above his head and a wall of windows behind me.

 

Wes

Malcolm Gladwell in TIME

I shot author Malcolm Gladwell (Blink, The Tipping Point) for TIME a couple weeks ago and it’s in today’s issue if anyone wants to take a gander.  Below is a scan of the magazine as well as the original version and my favorite portrait from the shoot.

 

Neil Gaiman

I had the chance to shoot author Neil Gaiman for 5 minutes last night.  Here are the results.