More Red Horse People

Early last year I took portraits of everyone who worked at the cafe on the ground floor of my building.  Well, they’ve got some new people and asked if I could catch up with the current crew.  So here’s a couple I’ve done in the last couple of days.  Both are available light, the first in the daytime using window light from across the room. The second is just a couple of tungsten bulbs hanging from the ceiling.

Nude Experiment 4

Silent Service – Individual Portraits

Tom

Obama’s People

A very cool gallery of the incoming Obama team on the NY Times website:

http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/magazine/2009-inauguration-gallery/index.html

Some excellent stuff in there.  Portrait people should take a look.  Scratch that, everyone should take a look.

Silent Service – Group Shots

I shot my friend’s band earlier today up here in Boston.  Some group shots and some individual.  I’ve got work to do on a lot of images, but here are a few group shots, one with just window light, the next using a flash, the last is obviously a composite (it’s supposed to be rough looking).  Usually I’m a individual portrait guy, as groups tend to have too many variables to juggle.

I will freely admit that I have no real idea how these look as I’ve edited them on my laptop.  So if they look like crap, cut me a little slack for a few days until I can do them for real.  thanks. 

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

Quick Self-Portrait

Had to take a walk in the very cold air today to get to an appointment, so I took along my camera with the 50/1.2 and shot a bit with it wide open. I think I really need to get the 85/1.2 when I get rich.

I focused on the stair that I thought my head would be at, but apparently I was off the plane of focus when the timer went off. Ah, they can’t all be perfect, but it was a fun little experiment.

Sarah

Recently I’ve felt stuck.  I liked the work I’ve been doing, but I’ve fallen into habits that keep me retreading the same steps over and over.  Well that’s all going to stop.  First off, this blog is going to be a lot more active with at least a post a day. More technique, essays, equipment reviews, random links and thoughts, etc.  So keep an eye out and spread the word.

Today I had to chance to shoot my friend Sarah.  I wanted to see what would happen if I shot with next to no light using just a small window on a rainy New York day.  I also wanted to see what would happen if I didn’t do any photoshop to them, so I limited myself to just the adjustments I could make in lightroom.  Kind of a tie one hand behind my back kind of thing as a training exercise.

They were shot wide open with either the 50/1.2 or 35/1.4   And let me say once again that there was NO light in this room.  Even completely wide open on the primes, shutter at 1/30th, and exposure compensation down a stop or so, the iso was at 6400.  Like I said, might as well been in the dark.  That 5DII is pretty impressive, but there are limits.  Anyway, take a look.

That second one is as close to Arbus as you’ll ever see me get.  😉