Cheetah

This cheetah looked like he was considering inviting me for lunch. His lunch!

This shot, taken on the sanannah's of Namibia... ...errr, I mean, the Houston Zoo, reminded me that most portraits are about the eyes. It also gave me some practice using selective focus to draw the viewer's attention to the face and eyes and to give the rest of the image a sort of out-of-focus, painterly look.

The watercolor framing was layered on top of the edited image, using PhotoFrame 2.0, another plug-in software used with Photoshop.

-CG TTL

Terrifying and Depressing!

So, I got this complaint from my old friend Leon, who said the self-portrait I was using for my profile for this blog was "terrifying and depressing." He said he had known me since we were in Junior High School, and he'd never seen me frown. He ordered me to ditch that picture immediately.

Well, who am I to disappoint an old friend? So, I set up this new shot by staring directly into my Canon 580 EX II Speedlite flash with a Lumiquest LQ-119 Softbox III velcroed to the front of it.

I shot everything in manual mode, including the flash. In this case I triggered the camera with an electronic shutter release cable in my right hand. The flash was synched with a simple PC cord.

First, I set the camera sensor at ISO 100 (to minimize sensor noise) and the shutter speed at 1/250 second (the fastest available synch speed for flash on my Canon 40D camera). Next I stopped the aperture down to about f/5.6 to give me a moderate depth of field and to underexpose the ambient light on the background by maybe 3 stops. I wanted it dark. Then I set my flash manually by trial and error (flash meters are for sissies!), until my face was properly exposed. I just kept readjusting the manual flash intensity and checking the histogram on the back of my camera, until it looked about right. If you want to learn more about how to do this, check out Strobist.com.

After some minor touhch-ups in Photoshop CS4 (mostly because I needed a shave), I layered on one of the seriously cool frames available in OnOne PhotoFrame Professional (third party plug-in software that works with Photoshop CS4). In this case I was doing my photographer thing, so I picked a frame that made the image look like a strip of 35 mm film.

I posted this image on my Flickr site and got 36 viewings in the first two minutes. Interesting. Must be the frame.

-CG TTL

PS: In case you're interested, here's a link to that terrifying and depressing shot!

Flamingo

Here's an image from my recent visit to the Houston Zoo. I was drawn to the shape of the bird's neck, and that interesting yellow eye!

Using a 200 mm telephoto lens stopped down to an aperture of f/2.8 to produce a very narrow depth of field, and using my tripod, I focused carefully on that eye and tried to leave the busy background as simple and out of focus as I could.

I cropped the image to draw attention to that primitive-looking yellow eye, by placing it at the upper right third of the image and by using leading lines in the background and that beautiful "S" curve of the neck.

I also tried to use the negative space shapes around the bird to provide some balance to the overall composition.

-CG TTL

Steve

My old friend Steve (...and, I do mean old! We were Boy Scouts together in the 1950's!) was nice enough to let me click this head shot, while we talked recently.

It was near noon, normally not a good time for photo lighting, but the day was bright and overcast and the clouds acted like a giant soft box in the sky. While we talked, I asked Steve to move to a chair a few feet from a North-facing window, so the top of the window could create the rapid light fall-off across his face. This is known as Portico Lighting.

Steve is a kindly person. He's also very smart (...if you count a PhD from Stanford). And both these things show in his eyes. That's why I filled the frame with his face and positioned his eyes on the diagonals of the image, near the upper third of the frame. That's also why I selectively brightened, saturated, and sharpened his eyes a bit in post processing with CS4.

Also, notice that by cutting off the top of his head in the image, I both limited background distraction and created two, symmetrical, parenthesis-shaped, ( ), negative space shapes, which framed his eyes.

And finally, notice the backlight on both his shoulders that provides leading lines, which lead the eye towards the center of the image, then up the highlights on the nose toward his eyes.

-CG TTL

Bubbling Lemon

This image was shot the same way as the bubbling orange, except I started with the yellow-purple complementary color pair. A lemon from the grocery store and a purple gift sack from the drug store did the trick.

Want to see how to do this kind of shot without a flash? See Bryan Peterson's cool YouTube video here.

-CG TTL

Bubbling Orange

Doesn't this image make you thirsty for a cool summertime drink?

I visualized this image starting with the colors, in this case the orange-blue complementary color pair. I picked up an orange (...Hey,what's more orange than an orange?) at the grocery store for the foreground and a shiny blue sack (...the kind used for birthday presents) at the drug store for the background.

After suspending the orange slice in a small glass bowl with unbent paper clips, I got out my 60 mm macro lens, added Perrier sparkling water to the bowl and fired away!

The shot was lit with an AB800 monoblock flash (from above camera right) covered with a piece of white printer paper to soften it a bit. The clear glass bowl was sitting on a silver reflector to reflect light back up from below. Notice how the shallow depth of field of the macro lens (...at f/6.3, ISO 100, and 1/250 sec) kept the background nicely out of focus, so it wouldn't compete for attention with the orange slice and the bubbles.

-CG TTL

Jalapeno (Hal-ah-payn'-yo)!

Hey! What can I say, I'm into complementary colors these days!

After a trip to Central Market on Saturday afternoon, I felt compelled to assemble this salad bowl full of color.

I shot this from above with my main "walking around" zoom telephoto lens, looking down on the bowl, while standing on a small ladder. The soft light comes from an AB800 flash, shot through a huge (for me) soft box, 45 degrees camera left. The bowl is sitting on a piece of black foamcore, used as a horizontal backdrop, and there's a piece of white foamcore used as a reflector on the back side of the bowl, camera right.

I like the complementary red-green color combination and the simple geometry of all these veggies.

-CG TTL