Busy week!

Wow, this week has been super-busy photography-wise for me, so sorry about not updating. I had photoshoots saturday, a botched one sunday, monday, wednesday, and then yesterday was sunday's reschedule. Whew! Once I look at all the pictures I'll do some blog entries about what I learned during each shoot. Next week is calmer, I only have shoots scheduled monday and thursday! When it rain, it really pours.

Part of me super-excited to have all this portfolio building under my belt, but part of me is scared that all I'm doing is taking crappy pictures that people won't be happy with! Someone on another board I'm on said that the more experience you have, the more confidence you'll take with you to your shoots. :)

And to leave you with a picture, here's something from me wrangling with Samuel for a good Father's Day picture. Again, working with the white seamless background and a semi-cooperative 3 year old.



the storyboard we ended up giving my husband as his gift (thanks Amber for the help!) She pointed me here to a storyboard template tutorial which rocks!



bigger version of the storyboard here

Samuel and the seamless

I've been practicing taking pictures on the big white seamless. Here's my first attempts a few months ago. My poor son was not really a cooperative model, no matter what the pictures look like. :) Shot with my D200 using the 50mm and my 28mm-80mm lenses.

Someone pointed out to me that the background isn't actually white, it's more "bone" colored. And who the heck knew there were SO many levels of white out there!





What I learned from those is that:

use a grey card or the white background to "set" my white balance

shadows aren't necessarily a bad thing

getting an actual "white" background will make it seem whiter

get more of a differential between the background and my subject (ie more light on the background, or less light on his face) to make it really "pop"

So, we're onto me dragging Samuel back on the seamless for another go-around. Here I'm using Superior's Arctic White instead of the Savage bone white I had before.

I made the mistake of setting the WB on my camera first on the background, then adding a reflector light. It made my coloring totally orange, which I tried to adjust in CS3 but you can still tell it's a little off.


here he is without the reflector light, just natural light from the living room window


trying out the BW conversion


this picture has all the "wrong" things going for it - it's too centered, I cut off his chin, his eyes are a little soft, but I love, love, love his cheesy smile


So there you go. Obviously I still have a long way to go but I think I'm getting the hang of the whole shooting on the seamless. My husband even bought me a piece of plexiglass to put on the bottom to soothe out the whole wrinkling issue I was having as well.