As promised here are a few favorites from the last few months. It's been a little bit of everything this spring. Some travelling for work, some for fun. Some food photos, some portraits, some wildlife. Lots of friends and family. It's been a good spring and summer shows no signs of slowing down. Enjoy.
Wow. Okay. I just had my first chance in three months to take a deep breath. It's been a busy spring. Good, but busy. Between shooting, editing, and some other projects at home, pretty much all my time has been booked. I just got back from Milwaukee late friday night, was home for two days and now I'm in Grand Marais, MN for another project. I'm getting to meet lots of cool people though, and getting some good images along the way. I haven't even had time to toss up a few of my favorites from recent shoots, but I promise they're coming soon. Today and tomorrow are the last of my spring editorial projects, then senior portrait season is right around the corner. I've already gotten the first few e-mails about sessions during the summer. Should be a good year. Have a great week and stay tuned for a few new photos in the next week or so.
I did a photo shoot for the Ashland Baking Company earlier this week to help fill out their new website. I'm finishing up the post processing this evening. Looking at these photos is making my mouth water. Kealy and Jess did an amazing job preparing some absolutely beautiful plates for the shoot. Then after we photographed them, I did an amazing job devouring the food off of those plates. Frickin' delicious. I was so stuffed by the end of the shoot I could barely carry my equipment out to the truck. Here are a few of my favorite frames:
Last week I shot the majority of the photos for my upcoming exhibit, {Body}, in one marathon photoshoot. It was amazing. Many thanks to our friends that rallied some bravery and came to model. I'm hoping to have prints on the wall by the end of the month. The show will be housed in the Stage North Lobby in the heart of Washburn's theatre district. Check back later in March for more details about the show and a possible opening reception. In the meantime, here's a sneak peak at a few of the pieces:
Here's the final version of the tilt-shift stop-motion film that I worked on with Creative Communication & Design in Wausau. This took literally thousands of still frames to make. It was a super cool project to work on and great people to work with. There are some really cool things coming out of their creative department.
After lots of shooting out in the cold lately, it was nice to shoot some indoor portraits late last week. I haven't worked with any children's photography in a couple months and Finn, the model for this particular shoot, reminded me of two very important things: (1) toddlers are way faster than you think and not predisposed to staying exactly where you put them and (2) kids can look good in a photo regardless of what they're doing. Smiling is cute. Crying is cute. Drooling is fantastically cute. Kids can't lose. Pretty much anything is free game. This is not true in all types of photography, like bridal photography for example. While a sobbing bride may be heartwarming in some specific contexts, drooling is almost always a no go.
Anyway, this was my second shoot with Finn and both times we've gotten some really good stuff. Here are a few more of my favotires from the most recent shoot:
Yep. It's definitley winter. Today is the first day in about a week that the mercury climbed out of the single digits. The snow has been beautiful and I've still been getting out to make a few photos. This kind of cold makes everything a little harder, but I think that's what I love about winter. I like the challenge. Even little accmplishments in the winter seem to have more weight. Everything feels a little more like an adventure (see above). Here are a few of my recent wintery favorites:
I shot photos for our local theatre, Stage North (click here to check out their site), this past Saturday night. It was the final weekend of an amazing production of "You Can't Take it with You." Lots of great people involved in the show. Absolutley hilarious. It was fun to watch and fun to shoot. Here are a few of my favorites from the evening:
Had my last Senior Portait session of 2009 this past weekend. Stephanie and her mother, Penny, drove up from Drummond for a shoot on Sunday afternoon. It was a clear, beautiful day here in Ashalnd. It was also about 8 degrees. That, if you're not aware, is cold. Real winter weather makes photo shoots a lot harder. Things freeze up, parts break in the cold, fingers get too cold to push the shutter button. Winter shoots are hard on the camera, they're hard on the lights, they run batteries dead in no time flat, but, most of all, winter shoots are hard on the subject. Stephanie was a trooper.
Now, keep in mind, I was wearing long underwear and about 42 layers of polyethelene and fleece for this shoot. Stephanie on the other hand was wearing a long sleeve shirt and jeans. Afterall who wants to look like they're on an arctic expedition in their yearbook photo (Okay, okay. I would have loved to look like I was on an arctic expedition in my yearbook, but I've always been a little ...abnormal, shall we say.). She would sit in her car while we got a shot set up and then hustle out, peel off her winter coat, and try to look warm for a few minutes while I snapped away. Then back to the car to warm up for a little bit. Not a perfect system, but we got some pretty cool photos. After about an hour and half outside, we went inside for a couple studio portraits. Here are a few of my favorites:
We're back from almost a week in Alpena, MI for Thanksgiving. I swear if I lived there, I'd be right around 800 lbs. We ate constantly for six days. Steaks, turkey, chicken, pie, potatoes, more pie, another potato, pasta, ice cream, another half of a potato. I think I even ate a paper clip that was sitting on the table next to my plate at one point during the feeding frenzy, but it didn't phase me. Amazing food. In between rampant boughts of stuffing my face, I did managed to snap a few photos.
Above is one of the outtakes from a shoot for our friend Heather. Her yearly Christmas Card features a photo of her and her dog, Tucker. I think Heather and I were pretty much on the same page about what we were going for, but Tucker had a widely divergent concept of how the photo should look. We were thinking a nice little shot of them sitting on the rocks looking at the camera. Tucker seemed to think that an action shot of him catching a goose and tearing it to tiny little goosey pieces would make a far better Christmas Card. While I agree it may have been a striking image, it's not quite holiday greeting material. Eventually, a small change of location and reason (by which I mean a squeek toy held above the camera) prevailed and we got a few good frames. Here's the best:
Here's another shot from this summer that I just got around to archiving. I don't have much to say about it, I just love the colors in this image. This was taken with a tilt-shift lens from the roof of a parking structure in Wausau, Wisconsin. Origininally designed for architectural photography tilt-shift lenses can be used to correct for converging verticals and other perspective related distortions. They can also be used to create this effect commonly referred to as miniature faking. Kind of cool. This was part of a project I did with an old friend from college. Craig's a designer with a firm down that way. Always a blast to work with him.
Wednesday evening, I got together with a local ceramics artist to shoot some slides of her recent work. As you can see, she has some really great stuff. A bunch of it is wood fired, which does some really cool things to the texture of the glaze. Pretty impressive. She's documenting it all before pieces go off to be sold or shown other places.
As a concept, shooting art slides of three dimensional work is relatively simple. I use a big roll of white seamless paper and two lights. One soft light from the front/side and one hard light from behind for some rim light. I sometimes add a reflector opposite the front light as well. Pretty basic. The tricky part is managing the glare. For matte finished pieces that's not an issue and you can get a good slide in one or two frames. But glossy pieces can be a bear.
The glossier the piece the more time it takes to get things just right. You have to fiddle with the angle of the lights, move the piece around; you have to find that spot where the glare is as small as it can possibly be with out disappearring completely. I still like to have that little spot of glare (we call that a specular highlight in photograpy) to show the true texture of the piece. Without it, you can't tell if it's actually shiny or not. In combination, that highlight, the halo of rim light and the soft , wrapping light from the side do a really nice job of revealing the shape and texture of the piece. That's the whole idea.
When Vicki (Allyson's mom) and I scheduled Allyson's senior portrait shoot, weather.com was projecting sun for Thursday afternoon. Sounds good. A sunny fall day, yeah, let's do that. Weather.com was wrong. Thursday afternoon was cold and grey. I mean really grey. And really cold, for that matter. The sky in the image above was not photoshopped to look that way, that's really how bad it was. And yes that's full color, grey just happened to be the only color around.
So what do you do when you get bad weather? Well, you could postpone the shoot, reschedule for another day, wait for better weather. I try give people that option if that's what they want to do. Or you could do what I like to do, which is work with what you've got and get some really good photos anyway. Personally, I think an ominous cloud-laden sky can be far more striking than a happy sunny day, but maybe that's just me.
Bad weather does take a little more planning though. You've got to have a dry place to leave extra equipment, a warm place for the subject to hang out while you get things set up, more lighting equipment, and someone to keep the lightstands from blowing over in the wind (Thanks Vicki, you were an awesome assistant.) That aside, the final images can still be pretty sweet. Of course, it doesn't hurt to have a photogenic subject either.
Here are a few more frames from Thursday afternoon:
Talk of harvest season always conjures up images of fresh-cut hay and yellow-tassled corn and old tractors chugging across frosty autumn fields. That sort of thing. Well it's my harvest season too, in a way. It's been cold and rainy all day, so I'm sitting inside this eveing drinking a cup of mint tea and processing all my backlogged photos; turning RAW camera files into real, usable photos. I'm catching up on all the things I shot over the summer and haven't yet touched. They're all photos I shot for myself and, since no ones paying for them, there's been no rush to get them finished up. "No rush" usually means they sit around for a ridiculously long time before I finally just delete them. But today I'm actually doing something with them, I'm harvesting my summer photos. They've been waiting patiently for an evening like this and now I'm reaping what I sowed. And taking a nice little saunter down memory lane while I'm at it.
This summer was all about food. It was the first summer Sarah and I had a big garden, the first summer we had a CSA share. It was the first year I really thought about where my food comes from. And when I think about something a lot I usually take a lot of pictures of it. Over the last several months I've spent time on a lot of different farms, including my Grandma's land in southwestern Wisconsin. I've learned more about chickens and livestock and crops and vegetables than I ever planned. And I have more farming related pictures than I know what to do with. So, here are just a few of the best:
Woke up Saturday morning to an inch of snow on the ground, a stiff northern wind, and an outdoor wedding to shoot (Where did I put my long underwear this spring?). Some very dear friends, Jess and Blaise, had been planning an outdoor wedding on their property for months and, due to the sudden cold weather, had to scramble to find an indoor venue for the reception. Despite a little last minute chaos, the whole thing ended up being absolutely beautiful. Thanks, Jess and Blaise, for the amazing party and congratulations on gettin' hitched, you crazy kids. Here's a sneak peek at a few of the wedding photos:
