Lonely hearts

Isn't that all any of us ask?

Still playing with Valentiney still life ideas. Helps to keep me occupied in the bitterly cold January of northern Illinois.

Good old box of Sweethearts candies on a light box with a gridded flash high and behind the subject.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

Lookin' at the world through love-colored glasses

We just might be amazed at how differently we view others.

Picked up a bunch of cheap Valentiney-type stuff over the weekend to play with setting up some Valentiney-type still life shots for my own amusement and for the editors over at Getty Images to consider. It's a nice way to spend some photographic time when it's grungy outside -- rain and warm temps pretty much nuked all our snow and left behind a soggy, muddy mess.

More to come.

Technical stuff: One flash camera left behind a diffuser panel to soften the light and put a nice little reflection in the lens of the glasses. Another flash camera right, low and aimed through the lenses, set at half the power of the main flash. It's counterintuitive, but a flash shot through a colored gel or other colored semitransparent material will register better with a lower level of light. A quarter-inch grid added to the flash to focus the beam to throw a more defined shadow.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

Make-A-Wish Monday

Fun with a wishbone left over from the Thanksgiving festivities. Yeah, it's kinda small -- we served cornish game hens with a wild rice stuffing. Mmmmm. Anyway, I thought I could do some photographic-type stuff with the bone and try out a new set of flash grids in the process.

The photo above has the flash set at 1/32 power with a 1/8 inch grid attached. The grid creates a strong directional light that wonderfully outlines a subject when placed perpendicular to the camera-subject axis. A sheet of white foam board is standing just out of the frame to the right to reflect some light back onto my fingers.



Same flash setup as above, only this time the flash is pointing directly down at the subject and is about 2 inches away. This time the grid creates a circle of light with a graduated falloff to black. Both this photo and the one above were shot at or on my dining room table at night. Normal room lighting was on the entire time -- I simply adjusted aperture down and shutter speed up to turn the ambient light to black and let the flash do all the work. No need to make the family sit around in the dark while I fiddled with some shots.

Last photo also taken at the dining room table. Afternoon sun is coming in through the window blinds behind me. White foam board propped up to catch the slats of sunlight and reflect some of it back onto my hand.



Here's wishing you a good Monday.

Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

From soft to scary

Wal-Mart has the right idea, kinda. I passed the photo studio in a local Wally World and stopped a second to check out their setup. One huge softbox with a jillion watts of light hanging seven feet in the air directly over the camera. That was it. A nice one-size-fits-all lighting solution. Except we all know that one-size-fits-all doesn't. If you have nice tight clear skin, Wal-lighting will make you look like a million bucks. For the rest of us in the 90 percent who aren't blessed that way, such light only enhances our shortcomings. But I digress.

The child portrait above employs the one soft light approach, except I chose to move the light low -- the bottom of the umbrella was set to about the child's height and placed slightly to the left. A reflector was laid on the floor just in front of the model to throw a little bit of light under his chin.

Having been a natural light kind of a guy for so many years, playing with multiple strobes, umbrellas, reflectors, gels, snoots and grids is a whole new ballgame. Sometimes it can be downright scary ...



Now, off to get my morning coffee. I can be such a monster without it.

Bottom photo: Three strobes - two LumoPro 120's set as optical slaves on stands behind me left and right, 1/16th power. One strobe on camera with a diffuser. ISO 200, f/5.6, 1/80th. Five image HDR from a single RAW file. Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

Thoughts on being wanted

One day my wife and I noticed that our cat, pictured above, who had always been the picture of health, was limping on her hind legs. Within two days, she was completely paralyzed from the waist down.

We rushed her to our vet, who told me after an examination, in very grave tones, that the left side of her heart had enlarged, which allowed blood to pool and form clots. These clots would occasionally escape the heart and lodge in her legs, causing paralysis, and that the condition was nearly always fatal, since the clots would eventually reach and shut down vital organs. The vet gave me a bottle of medicine, designed to enlarge her blood vessels and dissolve the clots, told me how to administer it and told me not to be surprised if the cat did not survive the trip back home. That was nearly two years ago.

In April of 2008, I posted on this blog about her medical issues and wrote that there would come a day when her condition would overcome any benefit the medicine would provide. That day came last week when a series of clots shut down her legs and eventually her lungs. She now lies buried under the shade of an oak tree in our back yard.

The cat showed up on our doorstep as a stray one winter about ten years ago after someone dumped her in our neighborhood. She was cold, hungry and injured. We took her in, had her fixed up (in more ways than one) and gave her the home she had been denied elsewhere.

Our now music-major college-age son named her Poly (short for Polyphonic) because of her distinctive two-toned meow. Her meow registered in perfect fifths in the key of A (I worked it out on a guitar after listening to her meow one day). Think of the first two notes of the song, Feelings. Karaoke cat sings, "Me-ow ... nothing more than me-ow ..."

Back in April of 2008, I was getting acquainted with a new digital camera and pointing it around the house when I spied a triangle of sunlight on our family room floor. Poly wandered into the shot and gazed up at me wondering what I was up to. I took the picture because it was an interesting composition -- it actually illustrates a principle of the golden mean, but I won't go into that.

I posted the photo on Flickr and on this blog and pretty much forgot about it, until the week before Poly died. I was contacted by Getty Images, who was interested in adding it, along with several others, to their stock photography library. Unfortunately, at the time I took the photo, I was not thinking in terms of it ever being commercially viable, and had deleted the high resolution version. The current version's resolution does not meet Getty's minimum standard.

But still, it's nice that a formerly unwanted cat found that our home and the world's largest stock photography agency did indeed want her.

Photograph © 2008 James Jordan.

Spring ahead

Time change tonight in most parts of the U.S. Turn the clocks in your digital cameras ahead one hour to keep your EXIF data accurate.

Video: Time lapse created on a digital camera (Fujifilm Finepix s700). Approximately 600 still photos, taken via continuous shooting mode, compiled in time lapse freeware and finished in Windows Movie Maker. Video © 2008 James Jordan.

Bling it on

I’ve been cooped up inside a lot lately. Not able to get out and get any naturey-type shots. Not that late winter/early spring is terribly inspiring here in the upper Midwest. What isn’t white is brown. Ah, well. Eighteen days until spring.

So in the meantime, I’ve been tinkering with my Home Depot-inspired studio lighting setup, and am just about ready to take it out on the road for some portrait sessions. Along the way, I got a chance to shoot some bling shots as part of an engagement photo package for a lucky couple (lucky that they’re getting married, not necessarily lucky that they have me for a photographer).

So I thought I’d post a few samples of the bling shots and a couple of self portraits to show you what can be done with a four-foot fluorescent light fixture, daylight-balanced tubes, a reflector, and a beat-up 25-year-old flash unit. The portrait background is fabric that was on sale at Jo-Anne’s held up by a frame built with less than ten dollars’ worth of PVC pipe from HD and held in place with three spring-loaded hand clamps that cost 98 cents each.

The ring shots were taken with the same basic setup. The top shot shows the ring on a mirror. A white sheet of foam board was used to reflect a white background. The ring and Bible shot was lit by a small LED flashlight.



Chic on the cheap. Gotta love it.

Photo blogging: Sure, I’ve shot pictures of waves. It’s tricky. You gotta time them just right. You’ll wind up with very few keepers -- most of your shots will look cruddy. Now I’ve just discovered another trick to photographing surf. Instead of photographing breakers from the outside looking in, you really have to photograph waves from the inside looking out. And that’s why I will never be an outstanding wave photographer. Be sure to check out the site's home page, which shows the photographer at work. That little teeny person in the lower left of the picture holding the yellow thingy about to be clobbered by a 20-foot wave - that's the photographer.

Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

Rockin' the white background

I'm using my down time in between looking for a job, looking for freelance work (and actually doing the freelance projects I'm finding) to work on fine tuning some studio photography skills. These shots were taken on white posterboard ($1.50 at Office Max). The cell phone was placed on a mirror ($12 at Home Depot) with a sheet of white foam board held at an angle to reflect a white background into the shot ($1.99 at Office Max).

They were lit with a 4-foot fluorescent light fixture ($9.50 at Home Depot) and two 40-watt daylight-balanced fluorescent tubes ($9.95 at Home Depot). A small scrap of white foam board was used to reflect some light into the shadow areas (cost negligible) and an old school on-camera flash unit was bounced off the ceiling to provide some extra fill and blow out the background (the flash unit was a Christmas gift in 1984).

When your photography game has mostly been natural light for twelve years or so, the transition to artificial light is simultaneously daunting and liberating. It helps that I have all that expensive lighting equipment at my disposal. (Actually, disposal is where I find a lot of my equipment.)

And a big thanks to those of you who let me know what you think about the new blog template. Nobody reported any problems with how things showed up on your browsers, so that's a good sign. I spent some time yesterday tweaking the HTML code to move things around - I know just enough about coding to be dangerous. I guess you could say the same thing about my lighting technique.

So far so good.

Photographs © 2009 James Jordan

Eyes on the conductor

A bassist concentrates on the conductor during a performance of the Roosevelt University Symphony Orchestra. I shot photos of the dress rehearsal under ideal stage lighting and was assured that the levels would be maintained during the actual performance. What I discovered when the stage lights came up for the performance was that the level was about one stop less than during the rehearsal, rendering one lens useless and placing me on the brink of disaster with two others.

I had come prepared for the worst, and I was now dealing with it. A monopod helped steady my shots, which needed to be carefully timed to prevent motion blur. I shot the first portion of the concert from the front row of seats, then moved toward the back of the auditorium. During the intermission, I moved to the balcony.

All in all, I got the shots that the school was looking for. It was just a little tense for a while.

Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2008 James Jordan.

A little harping

Last November, I was contacted by Roosevelt University in Chicago to photograph an upcoming concert of their Symphony Orchestra for their marketing materials. During the conversation, I was warned that other photographers had complained that the lighting onstage was too harsh to get photos with a good tonal range. I told the person who booked me not to worry, I had some exposure and post-processing tricks to overcome those problems. Afterward, I worried that I might have promised too much.

I arrived just prior to the dress rehearsal. I was allowed onstage to take some test shots and make sure I could negotiate the lighting. I needn't have worried. The lighting during the dress rehearsal was exquisite. I took shot after shot of musicians and conductor, wondering why other photographers expressed difficulty. The photo above was taken just before the stage was cleared for the stage crew to set up for the start of the concert. A harpist was tuning up and going through some musical passages. I tried to get a few shots of her hands in action, but her fingers moved so fast that the shots came out blurry. I asked her if she wouldn't mind holding a position for a moment so I could get a couple of clear shots. I got the shots then left the stage. The stage lights were lowered and people began to filter into the auditorium.

Just to be sure about the lighting situation, I located the stage manager and asked if the lighting for the concert would be the same as that in the dress rehearsal. He assured me that it would be. I took my place in the auditorium, content in knowing that the exposure settings I had determined during the rehearsal would not have to be adjusted. One less thing to worry about. The musicians entered and took their places on the stage. The stage lights came up and I began shooting. That's when I discovered that the stage manager lied to me.

Photograph © 2008 James Jordan.

Ready to rock some Wagner

Last November I had a chance to photograph the Roosevelt University Symphony Orchestra and Concert Choir in action for some promotional shots to be used in the school’s marketing materials. I was allowed onstage during the dress rehearsal before the performance and was given the run of the house during the performance. I even talked my way into the balcony, which was closed to the public that night. It helps to be friendly and polite to the ushers.

This was taken from front center of the balcony during the moment of silence before the piece – a portion from Wagner’s Ring Cycle - began. The crowd is hushed, the conductor has raised his hands and the musicians await the drop of the baton.

For the past 15 years, three of my kids have been involved in music and orchestras – my oldest daughter was a floutist through high school, my youngest son is a jazz studies major and drumset performer working on his doctorate at the University of Illinois and my youngest daughter is a senior studying cello performance at Roosevelt University in Chicago (she’s in the third row of cellos, second chair in). I figure I’ve attended more than 100 concerts and recitals during the last decade and a half. I’m just glad the music gets better the farther the kids go.

Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2008 James Jordan.

You know you're getting cabin fever when ...

... splotches of cooking oil on the bottom of frying pans begin to look interesting.

I don't think we've had more than one day this month where the temperatures made it above the freezing mark. I'm officially tired of winter. It can go away now. kthxbai.

Guess I'm not the only one with cabin fever.

Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Exploring the pasta-bilities

After last Friday's freeze-out, my wife and I sought some warmth for body and soul. We found a measure of it in the kitchen. For some time, she had wanted to explore making homemade pasta, and, in the aftermath of getting our funky furnace fixed, it seemed as good a time as any.

Let me just insert a note here to say that I like to cook. I liked the Food Network before they added all the pretty people with marginal cooking skills as hosts. I enjoyed the movie Ratatouille for the kitchen scenes, which kind of made up for the sappy storyline. And, because a certain food blog I read every now and then also features some excellent food photography, I decided to document our fun with farina.

We prepared some dough according to a recipe my wife found online (dark spots in the dough are basil flakes), I did the rolling and sliced the dough with a pizza cutter into 1/4-inch strips, then into a boiling pan they went. I grabbed the camera in between steps to document our progress.

Photos taken in available light (a mix of daylight and incandescent) with the camera's white balance set on incandescent. Images layered with Soft Light, shadows lightened, unsharp mask and warming filter applied in post-processing. 50mm 1.8 lens.

Click on pictures to enlarge. Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

Little daffydowndilly

“Diligence is not a whit more toilsome than sport or idleness.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Little Daffydowndilly

Cat encounters a wrinkle in the time-space continuum

Fun with PhotoShop on a real slow day.

Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2008 James Jordan.

An exercise in the division of a two-dimensional plane (with a curious onlooker)

Sometimes I walk around with a camera and peer at life through the viewfinder. More often than not, something will appear before me that seems to be worth snapping the shutter.

Such is the case with this photo. The triangular patch of sunlight formed a diagonal division of the picture plane. The cat’s body is perpendicular to the hypotenuse of the triangle. The upturned face, gorgeous green eyes and cute little forepaws are a bonus. Not a bad composition. Not planned. It just happened that way.

A note about the cat: She showed up several years ago as a stray on our doorstep. It was winter and she did not have the thick fur of an outdoor cat – someone just wished her luck and dumped her in our neighborhood. She arrived injured, cold and hungry. We took her in, had her fixed up (in more ways than one) and welcomed her to our home. Our now music-major college-age son named her Poly (short for Polyphonic) because of her distinctive two-toned meow. Her meow registered in perfect fifths in the key of A (I worked it out on a guitar after listening to her meow one day). Think of the first two notes of the song, Feelings.

Poly is at a ripe old age now and is suffering from heart disease. The left side of her heart has enlarged, allowing blood to pool in it and form clots. Occasionally, those clots will escape the heart and lodge in her extremities, cutting off circulation and causing paralysis. This has happened several times since last Christmas. Our vet has given us medication to give her to enlarge her blood vessels and help dissolve the clots when the paralysis occurs. So far so good. But there will come a day when the medicine will no longer work and there will be nothing else we can do for her.

It’s been a good run with this cat. Totally unplanned for and spontaneous. Just like this photo of her.

Shell game

This photo makes me feel a little bit like the guy who sets up a beach chair by the picture window and sits in the sun, pretending he’s at the beach. You see, this setup was done on my dining room table.

I wanted to take some photos of some seashells my wife and I collected on North Carolina’s Outer Banks a few years ago. I remembered a bag of landscaping sand I had bought at Wal-Mart. A photo of a cloudy sky was blurred, then printed on 8 ½ by 11 paper to produce a backdrop with some faux depth of field. The entire setup was about six inches deep. A flash unit bounced off the ceiling provided the light for this shot.

I need to get out more.

Release

A chrysanthemum releases its grip and gives itself to the world.

Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2008 James Jordan.

Unbearable lightness

According to Milan Kundera, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, one's existence and the occurrences within that existence happened by chance and are therefore insignificant in the overall scheme of things. We're not tied down by the consequences of our decisions, so they are considered "light."

But at the same time, according to Kundera, that insignificance (lightness) makes living unbearable.

That's sort of like a postmodern version of this old joke:

"Doctor, it hurts when I do this."

"Well, then, don't do that!"

Want to make life bearable? Then do something significant with your life.

Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2008 James Jordan.

'Mallow yellow

Just a few of my peeps. Another one of those sure fire signs of spring, along with the swallows at San Juan Capistrano or the buzzards in Hinckley, Ohio or robins returning to the northern states and Canada.

Everything you could ever want to know about the cultural significance of these chewy chicks (and bunnies and whatever) has been thoroughly researched by ABC news and presented in this video.

Enjoy.

Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2008 James Jordan.