Avast me hearties!

The weekend is nearly here and I'm planning a trip to Port Washington, Wisconsin's Pirate Festival. Three days of pillage and plunder and folks dressed up as various scallawags and wenches. Some folks take this thing pretty seriously and travel from all over the Midwest to attend these types of things decked out in their piratey best. Who knew?

I don't plan on dressing as a pirate (I think I get enough points for having my birthday on September 19 -- International Talk like a Pirate Day). I do plan on catching as many piratey portraits as I can throughout the day on Saturday. Arrr!

Hope that whatever swashbuckling you have planned for the weekend turns out well.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

Whirlybird

You're looking at photograph number 155 out of more than 200 that I took while trying to catch a maple seed pod in flight.

The seed pod, called a samara, is designed to carry the seed away from the parent tree so as not to compete for resources necessary for survival. I had the idea in my head for a few days to get a photograph of a falling samara while showing the path of its fall, and to do it all in-camera. Much easier thought than done.

The trick is to set the camera for a long exposure, then have a flash fire at the very end of the shot (this is called rear curtain synch). You then need just enough ambient light in the room to expose the fall of the object before the flash goes off. This is also easier thought than done.

I experimented with a range of exposures from 1/4 second to 2 full seconds, and settled on 1/2 second as sufficient to catch a blurry fall. I set the aperture at f/8 to increase depth of field and improve my chances of getting the samara in focus -- those babies are hard to steer.

Locked the focus on a target area on the tabletop, composed the shot against a black background, set the camera on auto timer, had a flash unit off to the side with a grid to direct a beam of light to where I wanted to catch the samara, had another flash with a grid and green gel to add some color to the backdrop. Did a few test shots using my hand to simulate a falling object. Once happy with the results, I started dropping seeds that I had gathered from my front yard.

At that point, the timing of the drop is everything. A lot of shots had nothing in them but a trail. Some had the samara at the very top of the frame, some had it going off the bottom. I got pretty good at hitting the target with the seeds. Over the course of dozens of seed drops, I discovered that you have to hold them in a certain way to make them twirl straight down. Only six shots out of more than two hundred were close enough to keep. The shot above was the best of those.

Hmmm. Wonder what else I can drop and photograph?

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

Food, glorious food

I've played with food photography in the past, but was fortunate enough to get a real good shot at it (pun intended) this weekend.

You're looking at eggs benedict, asparagus and pineapple with poblano pepper. Lighting was pretty simple -- window light from behind the plate, softened with a white diffuser. On-camera flash bounced from the ceiling to the right for some fill light on the front.

There's an interesting story of how this shoot all came about. A couple of blogging buddies set this up, and I'll let them tell the tale on their own blogs. But first, I have to process all the photos from the day and get them to the bloggers so it can happen.

So stay tuned.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

Love is in the air. Duck!

If anyone has an idea of what I was trying to say with this photo, kindly let me know, 'cause I sure don't.

Happy Friday.

Photograph © 2010 James Jordan.

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.

Valentine take-out

Mmmm ... loooove.

Technical details: A coupla flashes, some red gel, a coupla grids, beaucoup reflectors. Mix well.

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.

A holiday twofer

Some holiday tchotchkies have been hanging our house for years. In the case of Mr. Snowman, it's been nearly three decades. I'm guessing your house also features some longstanding decorations that have hung around year after year.

Playing around with lighting featuring a lightbox to throw some uplight, a couple of strobes fitted with honeycomb grids, one for the key light and one with a green gel set up behind the subjects to throw a circle of color on the black foam board backdrop -- I still can't get over how a grid makes the light from a rectangular flash head into a circle, but I'll take it. Some strategically placed white foam board reflectors round out the lighting setup.

Hoping that things are going well for you in the runup to Christmas.

Cheers.

Photographs © 2009 James Jordan.

Snowman (with bokeh background)

Christmas is the season of lights (oops, I mean the holiday season is the season of lights), and I can channel my inner Clark Griswold and light up the house like nobody's business. I can also play with out-of-focus circles of lights because there's just so many lights to make out-of-focus.

Bokeh is a photographic term used to describe the quality of the out-of-focus background produced by any given lens. You can get a thorough explanation here.

This photo was lit with a single strobe camera right. White reflector placed just off-camera to the left to add fill to the shadows. Silver reflector used to throw more reflected light onto the dark hat of the ceramic snowman (oops, I mean person of snow).

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Smokin'

I've seen these kind of shots done before and wanted to try them out, but didn't have the equipment or the knowledge of how to do it. Thanks to the interwebs, I picked up the knowledge part. Thanks to seriously getting into portrait and wedding photography, I picked up the equipment part.

There's quite an involved process in getting smoke shots, from lighting (two strobes firing simultaneously from left and right against a black background) to playing with background colors in Photoshop (invert smoke image, choose a background color, invert it, layer inverted smoke image over it, multiply, flatten and invert). But the result is kinda cool.

Now to play around with colored gels on the flashes, inserting objects into the smoke trails and yada yada yada without burning the house down.

Photograph © 2009 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.

Home is where the hearts are

Have a Happy Thanksgiving. There's a lot to be thankful for.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Cat on white background

The title pretty much says it all.

My daughter's cat, Boomer, doing a little face preening after finishing the kitty treat that was used to lure her onto the white photo backdrop.

Hope your weekend is filled with lots of little tasty bits. Have a good one.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Boomer

Meet Boomer. A cat that my daughter and future son-in-law own. Boomer is rooming at my house for a while (along with my daughter) in advance of the wedding in July.

Daughter and I were shooting some wedding band/flower photos on a tabletop with a white sweep for use on her wedding programs. After we finished those shots, we coaxed the cat up onto the table for a few snaps. This animal will do just about anything for a kitty treat. Above is Boomer thinking "OK, I'm here. Where's my treat?"

Smaller photo shows cat devouring said treat. Nom, nom, nom.

Photographs © 2007 James Jordan.

Banded together

My daughter's and future son-in-law's wedding bands. Taken for use on the wedding program covers. About a month and a half away.

Styling of the ribbon was done by my daughter, with a couple of small adjustments by me. Lighting is a single strobe off camera bounced off a white card about three feet over the setup. A small white paper reflector just off camera to the right bounced some light onto the sides of the rings.

Photograph © 2009 James Jordan.

Happy vernal equinox

I thought I'd celebrate with the traditional balancing of the eggs. On green. For spring. And St. Patrick's Day, on which I didn't do much that would qualify as being Irish.

Have a good weekend.

Eggs can balance on end on the vernal equinox. They can also do it any other day of the year. It just takes some patience. A scientific look at egg balancing can be found here. Photograph © 2009 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

A word about lighting hardware

I spent some time yesterday working on my studio lighting techniques. The only problem is that I don't currently own any studio lights. Up until the last few months, I've been a natural light kind of a guy. I've had a few still life photos rejected by iStock because they weren't up to par with photos taken with a bank of lights and soft boxes. Ok, fine.

I came across the blog of a pro photographer who uses some unorthodox (and cheap) lighting methods. He also shoots for some big time clients. And his photos are good. I'm sold.

One trick - he frequents that well-known photography supply store, Home Depot, where he picked up a couple of 4-foot fluorescent light fixtures and some daylight-balanced tubes. Instant studio lights. I did the same, and got a two-light fixture for about nine bucks plus tubes.

For this shot, I set up the fixture vertically to the camera right and took some test shots. The fixture lit the antique camera well (a Kodak Brownie Box Camera from about 1910), but the twin tubes created two streaks of light in the camera's lens, which I found distracting. I have a round five-way reflector (you can get one for as little as $50 at a camera shop that carries them) in which one of the ways is white translucent. I placed that in front of the light fixture to ty to soften the light. Perfect.

A piece of white foam board to the camera's left reflected some light into the shadow side and a flash unit bounced off the ceiling rounded out the lighting for this shot, which is very nearly SOOC (straight out of camera). Just a very small amount of levels adjustment and cleaning up some dust specks on the mirror was all that was needed.

I'll probably be heading to the Photo Home Depot soon for another fixture. Next step, portraits.

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

Model Solar bicycle lamp

To a country that traveled largely by horse and by foot, the arrival of the bicycle from Europe in the late 1800s touched off a craze in America. The demand for personal modes of transportation fueled a new industry in the United States and paved the way for innovations in manufacturing that eventually resulted in the automotive and aeronautic industries.

From 1897 until 1926, the Badger Brass Manufacturing Company of Kenosha, Wisconsin produced the most popular bicycle light – a model it called the Solar. As many as two million Solar lights were produced. The rear compartment held water which was carried by a cotton wick to the lower compartment filled with calcium carbonate. This produced acetylene gas, which emitted a brilliant white light when lit.

The Solar and its many copycat competitors were noisy, smelly and dirty, but that did little to dampen the spirits of intrepid nighttime travelers. The acetylene lamps were eventually replaced by mass produced battery powered electric lights.

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