Beauty and Ice

Late last year I decided to spend as much of 2009 outside with that in mind I started exploring the local area for sites that might make for interesting locations for shoots once the temperatures start getting warmer. So last week I load my two dogs in the car and drove over to check out another possible location, Now mind you I had no intention of shooting at this location anytime in the immediate future but when I saw how this pier looked with the icicles hang off it all I could think of was where can I find a model who'd be up for this. Now mind you when I emailed Amber I wasn't really expecting her to say yes, but knowing how cool Amber is I should have known she'd be up for it :)

Girl Talk

Melissa and Christina from this past Sunday's shoot.

Melissa on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Baryta

I have a shoot scheduled with Melissa for this coming Sunday so I thought what would be a better way to try out my first order of Hahnemuhle Fine Art Paper then printing a few of my favorite images of Melissa. As I've said in previous post I'm definitely what you'd call a beginner as far printing goes so when I give an opinion about how I like or what I think about a paper its from that point of view.
So what do I think about Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Baryta? I think it delivers incredible beautiful prints that feature excellent detail in all areas of an image from highlights to shadows as well as a beautifully range of tones.
As part of a comment he made to last week's post Vernon Trent was kind enough to recommend that I give a program called Quad Tone Rip and try, So I went ahead and downloaded the program and installed it as a printer driver in Lightroom 2.0. I've only been using the program for a few days so it will be a while until I can give even a beginner's level opinion of the software.
Mike

The Big Brown Truck :)

Thursday morning the nice person from UPS showed up with my package from Adorama, which included a box of ProJet Elite Watercolor Linen Texture 11x14 printer paper, along with a number of ink cartridges for my R1900 printer. Now I've only been doing my own printing for about year due the fact that everything I've read about printing made it sound pretty dam hard, but I finally decided to bite the bullet give it a try. Luckily for me the first paper I tried was Iford Gold Fibre Silk (FGS)which came with instructions that allow even someone as slow as myself to get high quality prints.
One the other hand the instructions for Projet Elite pretty much suck if you're using a MAC rather then a PC. In fact I'd probably still be trying to figure out how to load/use the profiles that I'd download from Adorama if I hadn't just said screw it and went ahead and used Ilford's instructions.
So far I've done seven prints with using the new paper, including the first two that came out too dark, due the fact that there's not a specific profile for the Watercolor Linen Texture oh and the profiles are actually for the older R1800 rather then the R1900. Once I figured/guessed which profile to use the resulting prints came out quit nicely. In fact just a few minutes ago I printed out the second image ,which was shot at ISO 3200, and was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the print. I'm still trying to decide it I like texture of the paper and may try some more standard papers from Projet, namely Picture Rag to see what I like best.
So I'll give the paper a B+, but the person(s) who wrote the instructions gets an F-.
Next papers on my list to try are Hahnemuhle Fine Art Baryta 325 and Bamboo.
Mike

Timing!

For some reason I keep coming back to this image from last Saturday's shoot with Christina. On one hand I feel that I missed the shot, most likely I pressed the shutter a second too late, which I have a habit of doing because of my dependancy on the camera's auto focus system. Yup even with a full frame body like the 5D and fast lens manual focus is pragmatic at best for me, so I a rule pretty much don't press the shutter unless the selected focus point is on the model's eye or other key feature. This of course results in a number of near misses here and there. On the other hand there something about this image that's communicates a feeling of sensuality with a just a hint of vulnerability.

A Little Color

A little bit of color to start out the new week.

Friends

I received an email last night from a friend who also just happens to be one of my favorite models wanting to know if I was interested in shooting some fashion stuff today, of course the answer was yes. So here I am setting in front of the computer editing a few images of her from Tuesday's impromptu shoot, while also trying to think of what to write for this week's blog entry.
Speaking of friends, I'm currently working with a local author to shoot some images for a novel he's written, thanks to another model, who I also call a friend, recommending me for the job. So far we're just in the initial planning stages but everything seem to be coming along very nicely.
About 14 hours later, well today's shoot went very nicely, though we only shot for about an hour we got a number of very nice fashion shots plus a few artistic ones.
Few images from last Tuesday's shoot with Christina.

Slight Disappointed

Yup that pretty much describes how I feel about the results from this past Saturday not really mad but just “slightly disappointed” . This might sound strange but even during the shoot I was feeling less then enthused by what I was getting it was like the shots were right there in front of me but I just couldn't seem to capture them in the way I wanted. During the shoot I kept looking at my watch no not to see how much time I had left buy rather strangely hoping it was time to call it a day and put it all behind me.
To the question of why I didn't just end the shoot early and simply thank the model for her time. Simple fact is since I'd already spent the money to hire the model as well as for the location I figured didn't really have anything more to lose. Also in the back of my mind I kept reminding myself that some of my best work has come at the end of what were up to that point very very disappointing shoots, but it just wasn't to be this time.
No worries though as I've learn to look at shoots like this as pot holes on the road of creativity no matter how hard you try to avoid them you're bound to hit a few

First of the New Year

Well to be truthfully these were shot on the 30th of December 08, but I didn't really start processing them until yesterday so I guess its Ok to call them my first work of the new year. I met RB through Craigslist and arranged for her to come in for short test or “get to know each other” shoot to see how well we worked together. For the first hour or so we worked in the studio which truthfully resulted in a few OK images but nothing beyond the mundane. As the idea's I'd come up with for the session just didn't seemed to work once we actually started shooting. The last half of the shoot I'm pleased to say was a complete 180 from the first half. We moved up stairs to one of the guest room which offered beautiful natural lighting providing a close to perfect setting for a serious of what I think are very beautiful and natural photographs.

Mike