Family portrait session

Past Saturday I got an opportunity to photograph a lovely family.

Kids are always interesting and it's not always easy keeping an eye on everything but I must say these children were very nice :-)

Here is a little sneak peak of the photos from the garden of the Carlyle house in old town Alexandria.

Twilight polo

This 4th of July we found a new and very interesting horse event. Ok I know many people may not be into horse events but with this one it's a little different.
It's about having a good time and enjoy it with family and friends.

At the same time there is a good action packed polo match where a lot can happen.
I didn't know much about polo before the 4th of July but the twilight polo matches held at Great Meadow is pretty cool and a great time spend on a Saturday night.

Below is a few photos from the 4th of July polo match
-- See more photos in the store front (no purchase necessary) --

Budweiser-Upperville Jumper Classic

From the recent Budweiser-Upperville Jumper classic here are a good handful of the Jumpers.

I didn't get the preferred photographer position (in the middle of the ring) so I had to do a little running from one end of the course to the other to get a few different angles.

You can view, send e-cards and purchase prints from here: http://udsigt.photoreflect.com

Sunday afternoon portrait shoot

This past Sunday Lily stopped by to get a few headshots to use in her portfolio while pursuing her acting career.

I used a pretty simple setup. On camera right (about 45 degree angle) I had my alien bee B800 with a large octabox and on camera left (about 80-90 degree angle high) I had my Nikon SB800 with diffuser and roughly 1 stop brighter than the main light.

Now I got around to finishing up a few of the photos and I guess eventually I will get some of them incorporated in a portrait section on my web site (http://udsigt.webhop.net).




After capture my workflow is to import the photos to lightroom using the camera raw plugin which does a very nice job at ensuring colors and light is right. (read more in this post).

After import I had Lily pick the top 30 photos to continue work on these.
Retouching portraits like this got soo much simpler and faster. I am pretty sure Emma could actually do it... it's that easy.
To process photos I take a few simple steps in lightroom:
1. Adjust overall brightness, color and contrast.
2. "fix" complexion with portrait professional (right click and select edit-in)
3. Crop to print size and if multiple sizes are needed create virtual copies for these.
4. Select all and make virtual copies
5. Select virtual copies and change to black and white with the develop setting.

Now all that is left to do is export and/or create a web gallery (using lightroom of course).

If you noticed it in the steps above you are absolutely right. I did not use photoshop at all in any of these steps...
The key to quick processing is the portrait professional package. You can read more about it here.

photostudio inspiration for home

Wouldn't it be nice having that 3.000 sq ft. studio with all the latest gadgets and lighting equipment you could ever find use for along with multiple cameras and lenses?

yeah well I would like it but then again I think I am short a few million $$ on that one. However there is actually quite a lot you can do at home at the kitchen table using anything from natural light with reflector cards, desk lamps and well any light for that matter.

Learning the basics behind light and the theory is well time consuming but strangely enough it's fun too. I just started reading a book on that (light, science and magic more about that later when I get further) and I have had a few aha moments as to why it works the way it works with studio light.

Anyway. I just recently found a great resource for those that would like to watch and learn and get inspired.
Photographer Jim Talkington is running a photostudio and on his website http://www.prophotolife.com you can find some really great video tutorials in his video library. Ohh and it may be worth to mention that these are free!!!!!

Mr. T. is easy to understand and it is really good information he is giving away here. If you want to improve your photography you can't help but to learn from him.

5 min studio shoot

With Halloween we had Uncle Dave and Aunt Linda visiting from Ohio (yeah that's a long drive).

So here is what happens when you have family see the portraits hanging just about anywhere and you are asked the question: "So you are doing those picture here in the house?".

Yep, scramble to do a 5 min setup hoping that you can wing it and get the light just about right in about no time.

With that in mind I did a kind of simple setup with the Alien Bee B800 in a octabox on camera right and the Nikon SB800 in a shoot through umbrella on camera left. A quick measure had the AB coming out with just under f/8.0 and the SB800 at f/5.6 or there abouts ;-)

Here is a drawing of the above description. Sooo much easier on the eyes ;-)



Ok first up is the toned and bw version of the sit down, look at me and ... smile



But that's no fun at all.... So of course there are a few others where it was actually fun and games. Somehow the "relax... this won't hurt a bit" doesn't always work ;-)

But here they are a little less formal.



Soo it was just about 10 min... but a fun 10 min :-)

Butterflies and such

Hosted by Cecily and MamaGeek

Here is another post with a line of photos from our trip to Hollins farm. This time looking at butterflies and bugs in that line ;-)

You can see the previous post on sunflowers right here.

Not that I am really the big expert on butterflies but Thanks to Cliff I now know that the next two photos is of the female Eastern Tiger Swallowtail.



Here's a pretty orange one. Not knowing the name of it but hey let's call it Bob ;-)





And finally a couple of close ups made with a 105mm macro I borrowed from Cliff just to see how it works... yeah it's ... man it sure would be nice to have one of those ;-)