First Day in Newport Rhode Island "Mentor Series"

Having a wonderful time in Newport Rhode Island on my my 5th Mentor Series. The weather was a bit wet today but we still managed to squeeze out a few shots.

This photo of skipper John was lit using a single SB-800 held by a Mentor Series participant. The flash only had the diffusion dome on it, it was held as close to our subject without showing in the frame. When I'm doing shots similar to these, I always meter for the background or ambient and then lit up the strobe.

The frame below, shows the ambient portion of the exposure prior to adding the strobe. Your shutter speed controls the ambient and your aperture controls your flash exposure.


Just a quick mention, we still have a few spaces available for the Egypt Mentor Series Trek. If you would like to join us, please contact them HERE. DT

Driving Down the Ambiet

This past April I held one of my Small Strobes, Big Results workshops here in Denver. We had the opportunity to photograph outside in open shade with our model Gwen. I found a section of wall that had a corrugated metal siding next to a bright yellowish wall and thought it would make for a nice background surface.
For this particular photo, I used only one SB-800 strobe fitted with a set of barndoors. Let me go through my process here on how I shot this image.

My first step was to shot the scene as my camera would have indicated. That result is seen below.

The top photo is exactly as I had envisioned the final photo. From the point where the camera indicated a correct exposure, I then shifted my WB on my camera to 3030*K and under exposed the image to my personal taste. That exposure is shown below. Shifting my WB caused any daylight to shift to the cool tones in the image. The corrugated metal siding was reflecting open sky or "daylight", which results in the blue you seen in the image.

I than had my nephew Ian, hand hold an SB-800 with a full cut CTO on the flash and the barndoors shaped in such a way to produce the angle of light I wanted.

You can view more workshop images created during various SSBR workshops HERE This link will take you to a new web site I created at SquarSpace, I hope you like it. As a reminder, I have space still available at the Denver July 31st workshop as well as the August 19th workshop in Seattle DT

Shoot Out In Michigan

During my visit to the UPAA symposium, held in Michigan the participants of the symposium held there annual shoot out. The winner of this years shoot out would win a Nikon D90 kit. The subject for this years shoot out was "patterns".

The day of the shoot out, we started our morning at the Traverse City State Hospital, asylum for the insane. The Traverse City State Hospital was built in 1885 and closed in 1989. The hospital is currently under restoration, but they still have several old abandoned building on the hospital grounds. We were allowed to photograph is one of those abandoned buildings that was deemed safe.

There were plenty of patterns for to be found at this location, I of course was not part of the shoot out so I just shot things various things I found interesting. Here are a few images from the my stay at the hospital that day.

I found this wonderful chalk board in one of the empty rooms and decided to throw a little light on it. I used a single SB-800 with a Lumiquest snoot on it. I just love empty spaces, this was a wonderful location to shoot at. I could spend a whole day there, or even hold a workshop there.

I decided to shoot this doorway on the 3rd floor, I shifted my WB to 3030* kelvin and placed an SB-800 with two CTO gels on it. The first CTO gel was to bring the color of the strobe to a normal color and the second to add the warmth I wanted.