Here’s a few favorite photos from a family reunion I photographed in West Virginia in early August.
August 10, 2010
June 1, 2010
Wedding at The Jasmine Plantation
We dodged three isolated thunderstorms on the Sunday of Memorial weekend while celebrating the marriage of Kristin and Sean…a good omen I believe. Kristin and Sean are a beautiful/handsome couple with wonderful family and friends. It was my first time photographing at The Jasmine Plantation which proved to be a beautiful venue, very well prepared with a relaxed elegance. What a great place to spend the night after a day of celebration, not to mention a beautiful environment for great wedding photography! At the reception Bill Cody of DJ Services by CODY spun some great music, created the bubbles for the first dance, and made certain everyone (including I) had a great evening. Here’s just a few of the photos I enjoyed making.
Our time now!
Love in her eyes
The Ring
First Dance
First Toast
Ready and waiting
The toss!
The catch!
Show it off!
Everyone had a good time
April 18, 2010
A new tree swing
With the motivation of young interest in a tree swing I finally discovered a suitable tree limb for hanging a swing in the backyard. The limb is about 30′ high so there’s not a great deal of arc to the swing but it has a really long glide. Since hanging it a couple of weeks ago I’ve been having some fun imagining and executing new ways to photograph our enthusiastic “swingers”. Here’s a few of my favorite photos from this project. In the interest of full disclosure I have to say that the photo captioned “Spinning Swing” is the product of compositing two images to get a more balanced composition along with some cloning techniques to fill in what was a more open tree canopy. I had a very short amount of time to capture the “Spinning Swing” shot before dinner and only got two exposures before I lost my subject, hence the post production enhancing.
Sunshine in motion
Flying High
Spinning Swing
February 16, 2010
Amaryllis by another light
Amaryliss by another light
To avoid disorientation I need to begin by pointing out that the perspective for this image is from almost directly below the flower. Yesterday I photographed with window light. Other than placing the flower near the window and slightly manipulating the light on the background nothing else was done to prepare the subject. For this image I made use of two lights. The key light was a 15×15″ softbox place about 2′ from the flower on camera left. The second light was a portable strobe with a 20° grid placed as nearly behind the flower as possible (slightly outside the top of the frame) to provide backlighting. The camera lens was shielded from the backlight by the table upon which the flower was sitting. I used a polarizing filter on the camera lens to reduce the amount of direct reflection in the highlights. This allowed for more detail in the highlight areas with only a small area on the top edges of the right blossom getting entirely blown out. I also used a gold reflector on camera right to fill in the shadow area on the right blossom. An interesting secondary effect of using the reflector is that the background (ceiling) was lit by two distinct light sources…the reflector warmed the left side of the background and window light created a cooler effect on the right.
Relatively speaking, creating this image was much more labor intensive than the one captured yesterday. Was it worth the effort? Let me know what you think.
February 15, 2010
Amaryllis by window light
Amaryllis by window light
My wife received this Amaryllis as a Christmas gift from a friend. It began blooming just in the last week. This is a very simple to make photo, but hard to pass up, sitting as it is on our dining room table. I simply slid the flower to the window side of the table, turned the near blossom slightly toward the window, placed a folding divider to block as much window light from reaching the background as possible, and photographed this with a Canon EF 100mm F2.8 macro lens set to F5.6 on a Canon EOS 7D at ISO 100. The snow covered ground outside the window enhanced the effect of the window light. I tweaked the contrast and saturation in post production with Capture One Pro ver. 5 then added a vignette. Voila! The photo will be a nice remembrance of a gift from a friend.
February 8, 2010
February 5, 2010
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!
My faithful and enthusiastic canine companion charging to greet me.
The third major snow storm of 2009/2010 is underway as I begin my first entry to my blog. Unlike many who live in Virginia I can’t get too much snow in the winter months. I prefer it hold off until I get my leaves up in the late fall. That’s seldom been a problem. This second snow of our winter season coincided with my son’s visit from a much warmer climate. He lives several hundred miles south of me and was excited to have visited when he did. We went out to play while the snow was fresh and powdery. I, of course, took advantage of the snowscape and beautiful sunlight for some photo ops. My son and his dogs (in the background) were the primary focus of my effort when my own dog Sadie, with typical enthusiasm, gave me an unexpected opportunity to capture her personality. The auto-focusing capabilities of my recently acquired Canon EOS 7D enhanced my likelihood of capturing this spontaneous moment. Following you can see some more of what I was able to capture.
