The other kind of senior portraits
Over the holidays I spent some time with family on the East Coast, and one of the things I wanted to do while I was there was shoot formal portraits of my parents. Like all of us, I have a lot of pictures of my parents but they’re all very casual. I wanted to make [...]
Santa Fe Workshops – Portraits
I took a little break to do some learning last week – spent 4 days in Santa Fe at a portrait workshop taught by Austin-based photographer Michael O’Brien. Michael has photographed everyone from Bill Cosby to Willie Nelson, and has a distinctive style of portraiture and lighting that he shared with us over the course [...]
Gabrielle
This month marked another big inflection point in life – after 2 years away from the corporate world, I decided to get back on the hamster wheel and resume the furious spin. I found a great job and I think it’s really going to be something I like, but it was a hard decision. Bottom [...]
Baby Lauren
Some images from a newborn shoot I did about 3 weeks ago – Lauren was two weeks old for this session. She behaved beautifully during the shoot – she slept most of the time and when she woke up gave up some beautiful shots with her eyes open. Proud parents Tony and Carrie were right [...]
Angela
Last week I shot with Angela, an aspiring actress and martial artist. She was great to work with and a lot of fun to figure out how to light and pose for what we were trying to do – we wanted to create some shots that were both dramatic and sexy but also showed her [...]
Pet portraits, how I’ve missed you…
I haven’t posted any pet portraits in a couple of months – I’ve been shooting other things – but I did a quick session this morning with my favorite pet model, Baron. I’ve got another session in the catalog from last fall that I need to write up a quick blog post about, but that’ll [...]
Recent Work
December’s been a busy month! Lots of events and holiday parties to shoot – a good time of year to be a photographer. In between the Santa shoots it’s always good to do some shooting that’s about art rather than events or commerce – keeps your creative juices flowing. Here’s a couple of shots from [...]
Emily in the Rain
Fall’s here in full force in Seattle which means it’s cool and wet most days. I’ve lived here 5 years now and I’ve adopted the natives’ obliviousness to rain – you pretty much simply go about your business, indoors or out. It does make outdoor shoots a lot harder though – blue skin looks cool [...]
New Senior Shots
Fall is senior season – two weeks ago I had a chance to do a portrait session with best friends Kelsey and Kyla on a gorgeous fall afternoon. The girls were great, the weather was fantastic, and the shoot was just a lot of fun. It was definitely one of the good days when everything [...]
Garage Meetup
Seattle has a pretty active Flickr community – about 2,800 members – and the group does a lot of get-togethers on a pretty regular basis. About every 6 months, the group puts together a lighting workshop type of meetup where people with equipment share their toys and knowledge with people who are interested in learning [...]
Baron – 6 Month Portrait
We took Baron to Discovery Park for the first time last weekend – it was a beautiful day, quite warm and sunny. I shot this in full, hard sunlight at 1pm – not exactly what’s generally recommended for great portrait photography but it can be fantastic when your subject has interesting texture or structure – [...]
One Model, Four Looks
Sometimes it’s just fun to play around in post-production to see what you can do with a set of similar photos. I did a shoot recently – one model, pretty basic lights, gray backdrop, a couple of wardrobe changes – that gave me the opportunity to push the boundaries a little bit more than I [...]
Baron – Beach Portrait Session
Took the pup up to the cabin this weekend – his first time on a beach and his first exposure to the ocean. I really wanted to get a couple of good portraits of him this weekend – he’s 12 weeks old now and growing so fast that every week he looks like a different [...]
Baron’s First Portrait
Here’s our new Bernese Mountain Dog puppy, Baron, age 8 weeks. I shot this as he stood in a doorway watching all the adult Berners romp around on the deck outside. Shooting portraits of puppies is a lot like shooting sports – a combination of understanding behavior, anticipating moments, and quick reflexes [singlepic id=45 w=600 [...]
Tucker – 14 weeks
This past weekend I got a chance to do another quick portrait session with Tucker, who is now 14 weeks old. He’s turning into a great dog, full of personality, as you can tell from these shots! [nggallery id=4]
Tucker
I love doing portrait sessions of pets. I’m a huge dog person but also love to photograph all kinds of other animals as well. Here are some shots from a portrait session I did with Tucker, a 9 week old yellow lab, last weekend. [nggallery id=3]
Some portraiture…
I haven’t posted in a while – I’ve been burning the candle at both ends and blog posts are just one of the things that dropped below the line of things that could be accomplished in a given week. Nonetheless, I’ve been shooting a lot – doing a good number of events which I tend [...]
Mila – beautiful light with a single off-camera flash
These shots are from a model session I did a couple of weeks ago – I think they really show the power of small flash lighting, because they were all shot using ambient light and a single SB900 flash through a Lastolite Ezybox, with a white reflector used here and there for fill, no studio [...]
Latest work
I haven’t posted in a couple of weeks because of the holidays (Happy New Year everyone and here’s to a great 2010!) and also because I’ve been crazy busy – 18 shoots over the last month. I shot a ton of holiday events which are great fun (most of the time) and rounded it out [...]
Alana – part 2
I’ve been finishing up the edits on the shots from Golden Gardens over the last 2 weeks. Most of the editing was cleanup of people in the backgrounds, posts and sign removal, levels and color balance, those sorts of things. On a couple of shots I went more deeply into touchup of hair, makeup, etc., [...]
Alana – Golden Gardens
These images are from a shoot I did two weeks ago at Golden Gardens park. It was really cold and Alana was a total trooper – it was about 40 degrees and the wind was blowing from the north so it was damn cold. The light was gorgeous – it was blue skies so hard [...]
Shooting at a photo meetup
This weekend I had the chance to attend a photo meetup (i.e., a group of people getting together to learn/shoot/mingle) sponsored by Pocket Wizard and hosted/emcee’d by pro photographer Mark Wallace. Lots of interesting discussion on studio strobes vs. small flash and how to use radio triggers…Mark was very good about staying neutral despite the [...]
