Recent Favorites
Engagement Session in Millenium Park
This was from a recent engagement session in and around Millenium Park and the Bean in Chicago. I suppose there must be hundreds of thousands of pictures taken in this location so I think it is difficult to come up with something unique.
For this picture I wanted to capture a couple of different things. First, I wanted to show the couple engaged with each other rather than the camera. Second I wanted to show the Bean and third I wanted images of the city (there are actually two, one looking south and one looking north toward the Prudential building. This image has Chicago written all over it.
To take this picture required a solution to the age old problem of a relatively bright background and the main subject in shadows. I set my camera to ISO 200 and shutter speed 1/250, the best combination for a bright background. I then dialed up my f stop to f11 to achieve a good exposure of the Bean and the buildings. Camera left with a single SB800 strobe, I added light back manually to the subjects to provide a pleasing illumination through chimping (we were working quickly and on the move).
I have lots of people ask about why I use strobe in situations where there is lots of light. The reason is simple: the light is unbalanced or not directed in a fashion that will make a great picture. If you have any doubts about that concept, the picture below was taken without the strobe with identical settings.
For the rest of the pictures of this engagement session visit this galleries here.
Indian (Sikh) Wedding
I had the wonderful opportunity to shoot a Sikh Indian wedding a couple of weeks ago. It was a six day event and there was approximately 36 hours of photography time. As one might suspect, many pictures were taken with lots of post processing. Fortunately, Aperture ran smoothly and I was able to upload over 3000 pictures for my client, all adjusted to make them the best possible image (as I talked about on my blog - 'Meaning of digital files'
It is difficult to select a couple of favorite pictures from such a set, because the story is so rich a single picture hardly does it justice. In time, I will publish a more complete gallery, but for now, just this one. For me, this is truely elegant picture with great colors, pleasing lighting and the richness of their culture manifest.
This photography effort was supported by a wonderful team effort of the following people/companies:
Mark Meravy Photography -- an excellent photographer, great collaborator and friend.
Lauren Lukacek -- L2 Photography -- a photographer in her own right, an excellent assistant and has a growing business in photo booths
Nicole Kuhlman Photography -- another independent photographer and excellent assistant.
Lastly, while not part of the photography team, there were the videographers from OrangeWeddingFilms, ( JJ, Charlie, Jimmy and Mrs Orange). JJ and his team were an unbelievable pleasure to work with.
Well almost lastly, I have to mention that bride and groom (Sonia and Rd) and their families and friends were fantastic to work with.
Pictures for websites and headshots
I have a keen interest in moving my photography business out of the studio and more to locations. There are many reasons for this. To help in this matter, I wanted to upgrade my lighting capabilities. Currently, I have studio lights and Speedlights. The studio lights are large, heavy and require an outlet, but they put out lots of light. The Speedlights are small, light and highly portable (4 AA batteries), but they only put out a modest amount of light. What I wanted was something small, light, highly portable and puts out a lot of light.
The solution: Paul C Buff Einstein 640 lights, Vagabond Lithium batteries and Pocketwizard MC2 that allows me to control the lights from my camera. The picture above was taken during a session for a new business, Battleforthebride, using two Einstein 640 lights and one speed light all controlled with Pocketwizard's AC3/MiniTT1. One Einstein was the main light shooting through an umbrella, camera left, one Einstein 640 was used to light the background (low and behind the subject) and the Speedlight was used as a hair light, shot through a softbox.
As I gain more experience with them, I will show more examples and comment on performance. Thus far, I am happy but have only used them on a couple of shoots.