Action!

For those of you that are overly literal, please abstain from lunging for the closest firearm and going out with a bang. Thankfully, with the recent invention of photography, we can all shoot ourselves and only damage our self esteem. This leaves our mortal shell intact for the world’s enjoyment/amusement.

There’s no arguing the fact that practice helps with every area of life. Photography is no different. Whether you are perfecting your shooting, lighting or developing techniques; there is no substitute for experience. Practicing your lighting can be a paticularly valuable excersize since time, vision and creativity are so essential when spending time with an actual client/subject.

If you’re experimenting with light, I’d encourage you to start with a simple one or two light set-up. Starting with one light will let you control that element completely. You can take notes on distance, angle and the look you acheive. Then, when you’re shooting in other situations you can refer back to the things you have done and use them in concert or isolation with a confident idea of what you’ll be getting as an end result.

In this instance, I used a flash modifier that I have built myself. If you’re interested in making your own I’m sure you could google: diy ring flash and easily acheive something similar.

Rather than use it as originally designed, I took it off the camera and mounted to a light stand, where I thought it would mimic the look of a beauty dish. It’s not quite as big as a beauty dish, meaning the light would be a bit harder and the shadows deeper. But I kept it pulled in really tight to help combat the apparent light size and help soften the shadows at least a little.

I used my cable release to get out in front of the camera and did my best to pose and crop from in front of the camera. (Which is a challenge at times.) A side benifit of this was seeing how “missing” the perfect crop can yeild very interesting results. I think it will help me be more creative with my cropping the next time I’m behind the camera as well. I like the deep shadows and moody light this gave me. I think bouncing a little fill in there would work well or even a kicker for some rim lighting from behind the subject. That’s for a future shoot though. These 5 shots are all the single light, basically straight on and right above me. I’ll throw in a picture of the light so you can see what was doing the lighting. I hope you like it!

I was lucky enough to spend an afternoon with my good friend Reid Rolls. He’s been a pal of mine since high school, and he’s worked himself into a stunning photographer that I greatly admire. He can take a single light and produce shots that are just gorgeous. I call him religiously to pick his brain and shoot the breeze. I always hang up excited to work and jazzed about life. If you get a chance, check out his work: www.reidrolls.com
If you’re in Nashville, look him up… he’s about as nice and approachable a guy as there is; but I digress…
So what do two photographers do with a free afternoon of hanging out? They shoot of course!
Except that we were shooting darts… Well, it didn’t take too long for us to grab the camera and at least play around with shooting our shooting. Here’s Reider zero-ing in on a bullseye.

You might have noticed my super spectacular shot above, where I actually landed one dart in the tail end of another. Here’s a better look:

This was a first for me, as I’m not a great darts player. I thought it was pretty darn cool… but a short while later, I totally outdid myself!

That’s right! No cheating I swear! Three darts in three throws, all in the bullseye! If you think that I’m bragging… well you’re right! Wouldn’t you!? I have yet to repeat the accomplishment… but I think I’ve got a promising future. Time to tell the wife that I’m quitting photography for darts. I’m sure she’ll understand.

For those of you that don’t know, there is a clever little lens out there that you can purchase that warps and tweaks the perspective of the pictures that it takes. It’s called a Lensbaby and they have a lineup of lenses that give you these effects with varying degrees of control. I spent a night shooting cherry blossoms with one a couple evenings ago and I was really pleased with the results. It’s so easy as a photographer to get caught up in the sharpest, most crisp images available, and for good reason. Most of the time that’s what you want and what you are trying to achieve. This was a wonderful way to step out of that box and to see the beauty in the flaws… the enchanting and magical results that you can get when you purposefully mix a little chaos into your art. Not to mention… I think deep down, we still all like taking pictures of flowers.

Here are a couple of my favorites from the night. (It’s a lot like staring at clouds… they seem to take other forms when you let your imagination wander.)

Fireworks descending

As I post here, I hope to share knowledge that I stumble upon as a photographer for others to use. I’ve been greatly helped out by fellow bloggers such as David Hobby from Strobist and the good people over at Flash Flavor. If you want to see some great photography and learn your craft a little more, I’d encourage you to check those fellows out.

This weekend, I wanted to play with an idea of how to light rings so that they look great and sparkle nicely. I had an idea for a reflector that might help pull a little more of the fire out of my lady’s “best friend.”
I started with the idea that I’d backlight the right with a bare flash. Raking the light accross the wicker to get the texture. That’s what you see with this first shot.
Now here we have the light bounce back into the ring. It lights it up nicely and fills in the shadow and all things considered is a fairly nice shot. But I’m not really digging the highlights that the backlighting is creating. They seem to compete for attention with the ring itself. So….

I moved my light to the right of the rings and just like a warning shot, I fired the flash over the heads of the rings. You can see just how little light is hitting the rings in “rings-3.” All that was left for me to do was to grab my handy dandy reflector and use it to bounce the light down onto the rings. I tried a couple angles and distances and this last one was my favorite.

Now here’s the fun part: The idea behind this project was to get a reflector that would help chop up the hard single source of a flash and turn it into several smaller, more varied points of light that the diamond could catch and reflect back. I had considered building a flash attachment or customizing a ring flash and then I realized that I was overthinking the whole thing. Here’s the “Magical Reflector” that I built. It took about 35 seconds and a screwdriver to kill off this poor pie tin. If you’d like me to build you one… It’ll cost you $10 or $6.95 if Marie Callendar’s is having a sale. I promise to send it right over… just as soon as I finish the last slice. YUM!

A Blog is no doubt the best way to show off the latest work and style of Swans Photography. It’s also a great chance for me to convey some of the personality and nature of myself and my wife. A way for you to get to know us. I’ve upgraded my old blog to this one and I will be posting regularly. Please be on the lookout for our latest info right here!