The above image is a follow up to the image I posted yesterday of Paul Mulholland and his Mother.   Our Bank in Clinton held an event in December for our customers and one of the things we did for them was to offer my portraits to anyone who wanted them taken.

I shoot a lot of green screen shots for a variety of reasons.  It is very portable, I don’t have to carry around  a lot of back grounds.  Working with a green screen (if you do it correctly) lets you create some stunning shots with cool backgrounds.  One thing that should stand out in the above image is how small the green screen actually is.

The problem is that my green screen is okay for a single portrait but put more than one person in the scene and it is just too small.  At this event I had several groups come up and they wanted a group shot of three or four of them  and it was very difficult to do because the group extended beyond my green screen.

So at Christmas time one of the Photography Stores that I buy from ran a special on green screens.  a 9′ x 15′ for $24.95.  WOW that is some price so I jumped on it and now have a green screen that can be used for larger groups or for a smaller need I can just fold it up.

Three years ago Jeanne gave me these studio lights for Christmas.  They are pretty low quality lights but work pretty well for what I do with them.  You can see I have two soft boxes on them (24″ x 24″.)   Lighting is my biggest challenge and I constantly struggle with getting the lighting right.  It’s like anything else, it just takes a lot of practice and I don’t get a chance to do a lot of portrait work, not nearly  as much as I would like too.

I also tried shooting directly into my laptop on  this evening.  I had never done that before so that presented a whole new set of challenges.  It was a great learning experience though and it will work much better the next time I do it.  Assuming of course I do it again before I forget what I learned 🙂

I love shooting portraits.  They are hard to get right but I really do enjoy the set up and getting the shot composed correctly.  That is the purpose of shooting tethered to your laptop because you can see a full screen image on your laptop instead of the small 3″x3″ LCD screen on the back of your camera.

Here is an image I made of John Doland on Christmas Eve.   I have gone to John for 20 years and he is an excellent barber.  Not many of them left in Dubuque.  I asked John if i could take him image and he said “Sure.”  I printed an 8 x 10 of this image for him and will matte and frame it and then drop it off at his shop one of these Saturdays as a surprise.

Thank you for stopping by.  Enjoy your day and the rest of the week.