Nikon D700 | Nikon 24 - 70 mm f2.8 lens | SB 800 SL | 1/60 sec @ f8

Today’s post has little if anything to do with photography other than the fact that I got to take the above image.  One of the duties I have at work is to teach a leadership class.  We offer this class once a year and runs for 10 weeks.

We meet for three hours one day a week for a total of 30 hours of learning.  It is one of the most enjoyable things I do because it lets me interact in a very positive way with quality people who also want to make a difference.

There is a lot of work that goes into presenting the lessons on a weekly basis but it is a rewarding task and yesterday was the last day for the class.  I’m sure they will be glad to be done with the extra work but for me I will find the next few Thursdays a little empty because at the end of each class I felt so invigorated.

Anyway that’s it for today.  Tomorrow my friends Becki and Steve are joining Jeanne and I for a photo shoot in Galena.  Should be a good day for shooting and it will be great fun being with them again.

Enjoy your Friday and weekend.  Thanks for stopping by and be careful.

Nikon D700 | Nikon 24 - 70 mm f2.8 lens | SB800 SL | ISO 200 1/60 sec @ f4.5

One of the things I seem to think about during the Christmas season is sweets and treats.  They seem to be everywhere.  Every day when I go into the break room to get some water there is almost always a new treat trying to seduce me into sampling it all the while maintaining the delusion that it will not make me wider.

Nikon D700 | Nikon 24 - 70 mm f2.8 lens | SB800 SL | ISO 200 1/60 sec @ f4.5

Why I was thinking of sweets this morning I can’t really say but as I was looking through my recent images I came across these images of sweets from the Ladies Night Gala I shot on December 1.

Even though these strawberries look healthy if I remember correctly there was some luscious chocolate dip strategically place near them.

Nikon D700 | Nikon 24 - 70 mm f2.8 lens | SB800 SL | ISO 200 1/60 sec @ f4.5

Finally some fiendishly delicious Red Velvet Truffles.  I can’t even begin to tell you how many of these bad boys I consumed.  The food table was just down the hallway a few steps from where I had my studio set up and between shots it was exactly 12 paces to the Truffles, not that I counted mind you. 🙂

So as I finish another blog post I wonder what delights I will meet today?  Enjoy this midweek day.  Even though it is supposed to rain most of the day the temperature will be mild.

Thanks as always for stopping by.  Be careful.

Nikon D3 | Nikon 28 - 300 mm lens | SB900 SL | ISO 200 1/60 sec at f8.0

Angie, Ben, and Joshua stopped over for dinner last evening.  What a treat to see them again.  The last time I saw there was at Thanksgiving.  Joshua has changed so much in that time.  He now says “Hi” and waves.  He did not make strange this evening but came right to me when I held out my hands.

Nikon D3 | Nikon 28 - 300 mm lens | SB900 SL | ISO 200 1/60 sec at f8.0

Josh’s dinner consisted of slices of ham, bread, bananas, and pears.  He has a good appetite and ate heartily.  Then while we ate he played happily with some of his Mom’s favorite toys when she was his age.  Kind of fun watching him enjoy the same toys she loved.

Nikon D3 | Nikon 28 - 300 mm lens | SB900 SL | ISO 200 1/60 sec at f8.0

After dinner Angie looked for some music that she use to play when she was taking piano lessons.  She couldn’t find any so was trying to play some songs from memory.  Josh made it over to the piano and wanted to join her in making music.

He took great delight and making sounds by hitting the keys.  He would make some sounds and then giggle.  It was great fun.

Enjoy your Monday.  Be careful and thank you for stopping by.

Nikon D3 | Signa 150 - 500 mm lens | ISO 800 1/15 sec @ f6/3

No I don’t have the blahs.  But today the images I’m posting do.  Saturday morning Jeanne got up early and I drove out to an area where a trapper is throwing animal remains.  I heard about him through my friend Dave Tabor and so Thursday and Friday Dave called me to give a report how many Eagles were at the feeding site both days.

He would count between 20 and 30 Eagles each day.  Well when we found the place there were two Eagles and a bunch of smaller birds sitting several hundred yards out in a field.  Of course when we pulled up to a place we could park,  the Eagles flew away.

We did see the partial eclipse of the moon but when I stopped and set up the tripod for the shot this is what I got.  I’m not yet happy with the long lens as it doesn’t seem to focus very well.  I sold my Tamron 500 mm lens, which I am beginning to believe was much sharper than the Sigma.

Nikon D3 | Nikon 28 - 300 m lens | Nikon SB 900 SL | ISO 200 1/60 @ f8.0

There was one Eagle that flew some distance away and sat in the field by himself.  So I got 67 images of a black dot that if you use your imagination and knew before hand that it is an Eagle then yep ,you could definitely  tell it was an Eagle.  I even put a 1.4 teleconvertor on the long lens and still nothing but a black blur with a touch of white.  😦

We came home disappointed but glad that we made the effort.  Then we had a Christmas party to go to last night.  I was looking for anything to shoot.  So when they set this salad in front of me I thought this might make an interesting image.  I was wrong.  (I think I was desperate.)

Nikon D3 | Nikon 28 - 300 m lens | Nikon SB 900 SL | ISO 200 1/60 @ f8.0

Finally this is the  center piece of our table.  Again it was something to shoot so at least I have some images to show you.  I did photograph many of the people at the  party but ended up with just a lot of snapshots not worth showing.  So this is as good as it gets for this past Saturday anyway.

Thanks for stopping by.  Enjoy your Sunday.  Be careful.

Nikon D3 | Nikon 28 - 300 mm lens | Strobe Lights | ISO 200 1/125 sec @ f8.0

A couple more portraits from the December Gala Event.  I must tell you that the fun is back in processing green screen images.  Amazing what one little click of a button can do.  Simply changing my color palette made all the difference in the world.

Above image is of my good friend Mike Stamp and his lovely wife.  Mike works at our bank and he was one of the “servers” at the event.

Nikon D3 | Nikon 28 - 300 mm lens | Strobe Lights | ISO 200 1/125 sec @ f8.0

These two women were having a wonderful time and it was clear that they are very good friends.  I’m not sure if they are related but the enjoyment of each others company was clear.  This is just one of the many things I love about portrait photography,  The capturing smiling, shining eyes.

Enjoy your Friday and thank you for stopping by.  Be careful.

Nikon D3 | Nikon 70 - 200 mm f2.8 lens | Strobes | ISO 200 1/125 sec @ f8.0

Just a quick post today.  I’ve been processing portraits from the Gala Event Shoot and it has been going pretty well.  I’m spending about 10 minutes per image, which is about normal.

One of the things I love about portrait photography is helping people look their very best.  When we look at someone during the normal discourse of conversation it is a constantly changing  image that we perceive.  We rarely if ever notice the out-of-place hair or the blemishes we all have or up turned collar.  We take in the whole environment and our focus is not about attention to detail on the person we are interacting with.

When you capture a person’s image it is frozen in time and that is all you have to look at.  I have seen things in a photograph that I would have never seen in casual conversation.  Since it is such a focused and frozen image of a person I believe that minor enhancements are warranted to help make the person seem  appear more as they do during normal interaction.  In other words diminish the things that would detract from the image and improve those areas where possible to enhance the over all experience.

I’d be interested in your thoughts about “retouching photos.”

Enjoy your Thursday.  Thank you for stopping by and be careful.

Nikon D700 | Nikon 24 - 70 mm lens | Strobe lights | ISO 200 1/125 sec @ f8.0

Pearl Harbor Day.  70 years ago what a day in infamy.  A huge debt of gratitude to our Greatest Generation.

Yesterday a really good thing happened to me.  It didn’t start all that well but it sure ended well.  You will remember my post two days ago about my love / hate relationship with Green Screen photography.  Well now I’m back to love.

Last year trying to process the green screen images took forever.  Converting the green screen or “Keying” the green out was not hard.  I have a wonderful program hat does  that.  The problem was that the program tended to “Mute” the colors so I would have to go back into Photoshop and try to recover the skin tones as well as all the other colors.  It took forever.  Not only that but it was very hard to always get the colors and tones exactly right.

I worked on an image for almost two hours Tuesday morning (which is why there was no blog on Tuesday.)  At the end of that time I still didn’t have a useable image.  I was very frustrated and demoralized.

I knew it had to be something that I was doing wrong because I had watched the tutorials on the program and they never had that problem and they worked with some really crappy images.   Finally just before leaving for work yesterday I sent an e-mail to the company who makes the software (which is in England)  and enclosed one of my image files.  I didn’t expect to hear from them for a couple of days but to my surprise when I got back from lunch I had a response.

Now I’ve taken on-line lessons on Photoshop and Lightroom for over three years and all the instructors always recommend that you select the “Pro Photo” color palette in PS and LR because it has a larger range of colors than the Adobe RGB color palette.

Seems the program I use for green screen require Adobe RGB color palette (doesn’t say that anywhere but it does) and so what was happening was that it was trying to match two separate color palettes and couldn’t so it would  “approximate” the colors.  I reset my color palette to Adobe RGB and the problem was solved.  Yea!

Now I can make my deadline of getting all those portraits processed before Christmas.  The group of guys above are loan officers from our Clinton Bank.  They were the valet parking attendants and beverage servers for the Christmas Gala.

Great group of guys and great friends of mine.  Thanks for stopping by.  Enjoy your day and be careful.

Happy Monday.  Today I thought I would talk about my love / hate relationship with green screen photography.   This was my set up last Thursday evening as I did portraits for the attendees of the Ladies’ Night Gala.  This year I invested in a larger green screen because of last year’s problems with trying to take group shots.  This screen is 9 feet by 16 feet.  Of course I only have enough light stands to go 10 feet wide and about 6 feet high.

If you look at the floor in front of the green screen you will see the “green blow back.”  The is the green color being reflected back to the subject.  Two ways of mitigating that is to properly light your background and or moving your subjects far enough in front of the green screen to negate it.

Since I only have two lights I opt for the moving the subjects far enough away from the green screen to negate the blow back.  Most of the time it works pretty well.

The two lights I have are really inexpensive beginner strobe lights.  They do not have variable intensity controls so it is hard to control the amount of light they put out and are only 100 watt lights.  Since I do not do a lot of portrait work (right now anyway) they do get the job done.   I also use two 24 inch X 24 inch soft boxes attached to the lights to soften the light and diffuse it.

Now to my love / hate relationship with green screen photography.  Some of which I have to blame on my lack of skill.   These two lovely folks are my good friends Gary and Lynn Saelens.  You can see one of the problems is that Gary is just a tad bit taller than my screen.  Additionally because of their height difference I couldn’t get them both in the frame with my D3, which had the 70 – 200 portrait lens on it and it was on the tripod (additionally it was tethered to my laptop so I couldn’t move it.)  I had to use my D700 with the 24 – 70 lens.  Then the angel I had to shoot from showed bare walls not covered by the green screen.

So to compensate for the problems I had to extend (in Photoshop) the green screen and then crop the image.  (I didn’t do a very good job on the crop by the way.) I should have left more space at the top of Gary’s head.  This image however was just for this discussion so I didn’t take time to fix it.

Finally after the image looks the way I want it to I take it over to a “Chroma Key” program called FXhome PhotoKey 4 to digitally remove the green screen or to “Key” the green screen out of the image.

I like the excellent job PhotoKey does in removing the green screen but I do not like the fact that it “mutes” the color of the subjects and requires that I go back into Photoshop and readjust those skin tones (which are very hard for me to get correct.)

The obvious question is then why use green screen?  Versatility is the main reason.  I can put any kind of background in the image I choose.  From a cloth  back drop to a winter scene or a tropic beach scene.  But like so many things in life, that versatility comes with a price.

Anyway I have lots of green screen images from the event that I need to process and it will take some time so I had better get after it.  Enjoy your Monday.  Thanks for stopping by and be careful.

Happy Saturday.  It’s a good day to stay inside and watch the rain come down.   It was too wet to go looking for Eagles today.  DSLR cameras and lens do not like moisture.  Besides my friend Dave called and said that there were no eagles there this morning when he went by the secret eagle place.  😦

So I thought I might as well just stay inside and work on the images I took at the December ladies Gala that was held Thursday evening.    The images today are the last images I have from my Reiman Gardens shoot.  The top image is one of the most beautiful flowers I have ever seen.

Last night I attended a gathering at the Maquoketa Art Experience Gallery to showcase some of the local artists and their works.  It was a fabulous time.  I met Sindi Mueller who is a photography fine artist.  I didn’t get to visit with her too long as there were a lot of people she needed to meet and greet.  Her work is just amazing.

Two years ago she had never held a Digital DLSR in her hands.  She had a point and shoot camera but just took snapshots.  She liked it and wanted to do more so she enrolled in the fine art institute in Chicago and 35,000 images later and a degree she is making some incredible art.

I could have visited with her all night, it was just that interesting to learn about her experience and how she approaches photography.  Hopefully sometime I’ll get to visit with her some more and talk photography.  If you get to Maquoketa it is well worth your time to stop in the Maquoketa Art Experience Gallery.  Rose Frantzen has some of her famous “Portraits Of Maquoketa” displayed there along with many other resident artists’ works.  It is a wonderful opportunity.  Additionally they usually have an artist in residence who is working during the day so you can observe their creative process.

I have to say I was really inspired when I came away last night.  It has caused me to rethink my approach to photography and perhaps has given me some new ideas.  Thanks for stopping by.  Stay dry and enjoy your weekend.  Be careful.

Nikon D3 | Nikon 70 -200 mm F2.8 lens | Strobe Lighting with green screen | ISO 200 1/125 sec @ f9.0

Happy Friday.   A short post today as I had a late night and now have an early morning meeting to attend.  Last night was the second annual Ladies’ Night Gala at our bank in Clinton, Iowa.  Once again it was my honor to be able to offer portrait opportunities for the attendees.

Here is a quick image I processed of my good friend Paul Mulholland and his daughter Abby.  I didn’t spend a lot of time on this image so there are some rough edges but I wanted to get something up for you today.

I started setting up around 3:45 pm yesterday and was ready to shoot at 4:45 pm.  It takes about an hour to get everything unloaded, set up, tested, and calibrated.  I shot tethered to my laptop so I could see full screen images of what I was capturing.

In a few days I’ll post process this image the way it should be and then post the two of them so you can see the difference.  Enjoy your weekend.  I’m going to try to get some images of Eagles tomorrow.  A good friend of mine gave me a tip on where some might be hanging out so I’m going to explore that tomorrow.

Thanks for stopping by.  Be careful.