Lauren - Portfolio Shoot

I had the honor of meeting up with Lauren this afternoon to help with an update to her modeling portfolio. She's currently signed to a Portland based modeling agency, so we've coordinated a series of shoots to cover the whole gamut of what she needs. Aimee J'Adore was on hand providing her makeup services and all around moral support.

Lauren is a joy to work with, the atmosphere was super laid back and the three of us had a great time making images.

The Arista Ballroom on SE Hawthorne Blvd. was kind enough to let us shoot in their wonderful venue. I've shot weddings there previously and it's a great space. Today we really got to shoot more in its nooks and small spaces. There was so much detail and loads of gorgeous light. Very grateful we had a great place to shoot indoors, as it's forecast to be a pretty rainy week.

Anyway, Lauren and I will meet up again very soon for the second half of the shoot. We'll switch gears and catch some great fitness themed shots. The end result should be a solid and rounded portfolio update, with a heavy emphasis on Lifestyle, Health and Fitness.

Well Hey Look. An Award. Okay? Sure.

That's pretty cool. Just received a phone call and notification this morning. I'm pretty happy to have a fair number of really good reviews on Wedding Wire. What a pleasant surprise. Anyway, back to prepping for this afternoon's wedding.

I'm so glad I received this award along with... every other well reviewed photography business in the Portland area (47). Haha. Aren't they good at making me feel special.

Second Round of Snow

Quick follow up with the snow footage. Kelly was home early today because of the weather and decided to do some hula hooping outside just cause.

"Oh sweet, let me grab my camera," I said.

So there you go.

Tech note: Flew the Glidecam 4000 Pro for the hooping shots (want to get more experience using it!). That thing is a real bother trying to get balanced. I've fiddled with it so much and I still don't think I have it spot on. Ahh well, it's a lot of fun to see the footage I get with it though!

A Little Bit of Dusting

Well, the weather forecasters saved at least some of their pride, as Portlanders woke up to some snow coming down this morning. Not nearly the 3 to 4 inches of snow that was once predicted to fall, but enough for cautious administrators to cancel school for the kids.

If there is one thing most Portland folks can be teased about, it's that we are complete and utter wusses when it comes to any amount of snow. The fact that we dub these uncommon snow events with titles like "snowpocalypse" would rightfully draw laughter from anyone living back East.

Still, it was very pretty to see some flakes coming down in the morning, and a great reason to get outside and film some.

Calm Before the Storm?

Update: Weather forecasters are back-peddling quite a bit now on their weather predictions. The Oregonian itself played this thing up as a fairly noteworthy weather event. Now they're saying it will maybe be a bit of snow, but not nearly so much. Online comment boards are alight, Facebook friends are poking fun. I'm more entertained that some are deeming this "Snoverreaction 2011" Haha.



There's a large winter storm headed this way from up north. It was supposed to hit this afternoon, but has stalled in the SW Washington area. Given this, the weather this afternoon has been gorgeous, so I figured I'd take a few minutes to take an HDR photo of the sky to illustrate the calm before the, well, supposed storm. Snow pictures tomorrow maybe?

Tech note: this is actually a composite of 12 different shots blended together as an HDR image. A tad overkill I know, given that the light was great and very even anyway. Still I want to take the opportunity to get the practice in.

Still Life Shots

Things are actually a bit boring this evening. We're supposed to get some snow tomorrow so maybe I can go out and get something then. So we have this black leather ottoman in the living room, it's somewhat reflective when you bounce a speedlight off it. Anyway, interesting things start to happen when you mix light sources (flash vs. indoor lighting) of different color temperatures and sharpen the heck out of things. Ehh, I really don't have much else at the moment.

English Estate Winery - Wine Tasting

My friend Jamie's mother recently won a free wine tasting session for 20 people at English Estate Winery in Vancouver, WA. This brought a bunch of old friends together to catch up, which was really cool.

Since I don't drink at all, I figured it'd be a good opportunity to try a hand at filming an event. It was a pretty intimate affair and not an official filming gig, so I wanted to keep a pretty low profile. Wide establishing shots, detail footage and most of the candid footage shot from a distance with my 85mm lens on a tripod.

It was wonderful catching up with friends, so I did my best to split my time between gathering footage and mingling. Hopefully I didn't disappear myself behind the camera too much!

So I guess on to the tech talk. Got to use my Atlas 10 linear tracking system more yaay. It's also more simply known as "the slider" in my book, haha. Shooting video hand held with my D3S has proven a wobbly mess every time I've tried, so I used a monopod for all the candid shots. It helped quite a bit, although I'm heavily considering a full on video monopod for even greater stability (keeping that side to side wobble under control with a long lens was annoying). Oh also, it was a bit dark lighting condition wise for filming. But I just used fast lenses wide open and shot at ISO 3200. It makes manual focusing fun!

The time lapse shot I set up outside I'm pretty happy with, although it took some work, since headlights from passing cars (far behind camera) resulted in a strobe light effect in the sped up footage. Agh. Fortunately the final shot looks way better, me having gone in frame by frame and taking out the brighter headlight shots.

Anyway, here you go. It's a fun little vignette of the evening. And a big thanks to Jamie and David for inviting Kelly and I! It was great catching up!

Marc + Buddy

More practice with off camera lighting today. Met up with my friend and colleague Marc for a few setup shots. Although his dog Buddy wound up hogging most of the lime light. Marc will be sending the shots over soon, but the real experiment was to set up my lights with my Nikon speedlights and have him use his Canon camera body to trigger the rig via Pocket Wizard radio transceivers. Yes, it worked and we're stoked! It's a total frankein-flash setup blending Nikon and Canon gear!

Marc and I will be teaming up to shoot a Pakistani wedding this Friday and Sunday, so now we know I can get all the lights set up, hand the pocket wizard to Marc and have him direct the couple for his shots. It'll be pretty epic. I'll post the shots Marc took of me once I get them.

Pretty basic two light setup using my new Lastolite Ezybox softbox. For wedding photography we need to move FAST because time alone with the couple for shots is always, ALWAYS , in short supply. So this setup (yes, I timed myself) only takes me about 4 minutes to get up and running. Two arrangements here. One for side lighting with Ezybox to camera left, and a hard SB-600 behind as a kicker. Second (the shot of Marc by himself) was more of a butterfly light setup, with main light up high shooting down, again with kicker behind.

Sunday Baking

So I found this scratch recipe on Allrecipes.com called "Clone of Cinnabon" a number of months back and just got around to finally trying it out today. Wow, they weren't kidding when they said it'd taste just like Cinnabon - I don't think I'll ever have to buy a cinnamon roll from them again with this recipe on hand. The trick to it all is to give the dough plenty of time to rise and let the active yeast do its thing. Works wonders.

I've seen time lapse footage of things cooking before and always thought it looked fun, so I figured I'd give it a shot myself today. I'm actually pretty happy with it! The total bake time was only about 15 minutes, but it was cool seeing the rolls rise like that. Yes, I'm a pretty big nerd that way, haha.

Holding Pattern...

Hey Folks,

First off, no brand new photos for today per say. Had a bead on trying out a new lighting setup, however my model/victim had some unavoidable work stuff come up. Wah wah wah (sound effect). Been shooting around at home with a combination of the Orbis ring flash attachment and 24'' Ezybox softbox by Lastolite. Fun stuff, but really just test shots. I'm hoping to not fill this blog with self portraits to the point of where readers are like "Ahh, Peter's bored and couldn't find anyone free to shoot photos of so he made himself another Facebook profile pic!" Haha.

However, I have some pretty ambitious plans coming up very soon!

Anyway in lieu of new lighting work, I'll share some photos from some off camera lighting work I did from before Christmas, since I haven't ever officially blogged them. Stefani was totally stoked to come out and model for a shoot along the South Waterfront here in Portland. I have a 42-inch umbrella as a main light off to camera right, and a bare SB-600 off left and behind as a kicker. I liked the idea of using these lights as more accent to the ambient, just to give these shots a bit more punch than otherwise.

Stefani loved the shots! Also another fun story about these two images. Stefani had actually brought a number of outfits but these first two are simply what she was wearing for the day. On accident she'd left her bag of clothes at the hotel she and her boyfriend were staying at. Jason, being the awesome guy he is, fought his way back through evening traffic to get the rest of her outfits. In the mean time we snagged these shots while the light was still with us. Fun times for all. As light faded, we wrapped up with a number of night shots, this warranted me dragging the shutter a bit more to let the ambient still burn in. FYI, with full frame cameras these days, night portraits are increasingly coming into vogue. The shots folks are getting are just mind blowing. This same type of night lighting is absolutely relevant to wedding photography, learn to shoot off camera flash at night or be left in the dust!

Oh also! Aimee J'Adore did a wonderful job on Stefani's makeup. I really liked this shoot, so I'm glad to finally blog about it in a somewhat official capacity.

Anyway, check back again soon.

It's Life in Fast Forward

Much like my dabbling in HDR shooting, I've always wanted to try a hand at doing some time lapse photography. Most pro-sumer and professional camera bodies have interval timers built into them, but I'd never given it a try.

These are really just test shots at this point. I was excited that some stars came out for that last shot, but then the clouds rolled in after only a few minutes of letting the camera shoot!

All of this footage is rendered at 24 frames a second, shot at 10 second intervals that means that it takes 4 minutes to yield just one second of footage. Obviously this meant a lot of me babysitting the camera and/or working outside.

Eventually I'd really want to get out to wine country, or someplace far from the city and its light pollution to really nail some epic star shots. I will totally do it, so stay tuned!

Above the Tracks

So these are shots from the railway yard just off of Holgate Blvd. at the edge of Sellwood (bordering on the Reed College area). Ticked off a pair of things on my wish list today. First, I've always eyed taking photos around this area, especially the roof of that building with all the graffiti on it. I've lived in the area for over two years now and I've never made it out there, it was time!

The next thing I did for these shots was shooting HDR (High dynamic range). This is a photography composite process of combining several images (some over exposed, others under exposed). Basically the end result is an image where your highlights aren't blown out and your shadows still retain some detail. A lot of landscape and architecture photographers use this technique.

In my opinion the HDR approach can look really tacky quite quickly. With cityscapes (and more so portraits) looking like over-saturated, over sharpened cartoons. Just do a Google search of "HDR portraits" and you'll see what I mean. However, when used in moderation, I'm pretty happy with the look I got. It was a bit dark today, so without making a composite, I would not have been able to expose properly to capture those rain clouds rolling in toward me.

This was kind of a first foray for me into the HDR thing. I may head into downtown sometime soon and see what I can get for city shots at night using this technique.

A Dark and Stormy Night...

Okay so not really so dark or stormy. I'd had it in my head to take some night photos from the Ross Island Bridge, but the rain really was coming down quite hard. I was speaking to my friend and colleague Joni about doing this picture a day thing and she came up with a great suggestion. Why not throw some Ziploc bags over my speedlights and try for some night portraits in the rain. I'd seen Joni use that very technique for a number of weddings she's shot, and the resulting images were breathtaking.

Remember, she said, don't forget to go with a longer shutter speed to make sure that rain shows up. Okay check. I threw a pair of speedlights onto some lightstands, Ziploc'd em and got them into place and made this first shot. It was a steady drizzle and I was happy the droplets were showing up against that backlight. I set my timer and was set to jump into the shot when (of course) it stopped raining. Great. Ahh well, took a few shots anyway. Yay two-point lighting.

However, a fortunate thing happened, the sky actually cleared a bit and the moon came out. I already had my camera set on a tripod, so I figured I'd turn my camera skyward. Shot at F10, 1000 ISO and a 10 second exposure. I didn't think I'd be able to get the stars to come out this close in to town, but hey, what do you know. Anyway, here are the shots. I promise I'll try to get a proper subject to model for me soon. Guessing on where to set the focus manually gets old real quick.

Orchid

Well, it's actually pretty stormy out on this Monday Valentine's Day. Figured I'd do a quick motion vignette using something on hand. I did mention I'm wanting to do more work in motion right? Oh humble Safeway bought orchid, I hope you look this good a year from now...

A few tech notes here. Need to get more practice in using the video capabilities of my D3s. Sure it's 720p and not full 1080p, but more than enough for what I'd use it for. It feels good editing in Final Cut Pro again too.

Mainly today I wanted to get some use out of a new linear tracking system I've outfitted with. Apparently Cinevate says the Atlas 10 needs to be broken in a bit, and it will get much more smooth with more use.

Ready. Set...

As a full-time photographer, I feel it's easy to fall into a rhythm of things. Not to say this is a bad thing, and having a busy work schedule is VERY good (I'm extremely grateful). However lately I've found myself longing to push myself more creatively and seek to grow as an artist; a problem many - if not all - working shooters face at one point or another. The creation of this blog is my solution. To force myself to get out of the house, away from editing and out there shooting and trying new things.

The point of this project is simple: get creative, push yourself and (try) to post your efforts on a daily basis for one whole year. And not just post photos, but tell the stories behind them. This isn't a new thing by any means, but it's the best way for me to motivate myself and grow.

So what's with the name?

Well, there are two parts to it. I once lived and breathed journalism. It changed the way I look at the world. I loved it, believed in it. I still do, but some time ago I realized that I wasn't willing to sacrifice my life, my livelihood and future, to the cause of an industry so embattled. Anyway "The Daily" is a nod to the spirit of print journalism. The best, romanticized aspects of it, minus all the crap of budget cuts, withering ad sales and falling readership.

Walkabout. To the best of my knowledge, a walkabout is a spiritual journey, a quest to find ones self. Technically it's a rite of passage undertaken by Australian Aborigines, where a young man ventures alone into the wilderness for months, tracing the paths of his forefathers, maybe making a few new ones too. I'm taken with the concept and the thought that I don't know where this will go.

So this is it. I'm excited! Let's see what I can come up with. Will every day yield an awesome post? I sure hope not, because that means I have too much damn free time and not enough paid work! Good or bad, I promise to share what I see.

Go.