day 145 - backslidinglylit

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day 144 - lit eyes

one goal i've been re-focusing on is getting light into the subject's eyes correctly. it can really make or break a picture, and it's something i've not been putting enough focus on, really. so i've decided to really get solid at nailing this one aspect of portraiture, before i move back towards more experimental type things.

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day 143 - that '90s shot

for some reason, this camera angle makes me think of the '90s. i wonder if it's only an association in my head, or if other people looking at this would think the same thing.

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day 142 - oversimplified

thought i'd slow everything down a bit here and set up a one light kind of a thing, do a bit of backlighting, keep things mysterious.

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day 141 - resolution

came across this look while i was trying unsuccessfully to set up a space heater in the background of the shot.... it glows kinda orange, and i wanted it to be this weird orange thing in the background, but couldn't get it to look right.

anyways. got this look, and i like it. strong mix of light on face and shadow on face. and it's in focus, which is always nice.

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day 140 - more clarity

the real success of this picture is the focus. this is shot at f1.8 very close up. there's almost no cropping up there, and at that distance the depth of field is very short. and i'm not holding the camera here, so it's even more difficult to nail the focus.

my solution was to hold up my hand, let the camera focus on that, then get my eyes the same distance from the lens that my hand was. it worked maybe 1/3rd of the time.... it's difficult to nail, but cool when it works. i mean, my cheek is going out of focus. how sweet is that?

anyways.

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day 139 - in reference to....

there is a photographer whose work i looked at the other day, and it was this surreal set of portraits where the photographer was using multiple multiple lights to really super-expose the subject, and then a lot of quality photoshop work to make them look very surreal and almost like a hyper-realistic painting. i've been trying, but i can't remember the photographer's name. but she really had an excellent style.

it'll come to me.

anyways. i only have three lights, so i'm limited as to how far i can pursue what she was doing, but this is my attempt at something similar. no photoshop, just a lot of lighting. lit from above, from below, and a grid spotted slash light to complete the ensemble. came out pretty well. i would've liked to move away from the wall a bit, but my small living room made that difficult.

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day 138 - slivers

my camera doesn't do multiple exposures.... so i have to take 12 different pictures, then hack it up in photoshop to get something similar. so that's what i did here... the only light source is an sb-28 camera left with a honl gridspot restricting the light.... i thought it'd be interesting to follow how the light spreads as the distance from the source increases..... so the light never moved, only i did.

info:
Model: NIKON D60
ISO: 100
Exposure: 1/200 sec
Aperture: 3.5
Focal Length: 18mm

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day 137 - walkabout

i've been carrying my camera around with me when we take tako for her evening constitutional here lately, and taking pictures with my wide open aperture of different things we come across. chicago has a real fall season, and everything is changing colors.... it's pretty strange to someone who didn't grow up around this kind of thing.

most of these were done with attention paid to composition and depth of focus.... i'm trying to improve my directing the viewers attention skills, so i'm looking for contrast (color, brightness, shape...), textures, the overlooked, the ordinary.

i figure if i can make an image that makes something ordinary look amazing, then that's a bankable skill. so that's what i was working on here.

day 136 - experiment for v.w.

earlier today i was reading "proust was a neuroscientist" by jonah lehrer. i'm almost done with it, i'm on the chapter about virginia woolf. lehrer talks about how her ideas about the self predate a lot of current neuroscience findings, namely that consciousness is a fragmented disconnected almost random place, only barely bound together that seems like it's constantly about to fall apart, but never does.

in her writing v.w. would describe her characters as having almost split personalities from moment to moment. one second manic, the next calm, the next irrepressible, the next sullen...... it's a remarkable insight into the mind. the idea that there's no real self, just a tumultuous whirlwind of thoughts, feelings, memories, insights...... and that the thing that we call our "self" emerges only when it's thought about, that it's only a story we tell ourselves to explain who we are and why we do the things that we do......

anyways. it was an interesting read. and it got me thinking, how would i represent these ideas in a photograph? i was thinking a multiple exposure situation, with one subject (representing the "self") lit properly, and all the others a sort of blur of color and shape, perhaps each one doing something different, or dressed differently, or something like that.

this is my experimenting with the process that would yield something like that. this isn't a finished piece, i shot a bunch of ambient light long exposures with the camera on the tripod, then adjusted the settings and turned on some lights and shot a proper portrait from the same camera position. bust it all into photoshop, stack it up in the "soft light" layer mode, and there it is.

this is a hack ps job, and nothing like what's in my head, but it's an interesting start, and since i'd never done something like this before, i thought i'd start here before i move on to the whole enchilada.

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day 135 - outside w' cto

this is me experimenting with coloring the flash very orange, then shooting outside on a grey day. then when you compensate for the orange flash, the sky (and background) goes all very blue-ish. i've seen people do it quite well, thought i'd give it a shot, but i'm not all that happy with how it came out.... i'm out of focus, for one, and slightly oddly colored, for two, it's not a terrible composition, but it's not all that interesting, for three......

anyways. first attempt..... i'll nail it next time.

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day 134 - shot in the dark

sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

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day 133 - thumbs up

shot in the kitchen, one sb-28 bouncing off the ceiling w' cto gel, one bouncing off the stove raw. f1.8 for shallow depth of field, and out of focus magic.

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day 132 - soft up hard down

i was playing around with a hard light above, soft light below setup, and noticed that if i tilt my head to block the hard light from hitting my eyes, the soft light shows up nicely and gives me a very creepy-intense look. so that's what i did. it's a cool look.... not one that you can use on everyone everytime, but useful for if i ever have to shoot a horror movie poster or something.

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day 131 - add softness

started out working the old hard and soft cross light thing, saw this and decided i liked the large shadowy expanse across my face. so i just called it here.

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day 130 - hard light pt 4

a more conventional use of hard light...

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day 129 - hard light pt 3

mysterious.... i like the three light sources in each eye.oh, and the flashes were both zoomed to 50mm for a more punchy light.

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day 128 - hard light pt 2

one above, one below, one for the background.

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day 127 - hard light pt 1

things have been getting too soft around here.... i thought i'd do a short series of hard light shots, learn a thing or two about not using modifiers, see what happens.

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