day 276 - intense ness

for this one i did my usual greyscale conversion move, and i realized that the only part of the picture that had any gold was flecks in my irises. so i played with the gold/yellow slider in lightroom, and got this super intensified iris version of myself. i like it. i don't think i pushed it too far, i did just enough to add some contrast to the iris, and that's it.

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day 275 - el squinty

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day 274 - amtrak ftw

on an amtrak train platform, using an sb-28 and a handheld trigrip as a diffuser. ran it through imagenomics portraiture, greyscale convert in lightroom.

day 273 - under el

we went to grab some sandwiches today, and i brought some equipment along because i'd seen this wall a week or two ago, and thought it would make a good background for a portrait. this is a minimal setup, just an sb-28 at 1/4 through a 42" umbrella camera left. 1/200th at f2.8...... and that's it.

day 272 - velveteen

bit of cross-processing on this one, i'd be a bigger fan of cross processing if it didn't look like so many picture-looks-like-its-from-the-70s actions.

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day 271 - off kilter

"off kilter" sounds like what someone would say right before they tear off their kilt.

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day 270 - sunrise

i've been wanting to hit up some pink clouds at sunrise/set for a while now, but everytime i'm up and ready to catch the dawn/dusk, it's been overcast and grey. until today. i saw the sun was coming up into a mostly clear sky, with a few scattered thin clouds, so i grabbed my camera and a flash and ran a block down the street to a park with a decent view to the east. i forgot to grab a diffuser, so i wound up bouncing the flash off the side of a white brick building that was conveniently there. so it's not a complicated setup, but a good example of quick and dirty.

setup shot:

day 269 - heater dish

we have a radiant heater that has a parabolic dish that's maybe 20" across. i'm always thinking i should take it apart and turn it into some kind of heater-light-modifier frankenstein, but it's a bit cold these days for that sort of creative thinking. so this is the next best thing.

has a cool light quality. crisp and focused. similar to a beauty dish, but the curvature prevents that hard shadow line from the edge of the dish on the background.

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day 268 - crotch light

clamped the flash to the stool and pointed it at the reflectors in front of me. played with the head angle and got very different results based on where the majority of the light was going.

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day 267 - split reflector

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day 266 - smug

got some hard / soft on this one. still just the one light source, with two reflectors -- this time both camera right. it's a good look. the hard light just outside of the frame gives a bit of almost ambiance, kinda like sunlight coming through an open window. and the reflectors give a warm wrapped softness to the subject.

setup shot:

day 265 - 100 left

another wrapped in shadows shot. got the gridded coming across light working here, and a big reflector as the "main". the trigrip is there to throw a bit of light back up from camera left, but i'm not sure it's actually doing anything. maybe lightening up the shadows just a touch. hard to tell.

oh, and i'm down to just 100 "days" left. this project has seriously been an amazing investment of time and effort.  it's been a lot of work, but it's definitely given me results. it's difficult to quantify all the ways i've become a better photographer due to this project. it feels like i've gained the level of experience that it takes most people years to get to. not to say that i'm better than anyone, but i think in terms of understanding what's going on and how i can bend and manipulate light..... i've become so advanced.  it's great.

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day 264 - leaner

this picture could use a separation light of some kind, but i kinda dig the wrapped in shadows thing that's going on here. it'd be almost like sfumato, if my highlights weren't quite so bright.

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day 263 - reflector tuesday

thought i'd limit myself to just reflectors for a bit, see what can be accomplished that way. i'm just trying to become a bit more flexible, a bit more facile with my approach.

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day 262 - itouch

so, had this idea and went for it. kinda disappointed with how out of focus the ipod is, but in order to get my whole head into the "frame" i had to be back quite a ways. did a bit of manual focusing with a light stand stand-in, and that's about it.

the out of focus ipod does have an interesting feel to it.

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day 261 - hey thats not the living room

yeah, took a trip at dawn down to lake michigan to get some shots of the sunrise. but the sunrise didn't cooperate very much with what i had in mind. instead of crazy colors and maybe some distant clouds all i got was dark grey fog stuff. so i did a few dark pre-dawn pictures, watched the sky lighten up, packed up and took off. maybe the sky will cooperate next time.

setup shot:

day 260 - keeping it simple

played around with cross processing for the setup shot on this one..... cross processing is where you adjust the brightness of each of the red-green-blue channels separately..... so you can get a very tweaked out color look pretty easy. it's not something i'm going to do a lot of, it looks too close to an photoshop action preset for my liking..... i kinda feel that actions are easy, so they're trendy, so they're going to be dated very quickly. and i want my stuff to be more timeless, less trendy.

cross processed setup shot:

day 259 - tako

tako jumped up in my lap, so i took a few shots of us. it felt good to vary up the composition a bit, go for a two shot instead of the usual one-shot.

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day 258 - back and forth

still working the zoomed flash into trigrip idea..... this time the flash is camera right, providing a slight bit of pop to the face, and then coming back from camera left warmed up off the trigrip cover.

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day 257 - so tall

working a bit closer to the background today, results in a lighter background and higher risk of a weird shadow showing up. i really like the highlight on the left sleeve from the direct flash going past on it's way to the trigrip.

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day 256 - big and bounce

yup, it's crazy face tuesday.

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day 255 - one light three sources

one flash, a large umbrella, and two reflectors, one gold/silver, and one just white. i am liking mixing pictures with all these dark areas more and more these days. i don't think it's all that flattering, but it's a different type of mood.

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day 254 - long throw reflected

this is doing the long throw thing with a reflector instead of a diffuser. so there's hard light, but with a bit of warm bounce to it, instead of just deep shadows. this could be a solid technique for use outside on a sunny day.

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day 253 - menacingly well lit

exploring the gold-silver cover used with the softbox containing a gold gel. put some raw daylight balanced flash in the back there for contrast, and that's it.

setup shot:

day 252 - pirate face

yep, you can't tell with the greyscale conversion, but this is using a gold gel on the softbox. i'm really becoming a fan of it, it just makes caucasian skin tones look good. 

setup shot:

day 251 - long throw

got the idea for this shot from a kelby training video by joe mcnally. in the video joe talks about how he likes to sometimes set up a flash quite a distance from the subject, with a diffuser screen close to the subject to create that soft light. he says that this "marinates" the light, since a lot of the raw flash bounces around the room and mimics natural light more closely.

i realized that i almost always set up my flash and modifier really close to the subject.... in all the setups i've done i've never had the flash far away, and the diffuser close. so i gave it a try.

so for this one i've got the flash in the far corner of the room, maybe 15 feet away from me. and my 32" trigrip is maybe a foot and a half from my face. the flash is zoomed to 85mm (the max on an sb-28), and honl gridded to shadow the background a bit.

i think it came out pretty well. some random things i like about the setup:

1. that background gradient
2. my eye reflections
3. the possibility of adding a reflector camera left.

and some things i don't like:

1. having to walk to the flash to adjust it every time i move anything.

setup shot: