day 152

setup shot:

day 151

had internet problems all last night, so here's the shots with no additional wordy noise.

setup shot:

day 150 - climbing the mountain

right now i have 5,068 pictures on my hard drive that i've taken for this 365 project. i'm not even halfway through (day 187 will be that mark) and i've got over 5k on the hard drive. it's taking up almost 60 gigabytes of space. it's almost time to buy a new hard drive specifically for this project.

it's becoming a bit different of a thing to do this project every day. i'm less pumped up about it, less thrilled to try new things..... feels more like i'm grinding away at it right now. making small but steady improvements, not big leaps of insight or understanding. it's more about refining things at this point. i'm still excited about it. i still think it might be the best idea i've ever had, it's just lost a bit of that thrill of exploration feel it had. the newness is gone, now i'm slowly categorizing every detail of everything i've discovered for future visits and return trips.

and i am discovering things that i still want to experiment with. it's not a lessening of the thing. i think it's kinda like a relationship. over time the infatuation period fades, but things get deeper. things feel deeper, more rewarding these days. i feel like i'm crafting images more and more, and blindly experimenting less and less.

setup shot:

day 149 - glasses and a dish

for this one i set up my beauty dish horizontally, as you can see right there in the glasses reflection. that was my fill light. for my main, i had an sb-28 pointed at the ceiling, away from the background with a cto gel on it. then when i adjust for the cto gel, the ungelled dish goes a bit blue, and everything looks that much cooler.

setup shot:

day 148 - small softbox

the other day alisia and i were at a restaurant, and i saw this young girl across the room check her iphone... and in the dimly lit warm ambiance her face was lit up with a bluish light from the phone. i thought it was an interesting scene, with a pleasant color contrast, and i wished i had my camera with me at the time.

but i didn't. so instead i did something similar here. this picture is no flash, wide open aperture and a longer shutter speed. even with all that, it was underexposed, so i bumped my iso up to 400. my d60 gets really noisy at 400, so i ran this image through imagenomics portraiture lightroom plugin after lightening it up in lightroom. it did a pretty great job of smoothing things out without making my skin look plastic, and this is the result.

other info:
Model: NIKON D60
ISO: 400
Exposure: 1/15 sec
Aperture: 1.8
Focal Length: 35mm
Flash Used: No

setup shot:

day 147 - color contrast twist

for this one i thought i'd get back to doing the old color contrast thing. so we have the beauty dish with an ungelled flash, and a lone sb-28 with a 1/2 cto bouncing off the floor (the hardwood warms it up even more) to provide the color twist.

i wanted it more dramatic/dynamic, so i used lightroom's "graduated filter" tool to push even more orange to the left side, and even more blue to the top right side of the image. i like the results.

setup shot:

day 146 - flat solid light

this is an example of that big flat light that a lot of photographers like to use to show gritty drama in the faces of ordinary people. the only real trick to the lighting setup is to make it as close to on-axis as you can.... in this case i did my fake ring flash trick, put the camera in front of my beauty dish for that shadowless feel, and fired away.

the real secret is in the post production. for this one i used lightroom, and made really solid black areas, then turned up the "exposure" knob until it was just shy of losing detail. played with the contrast and brightness until it looks right, and you're done.

by the way, that reminds me of something.... in lightroom, you typically use "exposure" to set your white point, the amount of the picture that is 100% white. then you use "brightness" to adjust the values of your midtones, and "fill light" to control the amount of light in your dark tones. if all you're doing is adjusting the "exposure" slider (like i used to) then you're losing out on over half of the control you could have on your image.

sometimes i think any recent improvements in my photography skills all just have to do with getting better at lightroom.....

setup shot: