Tag Archives: Photography

Happy Valentine’s Day – Chocolate Lovers

I’m not sure where the connection between Valentine’s Day and chocolate comes from… Does it really matter?  Just be sure to enjoy some today!

I took this photo on my kitchen table, using natural light. I placed a large diffuser just out of the frame to the right of the plate. I then positioned a large white bounce card to the left of the plate. To capture the largest depth-of-field (front to back in focus) I set the 100mm macro lens to the smallest aperture it was capable of (highest f-stop number): f/32. With the camera’s ISO setting of 100, my handheld light meter told me that the proper exposure would be obtained with the shutter set to be open for 8 seconds.

Editorial Portrait of an Entrepreneur

A few weeks before last Christmas, I became aware of Project 52. This is a web site that makes “real world assignments” to those learning the aspects of commercial photography. Since this is an area of photography that I would really like to get into, I thought that I would have nothing to lose, and everything to gain by participating in this exercise.

From the Project 52 web site, Don Giannatti explains: “What does “real world assignments” mean? It means you will be given assignments that are similar in scope and diversity as any commercial photographer in a small town. It means authentic work that is exactly the kind you will get the day your shingle gets posted. We work hard to make assignments that both challenge the creative, and produce work that could end up in your portfolio.”

The 4th assignment for 2012 was to make an “Editorial Portrait of an Entrepreneur”. You can find the assignment description here: Project 52 2012 Assignment 4.  As you can quickly determine, the assignment can be “faux”, or stated another way – “pretend”. Thus explains the photo at the beginning of this post.

Here is my lighting diagram that I used to create the photo above:

Hint: Click on any image to see a larger version.

The assignment required 2 photos: one showing the entrepreneur in their environment (see above), and one photo to be a close-up of the entrepreneur. For the close up shot, I simply took the camera off of the tripod and handheld it as I physically got closer to her, which you can see here:

If you would like to hear what Don had to say about my photos, you can go to the Assignment 4 web page, scroll down to where you see the “Audio Crit for Page One”, click on the Play button, and let the audio begin downloading. Once the download progress is about 50% complete, simply drag the leading edge of the white slider to the 31:15 mark.

Photo Galleries are Back!

I surprised myself today and actually got my old photo galleries up into my new web site this afternoon!  If you look at the little black bar below my logo at the top, you should now see [About Gregg], [Contact Gregg], and [Photo Gallery] menu items. If you hover your mouse over that last one you should see it pop-down, showing the sub-menu items.

Clicking on any of those sub-menu items should open that web gallery in a new window.
Of course, they still have the dark gay background theme of my old web site, so maybe I’ll put some effort soon into making them look like they belong with this new web site.

Now that I’m getting more comfortable with this new WordPress method of creating and managing my web site, I should be able to concentrate more on photography again soon.  If you like what you see, click on the “Leave a Reply” link right below this line.

Some Joker with a Knife

This is a Royal Flush gambling with some Joker with a knife, with the fuel of alcohol nearby….

Shot on my kitchen table, using a black velour fabric for the background. The only light was from a northeast-facing window to the right of the camera, and thankfully if was overcast late that morning. At first, I had bounce card on the left, but it took some of the mystery of the shadows away. I ended up putting a black flag on the left to absorb the light and prevent any light from bouncing back onto the scene.

I used a handheld Sekonic light meter, set the camera to manual mode with as small of an aperture opening as this zoom lens had.
I also used a ColorChecker Passport to set a custom white balance in the camera. The only post processing that I did (in Lightroom) was to remove a few dozen white dust specs from the black velour.

ISO 100
3.2 seconds
f/22
80mm

CowParade Austin Calendar – February – Moosic Capital

This is only the 2nd day of my new web site, and already I find myself with something to add.  I don’t believe I am a blogger, but two days in a row might make one wonder….

Today about 40 of my friends, family, and clients will be turning the page on the CowParade Austin 2012 promotional calendar that Barb and I had made and handed out around Christmas.  For February, the pictured cow is “Mosic Capital”. The artist is Sharon Roy Finch, and the financial sponsor was Coats Rose.

This cow was located on the southeast corner of 2nd and Congress Ave. here in Austin, TX. Dad and I arrived a little after 8:00 AM on Sept. 3, 2011 to photograph this cow, which was positioned very close to one of the Austin GuitarTown guitars that were on public display in 2007. The guitar was “Twinkle, Twinkle, Lonestar”.

There was a bright haze in the sky, so we tried to keep it out of our photos, but that wasn’t easy.  The most difficult part of the photo that ended up in the calendar was simply waiting, and waiting for an opportunity for when there were no pedestrians or ugly traffic in the background.

The photo above appears to be compressed horizontally when viewed in Internet Explorer 8, but looks fine in Internet Explorer 9. Not sure how any of this appears in other browsers. I have no idea why this is happening – the photo above was exported from Lightroom with the exact same settings as the photo below. By the way, to “uncompress” the photo above, or to see any of these photos at a larger size, just click on them. You will then have to use the “Back” button to return to my post.

What surprised me the most about this cow was how different it looked on the opposite side from what is shown on the calendar. Here it is:

That is an accurate color rendition!

Anyway, here are a few other photos that I took while we were near this particular cow.

 It would be great if you could leave a comment, letting me know if you liked this, or not.

Thanks!