Senior Portrait Outtakes

Saturday proved to be a great chance to get a little practice and experience in shooting senior portraits.

I went with @n8smith on a shoot he had booked. The subject was his nephew Dustin. Contained within this post is a collection of outtakes I was able to capture during the process.

Oh what fun we had. This first outtake was shot during a clothing change. Appropriately, Dustin was only changing his shoes, but that didn't stop @n8smith from hamming it up a bit.

We started the shoot, at the request of the mom, at the family farm capturing some of the safe shots. The farm itself was absolutely beautiful with a great deal of backdrops to work from.

Here Dustin is in front of a broke-down GMC truck that was located in a barn that had seen a similar number of years of neglect.

I was able to capture an occasional shot while @n8smith worked on changing his lenses. No artificial light here, just pure natural late afternoon sunlight warming the surfaces of just about everything.

Dustin was a great subject; patient and open to experimentation. A graphic artist himself, Dustin proved to have a fantastic grasp on the creative process and offered some of his own ideas for poses and shots.

The shot to the left is of my own design. While many of my shots were taken in conjunction with @n8smiths breaks to change lenses and configure settings, @n8smith did allow me some freedom to pull Dustin away for some shots of my own.

I tried to keep at a minimum, since I was invited to help with the shoot, but occasionally I stole Dustin away to take advantage of a backdrop that hadn't been used yet.

In the shot on the left, I fell in love with the window and the reflections it cast. A little Rural Grunge to contrast the clean look of the subject, Dustin.

Like I said, the location was ripe with natural and beautiful backdrops.

On to the next

Once the mom-approved safe shots were done, we experimented with different locations in town.

And while the different locations in town were contained within a couple of square blocks, each location was it's own goldmine of textures and shapes and lines.

It was a little slice of heaven in a rural town.

I decided to play around with a little creative coloring to give to Dustin. Something a little different that he can keep for himself.

Selective coloring is, for the most part, an overdone effect, but there is something about it creatively that I like. And while I don't do it a lot, I do it occasionally to give a client something unique that pinpoints something unique to them and helps make their experience unique.

So the image on the right and below are colored to highlight things that make Dustin unique, at least in the way that I perceived him.

Above, I selected his headphone and shirt for the coloring because in a day where teens are sporting tiny ear buds and in a world were smaller signifies better, Dustin's headphones stood out as a truly unique feature to him.

His shirt, in the above photo, was colored to accentuate the headphones. Because another trait of Dustin is that he has style.

To the left, I chose the jeans because the cool blue of the jeans made a great contrast to the hard sharp feeling of the background. The fact that I was able to coax him to bust a move speaks to just how comfortable his is in his own skin and to me that just speaks volumes of cool.

I was looking to deliver to Dustin a rock star shot and I think that I did it in the photo on the right.

Not much else to say about that photo.

An finally, The Wall. This wall is a the actual exterior wall of a local business. Talk about the dream back drop.

So that it is for the outtakes. Now to finish producing the rest of the images so I can get them delivered to Dustin.

Thanks @n8smith for letting me come along. It was a great experience and I look forward to doing this again with you.

To see Nathan's fantastic body of work, fo visit him at http://www.smithfineart.com/.

Ah, Crap

It's not every day that you can take a photograph of crap and make some art.
I can't take all of the credit for this. Kids are amazing. They see the world through a special filter: everything is amazing and awe-inspiring.
In this case my youngest, now 9 saw this and said, "Dad take a picture of this poop, it look like a cow." I chuckled and walked over and low and behold it was crap and it did look like a cow.
Now while this will not win me any awards and I likely won't sell enough prints to help fund my retirement, it is unique, it is interesting and is worth of this statement:

Be child-like in what you see; full of wonder and amazement and you will not be disappointed with what you find.

Spinning Around The Merry-Go-Round of Life

Where did the summer go? I really do want to know.

Time apparently flies when you are having fun. Apparently time travels faster than the speed light when that fun involves a camera.

My whirlwind ride of a summer was much like spinning around the Merry-Go-Round of life.

It started with me jumping on. Our photo club does these regular shoots at the bridge. By regular, I mean that we shoot there one Friday a month like religion. We have been there seven or eight times and each time is a unique as a fingerprint and as fun as a circus. You have to know the members of my photo group to truly appreciate the "fun as a circus" analogy, but since you likely don't know them you'll have to trust me. We have main attractions, vendors that can feed just about any palette and even some side shows ( I won't use the word freaks because I do respect these people a lot).

Then the event circuit came to town. Starting with the World Beat Festival.

The World Beat Festival is a smörgåsbord of food, culture, food, creativity and art. Oh, and did I mention food?

This event kicks off the summer of fun here in lovely Salem, Oregon. So much to photograph and so little mental capacity to cover it all. But if you have A.D.D. like me, you will be in heaven.

I got a nearly a whole week off before the double-whammy.

 The morning of the 4th of July starts with a trip to the Willamette Mission State Park Civil War Reenactment.

This is a huge event put on by the Northwest Civil War Council. Over 1000 actors come to this event and boy do they put on one hell of show.

Generally this starts at 9:00AM and rolls on to 6:00PM. But this year I had to call it an early day. I shared a ride and my ride was ready to go, but I was too. See during the morning battle a large cannon, like the one on the left, fired really close to me and the concussion from the cannon shattered a filling in my mouth requiring a dental visit the following business day.

That night is the fireworks show down by the river. Of course to get the best seats in the house you need to arrive early to save your seat and then wait. Well the seat happens to be a concrete dock right on the river. Not the most comfortable place to sit for five hours, but as you can tell from the image on the right, the view makes it worth it.

The best part of this event is after long hot day in the sun, at the reenactment, you get to chill by the river and then get a great entertaining show. By chill I mean literally; this is Oregon after all. Temps go from 85 degrees down to 67 with a stiff breeze. So chill is an appropriate term. Yes, we brought blankets and jackets and yes we used them.

 Next up: Welcome to the Oregon Garden. This location is heaven for nature and landscape photographers.

A day here will mean several memory card worth of images to go through later. I think I ended up with over 100 keepers of the one thousand shots I took.

I know what you might be saying, only a ten percent keep to toss ratio. I was experimenting with a new lens and some unique angles; some of which worked and many of which did not.

Now enter the Mount Angel Abby Monastery. This is truly a place I could spent  a solid month at and still not capture a fraction of the photographic opportunities.

This is a photographer's Garden of Eden.

From vivid landscapes, to lush interiors, no matter what your photographic preference, the Abby can be your fix.

As you can tell by the photo on the right, textures, colors and views abound and this is only one photo.

If you get a chance to visit the Abby, do yourself a favor and ask the librarian to see the vault.

The vault has book from before American was even known to exist. Yes, I am not exaggerating this, one of the books was dated 1467 and they have some that are even older than that and they allow flashless photos to be taken.

Throw in a few more bridge shoots, an HDR class and some other fun photo group activities and you end up with a summer that is flying by.

The next thing you know it is August.

The next thing you know, it is my birthday.

Then off on vacation, my first break from work in seven months.

Vacation for me is about relaxing. It is not about having agendas, to-do lists nor is it having a list of places to go. I get enough of that from work.

For me vacation is about, much like the Peter Gibbons character's agenda in Office Space, doing absolutely nothing.

And absolutely nothing is what we did. We drove to the coast and for the most part stayed on the beach most of the days, in the hot tub most of the evenings and in the room each and every night. That was a true vacation. If life were just and kind, the roles of work and vacation would be reversed. We would work a few weeks a year and vacation the rest of the time. Oh what a wonderful world it would be.

 After vacation it is back to the daily grind of my day job and joys of my moonlighting gig.

I was afforded the opportunity to shoot some head shots for Bob Olin. We became reacquainted after years of not seeing each other after high school while I was shooting a civil war reenactment.

He is an actor and needed some head shots for the director of a new film he is working on. He gave me a shout via Facebook and we hooked up for a two hour shoot.

The photo on the left is one of the images I actually presented to him. Oh, and yes in case you are wondering, he signed a model release.

One would think that after a fun filled summer like this that I would be done. Oh no. Not me. I am a glutton for punishment that would be epic, even by hell's standards.

Two nights of night shoots, 9:00PM to 1:00AM. My photo group strikes again. I do love these people. Just to give you a idea of how active this group is, I did not attend 3 shooting events with the group during the summer, one of which was an overnight trip in Central Oregon.

 After this, photography activity starts to wane a bit, and this is a good thing.

I have two weeks left before I have to be prepared for a week long run at the Oregon State Fair.

Our group has stepped up to give presentations all but three days of the fair. I say our group, but alas I was the one who initiated the whole thing with the director of the fair.

So I have to prepare three presentations as well as manage the logistics of who needs to be where and when. It was chaotic, it was exhausting, but must of all, it was fun.

So now that I am looking at the calendar, I see that I am in the second week of September. One might think that things would slow down, eh; oh how wrong you would be.

I am now planning a photoshop workshop, I have scheduled and will be presenting a Lightroom 3 workshop in two weeks and I am booked to shoot a wedding on Halloween. Oh yeah, I have a shoot planned at the Oregon Zoo with my group.

Life is good. No it isn't. Life is great. Be careful stepping on that Merry-Go-Round, you never know when you are likely to have chance to get off. But enjoy that ride while it lasts because it might not come around again for a while.