I collect light.

Accidental Diptych

These two photos ended up above each other in my flickr stream in an amusing fashion:

Texturing

My friend Jessie convinced me to try my hand at “texturing.” I combined these two images:





To get:



Overall, I like the tones and the vertical lines, but I’m not a big fan of the rivets across Melody’s face.

I got the aluminum image from grungetextures.com. Their images are free for non-commercial use, as long as you give credit. Lots of good stuff there, I’ll have to try this more.

Before / After

Here’s a quick before and after retouch post, using a neat javascript utility I found:

Stagecoach Road Photoshoot

On Sunday, Melody and I took a quick trip to Stage Coach Rd. off of route 154. We captured several great portraits and I’m still post-processing them, but here’s a quick preview.

This was my first real opportunity to use all of my newly acquired AlienBees gear (hooray for Craigslist). I decided to experiment with the beauty dish as a key light and use the softbox for fill. The first shot here was actually a candid, but I liked it and decided to post-process it anyway. It was quite warm out, so we were both sucking down a lot of water, and I happened to catch Melody being adorable in the process:



If you look at the large image, you’ll see the telltale doughnut-shaped catchlight from the beauty dish in her eyes. Here’s what the setup looked like from a few steps back (click through to the image to see some notes about what all of the equipment is):



We also played with the idea of wind in her hair. Since there wasn’t much wind (and if there had been my lights would have toppled quickly), we faked it. She pulled her hair down and put her head to the side, we counted to three, and then she tossed her head up and to the side, causing her hair to fly to the left. Ten or so takes of this later, et voila:

Last night I attended the 90th Annual Santa Barbara Hunter-Jumper Show with my friend Violet. She competed in a number of the events this week, but last night we were just watching the competition. I was struck at how quiet the event was. When the horse was close, you could hear it breathing, but there was little noise otherwise. Once the jumpers finished the course, the crowd erupted into applause, breaking the silence.

It’s a good thing I don’t do sports photography very often, otherwise I’d be tempted to buy the Nikkor 70-200 ƒ/2.8; who am I kidding, I want the lens anyway!

Fireworks

This evening I went to Girsh Park to see the Goleta Fireworks, and I happened to get a couple of photos of Patty:

New flash!

I picked up a couple of AlienBees flashes from Craigslist this weekend on my way to Jessie’s graduation party in Sacramento. I haven’t had much of an opportunity to use them, but we did get a couple of shots in the pool at the party:





I also got a beauty dish, which I’m very excited to use more of:

Austin: Inner Space Cavern

Denman and I visited Inner Space Cavern today. It was in the mid-sixties inside, but around 90% humidity, so it wasn’t much better than the 100-degree temperatures outside! Quite a bit of fun though. I’ve discovered that getting good photos inside a cave really requires a tripod, so I’m only sharing one with the world:

Austin: Hike to the Capitol

Today Denman and I took a six mile hike up a creek bed to the Capitol building. Along the way we stopped at Whole Foods and had a fantastic smoothie and lunch. We took a bus home since neither of us really wanted to hike in the 90+ degree heat.

Austin, TX

I’m in Austin, TX for the weekend, visiting my friend Denman. It’s HOT here, and I’m really not used to the heat.



We visited the Zilker Botanical Gardens:



and the Umlauf Sculpture Garden: