On Assignment: HoCoPoLitSo

Sometimes you happen upon beautiful window light for a portrait, and there is no sense even unpacking a speedlight -- just frame, and snap away.

Alas, this portrait of Ellen Kennedy was not one of those times.

I photographed Ellen, founder of the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society, in her home office for the Columbia Archives last week. The window light was beautiful, but not in a way that would translate well in my camera.

So I decided to recreate that light with a lower, camera-friendly contrast range using a pair of SB-800s. Read more »

Read More

Chris Crisman Finds Inspiration at Home

Paging through a recent issue of Fast Company, I came across a Chris Crisman photo similar to the one above. I loved the light, and got in touch with him to talk about it.

As it turns out, the light wasn't even the interesting part. Read more »

Read More

And Now, Your Lighting Case Pr0n

I am a big fan the ThinkTank Logistics Manager case. If you think Airport International Security on steroids, you won't be far off.

It can swallow up a ton of lighting gear, too. Four Profoto Acute packs and 4 heads is no problem. And because it is about the size of a Tokyo apartment, you can configure it just about any way you want. Which is the point of this spot-on video and the many config pictures on the product page.

And then there's that music. Chicka-chicka wow-wow…

-30-

Read More

Where Even PocketWizard Dare Not Tread

And now, your Moment of Zen.

Many thanks to Strobist reader Chano Reus for the heads-up on a Spanish-language blog post detailing the light-painting … of an entire city.

No fewer than fifty photographers in the Asociación Fotográfica de Toledo participated in the making of this complex and highly choreographed image of Toledo, Spain.

NOTE: The post now has English and Spanish versions embedded within the copy. Thanks for that!

-30-

Read More

LumiQuest Softbox-III Gets a Big Brother

Shown at left is one of my most used light mods, the LumiQuest SoftBox-III. It has just been supersized from 8x9" to 10x14" and released as the LumiQuest SoftBox LTp. (Not to worry -- you can still get the SB III, too. Otherwise I would not be posting this until I had stocked up on SB-IIIs…)

So yeah, bigger -- sure. But why 10x14 inches?

There's actually a pretty good reason for that. Read more »

Read More

On Assignment: Standing Behind Their Work

Ever see a thriller movie where someone (usually Matt Damon) is talking to the bad CIA guys while they sit in their office even as Damon has them zeroed in from across the street?

That'll soon be implausible if Dianna and Wayne Wilhelm any say about it. They are building (and retrofitting) government buildings with normal-looking, 1/2" glass that will stop a metal jacketed 9mm round at point blank range. And within two months, glass of that same thickness will be stopping rounds from high-powered rifles. Really cool stuff.

I was assigned to shoot the Wilhelms for a BizMo cover, and thought I would take advantage of the fact that this new laminated ballistic glass is also optically decent. So I shot them through a piece of glass that already had stopped five 9mm rounds in an earlier demonstration. Read more »

Read More

Are You Local to Baltimore or Washington, DC?

SECOND UPDATE: Results are here.
__________

UPDATE:

1:49pm -- Boy, THAT was fast. There were a ton of people who wrote in to join up for the shoot day on November 2nd. I am going through the list now, prioritizing toward people who are local and most available. I will write back to everyone who left an email address (whether in or not) by the end of the day. But we already have more than will be practical to use, so please, no more volunteers needed.

Many thanks,
DH
__________

Tired of the hyper-polarized election season? How would you like to spend Tuesday, November 2nd doing something worthwhile -- and nonpolitical -- with your camera?

Don't get me wrong -- I am gonna vote. But I thought it would be cool to spend the rest of Election Day doing something real with my camera to benefit a very worthy local organization. It is gonna be in a beautiful outdoor setting, and I think it will be a lot of fun.

If you might be interested in helping, keep reading. Read more »

Read More

Are You Just Dying to Get Into a New Studio?

UPDATE: The original I.P.S. site has since been taken down because they were "overwhelmed by orders and had to take the site down." (Natch.) Oh, and there were also a "few issues with the site that needed repair," too.

To their credit, they at least ran the new version through a spell check.
__________


I swear, I could not make this stuff up. The "Important" page on the new Inflatable Photo Studio (yes, I said Inflatable Photo Studio) includes the following among its several warnings:

"It is not recommended that you smoke, cook or have any open flames in the studio. Also lights can become very hot and melt the studio. Do not rest lighting or position it against the sides. Curling irons, hair driers (sic) irons, and steamers can also melt the plastic causing rapid deflation or possible fire."

But wait, there's more!

For instance, in the event of a "rapid deflation," not to worry! You have at least four minutes to get out alive -- if you remember to crawl and "keep your arms up at an angle in front of you." (Um, okay!)

(Hat tip: Andy)

-30-

Read More

Shoot the Bloggers: David Tejada

While in Denver late this summer I got to hang out with David Tejada, a corporate photographer from the area and frequent blogger/teacher. (Dave needs no introduction for long-time readers of this site.)

So I couldn't pass up shooting him -- and using his own cool DIY beauty dish to do so. Read more »

Read More

On Assignment: Newspaper Man

Sometimes I miss working at a newspaper.

And when I say "I miss," I mean that I miss it in the rose-colored glasses sense. Because some of the most fun I have had in the last 20+ years has been while shooting for small, community newspapers. So a few months ago I started stringing for a local business monthly as a way to keep touch with what I used to enjoy so much.

It was in that capacity that I was assigned to shoot a full-page portrait of Stan "The Fan" Charles, pictured above. Stan was to be the cover for the Maryland Entrepreneur Quarterly section. Which is pretty impressive, considering his entrepreneur chops are being earned running a successful newspaper in 2010. Read more »

Read More

Rosco will Help You Correct for Those Screwy Fluorescents

Time was, things were simpler and fluorescent lights only required a 30CC magenta filter in front of your film-based camera lens to bring them into line. Green your flash and you were done. Then the hippies took over and now we have CFLs pretty much everywhere. And they are not all the same color, either.

Today, Joel Svendsen (who is not a professional actor but merely an ordinary person much like yourself) will walk you through how to correct for the various types of fluorescent lights.

It is geared towards video but you can translate pretty easily. The big difference is that video folks frequently work with tungsten lights. Or as they apparently call it, a package.

But thanks to Joel I shall henceforth think of warm CFLs, for instance, as sort of a weird combo of tungsten and fluorescent, both of which need to be fixed.

Joel, BTW, is the man at Rosco behind the Strobist Collection gel pack -- which also saved the gel sample program from certain death. And that means that he drinks for free in Baltimore, whenever he visits.

-30-

Read More

Available Light. As in, Every. Available. Light.

UPDATE: In addition to abs, this one also has legs. It has made the rounds to Jezebel(!), Billboard and Blair's blog, too. I am heading out to get some ab spray now.
__________

Do you live in Phoenix? Were your lights flickering for a while a few weeks back?

That could have been Blair Bunting's cover shoot for Billboard Magazine. He used 7 Profoto packs, 14 light sources and just under 20 Kilowatt-seconds of power every time the shutter tripped. For a 3/4-length portrait.

Oh, and the subject was naked. So I am sticking it behind the "read more" jump. Read more »

Read More

Finn O'Hara's Time Lapse Rises From the Dead

Last November, we ran a cool time-lapse BTS from photographer Finn O'Hara of a huge-scale Toronto Maple Leafs shoot. It was up for a few hours, then had to be pulled over some confusion over who owned the rights to the video.

It was replaced with a watered-down, neutered version which didn't get anyone's panties in a bunch -- or show much of anything.

But the campaign has run its course and the original video is okay to run now. If you missed it, you can see it updated on the original post. It's a neat look into what goes into a 35-NHL player cattle call.

(Answer: Probably more than you think.)

-30-

Read More