Aug 2007
An early photograph, prior to her stage career
August/31/2007
Actually this is from a portrait session I did two days ago.
Kayden (her mom calls her "Peanut") is three.
And even though some kids might get tired of the shoot after about 15 minutes, she was still attentive and had a fabulous disposition after an hour and a half of shooting. More from the shoot (in new browser window).
|
Fashion portraits
August/29/2007
I've always liked shooting fashion, and it probably doesn't take a calculator to figure out why. Attractive people make great photographic subjects. And clothes, photographed with an attentive eye, can be art objects. So awhile ago I started thinking about how I could incorporate fashion approaches into more of the shooting I do.
It made sense to put together a fashion approach to portraiture, and offer it to everyone, not just models.
The idea behind these shoots is to make each person feel like they're getting their little bit in the spotlight. We bring in a stylist who'll monitor hair and clothing details, and we use portable studio lighting to make people look their best, whether we're working inside or outside. The fresh air outdoors seems to help generate appealing expressions ... but if a client (or the weather) decides that indoors would be better, that's fine.
I try to work the same way a cinematic lighting guy would work -- making lighting decisions on-the-fly. A lot of times we're able to find just the right type of existing light. Other times we create our own lighting with strobes and light modification tools. You may not have spent a lot of time examining different types of light, but for me it's essential. The goal is always to make everybody feel like the shots we'll be going for are the type of shots that could end up in a magazine. Here's a link to some other work: http://rogersteen.com/fashion_beauty_all/index.html
Part of my approach is taking time with the shoot, typically half a day, and if possible, shoot in graphically compelling places -- interesting or colorful venues that add interest to the background and surroundings (a little attitude in the ambience is usually okay). We try to make our "models-for-a-day" feel comfortable on a shoot, so the expressions usually take care of themselves.
Caitlin
August/27/2007
What happened when I dropped my Nikon SLR
August/26/2007
A few days
ago I dropped my Nikon D-200. Actually, it fell out
of my camera bag and bounced around on the rock-hard
tiled floor. (I'll try to avoid using the word
"horror" in this post.) I was on a shoot, with the
bag around my waist, in a really elegant
hundred-year-old building, working with a model on
some stuff for both of our portfolios. I leaned
forward to pick something up and hadn't zipped up the
bag. Unpleasant scenarios played out in my mind (the
warranty expired last week) and I thought about how I
wished that this were happening in a much less
interesting room that was thickly
carpeted.
I'm going to give some credit to Nikon for this next part, which is that the camera, so far, seems to work perfectly. The VR lens doesn't zoom quite as smoothly as it did before (there had to be a price of some kind, pretty much, for a mistake like this) but the captures still seem about as sharp as they were before. I feel that I'm pretty lucky getting out of it with just lens repair or replacement.
I have a Canon point 'n shoot that's without question a great little shooting camera, especially for landscapes, though it's limiting for indoor people work (compared to a pro camera plus some lighting experience). A couple of months after I got the Canon, the lcd stopped working, so I sent it back to Canon (when they answered the phone, they pronounced their company name "Kay-non"). They fixed it at no-charge, but first they ran a little test on me by telling me that the camera had been dropped. It hadn't and I think I made that clear.
There was a blurb on the Luminous Landscape website about a trip to Iceland -- the site's proprietor, Michael Reichmann, went with some notable photographer friends -- and in that piece it was mentioned that they were shooting on this one day where the rain was perpetual. As I recall there were something like 8 Canon shooters and 2 Nikon guys. Two of the the Canon shooters, apparently as a result of the moisture, had mechanical or electronic issues with their cameras; neither of the Nikon shooters did. The article's writer points out that, since there were 4 times as many Canon shooters, it just as easily could have gone the other way.
Maybe.
Sometimes I feel a little protective about Nikon because they've been trounced so hard by Canon, sales-wise, in the states. I felt better the other day when I read that, based on recent figures, they're now outselling Canon in that island country where cameras are born.
I'm going to give some credit to Nikon for this next part, which is that the camera, so far, seems to work perfectly. The VR lens doesn't zoom quite as smoothly as it did before (there had to be a price of some kind, pretty much, for a mistake like this) but the captures still seem about as sharp as they were before. I feel that I'm pretty lucky getting out of it with just lens repair or replacement.
I have a Canon point 'n shoot that's without question a great little shooting camera, especially for landscapes, though it's limiting for indoor people work (compared to a pro camera plus some lighting experience). A couple of months after I got the Canon, the lcd stopped working, so I sent it back to Canon (when they answered the phone, they pronounced their company name "Kay-non"). They fixed it at no-charge, but first they ran a little test on me by telling me that the camera had been dropped. It hadn't and I think I made that clear.
There was a blurb on the Luminous Landscape website about a trip to Iceland -- the site's proprietor, Michael Reichmann, went with some notable photographer friends -- and in that piece it was mentioned that they were shooting on this one day where the rain was perpetual. As I recall there were something like 8 Canon shooters and 2 Nikon guys. Two of the the Canon shooters, apparently as a result of the moisture, had mechanical or electronic issues with their cameras; neither of the Nikon shooters did. The article's writer points out that, since there were 4 times as many Canon shooters, it just as easily could have gone the other way.
Maybe.
Sometimes I feel a little protective about Nikon because they've been trounced so hard by Canon, sales-wise, in the states. I felt better the other day when I read that, based on recent figures, they're now outselling Canon in that island country where cameras are born.
Welcome
August/23/2007
I'll bet just
yesterday you were thinking, "I wonder if there are
enough photography blogs?" According to a
quick Google search, this is
photographer blog #4,800,001. I'm not sure if
that's the number of photo weblogs that exist, or
the number of times the phrase "photographer blog"
appears in Google results, or the number of Jamba
juices served in a small nation near the Equator
(is equator capitalized?).
Whichever, I'm happy to be here and glad you could make it.
Whichever, I'm happy to be here and glad you could make it.