Today… was all about light

Today was all about light… experimenting with light. You can tell the skill of a photographer by how well he understands and works with light.
Now I’ll be the first to admit that I have a LOT to learn when it comes to controlling all aspects of a shoot. But, I’m working to improve on that as quickly as possible.

Today I did a few shoots. The first was with Vered – the image above.
I wanted to experiment with shooting into the sun… I wanted a starburst effect and nice bright fill flash. I lit that image with just one 580EXII and an umbrella… I think it worked out fairly well for my first attempt at this style shooting.
I’m looking forward to Rosa’s arrival in a week. We’ll be doing a lot more shooting and playing with light, and will be creating some images very similar to this idea.

Now, tonight I also went out on a night shoot with Beau. I was originally planning to go with Aaron, but, he works early… oh well.
Below is another style of photography and image I wanted to attempt to create. So, we went out from about 11:30p to 1:00a and created the following two shots.

This is the image I set out to create tonight. It’s a lighting technique I read about from Joe McNally – an extremely talented photographer I had the pleasure of working with, with Nikon, at Imaging 2008 back in January. Believe it or not, this uses no gels, and only one 580II.

This is just a simple image, using avaiable light from an overhead lamp in what appeared to be a carport… but hey, just cuz it’s a carport doesn’t mean you can’t take powerful images.

So that was my day of shooting. I don’t really have much to edit tomorrow since it’s now 3am and I’m just going to sleep… I think a good plan would be to get up, go running, and then go lay on the beach. After the things that went down today it’d be nice to just relax in the sand and sun.

Cheers.