Shake-n-Bake With The Cooks

This weekend I did a photo shoot with the Cook family.  We’ve known the Cooks for about 10 years and became great friends when the lived one street over from us in our first house.  The Cooks have a lot of spunk and action.  I’ll post some great family football shots later.  This is just a preview though and it’s going to take me a few days to finish processing the rest.  I couldn’t help but start on them though.  They were a lot of fun.  Here are just a couple I’ve worked on to hold me over until I can do the rest. 

I like this one.  Tyson and Angie look like they know what’s going on and the kids seem to be pondering what the lines on the road could mean.

Like I said… they’ve go spunk!  They even shared their touch down victory dances.

I learned a lot during the shoot and then learned tons more after we were done and I could process it all.  I felt like I had a solid plan.  I scouted the locations ahead of time and we shot a two different locations.  I remembered to get some shots from up high, as Christi always reminds me, but I should have used higher angles more.  I’ll talk about it when I post some more pictures with examples. I wish I would have used my flash and umbrella I had brought along.  I need to create or better find the light I want if it’s not already there.  I still think my biggest hurdle is rushing and worrying about settings instead of seeing what is going on in the picture.   I have too many picture great pictures except that one person has shadows across their face.  Oh well, I’m still learning.  The one thing I know is that I will get better.

3 Week Old Anah Anderson

Lara and Lee Anderson gave me the chance last Saturday to do a newborn photo shoot with their 3 week old baby girl, Anah.  What a beautiful angel.  She came with a full head of hair and I’m curious to see if it stays so thick and dark.  Thanks Lee and Lara for taking the time to help me out as I learn about photography!  Here are some of my favorites from the photo shoot. 

f/1.8   1/250   ISO 200
Canon EOS 7D with ‘EF 50mm f/1.8 II’ – Cropped
 f/1.8   1/400   ISO 200
Canon EOS 7D with ‘EF 50mm f/1.8 II’ – Cropped

f/1.8   1/100   ISO 200
Canon EOS 7D with ‘EF 50mm f/1.8 II’ – Cropped

Behind the scenes, here is what I learned from the session:

I need to talk with the model(s) about how long the photo shoot is going to take when we set up the appointment.  I didn’t do this with Lara.  So, I was ready with a lot more props and ideas than we had time for during this shoot.  We kept this session down to about an hour with a feeding break in there.  Typically, Leah takes 2-3 hours for a newborn session.  I just need to remember it for the next portrait session I do (this weekend!).

Anah was very alert and wide eyed for our session.  I missed the prime age for getting good sleepy baby pictures.  Leah told me the best time was at about 1 week old.  I was able to get some closed eyes photos, but they were usually blinks.  Soothing Anah by rubbing her brow helped a bit, but she usually opened her eyes fairly quickly.  I was also trying to get her hands up near her face, but she was very alert and would often pull them back.  A sleepy baby makes it much easier to mold them and pose them how you want. 

This was my first solo infant photo shoot.  I stumbled along a bit at first until we took a break so that Anah could eat.  Christi gave me a pep talk and reminded me that I needed to take the bull by the horns and act like I knew what I was doing even if I didn’t.  Great advice!  My enneagram type 9 personality isn’t used to directly taking charge.  But it’s a lot of fun when I do so and my confidence increases.  I took a couple of minutes to regroup while baby was eating and by time they got back I had a plan and list of props and poses to use.  I felt much more confident the rest of the session with a plan.  Writing out a pose list will be a must for future photo shoot.  At least until I can do it in my sleep.

Time wise, I think it’s about on par with the Mortensen’s family portraits I did the weekend before (15-20 hours).  Several of those hours where used getting and setting up props and backgrounds where the Mortensen’s portraits where outside.  Some of this time could be cut out if I had my own equipment and studio.  It was close to the same amount of time editing though.  Just a whole new set of editing skills to learn.

Instead of swapping heads, I was removing loose skin and swapping/closing eyes.  Cross eyed baby pictures are so cute, but most people don’t want that hanging on their walls.  Replacing eyes is tricky!  In my case I didn’t have a good eye to replace it with.  So I used the other eye from the same shot.  How did I do?   I scaled it proportionally and tried to move the catch lights a bit to where I thought they would be on that eye.  Now that I’ve pointed it may be obvious?   But can you tell in the three pictures below which eye I replaced because it was cross eyed?

All three - f/1.8   1/200   ISO 200
Canon EOS 7D with ‘EF 50mm f/1.8 II’ – Cropped

If you couldn’t tell… great!  I did it well.  If you could tell, please let me know what tipped you off so I can improve.  :)   It’s her right eye (picture left) in the middle picture.

The other big Photoshop learning experience I took away was in regards to the black background in the photos of Anah and Lara.  I wanted to burn (darken) the background to pure black.  The black background I had hanging up showed wrinkles and lint.  When I went to burn the background I could use the auto-mask tool which would try to stick to just the black areas. But then it ended up having  somewhat pixelated transitions.  I solved this by taking off the auto-mask and going back over the seams by hand to smooth them out.  It worked fine, but after talking to Leah, it sounds like there are much easier ways to just select shadows, mid-tones, and lights in Photoshop.  I’ll have to try that to generate my selection areas next time.  I also ended up using a heavy vignette to hide some of the harsh transitions on Lara’s and Anah’s hair from the burning.  Here is the before with the wrinkly/lint filled background (hard to tell on this small picture) and after once I burned the background and added the vignette. 

f/5.6   1/80   ISO 800
Canon EOS 7D with ‘EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6L IS’ at 23mm FL – Cropped

f/5.6   1/80   ISO 800
Canon EOS 7D with ‘EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6L IS’ at 23mm FL – Cropped

I learned a lot from this shoot and edits.  Thanks again Andersons!  Keep up the great work!

Too Much To Do

If I didn’t have too much to do before, then I do now.  Things are getting busier at work as well as in my quest to learn photography.  It’s good, but I wish I had time to take on more clients.  Do you call them clients if they are free?  All friends and family right now, but I don’t think I’m going to have time for all the Christmas pictures that people want in time for Christmas cards.  Well, we do what we do. 

Right now I’m working on editing an infant shoot that I did last Saturday of 3 week old Anah Anderson.  Leah loaned me her props and I set up in our dining room which has windows the length of it.  I’m learning some new things that I’ll share once I post some of the final edits.  Here is one photo that was easy to edit.  Hopefully, I’ll get the rest done this week.

  f/1.8   1/400   ISO 200
Canon EOS 7D with ‘EF 50mm f/1.8 II’ – Cropped down a bit vertically

My First Photography Assignment at Work

I’m a Mechanical Engineer by training, but have been doing technical supplier management for the last 11.5 years.  My boss is currently letting me take 20% of my time to do a stretch assignment with the media center at work.  Last Thursday, I got my first solo assignment.  Our regular photographer is off in Asia doing shoots at a bunch of new factories there.  They needed a quick turn around on some HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography done on one of the building here in Arizona as well as some pictures of some new solar panels that had been put up.  I got to spend Thursday afternoon taking pictures!  I talked security into giving me a tour around since I wasn’t familiar with the buildings and even got them to let me up on the roof for some more pictures.  This media center does animation, web and graphic design and video on top of photography.  I talked to some other in the group and it looks like I’ll be learning Maya and Flash also.  I’ve done some Flash before and played around with 3DS Max, but Maya will be new.  I’m excited!  It’s a great break from the norm at work.  One step at a time.  It’s hard to be patient though when I can’t wait to see what my future holds.
Can you guess what this is?

f/5.6   1/80   ISO 800
Canon EOS 7D with ‘EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6L IS’ at 55mm FL with –2/3 EV

My First Family Photo Shoot

The Mortensen family took a leap of faith and let me take their family portraits for them this year.  Thank you for the opportunity and practice Mortensen family!  This was my first “official” family session although I’ve done my own family before just using the camera timer.  Autumn had a lot of good ideas already for poses and picture spots.  We spent the whole time in their backyard which is very reminiscent of my own.  Except that the Mortensens seem to be able to keep their chickens alive.  Here are some of my favorites:

Similar to the session I did with the Dalton kids, I need to step up my attention grabbing skills for those group shots.  I spent some good quality time practicing my head swapping abilities in Photoshop because I couldn’t get everyone looking at the same time… despite my whooping and hollering.  Leah recommended blowing up a balloon.  Kids can’t help but stare at a balloon being blown up.  I’ve got an idea to patent a hat that has a balloon on top and a tube running down it into my mouth (oops, public disclosure…. guess I won’t patent this one).  Then, when I’m ready to take the picture, I can start blowing up the balloon.  This is good in three ways.  First it would grab the attention of the little ones.  Second, peoples eyes usually look great when they are looking just over your head rather than directly at the camera (it make the whites of the eyes a little more pronounced on the bottom of the eye).  Third, who can’t help but smile at a guy blowing up a balloon on his head while standing on one foot and with a camera plastered to his face.  Maybe I’ll make the balloon on my head a balloon animal like a Giraffe or something.

In the end, I couldn’t decide on a color scheme again.  I liked some pictures in B&W, some under saturated, and other over saturated.  So, I’ve included all of them in each of these 3 colors schemes on their DVD.  I’m also expecting to get faster at this as my experience increases. 

To help me see how my time improves, here is how much time I spent on this session.  I spent about 30 minutes scouting Autumn’s backyard and about 30 minutes cleaning lenses and checking equipment before the shoot.  Travel time was minimal since they’re on the same block as us and the actual shoot only took a little over 60 minutes.  I ended up with almost 300 images.  I posted proofs and had Autumn pick out about 20 of them that I could edit (about 90 minutes to download, sift through, and post proofs).  Then, I sat down and reviewed photos, color treatments, and other questions with Autumn (30 minutes).  I didn’t keep exact time, but I’d say I spent about 12-15 hours afterwards in Lightroom and Photoshop playing with exposures, colors, healing, cloning, swapping, vignettes, removing drool, etc.     So, total of somewhere between 15-20 hours.  I’m sure I’ll get much faster.  I bet I could get it down to 5 hours easy.  Right now I’m limiting myself to one session per week, but I like to learn fast.  Did I ever tell you I was the most improved golfer on my high school team for two years in a row?  Good or bad, I get consumed by things and like to learn every nook and cranny.  Photography has A LOT of nooks and crannies.

Thanks again Mike and Autumn for letting me take pictures of your family.