Sherry is my wife’s Yoga instructor and she is a champ!  She has a little home studio here in Jamul and she can really bring it from what I hear.  My wife practically comes home limping some times yet still loves it!

While I was setting up a couple lights I was telling Sherry that I never like to “airbrush” people, I like to capture who they really are.  She bluntly told me “Daniel, I have been down a lot of roads in my life and not all of them have been paved”.  Did I mention she is a champ  So here she is, the real Sherry.  I thought she looked great!

I lit Sherry with an Alienbees AB800 Ring Flash and 2 Yongnuo YN460s for hair lights.

Here were the three photos that finally got approved.  Funny that two of them are self portraits.  Anybody want to come model for me any time soon?

The Burmeisters!

Kisses from mom.

Micah showing off.

When on a shoot Adam requires a cool glass of milk!

This one is of Haley Montgomery, a local Diego Artist.  A friend of mine was doing a shoot for her and I volunteered to do the lighting.  I figured it would be good practice to try to light without being behind the camera and observing everything.  It was a lot of unappreciated work but hey I learned a lot  I didn’t take many shots, most of them were light tests, but this one came out particularly sweet.

This one is of yours truly.  I was experimenting with lighting and had a fairly traditional 3 point set up with a background light as opposed to hair light.  I think next time I will light the subject a little more evenly.

This last one was inspired by Eric Curry’s work.  He is a master of light painting and I aspire to create images as intriguing as his some day.  This particular shot was a composite of 14 exposures at 10 seconds each.  You can read more about it on my Flickr.

I had this fancy little idea to to do a pseudo Bohemian Rhapsody shot of my sister’s fam.  I figured I could just take the pics one at a time and photoshop them all together.  (way easier then trying to get a 5, 4 and 1 year old to hold still and make appropriate faces.)  I didn’t think it through too well and lit them all with the same hard Rembrant lighting to achieve the fading to black effect.  When I got down to editing I realized the lighting was totally wrong for what I wanted to do.  I scrapped that Idea and went with something a little different.

Enjoy!

I wanted to get some cool pictures of cigar smoke but I found out quickly that the timing was a bit tricky especially doing self portraits with the remote in the dark…  The pictures with the cigar glowing were 6 second exposure with the flash.  The flash went off and I held really still puffing the cigar to get the red glow.

Enjoy!

The shoot was fun, hanging out was great and the massive amounts of Tri Tip and Deer (that Tony shot) were fabulous!

Enjoy the Pictures, you can find the whole set here.

I wandered from Harbor over to Chicano Park under the Coronado Bridge.  Matt came down and met me about half way through and I got to take a few more pics with one of his wide angle lenses.  All I have is a 50mm (which is really more like a 70mm on my small frame rebel) so it’s limiting in what you can shoot.  I had a crap tripod so it was pretty difficult getting sharp images.  I’m getting a new one in the mail monday so I may have to go shoot some of the areas again soon!  I was shooting mostly long exposure, 15-30 sec,  with really small aperture 15-22, iso 100.  I messed with other settings but I was getting the effect I wanted with this.

One of the highlights of the night was eating at “El Carrito” Restaurant.  It was this funky little taco shop I found down near Chicano Park that was an old converted train car and it was delicious.

It was a fine time wandering alone and hanging out with Matt.  You can find all the pics on my Flickr.

Then I was inspired by a photo I saw on Flickr and messed with a couple long exposure shots triggering a flash in convient places.  Yes I could have done this with remote flashes on wireless systems and it would have come out cleaner but hey, all I have is a crappy speed light that takes 8 seconds to re charge, has one setting (full power), no wireless triggers and the thing doesn’t even have a shoe that would fit my camera even if I wanted to mount it on top.  We played with holding a reflector umbrella (silver lined) and set the exposure to 20 seconds.  We set off two flashes.  One camera left at about 20′ away and one directly behind the subject up into the umbrella.  They came out pretty cool  I’ll upload some of the mess ups as well so you can see what was going on.