There was a good two day period where I just couldn’t get over the phrase “Wicked Pissah’”; a rare phrase only ever used or heard of in Maine.  Alissa finally understood what it meant after I lost my footing on a slippery rock and fell into Sebago Lake with my camera.  That…was a wicked pissah’!  Aside from my little accident, our trip to Maine was great.  Everything about Maine is fresh;  the air, the water, everything.  With Maine, I think of lobsters, blueberries, apple cider, Sebago lake, Amato’s Ham Italians, Whoopie Pies, Pizza by Alex, pine trees, family and friends.  If you’ve never been, you need to go at least once in your life.  Here are a few of my favorites from our 2011 trip.

You can see more photos of our family, taken by our friend Susan Mullen (<— Click) who also happens to be a fantastic wedding photographer!    I wish we lived closer or had a lot of destination wedding clients to tackle!

With a jug of Starbucks Bold and a double batch of chocolate chip cookies courtesy of my wife, I was ready to go Sunday morning as the crew at Last Tangle Salon, Lora Wade Artistry and Rachel from Nuance Boutique continually pumped out model after model.  Never a dull moment.

With all of my recent travel, preparations for a new addition to the family and my degree of personal selectivity I’m still editing files but here’s a sneak peek for anyone who hasn’t been to my facebook page in a while.  Angela, (top image, below) has got to be my favorite model of the 30 or so I’ve shot with over the past two years.  Her images rock!  Maybe it’s because she different, and different reigns supreme.

If you’re looking at these photos wishing you could have something just like them…contact me.  You wouldn’t believe what I can do with something as simple as a plain wall in even the smallest of spaces.  A match.com profile full of professional photos!  Now there’s a way to kick off the spring for all of you singletons.  I’ll even bring the cookies.

As I write this it’s going on midnight and I can hear the freezing rain bouncing off the front of our house.  It was less than a half hour ago that all of the dishes were done and put away after a long day preparing food for Christmas weekend in St. Charles, Iowa.  Alissa and I make a good team in the kitchen.  She does a wonderful job with the baking and I “try” to do the cooking.  The problem is I cook with a lot of vegetables….probably more than she cares for.  For this Christmas, I decided to make a tomato basil bisque (all vegetables, lol).  As I began looking at recipes, I noticed that every recipe was significantly different so I ditched the recipe all together and decided to figure it all out once I got to the grocery store.  First off, a bisque is really nothing more than a creamy soup.  To make a soup creamy…you simply add cream and since bisque is french, I thought I’d start with a Mirepoix, which is the french name for a combination of onion, celery and carrots in a 2:1:1 ratio.  In this instance I decided to mix up my onions a bit, so instead of going with all white onion, I used one white, one red and one leek.  If you didn’t know, a leek is in the onion family.  On top of the Mirepoix, I added 5 lbs of ripened tomatoes of different varieties, a red pepper, plenty of garlic, fresh basil, extra virgin olive oil, vegetable stock, a touch of tomato paste, and seasonings.  Once it cooked down, I pureed it all in a food processor, added 16 oz of Shatto cream and it was ready to serve.  For garnish, I made some giant homemade croutons from a loaf of Italian bread, olive oil and freshly ground salt and pepper.  I also snuck in a sprinkle or two of cayenne pepper;  I wonder how many comments I’ll get about having spicy croutons?

After tasting my creation I decided the next time I would omit most, if not all of the red pepper.  It took away too much of the tomato flavor which is what I was after.  Still very delicious!

Without a doubt, the coldest photo shoot I’ve ever done.  Wearing layers, gloves and a hat, I arrived on location to find Lauren hardly in a coat.  No one ever said looking pretty meant being warm!  We had to work fast as the point of diminishing returns was going to come fast.  Aside from a near vicious dog attack and my numb hands, it was a good shoot and the first Modelmayhem shoot of 2010…better late than never.

Everything I shot involved either natural light or the use of one speedlight.  For all of the shots below I used the Sunpak 120J flash unit,  28″ Apollo softbox, a 60″ convertible umbrella or a 20 degree grid.  Thankfully there was enough of an overcast to kill all the ambient light for some of these shots as waiting until dusk wasn’t an option.

Instead of just presenting the photos as with previous blog posts I thought I’d give more of the thought process behind each one, how I composed it and how I decided to light it.

Before I took this shot I knew I wanted to create some separation between Lauren, the foreground and background.  The field had some tall grasses which gave me some foreground to work with.  I asked Lauren to stand next to some trees  that had a few protruding branches sticking out which I wanted to be on the same focal plane as she was.  Everything behind her, at varying distances provided nice background separation.

I selected the Nikon AF-S 70-200 f/2.8 VRI and stood a good 25 feet from Lauren, set my exposure and simply asked her to stand still with her hands in her pockets….she did great didn’t she?  This shot is actually 10 or 12 shots which I later stitched together in Photoshop to create one image.  If I’ve confused you, let me explain.  Look at the above image and picture it as a blank canvas.  Now in your mind, divide the canvas into 12 equal areas in a grid pattern.  As I compose the image, each individual area (12 total) is 1 photo.  This technique has been called a couple of different things such as the Brenizer method, after NYC Wedding Photographer Ryan Brenizer, who reintroduced the technique.

Are you wondering why I’d choose to take 12 photos to create 1 instead of just taking 1 photo? In short, it gives the image the look as if it were shot with a medium format camera.  Using a telephoto lens with a shallow depth of field we make it appear as if it were taken with a wide angle lens.  A wide angle lens on it’s own simply cannot produce these results on a DSLR.   If you want the full technical write up, I’ll refer you here to read Ryan’s explanation and directions.  Some like the results, some don’t.  I sometimes do it because it’s different and I like the way it looks.

No crazy photographer tactics on this one!  I still had the 70-200 lens on my camera so that’s what I went with here.  As I looked around for different areas that would make interesting shots, I asked her to stand in the center of a very small patch of waist high grass.  Again, hands in the pockets for a more casual look, plus it was only 22 degrees.  Although this shot wouldn’t lead you to believe it,  to the immediate right was an ugly tree stump and to the left was a dwarfed evergreen tree.  I kept the framing nice and tight and the end result is the much overdone girl in the grass shot.  I like the way her jacket contrasts against the rest of the image and the light shadow under her neck to help define her face.

Time to do a little off camera lighting.  One of the jackets Lauren brought with her had a faux fur collar.  As soon as I saw it, this shot popped into my mind.  I asked her to pull the hood up over her styled hair (darn photographers) and pull it in close to her face.  She later dubbed this shot “Chewbacca”.  For this shot I used the 120J speedlight fired into 60″ umbrella.  As I took a few test shots I wasn’t getting quite the amount of shadows I wanted because the umbrella was such that it filled them all in.  To fix that, I partially closed the umbrella and tried again.  I needed to make sure that the shadow from the nose wasn’t intersecting the lip and the shadow from the eyebrow wasn’t preventing the light from lighting the left eye.  After a few more adjustments, I got what I was looking for; catchlights in the eyes, a few shadows to give her face some depth and the big furry collar to bring it all together. I would have liked for there to be a little less light on the far (left) side of her face.  Something for next time.

This past Sunday I met up with the family who won my photo session from June’s silent auction.  I met Matt, Julia and their two children Drake and Marshall at Shawnee Mission Park to take some family photos.  Good thing I decided to take a look at the sunrise/sunset calendar prior to scheduling their session as Sunday was Daylight Savings Time; sundown=5:12PM!  How I wish the long days of summer would come back.  With Thanksgiving just around the corner, winter will be here before we know it and their session was likely my last outdoor session for the year.  The winter months for photographers are slow, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  My camera will get a much needed vacation to Nikon to be cleaned and I can start preparing my marketing tools for the spring senior rush.  Here are a couple photos from Sunday.

With the internet modeling community becoming more popular now than ever before I thought I’d make a post to answer some of the email requests I get.  It seems as if every day there are hundreds of new model hobbyists popping up on one of the many internet modeling / social media sites such as Model Mayhem.  While I’ve met and worked with several very talented models I have gotten pretty good at spotting just another pretty face, from a model who works hard and takes pride in their hobby.  These social media sites are a place for models, photographers, clothing designers, makeup artists and hair stylists connect and collaborate.  I started using these sites almost two years ago and had the opportunity to work with some very talented people.

One of those super talented friends, Nori, recently posted a video on YouTube talking about TFP which I felt covered the topic well.  If you’re new to the community or new to the term, take a minute and educate yourself.  (Excuse her video etiquette, but she does have a pretty one of a kind portfolio!

I don’t accept alot of TFP work currently but enjoy it once or twice a year to try a few new techniques or to maintain my editing skills which I don’t normally get to use when editing weddings or portrait shoots.  The last TFP shoot I did was with Jessica down in the West Bottoms to practice with the creative use of off camera lighting.  Since I do so few of these each year, I have quite a bit of fun with them and actually learn a thing or two.  In the end it’s all about being effective and efficient and that’s something I want to pass along to my clients.