Oh! Hi!

Go Knights!

I'm thinking, I'm thinking!

Dad even got in this time:

Tyler and Tyson

And of course, a photobombing dog is still a good idea:

Tyler and Zoey

Maybe there's hope for me yet.

8th Place:

Disney Gifts Outlet

BOOORING! Moving on:

7th Place:

Blue Dolphin I'm not sure this place has an actual name, I'm calling it the Blue Dolphin. The dolphin is a nice try to attach something of a Florida theme, but still falls short. I had to do the oversaturated HDR treatment on this to make it look better.

6th Place:

Route 192 "You like this!" gift shop I can't help but think that a giant "Like" button would have worked better than this girl who looks like a tattoo gone wrong. The patriotic theme is a nice touch, though, and serves as a gentle reminder to those who may have forgotten they are in America.

5th Place:

Route 192 Jungle gift shop Now we're starting to get somewhere. Because Florida is crawling with wild tigers and gorillas. The landscape around them, though, is pretty accurate for the less developed areas (and there are still huge swaths of undeveloped Florida left - this state, like FunSpot, is HUGE). I might actually go in this store.

4th Place:

Giant Animal Head Gift Shop Looks a little more like a mini golf course than a gift shop, but I like what's going on here. Giant animal heads leaning over the parking lot are always a good draw for screaming children, and the facade was recently restored after fading in the sun. For those of you unaware, Florida is 50% closer to the sun than the rest of the planet, which means all exposed surfaces fade to white over time.

3rd Place:

Route 192 AMERICA gift shop AMERICA! AMERICA! AMERICA! Also, $3.99 beach towels. This is one of the first shops on 192 as you head West from Walt Disney World, and the first to grab your attention like a smack across the face. Between the eagles, the flags, the fish and the palm trees I have absolutely no idea what's going on. And I kind of like it that way.

2nd Place:

Route 192 Magic Castle gift shop Seriously, how could you not stop here, with the Welsh Wizard conjuring the dollars out of your wallet? We're nearing Las Vegas territory here, whether that's a good or bad thing is up to you. I've heard there is actually a magic castle inside the store, but inner beauty is for another pageant. We're all about appearances here.

1st Place:

Route 192 gift shop Old Florida at its finest, a wonderful reminder of the days of the Weeki Wachee mermaids and when Silver Springs was Hollywood East. I can't tell you how much I like this building. I think it deserves another trip to get a better picture. Now if only the owners would pressure wash the lady's hair...

Thanks for visiting, and don't forget to slow down and enjoy roadside America wherever you find it.

First, you need to lock your camera down on a tripod. If it moves at all during the shoot your results will be undesirable. If you're shooting outdoors you'll want to weigh the tripod down as well to provide extra stability.

Second, shoot in full manual mode. It's vital that your exposure doesn't change during the shoot. In addition to locking down your shutter spped, aperture, and ISO, you'll also want to use manual focus to avoid the risk of changing focus from one shot to the next. I did this by auto-focusing on one of my props after the camera was on the tripod, then switching to manual focus.

Now, what about the actual pictures? In mapping this shot out, I knew I wanted a picture of the front half, one of just the dress blowing around, and one of the flying woman's legs. I worked from left to right and ended up with these as a starting point:

Faces and arms Billowing dress Legs Top to bottom, we have the faces and arms, the billowing dress, and the suspended legs. You might be thinking that these look terrible, and at the moment you'd be right, but give it a minute.

The last thing I did (you can also do this first if you prefer) is a shot of the background, completely empty. This is actually the base to start with and the reason you need to lock focus first - if there's nothing left to focus on this shot will be drastically different from the others.

Background Now that I have my four shots, I open all of them up in Photoshop as layers and start masking the parts I need from each one. (If you're not familiar with layers and masks there are hundreds of tutorials out there to get you started.) Here's where the tripod becomes vital - the shots won't line up if the camera has moved at all during the shoot. This is a simplified and blown-out version showing roughly the pieces I kept from each image:

Bits and pieces After applying the pieces I need from each image, the last step is masking out the ladder so the empty background shot shows through. The ladder is what I used to set focus before any photos were taken.

Once that was done, I saved a copy of the final image and brought it back into Lightroom for cropping and final adjustments. Boom!

All done! Many thanks to Heather and Ana for helping out with this. Please reach out to me if you would like to participate in one of these.

A family friend asked me to take some shots of her grandson who, through an unfortunate set of circumstances, is now living with her. Knowing almost nothing about newborn photography, I immediately agreed to do it. Because I like to learn, try new techniques, and also in the back of my mind I knew that as long as I got one good image we could consider the shoot a success. And oh boy, did I learn...

Arriving at the house I saw there was a skylight in the family room that could be used for natural lighting so we set up underneath it. After a few test shots I managed to get this as a starter:

20140518_141816 Not too bad, and I'm thinking this might be easier than I thought. Then the lessons started kicking in.

1. Babies do not have bones. No matter what position we tried to put this little guy into he would just collapse into a ball. Even putting the camera into burst mode and saying "just pull your hands away as I shoot" with the intent of making a composite later didn't work. I might as well have been posing a water balloon.
2. Despite not having bones, babies are incredibly mobile. This may be due to waiting until he was eight weeks old to shoot him, but as soon as he collapsed into a ball he would start moving away. Meaning we have now moved from water balloon to jellyfish territory. Minus the stingers.
3. Babies apparently love spit bubbles. We ended up putting the little guy on his back where at least it would take him a couple of seconds to start squirting away, so his next defense mechanism kicked in: spit bubbles, at the exact second that I finally had the composition I wanted.
4. Noise. At entirely random times the little man would go from happy little jellyfish to screaming bloody murder for seemingly no reason. Probably because he was out of spit bubbles and was now sitting in the bottom of a bowl so he couldn't squirt away.

So, we'll mark this down as another valuable learning experience. One tip I can give: if it's safe to do so, let the family dog photobomb you.

20140518_143454 20140518_143536_01 The spit bubble defense in action.Same to you, kid.

20140510_071707 The start line. You can never go wrong with a giant flag.

I tried to find a unique perspective to get the rush at the start. I ended up sitting on the ground right next to the course, just far enough away that people would start to separate, and fired off a few bursts as everyone went past.

20140510_072242 20140510_071749 20140510_072314_01 One great thing about having a large camera with a flash on it during the day is everyone likes to show off, thinking I'll make them famous or something.

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I'm pretty happy with that last one. Also, what's a charity race without mascots?

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And humorous shirts?

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Having to scout locations on the fly during the race and still get something interesting was a refreshing challenge and a good stretch for me. Also, now I know I need a fast zoom lens for the next one.

Ria Von Strudel

The major difference between my shot and Neil's is since I'm shooting on a DX (or APS-C, or crop sensor) camera I only needed to use an 85mm lens to achieve the effect (this is equivalent to 127mm on a full frame camera, so the focal length difference between my shot and his is largely irrelevant).

Here, I was laying on my side partway down the ramp, with the camera just high enough above the ground that the different colored bricks form a nice frame to guide your eyes to Ria. We did get some looks from passersby, but both of us are far past the point of worrying about such things. It also helped that Ria totally got this concept and even in the process of moving through six different poses never moved from the center of that frame.

Next time you're taking a full length shot, give some thought to getting low - just be sure to back up and zoom in for the best effect.

"No. Are you free next Thursday?"

"No. I can do Monday but it's going to be cold so find something else."

Kim and I met through Model Mayhem, and for about six weeks this is what our relationship looked like. Fortunately, we did find a warm and clear day where we were both free and spent a pleasant hour walking around and shooting whatever looked good. Rather than bore you with the details, just keep scrolling for the results:

Kim Kim Kim Kim 20140403_183808 Click any image to see it in the gallery, and feel free to use the Contact Me page to set up a session for yourself.

20140331_183640 This is in front of the Cedars of Lebanon sculpture. As we were leaving this area we heard someone yelling to us:

"Hey! Photographer!"

Turns out the bouncer (so to speak) at the Stardust Lounge was inviting us in to take some pictures. The place had a really nice retro look inside, so I turned Ria loose to do her thing, and once again she was outstanding:

20140331_183931 20140331_184200 20140331_184641 My only regret is I didn't have a light stand with me to give her the full treatment she deserved, but we still got some good, if not amazing, shots.

Moving back outside we finished up walking some more of the perimeter. Just like last time, she seemed to know exactly what I wanted before I could ask. Thank you Ria, and thank you Stardust Lounge for another great shoot.

20140331_190444 See the full set here. Ria is also an accomplished makeup and hair stylist, and provided all her own styling. Reach her here to get the same treatment for yourself.

That was the first thing that went through my head the day I met Ria Von Strudel for our scheduled shoot. After mentioning her love for the retro pinup look I was anticipating someone from the 1950s. Instead, on the spur of the moment she decided to go for a little diversity in her look and gave me this:

20140320_191455 This is...this is straight out of every rock video I grew up watching. And you know what else?

It was great. After taking a minute to get my head around the new look I started running through my poses for her. Or I should say, tried to run through them, because Ria turned out to be a mind reader. Every time I was about to ask her to do something, she did it before I could say anything.

20140320_185317

Lower your chin a little and...yeah, exactly that, thanks.

Tilt your...yeah, that, and...yes, that will work.

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Turn and...do exactly what you're doing.

Sometimes the unexpected turns out to be the best thing that can happen. See the full set here, and visit Ria's Model Mayhem page to contact her.

1. You need a lot of light to do this. Think noon on a cloudless day at the beach, and sometimes that isn't enough.
2. Attempting to recreate the brightness of the sun indoors is prone to undesirable outcomes, such as incineration.

As an example of this approach, here are a couple pictures of news helicopters hovering near my house when there was a nearby brush fire:

579158_3557869224499_20937815_n

The frozen rotors are nice, but as it was a slightly overcast day when I took these, the light is a little boring and both of these images would need considerable work to make them presentable.

So what's the alternative? Fake it with a flash. Even though most cameras cannot use a flash at faster than 1/250s without resorting to some kind of trickery (that usually involves expensive equipment), this is really all you need to freeze action under more controlled conditions that do not involve helicopters. The secret is in the duration of the flash. Most flashes fire a burst of light that only lasts between 1/1000s and 1/30000s. So, if you arrange things such that the flash is the only source of light in your picture, the duration of the flash burst then becomes your effective shutter speed.

To accomplish this you need a camera that works in manual mode (sorry, smartphone users). First, you need to disable any setting that automatically increases your ISO, and set your ISO to the lowest value allowable - in my case this value is 200. Check your camera manual for how to do this on your equipment. Second, set your shutter speed to the highest speed that will still work with a flash - in my case 1/200s. Now, start taking test shots without the flash, and close your aperture (set it to a higher number) until you get a completely black picture. Now you know that the flash is supplying all the light for the picture. You will want to stop at the lowest number that gives you a black picture, as this will allow the flash to work at a lower power setting and provide a shorter burst of light. The flash that I am using has a duration of 1/1000s at full power, but only 1/20000s at minimum power. This can make a big difference depending on how fast your subject is moving.

After that, turn on the flash and start snapping. Taking advantage of light falloff (which I will not be covering today), I was able to turn my kitchen into a black backdrop for this:

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1/200, f/9, ISO 200, flash fired remotely from camera left at 1/16 power

Don't be afraid to experiment. Here's another one that I took when I was supposed to be washing the dishes:

a_billion_little_bubbles_by_speedofmyshutter-d5nbtgk

1/200, f/7.1, ISO 200, flash on camera in auto (TTL) mode.

I really like that I was able to see that the stream of water from my faucet is actually made up of bubbles, and that the water does not travel in a straight line but looks more like a snake. Both things I couldn't see just by looking.

Have fun with your new technique, and please comment with links to your own creations!