Valentine’s Day is coming and Brenna and A.J.’s mommy wants to send out some photo cards of her beautiful daughters. Our shoot was piggybacked onto the headshot/portrait session with Jeff Anderson, so I was using my portable Botero background with one Alien Bees B800 through a 60″ Photek Softlighter II. The light was positioned straight-on for a simple butterfly look. The time between the first capture and the final frame was 118 seconds. This is what you call a quickie.

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Local entrepreneur Jeff Anderson of Issaquah Trophy and Award, Trophies2Go.com, PokerTrophies.com and found in the blogosphere as the Awards Guru needed some head shots and knew exactly who to call. The gig was for one casual look, one formal set-up and then another of my choice.

The casual look. I wanted a mixed light look, so I did not gel my strobe to match the tungsten light in the background. This is one Alien Bees B800 through a 60″ Photek Softlighter II.

The formal look. An Alien Bees B800 through a 60″ Photek Softlighter II against my portable Botero background.

Loosely inspired by the look of Platon that dons so many magazine covers these days, I conceived this next look as if it were for the cover of a magazine. Same basic set-up as the previous image, but with the light in more of a butterfly position.

And with a few clicks using the magazine cover creator at Big Huge Labs and a bit of Photoshop, this is what you get for a laugh.

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Yesterday I spent the morning showing Elliot James, super-cool nephew of my boss at IQ Beats, a few fundamental concepts of shooting with his recently acquired Canon Digital Rebel XTi. Besides being a wicked drummer for the band Easton, he’s already got an eye for things as developed through his gift for design.

After going over the guidelines of the Rule of Thirds, the trinity of ISO/Shutter/Aperture, bounce flash, and shutter drag, it was time to break out the shoe-mounted strobes and show him about lighting off-camera. He had been showing me the images of a few photographers on Flickr that he admired, and so I set up a couple of examples of how to go about achieving something similar.

This image is in the style of Joey Lawrence

As is this one…

Discussing white balance and showing what sodium-vapor lights do to color. Also playing with shallow depth of field at f/1.4

Showing soft light with the use of a 43″ white, shoot-thru umbrella

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