Today I had the pleasure to hang out with Marcin Harla who is a great photographer and friend. We spent some time playing around with off-camera flash.
We played around with everything from a single flash to four flashes just to see what we could do.

Due to us both being business owners and professionals, we felt that it was very important to take some good photos that convey the utmost professionalism.

Here’s a couple of images that Marcin took of me:

This one was one of my favorites that he took with a fisheye lens:

Here is Marcin:

I will be teaching an advanced photography class to a small group (max 8 people) starting April 24th. If you’re interested in more details, you can find them here:

http://www.arisingimages.com/miscellaneous/email/sent/20080327_advanced_photo_class.htm

I just finished creating a brief lighting tutorial from the practice session that we did with Abbey a few days ago. For anyone that is interested in seeing the rooms that these images were shot in along with a brief description of the setup and work done, you can download the tutorial at:
http://www.arisingimages.com/learn/advanced_class/off_camera_lighting/

Here’s just a quick sample showing the image along with the room it was taken in. There is much more detail on the link above.

So as you can see from recent posts on the blog, we’ve been really wanting to do more work with off-camera flash and one of the biggest parts to that like any art form is practice practice practice.
Cheridy and I were ready to give it a whirl. Our friend Abbey from our church needed some photos and we needed a model and she worked out perfect. Everything about Abbey was exactly what we needed for a shoot like this…her hair, her makeup, all the fun clothes and jewelry she brought with her, etc. She was gracious enough to be patient with us as we made adjustments and tried out new things. Cheridy and I worked with her all afternoon and we got some great photos and learned a lot in the process so…thanks Abbey!!!
One of our goals from the photo shoot was to prove to ourselves that we could take cool photos anywhere so we challenged ourselves to shoot a photo in every room of our house including the bathrooms, laundry room, hallways, etc.
I will be putting together an educational page that shows what the rooms looked like and what we did to make the photos work, but that’s coming later. For now, here’s some of the pics:

As Part of the basic photography class that I teach, the 4th day is a field trip to the Detroit Zoo which provides an opportunity for my students to get out there and practice with their cameras. The goal is to try new things, and experiment with new compositions and different camera settings. The last class is this coming Thursday and it will be a critique of the students photos.

The Detroit Zoo provides a perfect venue for shooting because it is open year round and they don’t have problems with large groups of people taking photos. There are places indoors and outdoors that provide a mixture of challenging lighting conditions with a variety of subject matter. With a class of 26 people, we split into two groups to make things more manageable and with both groups, we never made it to any of the big animals which is just fine since that’s not what it was all about.

I posted a link showing a couple of my photos below in their original form and edited form. These were done pretty quick and if I was careful, there are a few other things that I probably would have done to make them even better. Here’s the link: http://www.arisingimages.com/temp_folders/temp/before_after_zoo/

Here are a few photos that I took while there, to help illustrate some of the things worth looking for.

This afternoon was my class field trip where I take my students to the zoo for the purpose of having some time to practice with the camera.
The last class will be this week where we do some critiquing along with talking about some before/after photoshop techniques. I only took a few photos today, but decided to play around with the ones that I took. Here are some before/afters:

Tonight we had another advanced photo class and the Dani and Jody Medford and their kids graciously came over to help us out and be our models for the day again. Here are just a few pics from tonight:

Tonight I held week 3 of my advanced photo class. The goal of today was to do an actual photo shoot and walk through the entire processing and sales presentation with my students.
About half an hour before the shoot it was pouring rain and hailing like crazy…it was total insanity! We weren’t sure what we were going to do.
But right before our models/friends (Jody and Dani Medford) came over, our prayers were answered and the sky cleared up for the photo shoot. By the time the class was done, it was dark and storming and miserable again!
Here are just a couple pics of Jody and Dani:

Today was field trip day for my photography class. As usual we went to the Detroit Zoo which offers a good variety of things to take pictures of indoors and outdoors with varying lighting conditions which leads to many unique photo opportunities. I split the class in half and did an early afternoon session and a late afternoon session. In both cases, we never made it to the animals because we found lots of other things to take pictures of.
I am a firm believer that the image capture is only the first half of making a good image. I love to finish my pictures in Photoshop to dress them up. Here are some examples of the final image along with the out of camera image.

There is a small museum area in the same building as the butterfly house and the bird aviary. This is a hand rail on the second floor. I really liked the sweeping lines and shapes that the hand rails created. I flipped the image horizontally so that the sweeping lines would lead the viewers eyes into the image. I added a heavy amount of contrast and saturation to bring out some of the unique colors that existed in the photograph along with helping to eliminate some of the distracting elements that took away from the patterns.

There was a watertank with some words on it. I loved the blue lighting and the bubbles coming up. Unfortunately the bubbles would be really blurry with a normal picture. I used a slow shutter speed and followed the bubbles as they rose up which made the text get streaked which I thought looked kind of neat and abstract.

In the same area was some really cool windows and I loved the softness of the light coming in the window. This needed a boost in contrast, some softening, some added color saturation along with a bit of distortion to make the composition a bit more pleasing.

These two birds were screaching at eachother but it looked like they were good buddies. This was a very simple edit…just a bit of a crop and brightening up the color.

This was inside the bird aviary. I left the industrial look of this scene and added a heavy amount of contrast along with a light bluish tone to give it more of a cold industrial feel.

These little worms were laid out as bird food and I liked the complimentary colors with the rich oranges and blues in this scene.

Today was the field trip for the photography class that I teach at the Kensington School of the Arts.
It was a chance for my students to shoot some pictures and hopefully learn a little bit more about their cameras and how to use them in different conditions.
While we were there, I shot a few pictures also:

Self Portrait in a Christmas ornament:

Today I took my photography students to the Detroit Zoo. It was a chance for them to get to do some real life shooting and playing with their cameras…adjusting apertures, shutter speeds, ISOs, etc. The weather couldn’t have possibly been more beautiful!! This was truly an amazing fall day…cool breeze, warm sun, and perfect temperatures.

While there, I took a couple of abstract shots that I liked:

Today I took my photography students to the detroit zoo to practice using their camera’s in a real world environment. It was very cold outside today so it was a welcome change to go inside to some of the indoor parts to see the birds and otters and just warm up a bit. But…going in from the cold causes cameras lenses to fog up so that caused some more problems. I didn’t take too many pictures today because I spent most of my time trying to help people with their cameras but I got a chance to shoot a couple posted below. For anyone interested in taking my photo class, you can preview the book that I wrote for it here: http://www.arisingimages.com/learn/photo_class/main.htm. The current class will be over in a couple weeks at which time we’ll start up a photoshop class.