Ninoska's Portrait at Fallingwater (click for full size)

This portrait was taken around 4:50 PM so the ambient light was very good. However, Ninoska and the closer objects were coming up underexposed; to compensate I used a strobe coming from camera left at just over 1/4 power and with a CTO gel pointed to her. It worked great and left very little shadow as you can see on her back. To get the misty waterfalls I set the camera exposure time to 1/4 of a sec, the aperture to f/11.3 and ISO 100.

Below is one of the pictures I took of the house:

Fallingwater By Frank Lloyd Wright (click for full size)

I have added link to the full size images since I noticed the quality looks pretty bad on some monitors because the images are reduced to fit in the blog.

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Last night I received a certificate from Adobe stating that I’m now an ACE (Adobe Certified Expert) in Advanced ColdFusion 8. Well great news for me but why do I mention that in my photoblog? Well considering the importance of the certificate I wanted to have an electronic copy of it. I also wanted to post it on my Tech blog as I don’t really have an assigned office so, the certificate will probably be in a drawer for sometime whithout getting seeing by anyone.

This reminded me of a post I saw once at the Strobist about photographing a historic piece of paper. I couldn’t find the post (if anyone knows the link please post it in the comments) but he explained how he gave the paper picture a 3D (more realistic) look instead of having a flat looking one. So, what a great opportunity to put that technique to test.

First the photo with on-camera flash, diffuser on, cranked down to about 1/32 and  pointing directly to the paper:

Flash on-camera

On-camera flash Zoomed in

Now the picture with off-camera flash, laying flat on the table pointing towards the side of the paper. I can’t remember the flash power but it was somewhere between 1/16 – 1/32. The faded bar is part of the certificate’ design:

Off Camera flash laying down on table

Off-camera flash Zoomed in

Now, that’s some nice paper texture! The first one looks more like a scanned image (flat) and the off-camera flash looks more real. One more example of the many advantages of using off-camera flashes.

As each member entered the room they were greet by us (me and my wife), then asked to take a sit at the hot couch.  The hot couch was surrounded by 3 flashes; each one with a different purpose. One to the left of the subject looking downwards lighting only the face by using a snoot. One behind the subject, lighting only the fireplace using two gels (orange and red) simulating that it was on. Another flash mounted on the camera (front of subject) pointing to the ceiling used for fill-in flash. Here are some if the results:

Self portrait @ Strobist DC kickoff

Dianne's portrait @ Strobist DC Kickoff

Todd's Portrait @ Strobist DC kickoff

Girls' Portrait @ Strobist DC Kickoff

The meeting went for about 3 hours.  We broke the ice by talking over Hors d’oeuvres & wine (soda for the speaker).  Then I presented on basic lighting tools, techniques & concepts. The presentation was very dynamic as members contributed to some of the topics and I was able to show most of the tools I mentioned. From there we procedded to build the snoot, which took us about 15-20 average to build using cereal boxes and/or foam sheets. Then everyone put it to the test right on the spot. Some of the results will be posted at the Strobist DC meetup group page (http://www.meetup.com/strobist/photos/). I have posted more of the hot couch pictures there as well.

I look forward for the next meeting which I’ll be scheduling soon. Thanks to all of those who attended, shared and learned with us!

If you wonder how was I able to get a model so quick. Well, that’s my beautiful wife and victim of many of my experiments.