Penny at Nostrana

Penny at Nostrana, originally uploaded by blister gone.

Had the pleasure of having dinner with Joe, Sammy, Penny, Vinh, Nikki, and my partner in crime, Audrey at Nostrana the other day. Fantastic food by the way, but that's not nearly as fun as photographing Penny.

She is the sweetest baby ever, just look at that adorable face! These are more or less casual shots, but the light was nice and the subject was cute so I can't complain.

Doing portraits of babies is really prompting me to get back to the basics. I need to stop being so lazy with Auto ISO on my new camera - 1/80th sometimes is just not fast enough for moving babies. I can handhold sharp shots at 1/80th, but it's definitely not a one size fits all setting!

Audrey at The Nines

Audrey, originally uploaded by blister gone.

Our friends are in town this weekend, and they just happened to be staying at the Nines, a place we've been looking at for wedding photos. We ended up going up a bit to check it a bit.

We went into the library, and I immediately thought of a shot done by Parker Pfister, one of my favorite wedding/portrait photographers. I had Audrey be my wonderful model on the leather couch for me. It turned out quite good!

Natural/dim light, 35mm f/2, ISO 6400.

My Super Heroes

My Super Heroes, originally uploaded by blister gone.

Well, it's been a while since I posted. A couple of my friends have asked me about how to do macro/product photography. Naturally, I pointed them to the Strobist Macro photography entry. Not having tried it myself, I decided to give it a go tonight.

The only difference here is, I have a black background, and slightly more control over my light in the lightbox. Of course, I was too lazy to actually construct one with a cardboard box, so I just winged it.

I used the black cloth that was used to ship my drobo in as the backdrop. I used tissue paper to surround the set so light will bounce around inside the area and provide even fill light. However, I didn't want that much fill light because of the nature of the scene. So I grabbed a piece of foam that was used to package my computer case in, and put it on top of a couple CD/DVD spindles for height. Then I used another tissue paper on top of that to soften it out a bit more. Then aimed my sb-800 down on one of the foam piece openings and fired a couple shots. That's it!

Here are the setup shots: