The Dark Side

Here is another outtake from a portrait shoot.  I was wrapping up an engagement shoot at Boulder’s Red Rocks Park, when this random guy flashed me a peace sign.  I really like how the composition turned out.

I spend some time the last two weekends up in Estes Park.  My friend Io lives there so I stopped by. She has a porch.  And a dog named Amber. I have an 85mm Perspective Control Lens. And a photography problem. This is what happened.

If you have your wedding at the Pastures of Plenty in North Boulder County, you just might have a bonfire. And if you do, John Howlett from Big Bang Catering will be there to get it started for you. His preferred tool is a propane weed burner. By the look on his face, I think he may have burned ants with a magnifying glass when he was a kid as well.

Here is part 2 of the Steve Z portrait in the hotel series.  Can you believe that I made you wait that long for it?  Yeah, I know, what can I say?  I’ve been busy with the big wedding month of June.  But the big crunch is over and I’m back on track to blog your face off.  On tap I’ve got lots of pics from my trip to Steamboat.  And over the rest of the summer I’ve got lots of mountain weddings, which should provide for some nice Dark Side excursions.  So have a happen 4th of July holiday, while I’ll be here blogging and working on the grand opening of the new studio space!  Yes, we are finally moving across the hall and collectively will be renting 4000 square feet of prime downtown Boulder real estate!  So keep your RSS feed up to date for the grand opening party announcement :>)

Sometimes when shooting a wedding, there is a little bit of down time during dinner. The hotel interior of the Omni Interlocken Hotel has some cool architecture. Chad and I had a good time taking some fun photos. Chad on the lens, me on the landing.

So I was walking down the street a block from my studio, and I stumbled upon a mobile art happening.  There was a crowd of people gathered around a car, and they were all painting it.  This of course, required immediate picture taking.  Upon a little inspection, here is what I found out.

The GIVING GALLERY Presents:

Running On heART: 13 Cities in 7 Days!

A cross country journey raising awareness and funds for struggling open art studios in our communities

In order to raise awareness for Open Art Studios and spread the word about their power to bring community members together we have decided to turn a car into a national community art project.

Cool!

For more information on the project, the journey, and the fun:

Website: http://www.srgivinggallery.com/

Dotate: http://www.giveforward.org/RunningonART

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DofRVAwOs8k

Pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/givinggallery

Blog: http://srgivinggallery.blogspot.com/

I shot this pic in the hallway of The Breakers in Palm Beach. I thought the combination of the long hallway and the two boys was just like the twin girls who were in the movie ‘The Shining’!

I posted pictures from my recent destination wedding in Palm Beach on The Light Side yesterday.  Here is one photo that I didn’t post on there!  Sometimes I gotta let the freak flag fly and take some off the wall shots during a wedding day.  Here I used up-lighting to give the couple an erie horror flick type look.  Yes, this is The Dark Side!

Greetings sports fans! While some of you might not follow all of the happenings over on Steve Z’s Light Side, here is a post that you don’t want to miss! Sport The Dress™ session up at Arapahoe Basin. Check out the full post HERE.

I had a lot of fun taking pictures of my nephews. I’m still enthusiastic enough with photography that I’m always shooting when I have willing subjects. It doesn’t get any more willing than this! Look at these poses!

The playground in Frenchtown NJ is classic. It has lots of old-school playground features. You know, the kind that kids can get seriously injured on, lik merry-go-rounds and see-saws! It was like being in the 70s again!

After the playground we got smoothies near the Frenchtown Bridge which crosses over the Delaware River.

So far all my images from this trip have been in color, and fairly ‘normal’ to boot. We are going to rectify that situation for the last photo.

On the second day, the sun came out and we were able to go play in the yard. Grammy’s house is a cabin in the woods.  So we headed out to take some family pics for the photo album. Things started out a little slowly at first.  Travis wasn’t super exited for the posed shot at first.  Evi is just a big ham and was ready to go from the get-go!

I didn’t want to burn the kids out with too much posing, so I decided not to set up strobes, even though I really wanted to! The sun was bright and it was mid-day, but I just wanted the boys to have some fun.  So I pointed them at some small trees that they could climb and shot away!  These next shots are with the 85mm 1.4 shot wide open.  I love the background blur!  Well, other than the crazy mad adorableness of the nephews.  Can you believe that spell-check says that ‘adorableness’ is a real word?

After I ran out of ideas of how to trick the boys into doing things that I thought would make great photos, we headed back onto the porch. Next I decided to trick them into smelling the flowers so I could take ridiculously cute photos of young boys stiffing flowers. You might think that I would be beyond that level of cheesiness, but clearly I’m not! Can you believe that spell-check says that ‘cheesiness’ is a real word?

Last up we have some extreme close up eye photos! I love these! The Nikon tilt shift is also a macro lens. Handy. :>)

So I made a long overdue trek back east to visit with family last week.  I of course took lots of photos and am trying to dig my way out of the backlog!  I coordinated the trip with my sister so that I could see my two nephews, Travis and Everett.  My first day in Pennsylvania was dreary East Coast rainy-ness, so we all went to Chuck E Cheese in Doylestown.  I actually had some fun playing the games.  I like Skee-Ball.  :>)  I didn’t take too many pics there, but the boys were funny playing a heated game of air hockey.

I’m always following the weather during the winter, tracking the big storms that yield glorious dumps of fluffy powder. I wasn’t able to get away too much this year, just too much business stuff combined with a pretty dry winter.  Well the storms finally showed up in late March and early April, and I was determined to get my money’s worth out of the pass.  So through the glory of Facebook, I found a co-pilot, 2 places to stay near Vail, and we set out for 3 days of bottomless powder hunting.

Things started out normally enough the first day at Vail. Until about 2 hours in the day I randomly shared a chairlift ride with a couple, and the girl had a piece of bridal veil material in her helmet. Turns out they were in town from Houston to get married at the swanky new Arabelle Resort in Lionshead. So we were chatting about weddings, and I mentioned that I have a shoot planned soon where I’m going to do portraits of the bride and groom in the dress and tux on skis. Tricia looks at me and says, “Can we do that on Sunday!?” Fortunately I had my camera gear with me, and I booked the shoot, thereby lengthening my trip another day. Well now I know that I need to get up skiing more often next year! And does this mean that I can write off my pass next year as a business expense?! Look for pics from that shoot soon on The Light Side.

Two runs later I went into the lodge to meet up with Io. She was talking with a man, who had a cute little girl pulling on his leg. Turns out he does energy-body work in Boulder. I asked him if he was interested in trading some family photos for body work . . . Yes! Two shoots hooked up in an hour! The next two days went pretty much as planned. I did a crazy amount of tree skiing. The next shot shows the aspen trees that lead down to the High Noon lift in the far Western back bowls. I’ve never skied them before because the slope is southwest-ish facing and is usually pretty bare. But after feet and feet of snow in two weeks, I was able to hit the chute just to the right of the lift, fresh tracks all the way. Very deep and steeper than it looks!

The second day at Beaver Creek was my best day there ever. We woke up that morning, and it dumped a foot of snow in 6 hours. It snowed crazy hard and I would have taken more pics but I was way too busy shredding. It was snowing too hard anyway. I hit tons of glades: Bachelor Gulch, Coyote Glade, Thresher Glade, Heads Up, 4 Get About It, Corkscrew, Stickline . . . my only regret is not hitting some of the steep upper glades earlier, by the time I got there they were closed. Next time I’ll know where to go first.

My last photo from this set is of a random guy who I shared a lift ride with. His beard was so awesomely coated with icicles that I had to take a portrait. Can you say, face shots?

So, I booked photo shoots, while skiing deep powder. I think it’s apparent that I need to manifest a place to live in Eagle County!

I’m still working on post some more pics from the Vail trip.  Here is a fun little sequence that I caught while hanging out in Lionshead waiting to get on the lift.  Cute stuff.

For the third class of body form photography, we shot with a single strobe with a soft box.  We warmed up with some long exposure shots using just the modeling light.

Then on to some strobe shots in the black room.

But then we moved to the white room.  I enjoyed this high key setup as a change of pace from the previous shoots.

And to mix things up a little bit I pushed the shadow areas of this last photo to bring in some blacks.

This is the second installment of photos from my nude body study of light and shadows.  This week we used 1 or two constant light sources.  There were no modifiers used to soften the light, thereby producing very dramatic light and shadows.

When you go to a photography convention, there is a lot of inherent nerdy-ness in the air.  Fortunately there is a prominent amount of libations that balance this out.  But sometimes, these two worlds collide with unpredictable results.  First, someone brings a Ray Ring Flash to a party.  Second, someone (me) brings a Canon G10 to a party.  Third, someone says, “Hmm, what would happen if you put the ring flash on the G10?”  Now you know.  What is still unknown is who actually took these pictures, because I don’t remember.  But I found them on my camera so they are mine now.  Finders keepers losers weepers.