No, I’m not back in some warm tropical locale, I’m just pretending. I still have a lot of the photos that I took on my trip to Florida yet to edit. I’m intentionally spacing out the warm weather photos. Like Homer would say, “Mmmmmmm, bikinis.” Or something like that.

I did this shoot right after watching an informational seminar on shooting in bright sunlight. Bright sun can be challenging to shoot in because it is going to create blown out highlights and dark shadows. A camera cannot record the full range of light and shadows that we can see with our eyes. So the trick to shooting out in bright sun is to plan where you want the light to blow out in the photos.

Well, yeah, you could always go under a tree in the shade somewhere. But I’ve found that pure shade can lead to photos that are kindof boring and flat.

I found that bright sun can really produce dramatic effects in your photos. I find these images intriguing where I intentionally blew out parts of the photos. Some of the other photos that I took where everything was exposed properly seem boring in comparison!

When you see Sports Illustrated type model shoots, the images are shot at the perfect light time of day, or there is a gaggle of assistants holding light blocking screens or auxiliary lighting. Sure I could have done that here, but when you are shooting weddings you don’t always get the chance to shoot when the light is perfect. A great photographer can produce solid images in any kind of light.

Another thing that I learned in some of the seminars is that I really liked a lot of the images that were blatantly (to me) manipulated in Photoshop. So I went a little crazier than normal on these photos with the color tweaking. But no, I didn’t  Photoshop her eyes to be different colors in the above photo.  That’s just how the picture came out.  We’ll see how I like my editing style three months from now. In the past when I’ve picked a strong editing style I’ve found myself changing my mind on what I like later.

More images after the page break . . .

Julie did a great job at this shoot. She didn’t really have any professional modeling experience; she’s actually a school teacher. Hmmmm, is a certain Van Halen song coming to mind?

We got so many great shots that I decided to divide her set up into two different posts. We shot in several different locations around the hotel property. These are just the ones by the pool.

We had a pretty fun day shooting. I must have took two dozen photos of her laughing! She really had a great personality and a great attitude. Just to show you that she’s not all serious all the time, I include this last photo where a bit of her personality came out!

I’ll be posting the second round of photos from this shoot in another week or so. I need to space out the cute girl pictures over this long cold winter in Boulder!

I’m still catching up with all of the photo shoots that I did while I was down in Florida. I’m almost through with 2007, can I get a ‘Hell Yeah’? These pictures were taken at Fort Desoto which is at the very southern tip of the St. Petersburg peninsula. This day was so damn cold. It was 45 degrees and windy. Rachel was so cold that she had to go back to the car for a while and warm up. I was OK with it, because goosebumps aren’t fun to Photoshop! Luckily there were these cool old cement pieces of fort left poking out of the sand. We did a lot of shooting hiding behind them, using them as wind breaks.

I found one thing out for sure when I was in Tampa, there is not a shortage of girls who have aspiring modeling careers. A single Craigslist ad resulted in over a dozen responses. So it worked out really well for me. I was on ‘vacation’, I had free time, and my usual strong desire to practice practice practice. And what better way to practice than taking pictures of beautiful women? I knew you’d see my point.

The purpose of today’s exercise was to see what kind of images I could get without any auxiliary lighting or reflectors. My last Strobist flash style sunset beach shoot that I did gave me some great results. I was confident that I could do the exact same thing again, but how fun would that be? I’m only really enjoying myself when I’m risking failure. Is that really true? I don’t know, I’m just making stuff up to fill in the gaps between these photos.  Anyway, I wanted to work on my shooting in pure bright sunlight.

My main goal was to create some arty black and white images, as opposed to another Sports Illustrated style swimsuit shoot. I took a lot of weird pictures. I’m not sure if I like them yet. I will post them later after I take care of more important things first. In the meantime, Rachel was anxious for some pictures for booking some gigs, so I edited these ones, which are a bit more conventional. They are still pretty contrast-y though. I probably will use a reflector next time.

A funny thing about being a photographer is that when you go on vacation it’s easy to just keep on working. New scenery is inspiring, and leads to more and more shooting. Usually there is not enough time to edit all the photos that you take while traveling, so when you get home you have even more work than when you left! But when you have the opportunity to take pictures like the one above … a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do!

I am doing a beach engagement shoot while I’m here for a very big wedding that I booked at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach Florida in December 2008. Being from Colorado, I’ve never actually shot on the beach before, so I wanted to do a practice run before this important client. So I found Eugenia to help me out with some modeling. She’s never actually done any modeling before, so she should be happy with the way these came out!

Eugenia brought a friend along with her to the shoot at Honeymoon Island Beach. As it turns out, her friend Amber is in need of some engagement pictures, but her fiance is in the military and was only going to be in town for 2 more days. Luckily I was free, and was able to shoot them the next day for some extra vacation spending money! Sweet!

More images posted after the page break …