I asked my friend Gerry a while back if I could do some photos with him.He has a great look.Setting it up last week, he said that we’d better hurry up; who knows how long he will be around.
Gerry is in his mid eighties.In season he works at the campground.He has no real need to work from a financial aspect.He has done well enough in life that he doesn’t have to worry about money.But he is aware that work is more than that.It’s good for the soul.
In a day when it is hard to get people to work because the government is constantly throwing money at them to keep them home, Gerry keeps on truckin’. He likes it here and feels part of the group.
It is too bad that more young people these days don’t understand that part of the joy of working is the joy of working.Exchange for that is not always money.
I got him to take a 10 minute break from work and with my Smithbilt cowboy hat and his truck as props we took 15-20 photos.Below you will see four of the best from that shoot.
The world, if not exactly getting back to normal, is at least to the point where one can function more naturally.With that I’m taking portraits again.
My happy place.
Perfect lighting here most evenings and lots of space.Last couple of photo shoots, I’ve been using an old Nikon 50mm 1.8 ‘E’ series lens.This lens is likely about 50 years old.I’ve had it for years and often when shooting I default to zoom lenses, even for portraits.Zoom lenses are so easy.Definitely great for candid shots but one does lose some quality/sharpness.
So… I’m forcing myself to use a prime lens for these portraits.This old ‘E’ series lens, in my Nikon D7500 acts as about a 75MM.In a couple of days I will be able to compare these photos to some taken with a Nikon Z6 with the new ’S’ series 50MM.
I’m taking about fifteen minutes with each of these recent photo shoots.I do about 30 photos.Similar to film when one was limited to 24 or 36 exposures per roll.Pretty sure newer photographers have no appreciation how inexpensive photography is in this current day and age.
Hopefully, I will be shooting enough to post some new photos once or twice a week.Subscribe to the newsletter or check back often.If you subscribe to my ‘portrait’ Instagram account, you will get notification when there is new material.IG: @portraits.by.martin
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I was getting revved up last Fall to do more portraits.I had viewed a bunch of videos done by Chris Knight.Excellent course available on ProEdu.com if you are interested.
There is no shortage of material on Youtube and elsewhere for learning studio photography and lighting.My learning process goes a bit like this.I try and find someone’s photos I like, then figure out the lighting and do exactly what the other photographer did. That’s the first step.The great thing with someone like Chris Knight is that he guides you through step by step.I honestly knew a fair bit of the material in his video course but there were definitely some hole that needed filling in.But more than that, the course showed me how to apply what I knew to what I wanted to do.
The other thing that continuous learning does, is keep it fresh.
Once I’ve duplicated exactly the techniques of whatever photographer I’m emulating, and after I’ve done it one or several times, I gain more understanding of what does and doesn’t work for me.
At that point I can make some decisions of what to add or subtract or alter using other bits of knowledge that I’ve acquired.Without the first step, I never really get to this third step.But here I can add other things like some of the techniques of head shot guru Peter Hurley.
And studying Dutch masters and how they used chiaroscuro or Leonardo’s “Divine Proportion” and working with these until they become second nature will go a long way to making your photos really communicate.The way to do this is duplicate whatever process you are trying to learn. Do it over and over and over.The more this is done the better your understanding and then the better you will be able to put your own create or spin on it.
All dressed up and no-one to photograph because the world shut down!
So, I took to shooting a few photos of myself.All the lights I used had modelling lights but that wasn’t a lot of use except for the backlight.As a result I made more trips back and forth to the camera than I care to count.
The photo here was accomplished with four lights.Camera right and very near and on the same plane I used a Strobepro 63” Para-Deep Parabolic Umbrella with STROBEPRO 600M Studio Strobe. Camera left, a 4 foot Octabox with grid and StrobePro 400M Studio Strobe.Camera right behind subject (me) a 4 foot rectangular soft box with grid. Light for this is ProFoto500. And to shed a little light on the back a small 80MM with a snoot. (StrobePro.com)
The model was very patient while I went through various combinations of power on the lights.Thank god for the remote firing thingamajig!
Some tweaking in Lightroom and Photoshop and this is the result.
I’ve been taking photos for years.I always kinda wanted to learn Photoshop but I’m quite competent with Lightroom and have made do pretty well with that.I could always find a way to do most of what I needed with Lightroom.And silly as it sounds I always had difficulty understanding ‘layers’.Fairly recently, having the need or desire to actually change a background and do a couple of other things that I couldn’t do well with Lightroom, I figured it out.
I was searching videos on how to emulate Sean Archer’s techniques.I didn’t necessarily want to take the same photos but there were a few things that I liked about his photos, one being how he installed his backgrounds.On Youtube, I came across Irene Rudnyk.One simple video of hers helped everything fall into place.I’m by no means an expert yet, ‘the devil is in the details’ and I need a lot of practice with those details but here are a few photos that where I changed the background to fit what I had envisioned when I took the original photo.
There are certainly a number of factors that have to be taken into consideration when combining a couple of photos and I don’t know that I’ve done a perfect job on taking lighting into account with these but for me it was a blast.I’m totally excited that I was able to get these three photos to the stage they are.
My Greek friend Nick. Would love to do some more photos with him but I've lost touch. These were done in 2013 and I went back and edited one of them - guess which - more recently in 2021.
find a way to do most of what I needed with Lightroom.
