Hi everyone-

Today's post was shot just after we had wrapped up shooting what you saw yesterday. While we were shooting that image Josh Berardi had set up another area to shoot at. So when we were done we quickly went over to that set up and began shooting again.

I don't seem to have an image of the exact set up here But I believe it was shot with just one very large parabolic umbrella as the key light.

There was a backdrop, which was essentially a piece of fabric hung in the back ground. They picked this fabric because it complimented Dora's dress. I included a wider shot to show you how the backdrop was set up.

Hi everyone-

Some days are just better than others... I'm sure you know what I mean, everything goes well and just comes together when you need it to.

Well Saturday was one of those days for me. We went to a state park outside of Knoxville to shoot with some models. I was lucky enough to be able to shoot with Laurie.

Laurie was so much fun to shoot with not only because of her great personality and friendly nature but because she is the consummate professional. She has been modeling since she was 9 and has worked all over the world. And it showed.

She was patient while we decided what our shoot would be, she was understanding when we explaining our concepts and picking wardrobe and as soon as she heard that first shutter click she went to work. It was so cool to watch her work, she made it seem effortless.

Everything fell into place that day and it was due in no small part to Laurie. I could have shot with her all week!

Have a great day!



In this image the key light was the sun which was behind some cloud cover. We reflected a bit onto her face to brighten it up a touch. We used a beauty dish with a sock on it to brighten up the background and accentuate the texture of the building.



This image was shot using natural light only. The best part was standing on top of a fence post with one foot and having Ted Van Der Linden holding me up with the other. I'm sure it was a funny sight to see. I know we spent a good portion of time laughing about me almost falling off a few times.



This image was shot right at the end of the shooting day. A reflector was used to focus the waning light onto Laurie's face. and i pushed the ISO up a bit to bring in some background detail. That's happens to be a very cool grist mill.



As we walked back from the water fall we shot some images along the road. I liked this one because of the way the sun was back lighting her hair. This was light with natural light and no reflectors.

Hi everyone-

Last night I arrived back from Knoxville or Knox Vegas as they like to call it. The trip was amazing! started out in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park with my family and then traveled to Knoxville to attend the Bryan Allen Location People II workshop.

It was fantastic. Hands down THE best workshop experience I have ever had. Bryan worked his tail off to make sure that we not only had everything we needed, but got the most out of the week possible. As well you couldn't help but be effected by his kind nature and giving spirit.

If you ever get the opportunity to attend one of Bryan's workshops you have to do it. They are fantastic! More about them in coming posts.

Today's image was shot on our first night while we were doing some single light studio work. The image is of Vincent a fantastic model and super nice guy.

I am trying to figure out how to present the images from the work shop over the next few days but check back as there will definitely be lots more to come!

Have a great day!



Oh, here's a diagram of how the lighting was set up....

Hi everyone-

Today's post was shot on Tuesday during Carolyn and Floyd's e-shoot. We had a great time and shot at a bunch of different locations. There will be a ton of images to come from this shoot so stay tuned! Don't forget to check out the SKYWATCH BLOG and see great skies from around the world.

In the comments from the post yesterday Larry asked me to talk a little about how the image was created. So here is a bit of information on how it was created.

First off here is the SOOC image:



This is a diagram of the basic set up:



So here is the story- Over the past three years Floyd purchased and restored this vehicle. So while we were shooting he asked if I would shoot some images of him and the car. We were at the Harrisburg Train and Bus Station which is a fantastic location to shoot.

The car was parked outside of the main entrance of the building. As you can see in the images there are a lot of lights that hang under the canopy. I wanted the light that I was going to use to look natural like it might be coming from one of those lights.

To do that I used a beauty dish with a diffuser on it to soften it up a bit. I had my assistant Kayla hold it up as high as she could so it would kinda of shine down on the car. She was at about a 45 degree angle from the passenger side front corner of the car.

That was it. We took several shots and adjusted the location and intensity of the light.

Once I got the image back and on the computer I went to work created the look I wanted. It had to have a vintagey feel to it so I altered the color a bit by desaturating and warming it up slightly.

Once that was done I removed some of the background objects that I didn't like. The rest of the work was local contrast adjustments to bring out the details.

It ended up being a pretty simple image to pull off and finish.

Here is the final image (which is different than yesterday's image.)

Have a great day!

Hi everyone-

I am rounding out the thunderstorm shoot with Savanah and Shay today with something I think they're going to like. They're big fans of the movie Twilight, which was a big influence in this shoot, so I thought I'd up the game and make their very own Twilight poster.

In today's post there are three images. The SOOC raw image, the fully edited image and then the movie poster shot. The fully edited image took me about 3 hours to complete.

Its not that hard to create just very time consuming because of all the detail work that must go into it. I have a few presets that I have created or found that I like to use in Lightroom. Basically similar to an action in Photoshop, its a quick way to make a batch of images look the same with a file that tells the program what to make it look like. Thats probably not a great explanation.

So first I crop the iamge to what I like, then I clean it up. Remove dust, dirt, objects I don't like etc. Once that is done then I retouch the main subjects. That is the easy part.

The next step is what is time consuming. I basically do a few layers (at least) of local contrast enhancement. There is a ton of detail work to be done here so it takes a while.

Once that is done I play around with color and anything else I would like to change in the image. In this case I added lightning. Once that is done then I might have to go back and revisit some of the earlier steps again to blend the added elements nicely.

Once the editing is done I'll go back and look at it again and fix anything that doesn't look right, then I might add some textures or try to create an over all look or feel to the image. That could be another big project. but in these images it was pretty simple.

I hope that racks the surface of how these images were created.

Also today is the Skywatch Friday post so be sure to click the link and visit all the blogs for more great images involving the skies! Click here:----> SKYWATCH FRIDAY

Have a great day!

This is straight out of the camera:



This is the edited version:



And finally, the movie poster:

Hi everyone-

I hope everyone is doing well this morning. If your in our neck of the woods...stay inside! it is hazy, hot and humid here and when I say hot were talking 90's...no time to be outside...lol I'm taking advantage of the weather to try and get a bit caught up on editing and posting today.

So on to today's image...

I am continuing with the shoot we did with Savanah and Shay along the Rocky Mountain Front west of Choteau, MT. As I said yesterday we rushed to get to this spot in time to get some shots before the sunset went away and we got clobbered with a thunderstorm.

Initially we were looking to shoot the girls with a nice sunset in the background, but as the weather rapidly developed we realized it wouldn't be the case. As a matter of fact if we didn't do something quickly we wouldn't get any more images that night period.

So initially we set out with a beauty dish as our light source and me shooting a 70-200mm 2.8 on my D700. We used pocket wizards to trigger the light.

My initial intention was to get the girls walking along a prairie road with a dramatic sunset behind them. But several factors just weren't working out. The skies were rapidly changing, the distance was to great and made the girls look way to small in the image and the light wasn't really believable.

Since I had initially been shooting from on top of a vehicle We moved the vehicle closer to keep the leading lines of the two tracks that made up the 'road'. But it just wasn't working.

After abandoning the vehicle I was shooting down at the level of the girls and things were looking a bit better. The shot was still just not looking right.

At that point Bryan suggested switching to his camera. He was shooting with a Canon 5D Mark II with a 24-105 lens. I switched over, set the lens to 24mm, got the exposure dialed in and we suddenly had a much better image.

We now had the girls as the main subject and not the sky, which was the case the original set up.

We finished out the shoot this way and I am really happy we did. Tomorrow I'll talk more about the actual set up and lighting set up.

Have a great day!

Hi everyone-

As many of you know this past July Bryan Allen joined me in Montana for some fun and shooting for just over a week. Bryan is a fantastic photographer and great friend who live in Knoxville, TN. He is an amazing people photographer and teacher. please make sure to check out his work, you will love it.

One of the fun things I had lined up was a shoot with my cousins Savanah and Shay. I only had a mild plan in mind for what we would do. Other than that I thought we would wing it and see what happened. We brought a long some props and a few changes of clothing.

Well we were out for a few hours and decided it was time to head back to town and get some dinner, a change of clothes and then head back out toward the mountains for sunset.

Well as luck would have it we were running late from a longer dinner than we had planned. So as we were driving the 20 miles out to the mountains the sunset was fast developing before us. Not necessarily a problem abut a line of thunderstorms were moving through and were really threatening to put the kabash on the whole sunset.

So we dropped back and punted. And I think it really worked out well for us. We just stopped along side the road, went out into the field and began shooting. The results were very cool.

All of the images in this series are a joint effort between Bryan and I to create the final image. As I post them I will explain more about what we did to create them.

Have a great day!

Hi everyone-

Today's image was shot in Choteau, MT this past July. There is a corridor of rail road tracks that run through the center of town. Along these tracks are several businesses that load and unload products to rail cars.

One of them is the grain towers. Here there are several old granaries as well as three large concrete towers. Sprinkled throughout the area are old out buildings. It makes a pretty cool setting to shoot photographs.

One night when the sun was beginning it's decent I headed down to that area as it usually lights up pretty nicely, especially against a stormy sky to the south or east.

On this particular day I got a special treat in this old farm truck. I didn't have a lot of time to shoot but was able to get several nice shot of this cool truck.

Have a great day!

Hi everyone-

Thanks to all of you who emailed or commented on Facebook about my Dad. He is doing well. The hip replacement surgery went smoothly and the doctor said everything looked great. He rested fairly comforably throughout the afternoon and evening.

Today he started therapy and will continue learning to walk with the new hip today and tomorrow. He should go home on Saturday and then will continue therapy for several weeks a few days a week.

He was in good spirits and seemed to be doing quite well. Thanks again to everyone that asked about him, he was glad to hear from all of you.

Today's image was shot from a bluff south east of Fairfield, Montana called the Fairfield Bench. This was the first day of Bryan Allen's trip to Montana. He had come from some really warm weather to the low 70's and no humidity. Once we started driving toward Choteau we noticed these storms moving out of the mountains and across the prairie lands.

I figured this would be a good spot to shoot from so we headed in that direction. Well the temperature dropped to the low 60's and the wind was around 30mph gusts. It was quite a change....I said well Bryan, welcome to Montana!

There was cool images to be shot in any direction. This one was looking to the south at Square Butte, a local landmark that looked a bit ominous in the storm. I hope you enjoy...

Make sure you take the opportunity to check out all the other cool Skywatch Friday Blog posts starting at 2:30 today by clicking the link here:----> SKYWATCH FRIDAY

Have a great day!

Hi everyone-

Yesterday we had a really fun family day. We basically just relaxed at the house. in the morning then headed to the park for a picnic lunch and a little playing in the Spring Creek. After that it was back home for naps, a little yard work a great dinner and then off to the movies to see UP.

All in all it was a great summer day. The weather was perfect. But what was the best part for me is to see my daughter playing and loving some of my favorite spots as a kid.

There are a few things here in Choteau, MT that I clearly remember as huge parts of my childhood. One of them was tubing on the Spring Creek. This is a little creek that meanders through town. Its not big, not deep and doesn't always have water in it.

But As a kid I spent hours and hours floating down the length of the creek that boarders the city park. We would float to one spot where it got a bit over grown and then we would get out very afraid to go any further, unsure of what might get us in there.

After that we'd walk back up to the bridge and do it all again. Cree loved it.

After our day in the park she took a much needed nap and then we played and she took a trip to the grocery store with grandma.

After dinner we headed to the Roxy Theater to see UP. I loved going to this theater as a kid and it hasn't changed one bit.

So al in all it was just a great family day. The ones that only summer can bring and there isn't a better place for that than Choteau, Montana.

Have a Great Day!

Hi everyone-

As I was going through past images to get ready to send to Mpix I discovered a whole series of images that I had not posted from the North American Indian Days Pow Wow at Browning, Montana.

So today I am starting with an image that I shot of Stephen Small Salmon of Rownan, Montana. Several years ago I approached Stephen about shooting some images of him. He agreed and now each year I Know at least I look forward to our meetings as we spend at least as much time talking as we do shooting.



This image was processed almost entirely in Lightroom. However, after making my normal adjustments there and then playing with the saturation i moved the image to Photoshop to finish it out. There I played up the blurs created by the lens and adjusted the brightness of certain areas of the image.

This is a kind of newer way of processing images for me that I think I might play with some more. As I get it dialed in I'll pass on some tips on how to process an image for this type of look.

Have a great day!