Photo Challenge

This photo was also taken with a wide angle lens. Basically I used a slow shutter speed to get this blur affect. I also used a technique called, pan-action. Basically you have a slower shutter speed but you follow your moving object with your lens and snap the picture. This allows for your subject to be in focus and everything else to have a blur affect to it. This obviously is of a carrousel. The carrousel was moving and I used the pan action technique to show that sense of motion.

Photo Challenge

This photograph was taken with a 50mm 1.8 lens, using a hot light with a soft box. Again I like to use different cropping strategies to accent different parts of the picture. Here it was just to simply focus on the eye. The liens within the picture I think are really interesting. The shape of the eyebrow creates a nice line that connects to the line of the edge of the face. The darkets part of the image is the eye which draws your attention there.

Photo Challenge

This photograph was taken in the middle of a dry lake bed. This actually was taken after I finished doing the regular photo shoot. This group of people is a very wild bunch and practically started running around when I was done with them. So I got my camera and started photographing them running around. They started reminding me of zombies because they were all dirty running around with ragged clothes on and dirty all over their body. I used a wide angle lens with all natural light. The lightness of the ground sort of made me feel like I had a clean slate to work with. The dry lake bed is a great placed to do any photo shoot.

Week 6 BOC Photo Challenge

Painting with light is something that I can find myself doing for really long periods of time and not even realize that a few hours has gone by, but it is also really tiring. This is probably because you are creating only one photograph in about thirty seconds.

What I did for this was put my camera on a tripod, of course. I wanted to make sure that there was absolutely no background whatsoever. So I knew that I needed to have a large depth of field. Of course when you do painting with light you need to have a long exposure. So I decided to put it at the maximum length, which was 30 seconds for my camera, which is without using the BULB setting. I also but my camera on the self timer, so that way there is absolutely no camera shake from my finger pressing the shutter down.

I put a filter affect inside the camera which was a blue tint. So here is the image! No post processing! Just fun!

Week 5 BOC: Competitive Analysis Project

When I started my initial search for photography companies, I decided to search, "Las Vegas Wedding Photographers," because those would be the people who are my competitors. Of course I came across a lot of web sites that were somewhat decent but I came across one that was particularly interesting. the website is http://www.altf.com/. This wedding company is based out of Las Vegas and do some amazing wedding photography that are very hip, and stylish for this day and age. When I finally got to see the images I really fell in love with the work. However, it was really dificult to make the actual website work. There were several categories across the top of the page that I clicked on that never worked or didnt appear to be working. Unfortunately that is a total turn off for a client. The sections of the page that did work were really nice and showed a lot of the photographers work. It just needs a little bit of tweaking. They did have a contact page that did work, so they are definitely not a glamour site, but a real working busines.

The second website that I looked at was http://www.blrphoto.com/. This website had a separate wedding section and a separate portrait site which I thought was a pretty good idea. However I went straight to the wedding site, and instantly it started playing a video and I noticed a section that said "cinema," which I was confused by. Do they do photo or video? Or both? This is clearly a large company because they are based out of Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Napa Valley. They also have about 6 different sets of photographers that work in all parts of the country. They are definitely a real business because they have all sorts of information all over their site. I am not sure I really like how there are so many different categories to choose from. Seems a little confusing.

Another website I checked out was http://www.redrockstudioslv.com/. My first impression of this website is that it is really cheesy. The wedding shots are very typical and really are not anything quite special to look at. Of course a lot of them are out at red rock (not somewhere I would choose to take a bride and groom) so I already don't like the feel. However I do have to admit that the site is very straight forward, and offers a lot of great information. It's laid out really simple: The images take up the entire screen except across the bottom there is a small bar that says gallery images, and our pricing. I think it really works out well.

Overall I think there was a lot of great information and especially a lot of great ideas with this research project.

Week 5 BOC: Wedding

For the wedding photo challenge I wanted to do something a little different because all I do is shoot weddings every single day of the week. Often I feel like when you look through a wedding magazine you don't really see the typical wedding photograph that a real wedding would have. You get a more posed, model type shot. So instead of the typical wedding dress, I put together an outfit that was of course all white, but was just a dress-slip and a white lace top. I went for a more grundgy, vintage style. I decided to not use any additional lighting, just ambient light. I also used my 50mm 1.8 lens, which also sort of gave it a fuzzier look which felt more vintage as well. I cross prossessed the image as well to give it a different look. I think overall it came our pretty well.

Week 4 BOC: Sports Photography

For my sports photography challenge I went to a gymnastics competition in San Diego. Sports photography is really tough because lots of sports don't allow you to use flash photography indoors while athletes are working out because it can be dangerous and distracting. Therefor you have to rely solely on there being enough ambiant light inside whatever room you are working in. If there is not much ambiant light and you boost your ISO all the way up you may not be able to keep your shutter speed quick enough which will result in motion blur. You generally want to keep your shutter speed above 1/250th of a second. Luckily in this facility there was quite a bit of extra ambiant light, however I could of used a little bit more. I shot at ISO 1600 which is not something I really like to do, but I had no other choice. Overall they came out pretty well, I just would of liked to have boosted up my shutter speed a little more.

Week 2 BOC: Crime Scene

For my crime scene photograph I used food coloring for the blood! Inititally my idea was the keep the photograph in color, however once I started taking the images the food coloring wasn't quite thick enough to be believable blood splatters.
After I turned the image into black and white, it sort of gave an old school feel to the image. I think it is a really simple image as well. I didn't want to give a whole huge scene, just a simple detail shot with an idea of what may have happened in this crime scene.
I leave it up to the viewer to imagine what exactly happened here.

Week 1 BOC: My Photo

I really don't like to have people take pictures of me, so usually I am the one who does it. I think that I am generally wearing a smile across my face when people see me, so that is why I chose to smile in this picture. However, I always scrunch my nose up when I feel awkward or nervous, so I think it fits well for this photo. I'd much rather take pictures of other people so it is just sort of an awkward situation anyways.

Week 1 BOC: Haute Couture

Haute Couture comes from the french phrase, "high fashion." The word couture means dress-making, sewing, or needlework and the word Haute means elegant or high quality. When you combine the two words and their meanings you get an elegant artistry with the fashioing of garments. When each piece of garment is made it is unique to the person wearing it. Also, the couture house sells only very limited percentage of garments to a small number of contracted customers. The profits from this are negligible and usually amount to less than 10% of the gross profits of the couture name or even sometimes a loss. In the book Best Business Practices for Photographers, John Harrington states that "What you do for your earned revenue is your choice as well. However, over a period of time, what you earn must exceed what it costs to earn it-- not just now, but projected into the future as well" (2). So, why is Haute Couture the exception to this common business practice? It is called, "selling a dream." Fashion shows attract huge media attention and gains enormous publicity for the couture houses. A dream of "chic cachet, of beauty, desirability and exclusiveness" that the ordinary person can buy into. How I see it as well is a way for an artist to show off their work. Often you go to an art museum and look at these pieces of work that no one would put up in their house, yet people will look at them for hours trying to understand why the artist chose the composition they did. It simply is an artists work!