Have fun photographing your kids and you’ll be a better photographer

I’ll be honest – there’s few things I hate more than seeing photos of peoples kids and pets. I don’t know why, but it annoys the crap out of me so I try to avoid doing it myself. Naturally I have to take photos to keep the wife happy so I limit my real shooting (excluding iPhone) to memorable events mostly. In the shot above, I took a shot of my son during the first snow event of the year.He was dressed in great colors and acting cute, but I didn’t really notice at first because I was just getting some photos for my wife. Sure, I was thinking about the composition of the shots and all those sorts of things, but I didn’t realize what a gem I had until I showed my pro photography mentor who insisted this was a portfolio shot (something he says about once a year – at best). I guess maybe its time to reconsider my policy on avoiding shooting the kids!

This shot was taken with a Canon 1D Mark IV mounted my favorite lens – the 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM zoomed to 90mm. I was at f/2.8 for 1/500 sec at ISO 160 in M(annual) shooting mode.

Accident or Awareness?

This shot comes from my Elinchrom Ring Flash review. When I sent a copy of this to the model she put it on her Facebook page (with my permission) and put the caption “accident photo while adjusting my boobs”. The reality is that when I photograph models I try to give as little instruction as possible so that I can try to seize the moment and capture them in their natural pose. For some this means I have to give them some instruction and take some shots to make them feel comfortable, but the ones that are always my favorites are when I tell them I’m taking an exposure test shot or that I’m still dialing in my settings on my camera.

I’m always watching my model with the hope that I can catch them in a great natural pose. This is one of those shots, but honestly I wasn’t totally ready so I shot it from an angle that was a bit too low (hence the abrupt crop at the bottom). When the model looked up I told her to adjust herself again so I could try to get the shot again from a different angle (i.e., no crotch shot), but nothing beat the first shot for its natural feeling.

I contend that this wasn’t an accident, but rather it was not a planned or posed shot.My friend Eric Kool-Brown said it best when he said “There is no such thing as an accident, just varying levels of planning” – I couldn’t agree more!

This shot was taken with a Canon 5D Mark II using a 70-200mm lens set to 110mm for 1/100 sec at f/9. I used ISO 190 and the ring flash was powered by my quadra set to 5.0. Post-processing was quick and dirty using Photoshop, Lightroom, Color Efex 4 and Portraiture.

A Pattern Interrupted

Many great photographers have said that there’s few things more interesting than a pattern interrupted. Typically that interruption is via a splash of color. However, how do you make that splash without looking like Sin City? Some say adding color to a black and white is blasphemy, others feel it has been overdone, yet others think it’s fantastic? Since art is subjective and beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, they are all right!

In this shot I decided to push myself to go outside of my comfort zone and interrupt the jet blacks and rich grayscale tones with a little interruption. Granted there’s no real pattern here, but the same concept applies. My interruption is subtle (the hood ornament on the BMW and turn signal on the Mercedes), but they are deliberate. My goal is to capture your eye with the BMW headlight, but to pull you deeper into the photo with the color hood ornament. The Mercedes should not be forgotten so I try to pull you deeper in with the color turn signal lamp 9since there’s no other color object on the car to grab you). This hopefully causes your eyes to explore the photo and the vignette hopefully keeps you in long enough that you make a repeat voyage across the attention getting points.

This image was shot with a Canon 5D Mark II using 24-105mm lens set to 24mm and f/11 for 1/4 sec. It was on a Gitzo GT1541 tripod with mirror lockup and a timer enabled for a sharp crisp shot. To process this color photo I used Nik Software’s Viveza to control the light and dark spots, Silver Efex Pro 2 to do the color conversion, and Color Efex 4 for the tonal contrast filter. Photoshop was used so I could do fine level masking on the photo at various points and Lightroom was used for RAW file conversion.

Beware of Branding

Here’s a shot that I love, but I can’t use for anything beyond editorial purposes because of that Hello Kitty t-shirt. Sure it’s a cute shirt and it kinda makes the shot, but it’s a very well protected trademark that I can’t use for commercial purposes without the trademark owners permission. This is something to keep this in mind in your shots, especially for little things too like the occasional Victoria's Secret branding that will show up on the underwear strap from time to time too.

This photo was taken with a Canon 1D Mark IV at 120mm using a Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM lens. This shot was taken at f/13 and ISO 160 for 1/125 sec using my studio lighting setup.

Think about your secondary subjects

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that the primary subject in the shot above is the model’s well rounded rear, but what I think makes this shot successful is its secondary subject – the photographer shooting her in the background. The head is irrelevant in this shot but the legs are super important. As the eye moves through this photo it goes to the booty, then down the legs then up to the photographer in front of the colored wall, then back to the model because of his camera point to her. It’s a fun shot that just works because of the triangle between these three points connects the dots and keeps the eye engaged in the scene.

This image was taken with a Canon 1D Mark IV using a 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM lens at 200mm and f/2.8  for 1/320 sec at ISO 800. The noise was removed with Noiseware and the skin was softened with Portraiture. Other processing was done in Photoshop and the finishing touches were done in Lightroom.

Fisheye HDR – A New Trend?

Fisheye Forest by Ron Martinsen

I was writing an update to my Photomatix review (discount included) and I decided to process a fisheye photo I took with the new Canon 8-15mm that I recently did a mini-review of here. I decided to cross the two together and voila – this is the result. Hopefully you’ll enjoy it as much as I did, and once again its another reminder for myself to experiment.

I initially processed this photo to look very natural and it felt very boring. In the spirit of wild HDR cheesiness, I decided to go wild with this one and have a little fun. I enjoyed the result so I ran with it. Go to my 500px site to see a larger version (or click the photo above).

This was taken with a Canon 5D Mark II with 8-15mm lens at 8mm for 1/60 sec at f/8 and ISO 100. I just laid the camera down on the ground with the timer, set it up to bracket three shots (-2, 0, +2) and hauled ass. I didn’t make it out of the frame, but it still works.

Go Beyond Black & White With Duotone

Chris by Ron Martinsen

For years I hated Black & White photography with a passion, but occasionally I would see someone’s work that made me say “wow” and it would be the exception to the rule. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was about their shot that made it better than other black and white images, but it had a kick to it instead of the flat blah that so many other black and white images had. When I reviewed Silver Efex Pro I discovered what that magic oomph was and then I took it to the next level by experimenting with duotones. Now most people when they hear the term duotone they think of nasty colors like cyan and black or something really bizarre like orange and yellow, but I’m not talking about those hideous monstrosities. Instead I’m talking about something that some will confuse with sepia or black and white as I’m talking about changing the white in the black and white to another color like white with a touch of blue for a selenium look or a touch of bronze to get the look shown above. This color has two tones and they are black and this bronze color and everything in between on the gradient ramp to create the image you see above. It starts its life as a color image before the conversion, but the result is something I find so much more compelling.

This image of Chris Vaughan was shot with my lighting setup (article) using a Canon 1D Mark IV using a 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM lens stretched out to 120mm at f/14 for 1/200 sec at ISO 100. The key light here was an Elinchrom 39" Rotalux Deep OctaBox (no diffusion at all) that my friends Tim Wallace, Joe McNally and Frank Doorhof told me was “the” light to have – I couldn’t agree more. I lit the hair with a 27x27” softbox and the background with a bare light from my quadras on a magic arm kit.

Post processing began with Lightroom, then moved to Photoshop CS5 and featured traditional editing along with the use of Viveza and Silver Efex. I sharpened the image with Sharpener Pro then took it back to Lightroom where I added the PC Vignette 2 preset. The border was actually done in Photoshop using one of the default frame actions.