Today my 7-year old daughter Keely, tried her hand at doing face painting … on my 2-year old son, Henry.

I happened to be setting up for headshots I’m doing on Tuesday, and my daughter decided now that she has mastered the art of painting on faces, to try her hand at doing photography. She gave Henry explicit directions on how to pose (which of course went on deaf ears), and then manned the camera (with my careful eyes on her making sure she wouldn’t break anyting) and snapped off a few shots. I was able to salvage a few somewhat usable images. I think it’s time for me to spend some time now educating Keely on the art of photography. I think she is showing a liking to it.

The headshots were all taken at her home (where her mother makes some delicious lemonade) in the family room / living room area. The home had a beautiful wood floor, and it made a great background as I shot from high above.

I think Valeria had a great time — once she got over a bit of nervousness in the beginning — and I hope I was able to help her land a great role in the future.

Lighting Information:

Clamshell lighting with two 43″ umbrella’s and 580EXs.

Top umbrella – 1/8 power
Bottom umbrella – 1/32 power

Hairlight from snooted 285HV at 1/16 power

I had been using many off-camera strobes for lighting the previous headshots I’ve taken in the past, which generally means I must stop down my lens into the f/8-f/11 range and thus increasing my depth of field. Which is perfectly fine for a portrait or corporate headshot. With this photo session, I decided to try something different , using the giant softbox that Mother Nature provided — gray cloud-filled skies — and a white foamcore board just below the subject to fill in the shadows. This allowed me to use my 135mm lens at f/2, with a sliver of DOF, and really concentrate on getting the eyes tack sharp to draw the viewer immediately to the eyes.

I’m going to use this technique much more in the future.

The headshots were taken on-location so not to interrupt their daily workload.

The setup for these photographs was an Alien Bee 800 with large softbox camera right, with a reflector camera left for fill. I also place a foamcore board on table in front of subjects to help fill in light under the chin. I used a blue paper backdrop with an Alien Bee 400 and 40-degree grid to create the background light.

I was resorting to setting a timer on my camera and then running over to the chair to capture myself in the frame to check my lighting. Luckily, after only a few laps from camera to chair and back, my son came home from work. He is on the grounds crew at Mountain Branch Golf Course in Joppa. Of course he was all sweaty and wanted a shower, but he was more than happy to sit in for a couple test shots.

There is something about this image I really like, and I thought I’d share.

This is taken with a large softbox to camera right and a white foamboard camera left. I had a second light with grid hitting the background from left to right. I normally would have the backlight directly behind the subject, but in this test setup I was limited on the amount of space between the subject and the backdrop.

Yesterday I was out shooting a boy’s soccer game for the Baltimore Examiner. Before the start of the game I was shootin’ the breeze with Examiner sports writer Sean Welsh. I haven’t seen Sean in a while and we were catching up on what was going on with each other.

The girls at the scoring table noticed me with my camera and started shouting to take their pictures. I am surprised how often I get asked, when shooting sports for the media, to take pictures of people in the stands, sidelines, etc. I was about 50 feet away from the scorer’s table, but I did have my trusty 120-300mm lens and proceeded to snap a few images of the girls. In the back of my mind I’m thinking, “ok, these will go right into the rejected bin”, for as hard as it is to believe, the paper wants images from the actual game.

When I got home and began to go through my images to select the shots to submit, I was pleasantly surprised to see the image above. Other than the white scorer’s table in the background, this shot looks as though it was taken during a photo shoot.

Hmmm, maybe I should just have clients show up at football and soccer games and take their pictures during timeouts.

Oh, by the way, Fallston defeated Dulaney 3-2.

Inspired by the images of Brent Williamson I decided to try a bit of crosslighting this afternoon.

With the beautiful warm late afternoon sun to work with shining onto the subject from the right, I setup a 580EX off to the left about 15 feet away at 1/32 power. Triggered using pocket wizards, the direct flash put just enough light into the dark shadow areas for a pleasing photograph. The idea is to use the flash in a very subtle way as to not even look like flash was used.

This is a very simple setup. If you don’t have pocket wizards, an off-camera sync cord will work just as well.