Water Polo

What do I know about shooting sports? Not a lot! I came to watch my niece play water polo, but I came from a house shoot and arrived with only wide angle lenses! Fortunately a kind photographer from Digital West Photography was generous enough to let me borrow a zoom lens.
To see Digital West Photography, please go here...

https://picasaweb.google.com/110790329719487819665/MontereyHighSchoolVNotreDameWaterPolo

Hotel Room shot with an Iphone

I recently shot a job in Vegas. Because of what I was shooting I left my cameras on set. The only thing I had was my iphone in my room. When doing these images, I used the HDR feature built in with the Iphone.To get the best results when using HDR on a iphone is to expose for the highlight and let the HDR software lightien the shadow areas.

Warm Cottage

My shoot was a beautiful cottage in Carmel. Problem was it's in midst of a forest. Any splattering of sunlight thru the trees makes the shot much harder. What I decided was to shoot at dusk, but light at dusk is very blue/cyan. Blue/cyan makes foliage lifeless. Of course, we can color correct for the color, but it makes incandescent lights much too orange. 

After color correcting for the blue/cyan, I felt the house exterior needed some sprucing. I used 5 small strobes...

1 in the entry

1 in bedroom

2 behind the tree for the walkway and front of house

1 for left side of house

The strobes balanced the dark exterior elements and made the house a little more inviting.

There's a view out there!

As I was going thru this home, the person showing me around said...there's a terrific view upstairs, but we can't seem to get the view and the interior. This is caused because the outside is much brighter than inside. 

As a photographer, it's as simple as making the inside as bright as the outside. The hard part is making it LOOK like it's not being lit with artificial light.

Another problem with this shot is there is no place to bounce, I would normally bounce on the side walls but with the all the exposed wood it would cause a horrible color shift that would be more work to correct.

What I decided to do is use large white panels to simulate a neutral wall. I bounced the light on one side of the window, then i mirrored the lighting on the other side. I now had two exposures that where blended together.

The hard part was the floor, I used a strobe on a boom to get proper exposure and get rid of the Cyan highlights from the light coming in from the door. 

Snowball on Monolight

I find one of the most useful lighting tools is a Snow Globe on my monolight. When I saw this bedroom had paper blinds, I thought...wow super large soft box to light the room. If I would use a reflector, the spread over the blinds would be pretty much near the center with a rapid light fall off. With the globe, there's some fall off but as you can see from the lit screen, it's pretty even. I added some other smaller strobes for balance and the final image is pretty much out of camera.