Four Light Portrait Assignment

Cadence was my lucky model for my first Lighting assignment!  She did great considering she wasn't feeling very well.  She is such a good kid!  She didn't get into anything and was very careful around the lights.  It was so fun since she is just plain silly most of the time! 

There were four lights involved in this assignment: the Key light (main light), the Fill light (to soften the shadows from the Key light), the background light, and a hair light (keeps the hair from getting lost in shadow or the background.  

The background is actually just black paper.  We draped a blue gel over the light and then metered the background to match our aperture (exposure).  That gave us this lovely medium blue.  If we had wanted it lighter we could have upped the light coming from the background light or used less light to to get a much darker blue.  Very cool thing since it means you can have all kinds of colors without having a million different backdrops.  Just a bunch of gels! Totally fun!  

Enjoy!

  

Night Photography

This summer I am taking a Night Photography class and it has been a blast!  I am a little behind in updating with my assignments since the class is going so quickly, but I thought I would show you what I have had to turn in so far.  Our first Assignment was shooting correctly exposed Neon...I decided to play with my zoom a bit...here is what I got:  (note:  you need a locking cable release and a "B" or Bulb setting to do most of this stuff at night). 

I had some camera shake from my weak tripod (you need a really sturdy one to be doing these longer exposures) and that is why the Always Open part looks wavy.  The exposure was 1 second long and all I did was zoom my lens after releasing the shutter.  

My next assignment was Traffic Trails...look these up on Google and you can get a really cool look at what you can get if you have the right angles and lots of patience.  Here is what I got:

My exposure was somewhere close to 20 seconds...long enough to get the lights, but the car won't show up unless it stops for at least 5 seconds or more.

Next up was one of my favorites so far in class, Moonlight Landscapes.  If they are properly exposed, the pictures should look just like sunlight.  It is best to take these with a full moon or a Gibbous moon.  We had a Gibbous since we couldn't get far enough away from Vegas to take them until the weekend (three days after the full moon).  Wendhy and Ashleigh came with (my mom was kind enough to drive us).  We drove out to Ivins Utah and didn't get back until 4am but we had a blast! Here is what I got:   

This first one was a 16 minute exposure and the moon had just risen.  You can see the lights from the town across the way and the neat part is the star trails in the sky! 

This one was also a 16 minute exposure.  I put a duotone layer over the original shot to make it look more like night.

This one was a 14 minute exposure and you can totally see how much light you can get from the moon...looks just like day huh?  If it weren't for the star trails in the sky you wouldn't know it was taken at 3 am!  

That's what I have so far!  Stay tuned for some painting with light, and star trails!  I am having so much fun!