Rolando Lopez Photoblog

Ninoska and I went to Fallingwater over the weekend with a few friends. We have been there before so we only got the ground pass. While the others took the house tour we went to take pictures of the house and a portrait of Ninoska.

Ninoska's Portrait at Fallingwater (click for full size)

This portrait was taken around 4:50 PM so the ambient light was very good. However, Ninoska and the closer objects were coming up underexposed; to compensate I used a strobe coming from camera left at just over 1/4 power and with a CTO gel pointed to her. It worked great and left very little shadow as you can see on her back. To get the misty waterfalls I set the camera exposure time to 1/4 of a sec, the aperture to f/11.3 and ISO 100.

Below is one of the pictures I took of the house:

Fallingwater By Frank Lloyd Wright (click for full size)

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While enjoying of a bonfire with friends on Thanks Giving weekend at a remote farm in Deep Creek Lake suburbs it occurred to me we were in the perfect place explore with night portrait. We were in the middle of nowhere, there were countless stars the moon was bright and it had snowed the day before.

I suggested my friend Gilbert that he should pose for my experiment (he agreed).  Missing light stands I setup two strobes left & right of camera on top of a table and a chair.  I set one strobe at just a bit less than 1/4 of power and another one at 1/8. The strobes both had about 1/4 CTO gels.  Unfortunately the lights were way lower than the subject’s face so I didn’t get the best results but I had to work with what I had. Everyone else was well into the guitar, singing and the burned marshmallows so I didn’t think about using to human light stands.

At the end I liked the results, although I know it could be done better with some planning. The image has not been retouched except for the copyright addition. Your feedback and tips are appreciated.

This is the end result:

(FYI: The picture is being resized to fit in the browser, to see it properly you may have to click on it to open it separately)

Strobist style night portrait

<Update: 12-04-2009>

Below is a portrait of Felipe. We got the effect by accident as he wasn’t aware he was supposed to stay still after the flash went off on first curtain sync. I like this ghost effect as it gives the sensation of action in the picture as if it was alive. The flash and camera settings were the same as the one used for the portrait above.

Strobist style night portrait of Felipe

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Last night was one of those nights when the moon is looking great and low and you wish you had a camera with you to capture it.  Well, we happened to just get back from shooting with some friends so the camera was out and ready (almost). I put on the 70-300 that I haven’t used for about a year and the final result is below with details of the shot settings:

Details:

Zoom: 300 mm
Aperture : F18
ISO: 400
Exposure Time: 1/5 sec.
Camera on tripod with remote shutter release

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On this experiment I used 2 strobes to create a high-key lighting portrait.  One strobe was positioned camera right at 1/4 power through a white umbrella. The second strobe was right behind the subject (pointing towards the subject) shoulder level at full power also through a white umbrella.  The backgr0und was an almost white wall which helped.  I didn’t try pointing the second flash towards the wall but I believe it would have worked just as well.

High-Key Lighting (self-portrait)

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This year I had the opportunity to participate in Scott Kelby’s second annual Worldwide Photowalk, leading the Arlington group.  It was fun to walk around Crystal City with 13 other passionate photogs snaping pictures of everything we saw (even our shadows).  We even had the opportunity to crash a couple of wedding photoshoots that were taking place at the Crystal City Water Park.

The route went all the way to the Gravelly Point park via the Mt. Vernon trail where we had the chance to snap a few pictures of the airplanes taking off the runway and where we decided to take our group picture (see below).

We ended our photowalk sharing our experiences over tapas at Jaleo spanish restaurant in Crystal Dr.

Here are some of the pictures taken by different Photowalkers:

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Going through my pictures I found some that I took at the live butterflies exhibition this year in the National Museum of Natural History.  If you are into Macro-photography or just want to take good close-up shots of butterflies in a natural habitat this is your opportunity. 

The butterflies are enclosed in a relatively small (natural) area so is easy to get good shots.  Just be mindful to look down on every step you take.  Also I recommend to dress comfortably and be ready to sweat sauna style as the humidity levels in that room must be a 101% in order to make it comfortable for the butterflies.

Here are some of my shots.

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Yesterday, I read a post from the Strobist.com about water drop photography which is something I’ve been wanting to explore for a while; or I should say something I’ve been wanting to try again. I’ve tried it once in the past but it was a total failure. This time I did my homework and then went on to the task.

Humbly speaking, I was amazed by how the pictures turned out and very pleased by how the colors reflected on the water and the clarity of the pictures. I already have ideas of things I will do next time to get better results but that’s just part of the learning process.  For those of you thinking “how boring can photographing a drop of water must be”, let me tell you I never thought doing this would be so much fun and interesting.  We certainly can’t appreciate what happens when a drop hits a surface because of the speed at which it occurs, but once we’re able to freeze the moment we start appreciating the physics behind drops, tension, momentum, kinetic energy, sound and all those things some of us studied in college but never look at again.

For this attempt I used two strobes positioned left and right of the camera with different colored gels. Here are some of the pictures. (Note: There is no Photoshop involved here, I only use a batch process to add the copyright stamp, other than that what you see is what I got straight from the camera):

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I know  that I’m a bit late for this post but I wanted to share these pics. On March 31st around 7:00 AM I met with my friend Daniel at the Jefferson Memorial to take pictures of the Cherry Blossom in DC.  We were late as we were supposed to be there by 6:30  to catch the sunrise. At that time the area was already full of photographers which I guess is normal during this season, despites the fact that it still pretty cold during this time of the year.

Below, some of my shots:

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Yesterday, I had the opportunity to be at the “Soirée Carte Blanche” event presented by The Alliance Française de Washington and the Mexican Cultural Institute. Gina Velasco, a NYC based Clothing Designer, presented her Fall 2009 collection and I had the opportunity to snap a few shots.

I was planning on using two speedlights to shoot the runway but things didn’t work out as expected so I ended up shooting with available light.  Here are some of the shots:

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[UPDATE: 04/22/2009]

I have added link to the full size images since I noticed the quality looks pretty bad on some monitors because the images are reduced to fit in the blog.

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Last night I received a certificate from Adobe stating that I’m now an ACE (Adobe Certified Expert) in Advanced ColdFusion 8. Well great news for me but why do I mention that in my photoblog? Well considering the importance of the certificate I wanted to have an electronic copy of it. I also wanted to post it on my Tech blog as I don’t really have an assigned office so, the certificate will probably be in a drawer for sometime whithout getting seeing by anyone.

This reminded me of a post I saw once at the Strobist about photographing a historic piece of paper. I couldn’t find the post (if anyone knows the link please post it in the comments) but he explained how he gave the paper picture a 3D (more realistic) look instead of having a flat looking one. So, what a great opportunity to put that technique to test.

First the photo with on-camera flash, diffuser on, cranked down to about 1/32 and  pointing directly to the paper:

Flash on-camera

On-camera flash Zoomed in

Now the picture with off-camera flash, laying flat on the table pointing towards the side of the paper. I can’t remember the flash power but it was somewhere between 1/16 – 1/32. The faded bar is part of the certificate’ design:

Off Camera flash laying down on table

Off-camera flash Zoomed in

Now, that’s some nice paper texture! The first one looks more like a scanned image (flat) and the off-camera flash looks more real. One more example of the many advantages of using off-camera flashes.

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