Website Tune-Up: Portraits

As I've been gradually working on things around here, I'm actually working in 2 different realities. I'm working virtually with regards to trying to blog more frequently, grow my social media presence, and revamp my website, and I'm working physically with the actual renovation of my basement into a functional photo studio.

365 Project Begins

I know it's been a while since I've put anything up here, life has been in the way. I've been busy with some personal things, as well as some charity photography I've been doing for a local cat shelter that I volunteer at. All this leaves very little time to keep up with blogging.

However I wanted to let you all know that I've started a 365 Photo project to keep the creative juices flowing. The idea is that you take at least 1 photo each day for a full year. It's supposed to help you develop your creative eye, as eventually you run out of cool things to shoot and have to make the most, artistically, of your bland everyday surroundings.

I hope this will enhance my skills, and I'm going to share the results with the online community on either a daily or weekly basis. It's hard enough to shoot something and post it online daily, it's even harder to write blogs and announcements and things, so I'm thinking I'll shoot daily, and update my website gallery daily, but maybe will post the results on here, FB, Twitter, and my business blog weekly, so as not to overload everyone.

I'm open to suggestions of what to shoot during the next 365 days, just don't be offended if I don't get to your request. Shots will range from ordinary things that border on snapshots, to full on studio work, to concerts and other things.

The first photo is online now, it's a photo of my new motorcycle sunglasses sitting on the headlight of my new (used) motorcycle.

Take a look here

Swing by and see, then bookmark the gallery or just look for updates on here. Most of these photos will also be for sale, so if there is something that catches your eye pick it up and help support independent art!

-Rob

Vulcan Death Grip In The Woods

Well, not really. Not even close; but when you have a bike with a model name like Vulcan, you just kind of go with whatever catchy, nerdy phrase you that comes to mind.

Anyway, down to the picure details:

A friend of mine has this bike that I always hear about yet never see because he never takes it out when I see him and whenever I'm over at his place his garage is always closed. So I started working on this Automotive project for myself, trying to build a portfolio to create a brochure from. I shoot him an email and he's up for letting me take some photos of the bike.

We head out early on a Sunday morning, get all the way to our destination, and I realized I broke the cardinal rule of portable flash. CHECK THE BATTERIES BEFORE YOU LEAVE! - No problem, I have spare AAs in my bag right? Wrong! Oh man... The entire purpose of this was to test mixing available light with flash in broad daylight. So I do what anyone in this situation would do: I switch gears into shooting nothing but available light and I save what little juice the batteries have (they weren't totally dead, just not recycling fast enough to beat out the power save mode on the flash) for when it realy counts.

We put the bike in a cleared area surrounded by woods and let the sunlight do it's 'thang while I did my 'thang. Came away with some nice shots like the one above and this one here:



You can see more photos of the bike as well as other automotive work I've done in the Automotive Gallery on DIGImmortalPhoto.com

I also did some shots of the owner on the bike. This is where I brought out the flash again and hoped for the best. I knew with failing batteries I would only get off a limited number of shots before I risked doing some kind of damage to either the batteries or the flash itself. So I worked quickly, or at least as quickly as the recycle time would allow, and got some nice photos for my friend to add to his photo albums.

Here's what a little mixing of available light and flash can do:


And here's a little HDR that I did:


I'm about to go from one extreme to another with my next entry. This one was motorcycles, the next will be fluffy things.

More soon!
-Rob