My Son’s First Real Shoot

May 29th, 2008 Dave Scott

My son Ryan (16) was putting together a video for a project at school. The video documented parts of his life and also the fact that he would like to be a photographer. Well the time came to do a complete shoot WITHOUT DAD present. Assisting him and shooting the video is Ryan’s older brother Jordan (17). Jordan also did the editing for Ryan’s project. I took this clip out of the finished product and replaced the copyrighted music that he used with a loop. This all took me about 15 minutes so I hope you can bear with the quality.

This should inspire some of you that email me with questions and lack confidence. All of the lighting was designed and set up by two teenagers. Don’t over think your lighting. Remember, main light, fill (if needed), accent light (if needed and/or you want it), and background light (if needed and/or you want it). For this shoot the guys used a medium softbox at f8.0, fill light was a white, reflective umbrella at f5.6, hair light was a 7 inch reflector with a 20 degree grid at f8.0.5 (yes, we still use a light meter that is about a couple decades old), and the background light is a 7 inch reflector with a 20 degree grid at f8.0.5.

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Posted in Equipment, Misc, Shooting | 1 Comment »

OTW - Sheba Wheeler’s First Wedding

May 28th, 2008 Dave Scott

For those of you that don’t know her, my friend, Sheba Wheeler is a writer for the Denver Post. She is an aspiring photographer who is documenting just about everything dealing with her journey into professional photography. I know I’ve said it before but it’s worth mentioning again. I enjoy reading her blog and reminiscing about my early days. The image in this post is from bridal session that she shot. She will be covering her first wedding for the bride-to-be shown above.

Best wishes to you Sheba!

You can view Sheba’s blog here.

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Posted in On The Web | 2 Comments »

Mark Your Web Images

May 19th, 2008 Dave Scott

One of my images has been hijacked. I was looking through my log files and I saw reference to one of my images and the referrer page was not on my website. My image was being used on another web page while being served from my server. This image is on the news page of my website and, unfortunately, I never marked the image with my copyright information. Well, it now has my copyright and website marked on it so the guy hijacking it now is doing a bit of advertising for me. I have sent hijacker an email and will report if he takes the image down.

You can see the page HERE.

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Posted in Misc | 1 Comment »

Keep It Simple When Time Is Very Limited

May 17th, 2008 Dave Scott

My oldest son, Jordan, is a vocalist and he was one of the leads in the musical Fiorello which was performed by his high school drama and vocal classes. I decided to offer to shoot photos for the performers because of their dedication to the project. They were rehearsing into the night. They were also serving as their own stage crew.

During the final dress rehearsal I found that the stage lighting was not acceptable for photographs. There were far too many hot spots and dark spots. We ended up shooting with our strobes in the two hour time slot between the final two performances.

Because time was so limited and the sets and the cast would vary I went with a lighting set up that offered a lot of soft, even coverage. Two 400 w/s monolights were placed just out of camera view stage left and stage right. Two 400 w/s monolights in reflective white umbrellas were also just out of camera view (left and right) and at the front of the stage. I also added a Nikon SB-800 with its diffusion dome at the middle of the stage near the first row of seats to kick a little light into the shadows. My background metered half way between f5.6 and f8. The subject area metered at f8. I used an 85 mm lens from about 8 rows back.

Ryan and I worked extremely hard to get everyone included. We ended up just getting our cart full of equipment off the stage right when seating for the final show began.

Oh yeah, Jordan played the part of Morris and is the seated, middle aged man in the above photograph.

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