Behind the Scenes

Adventures In Christmas Light Bokeh Portraits

   You’ve probably seen those "bokeh balls” on the internet before. You know the ones with lights blown out in the silky smooth background. Well I got together with an awesome model friend of mine and tried out a series of conceptual portraits using christmas lights that utilized the effect. Her idea was to string some icicle lights around a hula hoop and stand in the middle of them for this kind of etherial look. The idea was great, but until we set everything up and tried it out, it actually turned out to not work the way she was hoping it would. Now we could have scrapped the idea and went onto something else, but I knew what she was looking for so I suggested trying a different approach.

Adventures In Christmas Light Bokeh Portraits

Adventures in Light Painting Portraits

   A couple of days ago I did a fun light painting portrait shoot with a local model named Zylina. There were some high points and some low points with the actual light painting bits, but she was a trooper putting up with both me and the cold (HA). When I had first contacted her, I mentioned a couple of different ideas for some shoots and honestly the one I thought the least about was the light painting one. As fate would have it, that’s the option she chose. Eh, it happens. The original photo I had the idea for was this cool shot that I’d still love to do one of these days with underwater lights and such, but in lieu of a light source strong enough that also happened to be waterproof, I had to improvise. She told me the reason she went with the light painting was actually because it sounded interesting and something she’s never done before. The problem here is that it was also the first time I’ve ever done it myself...

Adventures in Light Painting Portraits

Behind The Scenes Product Photography

   So I get a message from a friend of mine and I knew what was coming in the next couple of days before he even asked. He told me that he just bought some more photo gear and he wanted some product shots of them. We've done some before when he bought a Sony A7 and I love any excuse I can get to take photos, so of course I said yes. Last time around we did some more "typical" product shots with very soft flat lighting on a white backdrop using a light box and a couple of lights. Now those are all well and good, but he wanted to go black this time around and we decided to try something different...

Behind The Scenes Product Photography

Bokeh Panorama Tutorial

   Oh yes, the illustrious Bokeh Panorama. It's a very cool technique that took the world by storm in the not-too-distant past. In case you don't know what it is, I've created a video tutorial explaining how you would go about creating this cool effect, which you can find at the end of this post. It's fairly simple to do once you figure it out the first time. First though, let me give you a bit of backstory. The bokeh panorama became famous a couple of years ago when a wedding photographer by the name of Ryan Brenizer created this technique which is now called the Brenizer Method. The idea is to create a wide field of view like what you would see from an ultra wide angle lens, like say a 14mm, and combine that with the shallow depth of field of a fast telephoto lens, like a 85mm f1.2 for example. So in essence, you'll need a fast telephoto that you'll use to take a series of shots which you'll stitch together later in a editing program like photoshop (or similar) much like a standard panorama...

Bokeh Panorama Tutorial

Lighting A Candle With It's Smoke

   Usually fridays I put up a weekly challenge where I have a concept like, for example, last week's white on white challenge, but today I wanted to mention something interesting that my friend had showed me a couple of days ago. He showed me a trick where you can light a candle immediately after you blow it out using it's smoke. For some reason I had never heard of this before and it was the highlight of my week (sad life right?). What you do to get this to work is by blowing out a candle and within the next couple of seconds you have a limited window where you can hold a flame to the smoke and the flame travels down the smoke almost like lightning and reignites the wick. This works due the nature of the candle. When you light a candle, the wax from the candle evaporates into the air and mixed into that smoke when you blow it out is a small amount of wax vapor. This was the perfect opportunity to try out some slow motion recording of the wick being reignited. Maybe this video will peak your interest and you'll try it for yourself. It's definitely cool to see the flame travel down the smoke. Also, apologies for the vertical video in advance...

Lighting A Candle With It's Smoke