A little preview of what newly blonde Samantha and I got up to in the studio today:
Front: Clamshell lighting with an Alien Bees 1600 on top and a Nikon SB-900 down below. Back: Alien Bees 400 with a yellow gel.
Alien Bees 1600 in a medium softbox above; soft white-gold reflector below.
This post only has ALL NEW Samantha content in it:
One caveat, though — the new pictures are in the new video. So you’ll have to watch it to see them. But don’t worry, real static versions are coming to the blog soon.
Without further ado, here’s a little video I put together of Sam, made from stills and video of our latest beach shoot, as she competes for Miss Hooters of Canada 2010:
[RSS users, please click through to see video in your browser]
You might notice that Sammy looks a bit different since the last time you saw her… that’s what #3 above was referring to.
If you like what you see, do Sam a favour and vote for her from your mobile phone. Like the video says, text the name SAM to 747474 once per day, and you’ll be entered to win a trip to Hollywood, Florida for the Miss Hooters International Pageant.
She’s also on Twitter and has a Facebook Group too!
I’ve been using my friend Heather’s studio lately. Winter sucks for shooting as I’m pretty accustomed to shooting outdoors. And although our current Toronto winter is better than most, it’s still far too frigid to shoot outdoors on a regular basis.
The studio is in Bowmanville, which is a long trek for me, but totally worth it. A couple weeks ago, I shot a familiar face for those of you who follow the blog — Samantha. I’ve only processed one shot from the shoot so far:
The pose and outfit was Sam’s idea. I lit her with an Alien Bees 1600 strobe in a Photoflex softbox, up high to camera right. The background is dark grey seamless paper, lit with a Nikon SB-800 on a tripod. The SB-800′s zoom head was set to about 135mm, for a narrow beam of light across the background, just enough to give Sam some separation.
But I also did another fun time-lapse video:
[RSS users, please click through to the blog so you can view the video.]
The video is composed of 2,290 separate pictures, glued together using QuickTime Pro (version 7, as they’ve stripped this functionality out of the newer versions). I was using my ancient Nikon D70S tethered to a MacBook Pro running Sofortbild. Because the D70S doesn’t have an intervalometer built in, the Sofortbild software is necessary to accomplish pictures at set intervals. Despite setting the intervals to one second, I ended up with photos that were five seconds apart. I suspect this is due to the D70S’s slow buffering, processing, and/or transfer speeds, but I don’t know for sure as I have no real way to test it.
Music: Anger (Rare Force 2 Meg Mix) by Ryuichi Sakamoto.
Meet Heather.
Heather is a friend of mine who takes pictures and today she opened her brand new studio space in Bowmanville, Ontario.
But before we talk about that, you need to know more about her!
Heather friended me on Facebook about a year ago, after realizing that we had each shot two of the same models. We hit it off right away, sharing our best photographic stories and insights. With Heather based a fair distance away from me in Oshawa, our first real-life meeting didn’t happen til many months later… at Hooters. Yes, Hooters. We had fried pickles and they were delicious. Hush.
She doesn’t like talking about herself on her website, but she’s a bit more chatty on her blog. And if you like what you see there, join the Facebook fan page.
Heather is a hardworking mom and fabulous photographer, so when she asked me to drive the 70km or so to Bowmanville and photograph her grand opening, I didn’t hesitate to say yes.
There were tasty treats from Custom Cakeworks:
Check out this crazy nice wallpaper:
The size of these windows makes me very excited:
Mayor of the Municipality of Clarington, Jim Abernethy, even came out for the ribbon cutting:
I’ve been bugging Heather a lot about when I can start using the space to shoot in, and I’m glad the answer is… now! I hope to get in there before the end of February and have a whole bunch of brand new content for everyone to see.