HDR - MacMillan Bloedel Conservatory

If you've ever been to Vancouver you know that one of the tourist destinations on almost every travel book is Queen Elizabeth Park and at the top of the park you will find the famous geodesic dome known as the MacMillan Bloedel Conservatory. This structure is now forty years old but somehow the strange shapes on the dome makes me think it's something from a science fiction movie set in the distant future. I'm sure everyone who visits this place ends up taking pictures in front of it but I wanted to get more of an abstract look and focus on the shapes. On this particular day the sun was starting to set and so I decided to experiment with some high dynamic range imagery. Below are some of my results.

Location Shoot - Billiards Room with Natasha

For my last shoot I left the safe and controlled environment of the studio and did a location shoot at a billiard room with model Natasha. As soon as I stepped in I knew it was going to be one of the more challenging lighting situations that I have dealt with in awhile. This place had bright fluorescent lighting all around, tungsten lights above the billiard tables and neon in some areas of the ceiling. Also behind the bar area there was a very flat fluorescent light. So for billiard area shots I wanted to get some of the ambient from the lights above the tables to maintain the look of lit billiard tables. Solution was to do a three light setup and just feather in enough ambient light by playing with the shutter speed till I had the look I wanted. For the bar area I pretty much did away with any ambient and did it all with a three flash setup. One flash had a warm gel on it to light the bottles behind the bar and then Natasha was lit with a softbox as the key light and a shoot through umbrella for fill.

Model Shoot - Brittany

I had the pleasure this past weekend to work with Brittany and also makeup artist Jazmin. Both of them were very professional and fun to work with. I had originally thought about an outdoor shoot but because of the forecast for rain on our shoot day we opted for the studio instead but as luck would have it the better part of the day was actually really sunny. Fortunately though the studio has these huge windows at one end that lets in some amazing natural light when the sun is in the right place. I've been wanting to challenge myself a bit more and leave the safety of the studio and start doing more location lighting and mixing strobes with natural light and ambient light. For part of this session I tried some shots next to the windows and mixed in some fill flash just enough to blend with the natural light but to also get those catch lights in the eyes.

Long Exposure - Shooting Star

I was experimenting a few weeks ago and headed out one evening just as the sun was setting to do some long exposure shots. Both of the pictures below were shot at f/11 with the top one at about two minutes and the bottom one at roughly three minutes. I did it by using bulb mode in manual for the shutter speed and then timed it with my watch. For both photos I switched to tungsten for the white balance to get a very blue shift in color but the top photo was then also color shifted in Photoshop for a different effect. If you look closely in the bottom photo you see I might have captured a shooting star or at least that's what the light trail looks like to me. A happy accident.

Model Shoot - Vienna

This is a model shoot I did a few weekends ago with Vienna. We had a hairstylist, Ivy and makeup artist Melissa helping out on the shoot as well. We had three different looks that day and tried some natural lighting as well as some work with flashes. Vienna wanted to do a sexy but innocent nerdy look and brought along a fake apple that had me fooled that it was real right up until I actually picked it up. Here are a few shots from the session.