Product shoots are a mixed bag

Hand puppets for children, seriously.

Kathryn @ Torrey Pines

Ok, so more insights on dance photography.

Lets start with silhouettes ( which are apparently harder to spell than to shoot ). Shooting silhouettes is great, mostly because it's easy. Why fight the sun by trying to light your subject, am I right? No worrying about flash recycle times, maximum sync speeds, or all of those other things I hate about using a speedlite.

So it's as easy as exposing for the sunset and you'll get a shutter speed plenty fast enough ( even at ISO 250 ) to freeze the awesome dance action.

There are obviously a lot of ways to retouch silhouettes, but these in particular I haven't modified very much. I would have liked to get even more contrast in the original exposure to make Kathryn's figure silhouette-out entirely but there is a huge bluff at Torrey Pines that reflects the sun back towards the water.

We worked for awhile with this sheer fabric thing and got a few good shots. The wind was blowing hard enough that we had to cooperate with it. It looks pretty cool but I've seen it photographed better.

Note: I spent a lot of time staring at the sun during this shoot which I do not recommend. When I got tired of it I just started shooting from the hip and hand-held just inches off the sand. The wide lens and low angles help dramatize the landscape and dancer.

Heres an alternative using the sun as key light rather than backlight. As long as you keep your model facing the sunset it works pretty well and there are plenty of opportunities for profiles with dance.

Kathryn teaches ballet and it shows in her dance. Shes so trained and reliable that she can reproduce the same leap for me five times so I can get the timing right. And like a good actor, it's great to be working with a dancer who can both improvise and take direction.

And let me mention how freezing it was... We finally had to give up when Kathryn's feet got so cold she couldn't point her toes anymore. She was a really good sport about the whole thing. You can see in the background that this was not a particularly popular time to be prancing around in the surf.

I probably could have kept more footprints out of the sand also but I'm not a perfectionist.

Jason & Jen's engagement @ Balboa Park

I headed out to Balboa Park this past Sunday to shoot some engagement portraits for Jason and Jen:

Jason planned a surprise vacation from Colorado to pop the question here in San Diego, which he did the night before our shoot. Unfortunately the weather wasn't typical of San Diego ( and they did get out of town before the storm ), but we made the most of the last overcast hours of the day.

Their personalities and smiles helped keep the mood lighthearted and we quickly covered a lot of locations.

I did my best to provide the historical background of the

park... "Who was Balboa? Umm.." and I felt I gave a pretty good tour.

Engagement shoots can be challenging for a variety of reasons but I find striking a balance of candid and conceptual ( cheesy ) shots is the most difficult. Trying to shoot two different styles simultaneously is a tough state of mind to maintain. I'm always just trying to give my clients variety so they're left with options in the editorial process.

Another challenge is to capture the personalities and character of people who you've had very little interaction with. This is a talent I've had success in refining. I can generally have people laughing at themselves ( or me ) within just a few minutes.

At the end of the day it's all about getting people animated and looking like they love each other! ( A lot of engagement photographers are so avant garde these days their subjects don't even appear to like each other. But thats a rant I'll save for later... )

Book Recommendation: The Tao of Photography

I would never recommend a book that I haven't read, and this one I thoroughly enjoyed. The Tao of Photography ( Gross, Shapiro ) is a hybrid of a text and coffee table book including lots of full page images as examples as well as exercises to develop one's photo-chi.

The authors reference the work of several famous photographers but place a lot of emphasis on Henri Cartier Bresson. All the examples and discussion are based on the black and white process, but the concepts can easily be extrapolated to a color format.

Photography is actually a great way to practice mindfulness. It is in all truth an art form based on how to look at things. This book does a good job of convincing the reader to break down guidelines for what makes a 'good' subject, or even a 'good' photograph. There is almost no discussion of the technical aspects of cameras, but instead an emphasis on process and composition.

Being someone who has studied photography up and down, I can say that this book provided a refreshing new way to think. It helps put motivation and sense of purpose back at the forefront of shooting.

Available at Amazon. And you can get it used for under $10.

Katie and Kevin Tritch - Jan 9th 2009

I had a great day Saturday shooting the wedding of Katie & Kevin Tritch down here in sunny San Diego. To say that this was a beautiful wedding wouldn't begin to do it justice. These are the kinds of events where I'm challenged to make sure everything looks as amazing in the camera as it does in reality.



The ceremony was held on the USD campus ( Katie's alma-mater ) in The Immaculata chapel. Everything was stress free from the start and I've rarely seen an event run so smoothly.

I had my friend Mike Patterson of Oalian Photography help me out with shooting the ceremony and following portrait session. He rounded out my focus on the traditional shots by getting candids and alternative angles whenever possible. Working with a 2nd shooter can really alleviate some of the pressure of working on such a tight schedule. The only real drawback is having another thousand images or so to manage. ( I left this wedding with 56 gigs of photographs ) Some photographers may disagree with me, but shooting everything in RAW is the best policy if you've got the storage media.

Around sunset the whole gang headed down to the Naval Submarine Station in Point Loma for more photo ops and the reception. I had never been on the base ( or shot a Navy wedding before for that matter ). It was a perfect venue with a deck that opened to the ocean.











Now I've said that I've seen some families that know how to party before but the Kavanaugh / Tritch clan might top them all. The dance floor was raging with a bunch of uniforms and even grandma. By the time I headed out around 10pm there was no sign of anybody slowing down.

When working an event doesn't feel like work at all you know you've got a great gig. Thanks Katie & Kevin!

1st Fashion shoot of the year with Megan

I headed out to the open space preserve with Megan yesterday morning to keep my fashion shooting skills sharp and spend some time with my new Canon 7D.

A few observations on the camera first. Having to compare this with my old 5D is a tough standard to follow, especially considering that the 7D retails for $1,000 less.
The fact that the new 7D is not a 'full frame' camera had me kind of bummed but the decision to buy finally came down to $$. The smaller sensor in the camera means working with a 'conversion factor' of 1.6x, or basically multiplying the focal length indicated on any lens by 160%. I did my best to find the bright side of this fact and the answer was hidden in my EF 50mm f1.4. ( 50mm x 1.6 = 80mm ) I now own an 80mm lens for portraits! Of course the optics won't have the exact benefits of a real 80mm lens, but it is one way to save about $1,600 on Canon glass!
So in summary I was pleased to be working with a more appropriate focal length than my previous standard of 50mm.

Now for the bad news... I'm not the first new 7D owner to quickly realize that this camera has problems in it's redesigned auto-focus system. There is nothing worse than getting your images on a monitor and realizing that they're just barely soft enough to be unusable. The jury is still out on the nature of the problem but I've read all over the net about possible solutions involving manually tuning focus, firmware updates, and custom function workarounds.
Several buyers have exchanged their 7D bodies ( even twice ) with no improvement in the autofocus system and in the meantime Canon has yet to propose a solution ( or even admit a problem exists ) .

So the moral here is... Don't go out shooting a whole wedding on your brand spanking new camera without testing it! I have a wedding tomorrow and I couldn't be more pleased with myself that I set up a test shoot. Also, I'm not getting attached to this thing. Yes it's new and flashy and it shoots HD video, but if the AF system is shoddy I'll return this thing first thing Monday morning.

Megan was a great model and a true pleasure to work with. Being a photographer herself makes it even more embarrassing for me to have committed one of the most seemingly amateur mistakes in the book. Fortunately she was consistent and delivered her best which shows in the images that did come out sharp.

San Felipe New Years 2010

Just sharing a few images from this year's trip to San Felipe.
To see more check out this gallery:
http://www.robertsonexposure.com/galleries/sfan10/index.html












These dogs were hanging out at the fireworks trailer. This brown one was cool but the black one in the background tried to bite my heel. It's bound to happen one of these days.



This is my friend Arturo who owns a hardware store downtown. His band, Agave Blues, performs around town almost every night of the week. A new bar opened outside town called the JollyMon and this picture is from their New Year's eve performance.

I don't think you can get these over sized sparklers in the states. They're pretty fun to photograph because the sparks come out sharp even though I'm hand-holding a five second shutter speed.

One of my other favorite San Felipe pastimes is taking walks (drinking beer) in the desert at sunset. I could tell earlier in the day that this was going to be a good sunset and it turned out to be possibly the best one I've seen. The color show kept going after the sun went down for at least an hour.

Happy 2010!