Ava and Tess at Thanksgiving Point

Since graduating, I've taken on more of a stay at home dad job during the day. My wife has actually got a job as a photographer during the day! I'll continue to shoot weddings, which I'm starting to love doing more and more, but in the meantime, I'll have a lot of time with my two girls. Time that I didn't really have during the past two years. Because of all the time we'll be spending together, you'll probably see a lot of shots of Ava and Tess.

While we took these two photos, the tractor was waiting to take down the stack. The guy was nice enough to wait for us!

My Passionate Daughter

I live with three very passionate women. Between my two daughters and my wife, there is no lack of emotion!

A couple of weeks ago, we took our girls to downtown Salt Lake to see the lights. While we were there, we got this photo progression, showing the passion of my youngest daughter Tess. As a young boy walked in between me with the camera and the girls posing for a photo, Tess wanted to let that boy know her displeasure. Enjoy.

I don't know why I kept shooting, but I'm glad I did.

The Messy Girl

So I had this idea to show off how tough our 9 year old linoleum flooring was in our kitchen in a photo. While I may have accomplished that goal, one things for certain. The girls loved the excuse to make a huge mess with permission.

Here's how we set it up. Moved the table around, used an umbrella and a softbox, and a white board on the opposite side for fill. I stood on the table and looked down.

Wacom Tablet Still Life

This was an interesting still life to set up. You'd like to think that pen is put in after in photoshop, wouldn't you...

Who needs photoshop when you can use fishing line suspended from a bar above?! When you are shooting still life, fishing line becomes your best friend. It is so small, that it basically disappears when you are shooting in the studio.

Doing it this way seems like it would be harder than putting it in later in photoshop, but its actually easier because it doesn't take that much time to set up, and you get a great shadow from the pen across the tablet that would take a while to make a believable shadow on photoshop.

Here's the look of how it was set up in the studio. Used a plexiglass sweep, a softbox to light the tablet, and three lights to wash out the background and the surface directly under the tablet.

Times Square

Make sure you click on the image to make it bigger!

I shot this back in March when I was in New York last. I made this image by stitching together 12 vertical images together. When I was in New York, I put my camera on the tripod and moved the camera in a complete circle, stopping every inch and got a shot. It's a pretty simple shot to accomplish, you just need to go out and try it!

Ava at Pictureline

This was a test shot of a new Nikon 50mm lens I purchased at Pictureline a couple of weeks ago. I needed to see how it worked, so I had Ava look into the camera. She's such a cute little kid that I had to put it on. Taken inside Pictureline, my settings were ISO 1250, 1/80 of a sec., f/1.8

The reason I purchased this new lens was because my old lens was damaged after it lost an epic battle with my 3 year old. (See image below) It cracked the filter, which by itself wouldn't be a big deal, but it also pushed the body of the lens into itself and it wouldn't focus after that. It would have cost about the same to fix it than to purchase another one, and it's my favorite lens, so to Pictureline we went to get a new one. They take care of us there.

Generations Project

These are part of a fine art project that I'm working on right now. They are very simple portraits when viewed individually, but when you put four together, they become very interesting. You start to compare the eyes, the noses, the mouths, the chins, the hair, the forehead, everything. (Click on the images to make them bigger to really see the differences) I started this project because I noticed that people would look at a new born baby and say to the mom, "She has your eyes," or "He looks like your husband." Then I thought, it would be fun to show the genetic progression between generations.

I'll be working on this project for 2 and a half more weeks, and then I'll be putting them all up on a wall somewhere on BYU's campus. So if you know of anyone that has 4 or 5 generations of just men or just women, and you think they'd be interested in modeling for me, let me know quickly!

iPod Evolution

So Here's how I did this:

I shined Profoto 4 heads on a white wall to blow out the background, and then flagged off everything with the black dividers except for the area that I needed open to prevent lens flare.

Here's how I got the white reflective surface: Table, white butcher paper placed on top, then place a big piece of plexi glass on top of that. So that way I was able to get the plexi to pick up the white, instead of the brown table top.

This is a pretty good way to get a white blown out background when shooting in still life in the studio. It's pretty simple, but effective.

Green Nike Shoes

A few weeks ago I needed a subject to shoot for a still life assignment and I couldn't think of anything interesting. It was killing me! I'm not really into still life in the first place, but I'm taking it as one of my last classes just so I can learn techniques of lighting products in case I ever need that in the future. Anyway, I went to Nordstrom Rack looking for a new pair of running shoes and found these. $39.95 and bright green. As soon as I saw them, I knew I could use them for my assignment. This is what happened.

This was the setup. I knew that I wanted a green color background, so instead of going through the hassle of trying to get a similar color background, I shot it against white, and added the green color in Photoshop. It was actually very easy. I used two lights to light up my background and light up the bottom of the shoe, and one soft box to cover the rest of the shoe. As you can see from where the soft box is situated, there wasn't as much light on the tongue of the shoe, so I put up a big piece of foam core on the opposite side to fill in the darker parts of the shoe.

Not a very complicated shot to execute. Sometimes, shooting products can be very simple and easy and look good, but other times it can be a small nightmare!