The Stormtrooper

Did you know cameras depreciate a LOT over only 2-3 years if you're in the industry as a professional user of the equipment? And by a LOT I mean that you quickly find you cannot easily do things other professionals are doing. Deviously important tidbit how fast technology goes from novel and new to faded and slow. Needless to say, my equipment was due for an upgrade, and I wasn't even aware of the fact. Then I held the new piece of plastic and electronic brains in my hands and said "Wow! What was that piece of junk I was using!"

Allow me to introduce you to the Pentax KX (I chose it in white), aka, The Stormtrooper.

... for obvious reasons...

Functionality is clearly faster and processes much cleaner images at higher ISO levels (which compensates for graininess in low lit situations). Playing around with the Stormtrooper, I can already see that my scope for taking low light photography withOUT flash is much more possible. This is a huge boon! Especially for us natural-light-loving photographers.

Me and the 'troopster. Yup.

Infant Photography: Claire Amelia

The most fun in doing maternity photography is doing infants' first portraits. Babies have no idea what the world is, and therefore they're always apt to do something unexpected and totally photogenic. But they also can give you something quite magical which doesn't really exist anywhere but in photography.

These are my favorite shots from a gig I did today. I think what makes them my choice picks is not only the moment, but the composition. That red velvet fabric worked wonders, and having desaturated the images 80% makes these photos look really nostalgic.

Teddy bear chaperones.

A very squirmy Claire.

Baby hands and feet tend to be really magical for some reason. I personally find them fascinating because these digits have not yet done anything in the world. They're still fresh, untouched, unscathed... and so soft!

Tender moment with dad.
And what is a December baby shoot without Christmas gear?

What's great about my method of portraiture in these sessions is that the parents don't have to leave the convenience of home to have their infant photographed, a huge benefit when baby is crabby because she's hungry or needs messes cleaned up. All the images posted above were shot in the baby's nursery room. The red velvet images were shot on the floor, as baby Claire laid on a velvet covered pillow. I have to also owe some of the success of these shots to my new fixed length camera lens, which throws short depth of field elements delightfully out of focus, and allows for great light capture.

Here's looking forward to more kiddo shoots.

Cake Make: Skull Cake Version 2!

Wow! What a way to recycle a leftover cake! The skull cake from my previous post has been reconstructed for Halloween Round 2. How and why? Well, the original cake was made for my co-workers in office on Friday. I instigated all cake slices to be made at the back of the skull, preserving Skeletor's face, because I wanted to show the face detail to my family later that evening.

Consequently, I was left with excess cake that I wasn't going to consume, and luckily, I have another Halloween party today. So the skull cake has been reconfigured!

Now Skeletor is just a face, surrounded by exploding brains behind him, and looking totally mad in all his gory. This was accomplished using the excess icingless cake shavings which were originally removed from the infrastructure of the first cake design. The shavings were placed surrounding the existing skull face to create the base shape of an "exploding brain."

Then, using some leftover icing, which I colored pink with red food dye, I created the brain shapes via icing bag, with squiggly shapes. To top it off, some extra red food dye was splattered around the whole cake.

Ready for Halloween party part two!

Cake Make: Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween! Have a piece of my skull cake, it's red velvet inside with strawberry filling. This cake project took me two days to complete. Day one consisted of baking and filling 4 layers of cake. Day 2 consisted of sculpting the layers, rolling and shaping the fondant, and painting on details. Slapping on the fondant and painting was the best part.

This was my first 3d sculpted fondant cake. It turned out pretty well if I do say so myself. I was afraid the head roundness would turn out too square, but it rounded out nicely. Now I have a bunch of excess cake shavings I need to pawn off to someone. The melting candle on top turned out looking more like a mini derby, and effect I'm not too keen about. Maybe I should have used another color. Oh well.

This was made for my co-workers tomorrow. They all contributed to ingredient costs, so the project was mostly funded by them! Now they all get to taste my experiment...

The Buddy Skeleton

As many of you know, Halloween is my favorite holiday. My favoritism is based less on the themes of creepiness and ghoulish things, but probably more so on the fact that dressing up in costume and pretending to be something else is such a fun thing to do. Costumes these days have swayed from their original intent of being something scary (to ward off demons). Nowadays, people are dressing as anything and everything under the sun, from astronauts to cupcakes, to abstract axioms. This year I'm going to be an angel of darkness - a scary character, to keep in tradition with warding off evil demons, which is a fabulous idea, especially in this day and age.

Of all the creepy characters associated with Halloween, I prefer skeletons. As the base infrastructure of our physical selves, they're just interesting. I love the Mexican decor for Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), which is synonymous with our Halloween, during which calaveras (skulls) are decorated and adorned in fun ways. Dia de los Muertos is less a dress up occasion than it is a moment to remember those close to us who have died. November 1st, on the Catholic calendar, is listed as All Souls Day, also synonymous with Dia de los Muertos. Anyway, I think it's a grand idea to honor the lives of those who lived before us.

This Halloween, my decorations shall be fairly frugal. I decided a life sized skeleton was needed, so I made one out of paper. Here he is: the Buddy Skeleton.

I created him out of stiff paper rolled tightly for the limbs, and a paper chain link structure for his spine. I drew his face with black marker. He's hanging in my closet at the moment, waiting for Halloween.

Birthday Toy

Today I received my new camera lenses! They came in the mail today, so I had to go out on a photo trek to try them out. One is a zoom lens with mild telephoto capabilities. The other (more visually impressive for you all to see in examples) is what I'll show you. This is the 50 millimeter prime lens which has an aperture that opens as wide as 1.4. To those who don't know the photo jargon, that means the aperture opens wide to let more light in, thus taking crisper photos in low light, and also allowing a beautiful background blur effect. See my experiments today:


These are my dad's old Pentax lenses (which don't work on my camera). See how nicely the background comes out of focus? This intentional efffect is called bokeh.

My ring and my backyard.

Some weird milk pod thing. This lens has also been praised for it's accuracy with portrait photography. Me in the sun...

The bokeh tends to look very nice for close ups. We don't need excess confusion in the background to distract from the subject. Me in the shade:

This lens will do the job for those inevitable indoor situations.

Taking People Out

Once more... the magic of Photoshop! Behold...

This image was shot at the last wedding I covered on September 12. Shortly after, I received an inquiry from the bride checking to see if I had captured any shots of just her and her grandma or just her and her mother. In reality, we were pressed for time to get to the ceremony during this scene, so all I had captured was this threesome of grandma, bride and mother. However, she wanted a twosome of each, and requested me to crop the images to create it.

Her notion of cropping and mine of course are far different. It cannot just be cropped, because the subjects need sufficient surrounding space after they have been cropped, and leftover portions of the cropped-off person is simply unacceptable, so some fancy Photoshoppery was required. Here is the final result: This was achieved by removing the bride from the original and placing her closer to her mother, while tilting her a little so it appears more natural that she is leaning sentimentally closer. Then the background and surroundings were retouched to appear as though they hadn't been sliced and replaced. Essentially, a brand new shot has been digitally created from an existing one. Gosh, how magical is Photoshop? I don't know how I could ever live without it!

Taking extraneous background people out of photographs is also another time consuming part of wedding photography. This wedding was shot at Missouri Botanical Gardens, which is one of St. Louis' major tourist attractions. It is impossible to avoid T-shirt wearing tourists from creeping into a lovely shot of a couple dressed formally on their wedding day. Many shots from this wedding I had to doctor up by removing those tourists. This is done by skillfully copying portions of the background and pasting them over the areas where tourists are present (a procedure known in Photoshop as "cloning"), essentially covering them over with background and blending them away seamlessly. As I like to say, "takin' out tourists!". It is rather amusing to myself to delete them. Two rather shabby looking tourists were deleted from the background of the photo below. And I daresay this couple would use this photo for their wedding album cover if shabby looking tourists were in there.