Roadside Stops

Last week my good friend Mike and I went down to Clear Lake to help teach at a journalism workshop for high school students who are on the yearbook staff. This was their first year having a photography class and the kids seemed to love it. The first day was spent going through the basics of operating a camera and composing a photograph, but on the second and third day we got to get a bit more advanced and showed them some basic lighting techniques.
Here is a photo that Mike did of me teaching them the basics of lighting:


Clear Lake was beautiful and Mike and I took the opportunity to walk around and talk to some locals and, of course, to photograph them.

Here is one of my favorite photos from a town called "Kemah".



You wouldn't be able to tell from looking at him, but he is a nurse! He has the softest hands of any Harley rider I've ever met. haha

All in all it was a very fun trip and it yielded some great portraits.
More to come I'm sure!

Hot Pursuit

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was doing a shoot with a police officer. The shoot didn't go as well as planned unfortunately. We got a late start and I had some equipment problems. Actually I can't blame it on equipment. It was more a brain malfunction. I forgot that for the camera to be able to snap quick photos in remote mode it needed to be pre-focused and not on "auto-focus" mode. It took me 10 minutes to figure that out so that was more time lost.
The next problem I ran into was that the lights on a police car are much brighter than those of an ambulance. This produced a lot of lens flare and every spec of dust on my lens became a big blob of light. So after fixing that we made one last pass and I got a few usable images before moving on to the next setup.

Here is a Horizontal crop of one of the better ones:



To get this shot the camera was mounted to the rear window on the left side of my vehicle. The shutter was fired via pocket wizard, which was set to relay mode and fired a strobe in the police vehicle as well.

Here is another shot we did. The setup was basically the same except the camera was on the hoot of the police car and not on my vehicle.



Special thanks to Jake and to the Allen P.D. for letting us do this shoot!
I'll post some behind-the-scenes photos of this shoot in a little while.