Along with the main shot above we did some individual shots of each of the girls and some other poses/looks. Hit the jump to see all of the outtakes and the shots that turned out awesome, but just didn’t make the poster. Jason

The vivacious duo were a blast to work with and were willing to try just about any concept that I wanted.

The always lovely Dawn Kohler. She never fails to impress and inspire.

The newcomer to modeling Jamie is off to the races with her career. She hopes to shoot for a Tattoo magazine in the future. If anyone knows someone at one of these magazines and would like to use Jamie, contact me.

Again, they were a blast to work with. I’ve shot Dawn so many times that I know what to expect when heading into the studio with her. She’s always great to work with!  See everyone next time! Jason

A few weeks ago I had the privilege of photographing the beautiful Kayla and her dream man Jake. Jake is in the army, stationed in Korea, but he was back for a few weeks to marry the woman of his dreams. They were married at a beautiful church in Dayton, Ohio and I was lucky enough to be there to capture the entire event. The reception was held at the officer’s club at Wright Patterson Air force Base (also in Dayton, Ohio). Having never been to the officer’s club at Wright Pat, I was a little nervous about the photographic opportunities we had available to us. Luckily there is an amazing golf course that surrounds the club that we were able to make use of.  While I was worried about the scenery, I was ecstatic about what I was seeing in the sky. One thing I always hope for as a photographer (at least when shooting outdoor portraits like this) is an overcast sky with clouds that have contrast and definition. We were very, very fortunate this day with our sky. We (the bride and myself) couldn’t have been happier. When you have a sky like this, you know two things. First, you know that it’s not going to take much power to light the subjects. Since the light levels are low, you’re usually shooting at a higher ISO which in turn allows you to bleed down the power on your lights, or allows you to use speed lights and work really quick and light. The second thing that pops into my head when I see a sky like this is the drama. My plan of attack when shooting against a sky like this is to underexpose the sky by 1 to 1-1/2 stops then using my flash to light the subject. By dropping the sky 1 stop underexposed, I allow it to become very saturated and very contrasty as in the image above. The One thing to look out for when doing this is your ratios. It’s not a set subject to background ratio, rather a “seat of your pants” judgement call. What you have to watch for, and avoid is making the background too dark. If you make the background too much darker than your subject, the viewer doesn’t know where to look. There are competing areas of the image for the viewers eyes to move to. You obviously want the subjects to be the focal point of the image, but your don’t want them to look like they are out of place either. You want the background and the foreground to look believable. As with anything, practice makes perfect and it takes a little while (and a lot of bad photos) to finally figure out where your sweet spot is. Check out a few more from that day below, and I hope to see you here again soon! Jason

It took a little finessing to get the light right under his hat in this shot.

A couple of sweeps to end the post…

I absolutely love the lines in this shot. The triangle that her arm is making, the Curve of her back with the contrast of the colors are just amazing. Thank you Kayla and Jake for letting me be a part of your day! Jason

Recently I did some family shots at one of my favorite winter shooting locations here in Cincinnati, Ohio, The Krohn Conservatory. The Krohn Conservatory is our local green house and conservation center. Inside the glass walls is 1,459 acres of lush greenery year round with one room changing “displays” with the seasons. Right now (as I’m sure you can imagine) they have a wonderful Holiday display including a poinsettia “tree”, several model train tracks in an elaborate display, as well as a Christmas tree that goes from floor to ceiling in the large entry way. It’s truly a great place to visit all times of the year, but especially this time of the year when things are colder outside and beautiful greenery outside is months away.

The family I had the privilege of photographing came to me through my sons football team. The little boy in the photographs was on Jackson’s team. The two of them were a blast to spend some time with and we really were able to get some wonderful shots. All of my shots this day were done with a 28inch Westcott Apollo Softbox. I used the one Apollo in conjunction with the beautiful diffused light coming through the aged greenhouse windows.  Hit the jump to see some more images from the day, and to see how they were made…

The shot at the top of the page was actually one of the last shots that we did that day. We were wondering through the final room (there are several different rooms at the Krohn) and I saw this wonderful diffused light coming in through the windows and trees just rim lighting the two of them perfectly.  I positioned my Apollo in front and slightly camera left. I asked Jennah to hug her brother and she obliged giving me the sweetest smile that I had seen from her all day. It is my favorite shot from the day by far.

Again I placed my key light (Apollo softbox) camera left and let the ambient coming in through the windows on the right fill the shadows on his face beautifully.

Lastly we have a shot of the two of them really showing their sibling love. The beautiful thing about this is the softness provided by the Apollo, really wrapping around their faces. This is what makes the super versatile, ultra portable softbox so much fun to use, and so easy to move location to location.

That’s it for me today. I’ll see you all again in a few days. Jason

Day 2!

As many of you know my buddy Don Giannatti came to town last month to teach one of his awesome work shops. While he was here we got to do lots of shooting and I wanted to share a couple more shots from day two with you. You might remember Amanda (pictured above) from my recent fitness shots. She’s a lot of fun and has great lines and poses so I asked her to join us! As you can see from the shot above, she has looks other than the fitness model look. The lighting for this shot was a single 4foot by 6foot softbox camera right with a white reflector camera left. I was really happy with the way this image turned out mainly because I love the carefree look on her face.

Again, this is Amanda. Same lighting setup but I wanted to show one of the other guys shooting with us the closeup ability of the Tamron 70-200 f/2.8. I absolutely LOVE the Tamron for doing portrait work. The Focus distance of the Tamron is 3 feet (compared to 5 feet on the Nikon). This doesn’t sound like much but 2 feet closer when shooting this tight is HUGE. Shooting in close keeping the eyes tac sharp like this makes it my favorite lens for shooting people.

For this last shot we went to my buddy Dave’s body shop. Dave always has something cool sitting around and this time he didn’t disappoint. For this shot we had lights everywhere. The main was a Nikon Sb-900 on a stand through an umbrella camera left. There was a Sb-700 on a boom over head to light the ground behind her, a Sb-700 in the car shooting out at the camera for the flair, a Sb-800 camera left lighting the back section of the car, and one more Sb-800 behind the car lighting the area back in there. We had a really great time shooting and I can’t wait for Don to come back to town again! I have some really cool things coming up soon to share. Stay tuned for a book announcement and some other cool things! Jason

2011 Holiday Gift Guide

Every year I get asked what are my favorite things. What things do I recommend for people to buy. For the past two years I have started using Amazon to make those recommendations. Click on the picture above or HERE  to see my guide. I will continue to update this list. Happy holidays and feel free to send me any of the things you buy off of the list

A couple of weeks ago I did a post about why I loved the rain and Sally and Ben’s wedding at the Oasis country club in Loveland, Ohio. Today I was forwarded an email from the Oasis, telling me that they were featuring that wedding on their site! If you are a bride in the Cincinnati area, you should definitely check out the Oasis. They’re an amazing staff, and it’s an amazing location for a wedding or group event. I have worked with them a few times now on weddings and events and it gets better every time I’m there.  So check out their feature of the wedding here, and be sure to check back here on Friday for some great photographic work!

My buddy Tom Seibert took this shot of me last weekend down by the Ohio River. We had a lot of fun shooting with Don Giannatti for two days. I love it when he comes to town. If you haven’t checked out his Learn To Light workshops, you’re missing out. It’s definitely worth going! We had the always lovely Tarah Sand join us for this first day of shooting and she looked a lot better in front of the camera than I did. I think you’ll agree seeing the following shots. Don called the shot above “Epic Jason” lol. I know this is a short post today, but I have been backed up like crazy with sessions to edit. I have something pretty good scheduled for later this week so be sure to check back on Friday. Until then, check out a few shots from the weekend. Jason

Don Giannatti Himself

You all know (or should know) that light is the most important thing when it comes to photography. When it comes right down to it, without light there would be no photography. When we talk about light though, we talk about it not only as a whole, but we talk about the different aspects of it as well. We talk about the quality. Is it soft, hard, wrapping, etc. We talk about the direction. Is it a loupe pattern, is it a butterfly pattern etc. We also talk about the color of it. Are we talking golden sunset light, are we talking sickly green light from florescent lights, are we talking the warm glow of tungsten light… The descriptions go on and on. The important thing is that we are aware of the different light colors and that we adjust our images accordingly. That’s where the Passport Color Checker from X-Rite makes life a whole lot easier.

Keeping All of the multiple colors in check in an image like this is made easier with the Passport

The Passport Color Checker is a two part system. It is a Color target (as you see above) and it is also a piece of (included) software that works either as a stand alone color corrector, or works as a Lightroom plugin. The latter is how I use it, and it makes for a seamless, easy to use, must have addition to my workflow. The way it works is you have your subject hold the color checker target in front of themselves (as you see above). You then take a shot of the target (try to make sure that the target is at least 10% of your image) while your subject is holding it in the lighting that you will be using for the shoot. Once you import this target image into Lightroom, you then go to your export tab for the image (located at the bottom left of the screen when in Library view). Instead of exporting to a hard disk, you choose X-Rite Presets as shown below.

When you click “Export” after choosing the X-Rite Option the image will be exported into the X-Rite Presets and a color profile will be created for that image. When the plugin is finished creating the profile it will tell you that Lightroom has to be relaunched for the new profile to be shown. Once you relaunch Lightroom the new profile can be found under Camera Calibration-Profile in the Develop module of Lightroom as shown below.

The really nice thing about having this adjustment in Lightroom is that you can select multiple images and change them all to that color profile at once! If you shot the same lighting for 50 shots in the studio, you don’t have to color correct each individual one! This is a HUGE time saver!  Don’t shoot in a studio you say?  Don’t worry, as long as the lighting is the same, it doesn’t matter if you’re in a studio or not. The Color Checker is for you!

I’m sure that some of you are saying, yeah that’s all well and good, but I don’t shoot a whole lot of people. I do mostly landscapes. The Color Checker has you covered on that too. There is an optional landscape white balance square that you can click on in the software that adjusts the color warmer or cooler just by clicking different squares.

The Bottom Line

The Passport Color Checker has become an integral part of my photographic workflow. It insures accurate, reproducible colors every single time. For the price, you can’t afford to not have one in your bag!

You can get the X-Rite Color Checker Passport for $99 here.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of photographing Amanda, a local bodybuilder and fitness competitor here in the Cincinnati area. She is sponsored by Enso (a performance apparel company), as well as GX supplements. We worked together to create images for her portfolio that brought out her muscle tone and definition (I’m pretty sure she could kick my ass), as well as her attitude and style. To accomplish this we worked with solid background colors of black and white to contrast her outfits and really make her images pop.

Having clothes and backgrounds that work well together is one part of these images, the other is the right lighting. History (and pretty much everything everything that you’ve ever been taught) tells us when you’re working with females you want a large soft light, and most of the time this is a good idea. Shooting fitness models, female body builders, and women athletes is the exception to the rule. For these types of subjects, hard light is the style of choice. Hard light makes every ridge, and every muscle stand out with the harsh shadows created by the extreme angles and level of the lighting. The image above was shot with two strip boxes behind the model and to the sides. This created the hard, rim light you see around the subject. To light the subject area facing the camera, I used a large octobank on axis and above the lens. This helped to open up the dark areas of the skin not being lit by the rims light, and also (because of how high I had the light mounted) created shadows on the muscles. Check out more awesome images of Amanda, and the lighting explanations after the jump….

Again, this was lit with the two kicker lights behind and to the side of the subject (although lowered from previous positions) and the octobank. For this shot however I changed my camera position dramatically. I was atop a 6foot folding ladder shooting down at Amanda. The octobank was up high (probably 12feet) pointing down at her.

The General Rule When Lighting like This..

The general rule when lighting subjects like this (with two rear rim lights), is to make the rim lights about two stops brighter than the main light you have in front. For our setup the rim lights were around f/8 and the main light was f/5.6. This gives you nice highlighted areas around the subject without the light wrapping too much and washing the subject out.

For this shot, I changed it up a little. I decided to get a little more harsh with the main light and use a beauty dish as my main. So on a stand camera left I had a beauty dish shooting around f/8. The lights I was using for kicker lights were turned around and used to light the background. They were cranked up to around f/11 or f/12. While I love the beauty dish as a main light source, the problem is that it is much smaller than an octobank and so the shadows are much harsher, and the fall off is much more dramatic (fall off refers to the transition from highlight to shadow on the subject). To counter this, I brought in a reflector camera right close to the subject. This filled in the shadow side of her face fairly nicely with reflections from the main light’s flash overflow into it.

This last image is one that I really love, for a number of reasons. First, I’m an eye photographer. If the eyes aren’t perfect, I usually hate the picture. In this image, I think the eyes came out really nicely. The second reason I really like this image is that while it shows definition, it still shows a sexy side of Amanda. Lighting was exactly the same as the last shot. Beauty dish, reflector etc.

That’s it for me today. I have editing to do and pictures to still take so I’ll see you all on Friday! Jason