This weekend, I had the opportunity to shoot my first property over one million dollars (1.243 million to be exact). The property is in a hot neighborhood and is priced hundreds of thousands below its competition, so I was excited to finally shoot a house like this. The house was also the largest I have shot to date.
Of course, I actually had the ‘opportunity’ to shoot this house twice, as my original pictures taken at night turned out so bad that I needed to reshoot. The following is what I learned from this shoot. Continue Reading…
Posted 3 years, 6 months ago at 2:20 pm. Add a comment
I finally had time over the weekend to take some pictures, including a number with my new 180L. A review and comparison with the MP-E 65 is coming, but for now I thought you would enjoy some shots I took with the kids playing with a new bubble machine. I decided to practice using multiple lights with this attempt. I used a 580EX and a 580EX II triggered with Pocketwizards for the shoot. On flash had a small softbox attached to it while the other used the white card. In general I was happy with the lighting, but more tricky was getting the focus right. Only a number of shots in did I realize it would be a better idea to only use the center focusing point – as otherwise I was getting only bubbles in focus!
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Posted 4 years ago at 4:15 am. 1 comment
Recently I have spent some time debating about an off camera lighting solution. As much as I want the Canon 180L macro lens, I am leaning towards improving my lighting possibilities as that opens more doors for me to improve as a photographer. The following are the areas where I see myself using them.
Real estate photography
I have spent some time researching and found that most of the best photographs I have seen use hot shoe strobes. This is the main reason that I am only considering Pocket Wizards or Radiopoppers. The ST-E2 will not work through walls or in other situations necessary for real estate and I have heard of too many problems with the cactus triggers. This is also the area where I expect the triggers to pay for themselves.
Kids
Basically I want to use off camera flash(es) to improve shots of my kids.
Experimentation
There are a number of experiments I would like to try such as the strobist assignments. On a more serious note I would like to use remote flash for background lighting in macro and I would like to trigger the camera remotely. I have tried using the MT-24EX to trigger my 580EX but found it unreliable outdoors.
So after some research, the following are how I see the two stacking up.
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Posted 4 years, 1 month ago at 4:15 am. 3 comments
Last week I blogged about whether to expand into bird photography or expand my reach in macro photography. I have been giving this a bit more thought and right now I have ruled out buying a large telephoto, mainly because I realized that with two small children I will not be able to find the time to go out and wait for them. Definitely in the future I plan to do this, but not right now.
Currently our budget is locked down, but with the real estate market getting better here (my wife had two sales this week) it looks like somewhere at the beginning of May the funds will be released from my stock photography sales and I can go ahead and make some purchases. However, again it comes down to what things I want to focus on. With bird and wildlife photography removed, the following are the avenues I can take.
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Posted 4 years, 2 months ago at 5:15 am. 5 comments
