A week or two ago (yeah yeah I’m way late to report this) I received some mail that stayed on my kitchen counter for a few days before I picked it up again. While going through some old mail I noticed a particular envelope from some company called, Serbin Communications. I assumed it was just junk mail and was about to trash it but at the last second I decided to open it just in case.

To my surprise it was notification of the fact that one of my photographs is a finalist in Photographer’s Forum Magazine’s 28th Annual Spring Photography Contest. I suppose it was a good thing I opened the envelope after all.

I had actually entirely forgotten about this contest I entered sometime before April of this year. Of 11 photographs I entered, the following has been picked as a finalist.



The contest’s web site states the actual winner’s and honorable mentions will be notified by August 15, a few days away. Although I have doubts my photo will earn 1st prize, it would be nice to have the distiction as well as a new camera. I’m happy with honorable mention at this point in my career.

More to come soon...

A couple of weeks ago I sold my Canon 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L lens on eBay. I believe I got around $1100 for it which was what I was hoping I’d get for it. When I decided to sell the lens I thought I could use the money to buy the Canon 180mm macro lens, a lens I’ve been wanting for a while now, or buy some lighting gear and other miscellaneous things. In the end I decided to buy some lighting gear.

Last week I received a couple of collpsable softboxes from Alien Bees. They are 24x36” which should be plenty for portraits and still lifes. I also bought another Dell LCD display as my 21” Apple monitor saw its last days a few months ago. And I’ve grown accustomed to using two monitors.

At the moment I’m not sure what to do with the remaining money. I’m thinking of getting two pocket wizards so I can control my Alien Bees strobes and get rid of the 20 or 30 foot sync cord. I have 2 already but I ‘d like to have one for each Alien Bee and one for my Canon speedlight in case I want to use all 3 together.

Anyway, here is a few photos I took with the new softboxes.


I wanted to two highlights on the apple with the smaller being narrow and next to a spot of black. I used a sheet of black foam core to block one of the softboxes, which gives the small band highlight in the upper right hand side of the apple, and provides the dark shadow next to the small highlight. The background is a sheet of diffusion plastic from a lighting tent. The sheet and apple are on top of a cheap tv stand. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the table’s fake wood grain is seen through the diffusion sheet. Something I didn’t want but later thought it added some color and mood to the background (bright shiney apple on top of a white-brown background).


Self portrait. Taking self portraits is interesting as it requires some luck in compenstion but it allows me to keep trying depending if I feel up to it. But I don’t have to deal with others being impatient or losing interest.


Close up of my hollow body Ibanez electric guitar.


Another close up of my hollow body Ibanez electric guitar.

Tags: softbox, lighting, gear

I have 4 of my photographs on display and for sale at the Infusion Gallery of downtown LA during the month of June.

Also, I’ll be at the gallery on evening of the opening reception, June 12th. You can visit their June 2008 page for a sampling of the artwork that will be on display this month including my own.

My photograph, "Parsec" was returned to me by the Center of Fine Art Photography earlier this week. That means it didn't sell but that's cool with me. I'm sure it'll happen eventually and I'm happy just to have it on display.

My next show is in June (6/1-6/25) at the Infusion Gallery in downtown LA. 4 photographs instead of 1!

At the moment I updated my portfolio (check it out by clicking on the link on the right) and I'm trying to make a nice fancy CD of my portfolio so I can have it reviewed by other galleries and anyone else. But I'm having trouble with the "fancy" part. At least on the Mac OS, I want to CD to auto open its main window which it does but also reveal the custom layout that I've spent too much time on. It looks great on the system I created the CD on but not on my powerbook. Very frustrating indeed. Once I have it figured out I plan on mailing it to several galleries for review in hopes they like my work.

Also, I want to contact the people at the Infusion Gallery to see if they would be cool with me having several books of my work available at the gallery during the time my work will be on display. Since I'm not in a solo show, they may not like the idea but on the other hand the books may help sell my photos so they may like it. The books are cheap books you get through Aperture and iPhoto and I plan on having around 50 pages per book of 50 or so of my photographs inside. Basically a cheap promo piece. If I get a few people to at least just visit my web site after thumbing through the pages, then I say they're successful. I may also have the CDs available too but I thought the book would be better because books don't have additional requirements (gotta have a computer to view the contents of the CD) to view them and thus people get instantaneous viewing.

Tags: gallery, fine art, promotion, exhibit

This post is all about a sampling of images I've taken in the past week. This week and last week I was on vacation and had planned to devote it to photography and particularly studio lighting.

During these past 2 weeks I've learned quite a bit about studio lighting but I am by no means an expert or even a vet. I still need to work on creating a good sweep, lighting the background so that the light is evenly spread (this seems easy and probably is but for some reason was rather challenging for me), pocket wizards are great (hope to buy another soon), learned how to make a cardboard grid which seems to work better than my cardboard snoot at giving me a spot light, I should start shooting tethered to my computer and I should also review my work on my computer before moving on and I'm sure far more but that's enough for now.

Here's some of what I've shot this past week:




I need to find a good white 2'x2' or so surface to shoot my drinks on. My wife and I received this tray as a wedding gift and I finally found a use for it. I think it'll be good in the future but just to get me started I don't want any distracting elements such as the tray's wood trim and handle getting in the picture. I went to Home Depot a few days ago but couldn't find anyway that fit my requirements. I think I'll try another hardware store that either sells custom counter tops or maybe will sell just the laminate to me. Still looking...








This came about as a test shot. Just so happens I really like it. Maybe not a good "drink" shot from a commercial / editorial standpoint, but definitely enjoyable to look at.


This as well as the next two shows me playing with the "shooting through" technique as well as using several color filters on flowers. The idea of changing the flowers' colors using filters has intrigued me for a while. It turns out I really like the blending of the natural and fake colors together that I want to continue exploring the idea.






After stumbling across another photographer's work and seeing him use flowers submerged in water and then freezing the water, I thought it would be cool to try introducing air bubbles to the flower (obviously had to submerged the flower in water first). Instead of water droplets on the petals, why not air bubbles? I tried my first attempt at this a few months ago but was stuck by not knowing how to control the flower so it stands still and didn't know how to put air bubbles on the petals.

The only way I know of to get air to stick to a flower is to dunk it in the water very quickly. The problem is the water will be rushed into the bloom forcing the petals to move out and possibly break off the stem. Getting the flower to stand still was solved by using a McClamp which was holding the stem and the other end was connected to a light stand.

You can also see some rather large air bubbles in the picture as well. I decided to kill the air bubbles on the petals idea and introduce bubbles moving by the flower. You can see something similar in the below picture as well. I used a straw to force air into the water using my mouth to blow into the straw. The problem with that is 1. I get out of breath and 2. unable to control the flow and size of the bubbles.


I decided to go to the pet store and buy the cheapest air pump they had. I actually bought the 2nd cheapest pump as the cheapest was battery powered and I didn't want to bother with even more batteries (I have enough stuff on battery power as it is). I went through a few nearby isles just to see what they had and ran across some fancy do-dad that will break the air up into smaller bubbles. That do-dad worked out perfectly for what I wanted.

How did I get the flow to move in a diagonal? I moved the tube back and forth below the flower and tripped the shutter several times before I ended up with this picture.

Do I like this? Eh, not really. Although I'm glad I explored the idea, I don't think its all that interesting to look at. However, I still like the idea of having bubbles cling on to the flowers' petals. I just need to find a way to get lots of bubbles on the petals without destroying the flower and frustrating me.







This is basically a combination of studio magic and the use of Photoshop's clone tool. I cut the lemon in half and stuck two bobby pins (I think that's what they are called. My wife uses them to control here hair) to force them to stay in place. I would have used toothpicks and actually would have preferred toothpicks but I also wanted to get this picture without having to go to the store. The pins acted as braces to prop the lemon halfs up. I then cloned the pins out of the shot making the lemons appear standing on their own (well I hope they do anyway). Perhaps not the greatest picture, but I was rather proud of myself for coming up with the idea, the use of the pins idea, and for the execution of the picture itself.


This thing is a floating bridge and it belongs on my hollow body guitar. See the chrome thingy on top? Notice there isn't much light hitting the front of it?


So I placed some hand made reflectors (cardboard bent in half to as a support for two pieces of white paper taped to the cardboard) which gives it not only light up front but also a nice white reflection in the chrome. Quite happy that I realized the need for that and was able to figure out how to do it. That "whole family of angles" concept at play here for sure.



In a previous posting I mentioned a DIY cardboard grid for speedlights. The above and the next shot use this grid. See the blue highlights in the top thingy? That's the grid with a blue filter hard at work.


Here, I placed a light from below to help light the chrome as well as the bottom. We can see the bottom of the bridge by its reflection in the plexiglass. I think it helps to define the bridge's overall shape. Without it, there would likely just be black and you'd think the entire black was all solid wood. As you can see, its not as there is a bit of a curvature to it.




My cardboard grid working hard again. If you look closely, you'll see I have two wine glasses in a row. The 2nd is hidden behind the 1st glass. And if you look even closer you'll see the base of the 2nd glass in the stem of the first. Something I didn't notice until I review the images on my computer (which is why I should be shooting tethering and regularly reviewing my work on a monitor).

Tags: studio, lighting, glass