Making Lemonade Out Of Lemons

I spent a lot of time over the last couple of days looking at various Flickr photostreams and blogs. And for some reason the theme of "making the most with what you have" kept circling back in my thoughts. This rang particularly true as I looked through Ainsley Joseph's Flickr photostream. I was amazed at the work he was doing in his garage and in various corners of his house.

I've been on the hunt lately for some good north facing outdoor locations and our town just doesn't have that much available. But I do have decent space on the north side of my own home. It just seemed like every time I looked at it, all I saw was the flotsam and jetsam of a typical suburban neighborhood - my own chain link fence, the big honking house next door, garden hose reels, cars in driveways, etc. So while I was always loving the light, the shooting possibilities never really sank into my brain.

Well, this morning I decided to see if i could make some lemonade out of those lemons. Turns out the swing on my deck (which I made, by the way) offers a great setting for an outdoor portrait when all the elements are framed just right.

Here I am sitting in the north side shade of the house, with the house and foliage across the street underexposed by 2 stops at ISO100 160/f5.6. I metered the northern skylight coming in from the right at 60/f5.6 and set up an Apollo 28 softbox on camera left with a Canon 430EX II flash and Cybersync to give me a total 160/f5.6 exposure.

Now the real beautiful part is the big honking two story house next door is behind and to the right of me as seen from my sitting position, is painted a light, fairly neutral color, and is catching the full sun and reflecting it back on my rear right shoulder for some great diffused rim light.

The double-wide chain link gate directly behind me has been opened all the way to get it out of the shot.

A wider aperture for some more bokeh on the background would be just the ticket.

Here's my setup and exterior environment. You can see how on first inspection this area might seem rather unappealing for a photo shoot. But I'm really looking forward to getting a real subject in front of the camera in this spot so I can see just how much I squeeze out of it.


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Beauty Of The Ages

I had an usual pair of shooting opportunities this weekend - unusal in that they represented opposite ends of the spectrum of American womanhood.

First up was Cara, a 20-something collge student and aspiring musical theater actress. She is also the daughter of a good friend of mine and I've known her since she was 8 or 9 years old. I was struck by that fact while shooting about 100 frames of her on a chilly Saturday morning.

She needs some 8 X 10 black and whites for a couple of scholarship auditions she has coming up and this is one of the shots she chose.



On the next day, I shot portraits of 24 widows in our church. Every year at Valentines Day, a group of men in the church host a Valentines Day banquet for the widows in our congregation. In addition to the usual gift of flowers and candy, I suggested this year we also shoot a nice portrait of each of the ladies in attendance.

I set up a makeshift studio in an open area of the church, and each of the ladies dropped by and sat for a picture. There's something about the character in the face of this lovely saint that just really captivated me when I first saw it come up on the monitor.
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