A few weeks back I was contacted by a student at Eastern Oregon University asking if they could interview me for a paper they were writing for Leadership class. First of all, I let him know he might find a more interesting subject to interview if this thing was for a grade, but that I would love to help him out. He just sent me a copy of his paper and wow, its probably some of the nicest things anyone has ever said about me. If your bored, take a look (after the jump, reprinted with permission.). It’s a little long as it was written for a college class but I appreciate the kind comments. Thanks Sean.

(more…)

Last night I taught a small lighting class for a group of 6 photographers wanting to learn a little bit more about using off camera flash outdoors. Lucky for me, I share a building with an awesome dance studio and a few of the teachers have a dance group called Remix. They perform all over town and needed some new photos so they got all dressed up and modeled for us. I shot this at the end of the class in the road in front of the studio. Milwaukie traffic will never be the same!

Kit Taylor plays the piano, and is really freaking awesome at it. Besides being a solo artist, playing at places like Portland City Grill (check out this video of him playing Lady Gaga at the grill), and teaching youngsters the in’s and outs of the ivory keys, he plays in my favorite local band, Intervision. He’s also just a really cool dude. He hired me to shoot some promo photos of him and I was happy to do it. We wanted to shoot him with a Grand Piano, but those aren’t easy to come by so we found a church willing to let us shoot. Next we just had to light the place to not look like a church! I also noticed a sweet red door at the front entrance so we shot outside too. Here are a couple of my favs. If you reading this on Friday night, Intervision is playing a show at Jimmy Mak’s tonight. Go check them out.

Mike Harris has a feature on his blog called “Pro Photographer Spotlight“. He came to the studio and interviewed me yesterday, go check it out!

Here are a couple of photos I shot in the last 24 hours that I like. The photo of the left was shot for a law firm in Portland. Conference rooms leave a lot to be desired as far as a photo goes, but it had a very nice reflective table, so I tried to use that to make the photo a little more interesting. First, I setup a speedlight on the floor behind her with a CTO gel to turn to give the white wall a little color, then I placed a speedlight with a grid behind her, a third speedlight with a 1/4 CTO gel in a small softbox was used for the mainlight and finally a white reflector on the shadow side for fill.

The photo on the right was shot in the studio. The main light is a strip box directly overhead a ring light for fill and two 20 degree grids behind him. I’ve been using the “one overhead light with 2 side lights” method a lot lately and am still working to perfect it. This was the first time I used a stripbox as the main light and I like it. Let me know what you think!