DIY Beauty Dish

Via David Tejades' blog, I decided to spend a chunk of my weekend time building a beauty dish on the cheap.  Not necessarily because I had previous experience with a dish and wanted one of my own (I didn't), but mostly because it was cheap and I wanted another tool in my burgeoning arsenal of lighting tools.  Surprisingly (because most of the time you read about DIY and they're pretty involved and painful) this turned out to be pretty simple to gather the materials and create.  Everything was off the shelf at Home Depot and I don't think any single piece cost more than $5.  And the light - oh the glorious light.  What an enormous difference diffused and soft off-camera light makes!

And here are the final results (using an SB800 with CLS triggering):

You've Got The Look

This shot is a great example of how luck sometimes interacts with actual photographic intent.  Usually this is when magic happens.  Not to say that this shot is magic, but it does have a certain charm (to me at least).  I was trying to capture just the top half of my wife's head (eyes and glasses) in the lower right corner of the frame (using the rule of thirds).  The first few shots I took placed her in the corner, but her eyes were either looking away or were shut.  At that point she heard a noise or Gabriella said something that caused her to move more to the middle of the frame and her eyes to veer off.  For once I was on the ball and snapped off a few frames.

Motorola End Of Year Party 2010

It was a good time, exhausting (3 hours straight of shooting), but enormously helpful in terms of giving me an idea what's in store for a photographer charging money and shooting an actual event.  When it was all said and done, I ended up with some pretty good shots.  Especially the concert shots - I had never tried anything like that before.

Yashica Electro GSN

This is one of my favorite shots. Taken with a Canon A2 & Fomapan 400. The GSN should be a fav or mine, but it's not. Unfortunately I caught the Nikon bug right around the time I picked up a working copy. It's a fine camera w/ a great sharp lens. Hit my flickr stream for more examples.

Mitsuwa Market Arlington Heights

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

A neat little Asian market in Arlington Heights, the main attraction has gots to be the food court. Authentic, fairly cheap, and abundant Asian food - all served along with a massive crush of humanity mixed with a cacophony of noise. The real star is the takeout sushi though, it's actually fresher and tastier than a lot of sit down restaurants.

I've really grown to love a good serving of chicken feets, done right these things are the bees knees. Tender, chewy, ligament-y, all in a fragrant & delectable sauce. The best way to eat these guys is to shove a foot in your mouth and start sucking off the meat(?) without using your fingers and creating a huge mess. Then when all the meat(?) has been slurped, spit the bones on your plate and grin at the people at the next table. Not the safest method, since I constantly felt like I was going to swallow an entire bone.

These pics were taken with Fuji 400 Superia, Nikon 50mm 1.8D, and Nikon N90s. A swell little camera, it's light, fast AF, and feature packed. It was Nikon's pro-level SLR right after the F4 and between the F5. It's a great little camera to carry around if you don't feel like doing the whole manual focus thing.

A Snowy Day In Chicago-Town

The first big snowstorm of the year. I'm just trying to get outside of my comfort zone (tight portrait-style shots) and stretch myself a bit. I used the flash to illuminate the snow falling in front of the pole and metered about in the middle of the pole. Which was just enough light to avoid seriously overexposing the light bulb. It was still way overexposed, I added a burn layer in PS to turn it down a notch.

Nikon D700 @ ISO 200, spot metered
Nikkor 200mm f/4 AI (manual focus)
Speedlight SB-25 @ 1/16 manual (zoom to 135mm)

created with linkr

Need to work on landscapes

created with linkr

-details: Nikon D700, 80-200mm f/4.5 AI.

Landscapes - I really need work on them. Even when I start out trying a landscape (using my 24mm), I end up shooting the weeds @ 200mm. I simply don't visualize things in a landscape setting. I keep wanting to squeeze my shots into a normal or short tele- range. I've been using the 85mm 1.8 so much that I've been feeling a little constrained by it, maybe constrained isn't the right word. Overused. Struggling for inspiration. So I guess a partial New Years resolution is to try and see things differently. Look at life through a wide-angle lens.