My morning run route takes me through some rice fields near our house. Yesterday, just after sunrise, I noticed some delicate dew drops on the rice plants catching the morning sun. It was beautiful.
So this morning I went back with my camera. I left the house around 5am, a little before sunrise, and shot as the sun was coming up. My first few shots were before sunrise, and needed ISO 2000 to get decent exposure. But as the sun came up I backed down to ISO 400 and got a few decent shots. Enjoy!
Last weekend I had the pleasure of working with Lucy on some beauty shots. She did a great job and her experience was valuable in helping take the images from idea to reality.
Lighting Setup
I wanted a clean, bright look for the photos. This meant a pure white background, and soft, even lighting on the model. For the background I hung a large white cloth against the wall, and hung a roll of diffusion paper from a background stand about 1 meter in front of the cloth. Continue reading
A couple days later I took a 6am bullet train out of Tokyo to meet Jason and May in Kyoto. We spent the day touring several historical locations in the city. First we visited Fushimi Inari Shrine (伏見稲荷大社) to see the 1000 Torii Gates. I’m told there are actually more than 1000, but I didn’t count. In fact we walked for an hour and didn’t even get to the end!
The next location on our agenda was the Sagano Bamboo Forest (嵯峨竹林), just north of the Tenryu Temple. Tenyru means “heavenly dragon” in Japanese. 
The bamboo forest is the largest I’ve ever seen, and is famous for good reason. The forest is preserved by harvesting just enough bamboo to keep the plants from choking each other.
Our next stop was the famous Kinkaku-ji (金閣寺), or the Golden Pavilion, a Zen Buddhist temple that is plated with gold. The weather was perfect and I got several good shots of the temple. 
It’s a little challenging to make an original photo of Kinkaku-ji because there’s really only one angle that is much worth shooting. I didn’t have my circular polarizer so I had some difficulty with the very wide dynamic range in the scene. I ended up processing several of the photos to HDR later with fairly good results.
After Kinkaku-ji, we took a taxi to Ishibe Kouji (石壁小絽) in the Gion area of Kyoto. The taxi driver proudly pointed out the various landmarks we passed on the way. It turned out that he was also a avid photographer and he gave us two of his own photos!
Ishibe Kouji is one of the most “Kyoto-looking” areas of Kyoto and features narrow stone streets with old wooden Japanese buildings on both sides. We got there just as the sun was beginning to set. I was excited spend “golden hour” shooting in such a great spot. 
I mounted a Canon 430EX and a 70cm white bounce umbrella onto a monopod and used the ST-E2 to trigger the flash for some very nice portraits as night fell.
Overall, it was a great day of shooting and I’m very happy with the results. I made made a few stupid technical mistakes and lost a few images, but still got enough good ones that the couple was happy with their pictures. And that’s all the really matters right?
I recently had the pleasure of shooting engagement photos for Jason and May, a wonderful couple who visited Japan from Singapore.
We spent one day in Tokyo Disneyland, and one day in Kyoto. In Disneyland my job was mainly to follow them around and document their day, without getting in the way.
They had one specific request: a photo of them together, underneath the fireworks. Ouch. I did some research and found that this would be a difficult photo to make. First of all, Disney doesn’t allow tripods, or even monopods, in the park. Second, I couldn’t think of a good way to get enough depth of field for a couple in the foreground and fireworks in the background.
In the end, I cheated. When the fireworks started I propped the camera on top of my bag and did several one-second exposures of the fireworks display, hoping to get a good one. When it was over I shot a few frames of the couple from about the same camera angle, using an on-camera 430EX speedlite to light them. A few minutes in Photoshop, and poof! Disney Magic.
Carolyn Leddy in front of the National Diet Building in Tokyo
I was excited, understandably. This would be my first gig for a magazine, and also showed that my online promotional efforts were paying off. After a few emails back and forth, and a conference call on Skype, we had the details worked out. Continue reading
It’s been a weekend of portrait shooting and I really put my DIY Strip Lights through the paces. On Saturday I had the pleasure of working with the lovely Megumi (Mayhem #1594582). I’d requested that she wear something black, or at least dark, because I wanted to work on lighting dark clothing against a dark background. She also brought along a dress she had made in Vietnam, which turned out to be much more interesting than my black-on-black idea. I’m quite pleased with how these came out.
Camera: Canon EOS 5D Mark II
Lens: Canon EF 70mm-200mm f/2.8L IS USM
Background: black cloth, stretched and taped to remove wrinkles
Lighting info:
- Key: 430EX Speedlite with omnibounce, 1/2 power, fired through DIY Strip Light
- Hair: 430EX Speedlite with omnibounce, 1/1 power, fired through DIY Strip Light
- Background: 420EX Speedlite, gelled blue, fired through DIY food container diffuser w/ cardboard gobo on the camera side
- 100cm silver reflector at left and slightly in front of the model
On Sunday, I did a shoot with Valeria (Mayhem #1235542). Continue reading
So far, I’ve been pleased. It’s well written and full of good information and example photos, but this is not a beginner’s book. You’ll get lost in the jargon if you don’t already understand lighting terminology like “gobo” and statements like “set the hair light 2/3 stop higher than the key light.”
One of the techniques he explains is using a strobe right behind the model’s head to push light through the hair and make it glow. This is seriously cool effect, and something I’ve only done accidentally with sunlight, not intentionally in the studio. After reading the section on backlighting, and checking out his beautiful sample images, I just had to give it a try. Continue reading
Planning for the Wedding Day (continued from here)
I didn’t have time for the detailed in-depth prepartions recommend in the book, but I did visit the setting about 24 hours before the actual wedding ceremony. I took pictures of locations that I thought would work for group shots, and I made mental notes of how the shadows were falling, and where to place my flashes. I also studied the lighting using Lighttrac for iPad to see where the sun would be a different times in the day. Read more about this cool app [here].
That night I reviewed my test photos, and organized my shot list. My mom had kindly provided an impossibly long list of requested group shots. My sister and I hacked away at it for a while to make it more reasonable, and I tried to organize the final list by location, hoping to decide ahead of time which shots to take where. This helped a little, but I ended up making several changes on the wedding day because of people camped out in the background of my planned shot areas.
Next: Backing up photos onsite
Group Shots (continued from here)
I’d been to enough weddings to know that there would be a need for lots of group shots. I was sure this would be a challenge. You always see the photog referring to a paper shot list, and in addition to that, there’s always someone yelling at the last minute “oh, let’s get one with uncle Bob!”
And that’s before you get to the technical issues like having enough depth of field to keep everyone in sharp focus, making sure no one’s face is in shadow, and making sure uncle Bob doesn’t have his eyes closed in the shot. Kelby’s book has a couple good tips for these issues too. For groups of people he recommends shooting at f/11 and focusing on the eyes of the person in the first row. Perfect! Practical advice I can use right away without having to trial-and-error my way to the same conclusion. Kelby also mentioned that in group shots someone always has their eyes closed. He recommends telling everyone to close their eyes at the outset, count to 3 and then tell people to open their eyes and smile. This trick works great and has the added benefit of being funny and unexpected – so the smiles are genuine.
Another book that was very helpful was the Wedding Photographer’s Handbook, by Bill Hurter. If you’re shooting your first wedding, you need to read this book. It’s full of practical advice, sample photos, ideas for album layouts, etc. The constant “watch your DoF” reminders were especially helpful. I often use shallow depth of field for creative effect, and I really did need to be reminded of the situations were I’d need to stop down to f/11 or so to get enough DoF for the group shots.
Next time: Planning for the Wedding Day
Back in December my sister asked me to shoot her wedding, which was about 6 months away.
At the time I knew just enough about wedding photography to know that I was completely unqualified to shoot a wedding. So of course I agreed. In the next series of posts I will recount my journey over the last several months and the steps I took to prepare for the wedding.
Two Bodies
Lunch break photo walks are hard; almost nothing looks good with the midday sun directly overhead. I started doing these because I think I need more time behind the camera and finding a good photo in a limited amount of time in difficult lighting conditions with only one lens to choose from can be good practice.
(I bring only a single prime lens for my week-day practice shoots. Usually it’s the EF 24mm f/2.8 because that lens is small and light and fits in my bag nicely, but today I brought my EF 35mm f/1.4L)
But I’ve already walked all over Akasaka, and taken pretty much every photo that can be taken within walking distance from my building on a one hour lunch break. The images are starting to blur together and I’m beginning to hate myself for taking so many pictures of flowers. Continue reading