Digital

Golden Hour and Portraits

It’s no secret that the final minutes of light right before sunset are often the best moments to make photographs. You have to be swift and decisive because you don’t have a lot of time before the sun dips below the horizon, but if you have your scene set up and get you get a little bit lucky with your exposures, great things can happen.

Photographed with a Sony A7c and Zeiss 55mm f/1.8 lens.

When COVID was in full swing and everyone was being incredibly cautious about where we went and who we worked with I did quite a few photo sessions in my living room. I have west facing windows that tend to get very dramatic light in the final minutes of the day. Sometimes the light is just way too harsh to work with, but on this particular day it was perfect. Probably because it was the fall season when the light tends to be a bit more subdued, yet full of color.


Water Reflections in Black and White

Every so often a photography session will line up just perfectly. All the elements that can make or break an image from the light, to the location, to the time of day, to the equipment you brought along will work out exactly like you want them to. It doesn’t happen all the time. In fact, it hardly ever happens. But when it does the results can be so stunning and the moment so effortless that you hardly believe the photograph that resulted from the day was something you did on purpose.

Photographed with a Sony A7iii and 55mm Zeiss f/1.8 lens.

I actually wasn’t expecting to get very good light when I set out to make this particular photograph. The day had been both muggy and overcast at the same time which isn’t a great combination for a productive photoshoot. However, at some point between leaving my house and arriving on location everything took a turn for the better and we managed to capture the last glimmers of light before the sun set in the west over the mountains. It certainly didn’t hurt that there wasn’t a soul in site either, which meant we could take our time and get the image right. The model was incredibly patient, holding this pose for quite some time, letting the water beneath her feet become as calm as possible to really enhance the reflection.

I brought along a digital camera for this session as I’ve been trying to work with my Sony A7iii a bit more. I exposed a few rolls of film in this spot as well but have yet to develop any of them. I’ll get to that eventually but at the moment I’m happy with the digital capture results!


Extreme Light In The Studio

It’s been an incredibly hot and bright summer here in the Pacific Northwest. To spare myself, and the people I work with, the pain of dealing with extreme heat I’ve been booking work in local studios instead. This has been rather fun for me as I don’t work indoors all that often and exploring the slow pace and creative freedom of being indoors has been nice.

Photographed with a Sony A7c and Zeiss 55mm f/1.8 lens.

For this particular session I booked the studio at 8am thinking I should get some nice soft morning light to work with. I was quite wrong!! Despite the early morning hour the light was harsh, bright, hot, and incredibly intense coming in through the studio windows. So really I had no choice but to try and embrace it and use it to my creative advantage.

Photographed with a Sony A7c and a Zeiss 55mm f/1.8 lens.

I exposed a few rolls of film for this scene, but to cover my bases I also figured I would expose some frames with the digital camera. I haven’t developed the rolls of film yet but I do think these digital “test shots” came out pretty cool.

Photographed with a Sony A7c and Zeiss 5mm f/1.8 lens.

There are times when I’m really impressed with the dynamic range digital cameras are capable of these days. Naturally I photographed these images in RAW format and brought up the shadow details just slightly in PhotoShop. They didn’t take much editing though which is good. Sitting on my laptop with PhotoShop opened up for hours on end is never going to be my thing.