For this event, they had closed down the street, had some bands playing, giveaways and a fashion show. As a photographer I thought this was a great time to try some street photography with the fashion models. But as I watched what was going on I saw that a photographer had set up three hot lights on the street to shoot the models before they went on stage. I’m used to seeing fashion done with strobes, but rarely hot lights, so I stood around and started taking a few photographs myself, to the chagrin of the photographer trying to do his job.

It was a very simple setup, three Smith Victor’s lights with regular 200 W bulbs in them on three stands. Two of the lights were placed a little over at 90° angles from each other, and one light was set in the middle and placed low. This was a fairly simple setup that seemed to work really well as the models moved around. He did not have to adjust the lights that much and was able to shoot quite quickly.

This just goes to show you that you don’t need to have a lot of strobe equipment to get some really good photographs, that all you need is a little creativity and some beautiful woman. Here are a few of the shots that I took while the other photographer worked. I did no Photoshop work on any of them, just adjusted the RAW files in Lightroom

Happy New Year to everyone, I hope your holidays were everything you hoped for. Sorry it’s been so long since my last post, as I took some time off for the holidays and I was putting together a grant proposal for the city of Tampa’s Big Picture Photographer Laureate program. I have been working on my black & white images from Chicago I shot back in June. My goal is to have at least 20 images up on my web site by the end of the week.

I have been using Adobe Lightroom to do the conversions to black & white and I have been very happy with the results. In a few images I have been able to get the sky to go almost black, the same way Ansel Adams did in some of his photography of Yosemite. This is an image of the “Bean” and it is a very reflective bean shaped sphere. Just a little tip if you want to get a clean photograph without a lot of people, get there very early in the morning as there is usually a mob of people standing around. I love the contrast of the distorted; in focus buildings on the Bean and the out of focus Buildings on the right side of the image. I think this shape and focus contrast works well in this photo.

Before I went to PhotoshopWorld in Las Vegas at the beginning of the September Jeff Leimbach and I drove to Yosemite to shoot for 4 days. I photographed over 70 gigs of images and plan to spend the next few weeks (or Months) going though these images. As I was photographing a lot of these images I kept thinking of Ansel Adams and how he had to carry an 8×10 view camera and glass film plates on a donkey to get some of his great photos. I just had to drive to a parking lot and carry my digital camera and fight the crowds of tourist and answer the question “what are you waiting for and is something going to happen.” I did all my adjustment on this image in Lightroom trying to give it that Ansel Adams feeling.

Before I went to PhotoshopWorld in Las Vegas at the beginning of the September Jeff Leimbach and I drove to Yosemite to shoot for 4 days. I photographed over 70 gigs of images and plan to spend the next few weeks (or Months) going though these images. As I was photographing a lot of these images I kept thinking of Ansel Adams and how he had to carry an 8×10 view camera and glass film plates on a donkey to get some of his great photos. I just had to drive to a parking lot and carry my digital camera and fight the crowds of tourist and answer the question “what are you waiting for and is something going to happen.” I did all my adjustment on this image in Lightroom trying to give it that Ansel Adams feeling.