Those of you who have followed my self-portraits for the past couple of years know that I really like to do jumping photos. They’re fun to shoot. I get a little bit of a workout when I do longer sessions. And did I mention that they’re really fun?
I’ve done so many jumping photos that many of my Flickr and photography contacts know me as “the jumping guy”. During the Strobist workshop a couple of years ago, David Hobby referred to me as “the guy who does all those jumping shots.” At the last Chase Jarvis Hangar Shoot, Chase casually mentioned that I would “probably be jumping around the hangar at some point during the evening.” Jumping is basically my thing.
All the jumping has also gotten me a bit of publicity. Earlier this year, one of my jumping photos was published in Popular Photography Magazine. I also had a couple of my photos featured on the Flickr Blog.
With that said, my jump shots have been few and far between over the past few months. There isn’t any particular reason for the lack of jumping, so I’ll just chalk it up to laziness and getting older (bad landings are really bad nowadays…). I’m going to change that up though. Jumping makes me feel good. Jumping photos make other people feel good (or so I’ve been told). Thus, I need to jump some more, and that is what I’ll do. They make for more interesting and fun self-portraits anyway. :)
Earlier this week, I got a chance to spend the day photographing the annual Amaze Entertainment golf tournament out at the Snohomish Public Golf Course in Snohomish, WA. The weather was absolutely gorgeous. We had the entire course to ourselves. And there was more than a little bit of beer flowing at each hole.
Here are a few of my favorite photos from the day:
Thanks to the wonderful crew at Snohomish Public Golf Course for putting up with a bunch of crazy and slightly drunk game developers. Also, kudos to the studio coordinators at Amaze for putting together yet another great afternoon of golf to close out the summer.
This photo makes me all sorts of happy. There’s obviously a lot of movement, but it looks calm and controlled. Margaret is smiling and not making a try-not-to-snap-neck-while-flipping-hair face (anyone who’s taken similar photos will know exactly what I’m talking about). And the lighting is nice and soft and completely not the focus of the image.
The setup for this is very simple and straightforward. I positioned Margaret about 5 ft. from the wall, so that any light I had on her wouldn’t cast any shadows. I had two Nikon SB-600s in shoot-through umbrellas positioned at about 45° off-axis at camera left and camera right. The one on the right was at 1/4 power providing most of the direct light as well as bounce light around the room. The one on the left was at 1/16 power giving me just enough light to fill the shadows a bit. Both lights were right around head-level and about 4 ft away from Margaret. The exposure is ISO 200 and 1/250th sec at f/8.
As you can see, nothing really fancy here. The emphasis of the photo is the hair movement, so I wanted to make sure that everything was broadly lit and that there were no obvious hard shadows. Shooting at my max sync speed of 1/250th sec. allowed me to freeze the hair motion, but, even then, there’s still a little bit of blurring that adds a nice soft quality to the image.
The final touch was some liberal post-processing in Lightroom to make the colors pop. I really like how the blue-green wall complements Margaret’s purple shirt and red hair. I won’t go into the details here (I’m developing yet another Develop Module Preset that I will talk about when it’s gone through some more testing and fine-tuning passes), but I will say that the back wall is actually a warm off-white color in the unedited photo. The original colors weren’t necessarily bad, but they were a bit too monotone for my tastes. I’ll save the discussion for another blog post.
For some reason, I really like the cheap coffee at Cyclops. It’s not the best coffee on the planet, and they serve you so little at a time that it gets cold quickly, but I seem to have no problems drinking a lot of it whenever I go there for brunch. Maybe it’s because there are free refills. Maybe it’s because I’m usually still waking up when I go there on Sunday morning/afternoon. Or, maybe it’s because cheap coffee is the best way to wash down a big, hearty breakfast consisting of a 2-ton omelette, a loaf of toast, and a sack of potatoes. Yeah, that’s probably it.
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