I’ve been happier in the past few days than I have been in a long time. I’ve spent some quality time with friends. I went to Portland to hang out with my family for a couple of days. I’m taking photos of things that I enjoy shooting. And the sun is out!

Here are a few images from the past week that make me smile:

There are two events that do stand out as the most smile-worthy things for me.

1) Today is my 33rd birthday. I’ve been stuck in the office all day, but I will be heading out to have a fun and relaxing night with my friends later.

And 2) My sister got engaged last night (that’s her in the picture above)! Congrats!

Needless to say, I am happy today. :)

To test out the new presets, I pulled some images from a recent self-portrait shoot and went to town with the processing. The base lighting is the same in all images — Nikon SB-600 at full power with a CTO gel at camera left, sun at camera right.

Here’s what the original colors looked like:

And here are three variations on the cross-processed look I’ve been working on:

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how they turned out. I still need to do some tweaking to find a good starting point for the preset(s), but I’m starting to get the colors and tones that I want. Someday, I might even share those presets. :)

I’m still waiting to be enlightened…

For more photos, head on over to my Flickr photostream.

The master bedroom in my apartment is empty at the moment, so I decided to take advantage of the extra space to do more white background lighting practice. My goal for the session was to get a clean white background and capture a full-body shot in the air without using an actual seamless background and large studio space (neither of which I have at the moment).

Here’s the setup I used:

To illuminate the wall, I used 2 Nikon SB-600s cranked up to 1/2 power. I attached a couple of Honl Speed Gobos to prevent the strobes from flaring into the lens (a Sigma 10-20mm ultra wide-angle lens that can pick up *anything*). The main light is a Vivitar 285HV at 1/4 power in a shoot-through umbrella. The big red laundry bin in the middle is where I was standing for the shots.

The exposure on the two jumps featured in this post was 1/250th sec at f/8 at ISO 400. Why ISO 400 when I have so much light and white walls that bounce that light? I forgot that I had shifted the custom studio lighting preset on my D300 from ISO 200 to 400 during a previous session. Oops!

Overall, I’m happy with how the images turned out. I feel like I got a bit too much spill from the background lights, but that’s mostly because I don’t have a whole lot of space to work with. I’m also seriously considering getting a softbox (possibly the Westcott Apollo 50″) for my main light, so I can restrict light even more in such a tight shooting area. Still, I like the final results from my 30 minutes of playing around.

I’ve gotta send out props to Zach Arias and David Hobby for always being so awesome about sharing their photography and lighting knowledge with the world. I’ve learned so much about lighting from reading their blogs and seeing their work. I’ve already attended a Strobist workshop and hung out with David a few times. One of these days I’ll get to a OneLight Workshop with Zack.

Just something a little different to mix things up. Mostly just practicing with my 85/1.8. :)

I like koi. That is all.

Big orange cones at the Olympic Sculpture Park:

A huge wave made out of 2×4’s in the pond at Bellevue Downtown Park (yes, the art is still constructing it):

And giant metal balls that I incorporated into a 365 Days shot:

Outdoor art is fun!