pho//blog//raphy

My friend Jeff and I drove down to San Onofre beach yesterday to scout out some locations for a photo shoot he has coming up. I brought along my camera and snapped a few shots.

Nothing special, just a flower I noticed while out walking Fisher.

And a succulent plant.

My really good friend Dan was diagnosed with cancer less than a year ago. After his operation and chemotherapy, he began his road to recovery. It’s only been 5 months but he has come so far. So we wanted to document how far he has progressed.

Haven’t had time to shoot anything other than cars lately.  Here’s one from the beach shoot I had with Liz last night.

Glorious Milo!

I saw these birds in my backyard tree a couple days ago. So I grabbed my camera and my 70-200 f/2.8 lens so I could go shoot them. I took a few pics from behind them and next to them but I still didn’t have a shot I liked. I moved in front of them and when I raised my camera, they flew away! They saw that I was pointing something at them and got scared!

I thought I had missed my shot but a couple hours later, I looked out the window and saw that they had come back. I went out there again and without rasing my camera, I raised my arms to show them I wasn’t going to hurt them. They seemed fine so I raised my camera and took a few photos. Looking at my display, I saw that the camera wasn’t metering the birds correctly because the sun was behind them. (I wanted to keep the sun behind them because it outlined them nicely from the background.) The camera was metering for the whole picture, so when it saw bright light, it darkened the exposure. I switched the camera to spot metering where it only meters what you have in the exact center of the photo, recomposed and took the picture. Voila! It came out perfectly exposed.

Here is the photo with lots of adjustment layers in Photoshop like levels and curves.

Someday, when I am making more money, I want to buy this lens:

Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8L II USM

While shooting cars, I need that extra stop to f/2.8. My f/4 isn’t cutting it inside the car where I can’t use flash!

I got a job doing some contract photography work for another car dealership.  I’ve been doing it about a month now.  It’s cool, just a lot of work!  Here are some cars I have shot:

2005 Mercedes SLR McLaren - Retailed for $450,000

2005 Ferrari 612 Scaglietti - Retailed for $260,000

2006 Ferrari F430 - Retailed for $179,000

2007 Porsche 911 GT3 RS - Retailed for $106,000

Haven’t shot anything fun in a little while so of course, I took some photos of my cat.  Here’s one of them.