Rain Rain Go Away, Come Again Some Other Day!

Photography is going great! I have had a lot of opportunities in the last few weeks to get photo shoots setup. I am also currently finishing up a design for a friend's CD. We have done a photo shoot for that, but I am not releasing any of the pictures until the CD is done, and is for sale. So, sorry, I can't share them on here YET.

Unfortunately, it is winter, and in Oregon, the winter brings rain. And lots of it! Why do you think everything here is so green? I have a few photo shoots coming, but my most recent one with a girl named Katie was fun, except, most of the time it was spent undercover and indoors. She already has a lot of studio photos, so I naturally wanted to be different. We were able to get out for a bit, before a huge down pour came out of no where and we had to retreat back to my car. It was fun, we got a few pictures. Well, six total that were anyway usable. I have never done such a short photo shoot in my life, but I think overall the pictures we got were better than expected for not having much to try.

I am learning a lot about my photo printing host. I am quite amazed every time I get feedback from my customers. SmugMug has changed a lot in the last few months that I have been involved with them. It is great, good opportunities with this company for printing. I printed some large prints for my family, and they turned out amazing. So if you have any thoughts of getting a SmugMug account, be sure to use referred by me and save $5, and I will get $10. This is a link will automatically add me as your referral. Not a whole lot of money, but it will help both of us, you'll get a great photo printing service, and I'll get some money off my next year's subscription.

This all I have for now, I will have another update on a few photo shoots in the next coming days. Thanks for all your support!

Merry Christmas

I just wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas, and for those who don't celebrate Christmas, happy holidays! I hung out with my family for the weekend, and took family portraits at my local church for 5 hours. It was a lot of work, but I think meeting new people will help me out eventually! :)

Flickr Groups

I just wanted to take this time to mention a couple Flickr groups that I am involved in that I feel would be important to helping a starving photographer.

First off, I wanted to plug the groups that I am a moderator, or admin for.

• The Training Grounds: Photographers Teaching Photographers
  
• Midnight Photography
  
• Willarg - Just a small group to go along with this blog.
  

And these groups, which most have a huge user base, and are also very active, are some of the real inspiration that I have come across.

• Strobist.com - One of the most active groups on Flickr for low budget photographers.
  
• Photographer’s tech Resources
  
• Pro corner
  

And some fun Flickr groups that I am not at all involved in, but I feel are really cool!

• Photoshop Tennis - A good place to practice bogus Photoshop skills that you will probably never use anywhere else.
  
• Polar Panoramas - A fun style of panoramas.
  

If you have any groups that you'd recommend, please leave the links in the comments!

Updated: I fixed my links, whoops. Thanks Philip!

Saturday Photo Shoots

Wow! 2 on location photo shoots, 6 hours. Wow, I couldn't have been more crazy. Tomorrow, I have the same thing. It might be a little bit more tricky. One is an actual set up and shoot photo shoot, and the other is just a "hey let's have a photo shoot" photo shoot.

I think it will all work out in the end, so I am excited about that.

My photo shoots from today were great, both of my subjects were a joy to be around, and were both excited for the photo shoot. Which makes my job easier! One of the photo shoots was a senior photo shoot, and I haven't edited those pictures yet, but the second was just a friend on a model web page and i uploaded two photos from that shoot of onto Flickr. These are the pictures that I added to this post.

More to come later!

FYI: You can click on the images, they are directly linked to the image on Flickr! You can get to the rest of my pictures there! Enjoy!

Upcoming Photography Weekend

I apologize for the lack of updates lately. I have had a very dormant week when it comes to photography. I really need to get up, and do some photography. I assure you this weekend will bring a change to that. I have scheduled four separate photo shoots. Each one will bring a unique flavor to my portfolio.

The picture on the left, is a picture of myself. I just really enjoyed my expression, and quality of this picture. I used a Wacom Bamboo tablet to edit this photo, and it turned out nicely.

I forgot to mention that last weekend I had a photo shoot with a friend. The photo shoot was for a Secret Santa gift exchange. Apparently she is good friends with this co-worker of hers, and has baby sat for her Secret Santa's family. The photo shoot was of the co-worker's children. The pictures turned out good.

The photo shoot was a fun experience, first time I have shot with another photographer as a team. Although, my friend may not consider herself a photographer, but with my Nikon SpeedLight SB-800 and PocketWizard strapped to that on her Nikon D40, she definitely played the part well! My pictures were taken with my flash on a stand powered by PocketWizards, I was hoping that by having a PocketWizard attached to her flash, I would be able to leech some light from it. I will have to play with this idea more at another time.

Here are a few photos from this last weekend:

Group Pictures

Group photos. A photographers worst nightmare. This last weekend, I got to do three extremely large group photos. One with up to 60 people and two others of 30. A little background, I was doing photography for The Onyx House, it is a CO-ED Christian house in Eugene, Oregon. I actually lived there for two years, but moved out last summer in 2007. It was a great place to live, and a great place to learn how to deal with large amounts of people! I actually setup my first photography studio on the basement of this house, and convinced housemates to let me take pictures of them.

My main task of the night was to take a group picture of all the residence.

Before the big group photo, I got the pleasure to take pictures of everyone individually. The whole night was a mystery going into it. I knew I needed to bring all of my lighting equipment. I setup two flashes in a wide clamshell format, one high the other low. Both at 45-degree angles from the subjects. The background, and surroundings was already setup for me. I shot one test picture, and I had it! I was completely pleased! Bring them on! You can see one of the earlier pictures to the left, and if you are interested in seeing the rest, go ahead and click the image!

I had my brand new Nikon D300 camera. It was definitely a great way to test out the capabilities of the camera. I was shooting JPEG images most of the night at 1000 ISO. The pictures turned out magnificent without any additional noise reduction there was hardly any to be seen! I also had not recharged my battery since putting it into my D300, and had already taken over 500 pictures. I had around 50% battery left, and an extra battery just in case. By the time the night was over, my camera had 6% battery, and I had taken nearly 300 pictures. That’s a total of 800 pictures before having to recharge my battery. Quite an improvement from my Nikon D200!

After the "Narnia" pictures. I got an opportunity to play a little. When everyone was asked to go over to the "dance floor" I quickly followed with my two flashes in hand (I ditched the umbrellas). I placed them on opposite sides of the dance floor, and since I had them triggered on wireless by my trusty Pocket Wizards, I was free to move around the room wherever I pleased! I got a few interesting pictures.

Lastly, after everything was winding down, I was pressed with a daunting task: a group photo of everyone in the house. My trusty D300, and 12 mega pixels to fit 60 people into. I had two strobe lights and with my stands on some dining tables was just enough to light the scene.

I added a black border to focus the attention toward the people in the picture. Here are the pictures from the shoot. I hope you enjoy them!







Lastly, I decided that I could throw in a picture I did a few months ago of the staff of my personal church, Eugene Faith Center. This one has a little more flavor because it actually had appealing surroundings.

Another Me

Earlier this week I was checking my web page on Google, and found another photography that goes by the name Will Foster at dubFoster.com. Very interesting. He seems to enjoy documenting his life in some sort of photo blog and has since included pictures of my sites explaining:

"... I got an email from another Will Foster, we seem to be interested in the same sort of thing."

It's good to see that I have an alternate life, and I am still interested in photography!

I have found many instances of my name, unfortunately most of these come up before me. This was the only me that was also interested in photography. Others include basketball, music, drugs, and just a bunch of random stuff that I don't want to be associated with.

Winter Wonderland

Last Saturday I had a little photo shoot at my old residence “The Onyx House.” They have an annual Christmas party for all the residence. The residence dress up and have a special night with out housites, and just have fun! For the photo shoot there was a nice winter, almost as if it was inspired by Narnia, scene setup for me to take pictures of the residence in. It was creative, and worked well with my lighting. I will post more about that later, since I don’t have any of the pictures online yet.

I have been really busy lately, but today’s looking nice and calm compared to my weekend of fun, and hanging out with friends! I apologize for my lack of updates lately. I will get the ball moving, and get more stuff up here. I actually just joined a model/photographer/makeup/wardrobe social community. When I checked, I found a lot of people in the Eugene, Oregon area! So we'll see what this brings to my photography! I will give you an update later on this as well.