The recent article about me in Nikon World Magazine in now available online.
Dubai GPP 2012 Photo
I'm headed to the airport just now, but wanted to put up a photo from last weeks GPP workshops. I'm headed to Ghana for a 10 day assignment so I will be pretty much out of touch. Let me leave you with this, and I will explain how it was lit on my return. Sorry for the short post, got a run. DT
As it turns out, I have a 4 hour delay here in DC for my flight to Ghana. Thought I'd run through the process for making the photo above. The location was the Kempinski Hotel at the Mall of Emirates in Dubai. I was told that we were shooting in a $10,000.00 USD a night room. It was a 3 bedroom with a view of the Ski Resort in the mall. Yes, a ski resort in the shopping mall, only in Dubai.
The lighting outside the windows over the ski resort was a Mercury Vapor type lighting. By shifting my white balance on the camera to tungsten, the color of those lights went very blue. The ambient light in the room was a clean tungsten, however the light over the bed was dialed down by use of a rheostat. Dialing down that light made the color temp drop below a true tungsten level. I used a single SB-800 fitted with a Rouge Grid, the speedlight was also fitted with a full cut CTO to balance with the tungsten setting on the camera. DT
Nikon World Magazine
I was surprised to see that a photo I had shot for Nikon late last year made the cover of the Winter 2012 issue of Nikon World. I knew of course that I was being featured in the magazine but had no idea that one of my photos would grace the cover. I'm thrilled and honored. I blogged about this photo a while back. You can read that post HERE.
Late last year, I was asked by Nikon to create 3 different photos and that they wanted to video tape me shooting. The cover shot is one of the three I created for them, the other two can be seen in the complete article in the magazine. The video which was shot during the photography process has not been released just yet, perhaps in the next few weeks.
The photo on the left was another one of those shot for Nikon during my NY visit. The other is the beautiful model on the right in the spread below. I'll post more about these to photos later as time permits.
I look forward to the opportunity to do more work for Nikon! You can download the article HERE.
Egypt Slideshow
I've been teaching for Popular Photography Magazine's Mentor Series for quite sometime now. I have about 4 Treks each year to various locations throughout the world. In November of 2010 I had a Trek to Egypt, about 4 months before the "Arab Spring" uprising in Egypt.
Recently in the news we're seeing new demonstration in Cario and total chaos in the streets. I feel very fortunite to have visited Egypt, who knows when it will be safe to visit that country again. Egypt is a beautiful country and it saddens me to see what is taking place in that country.
I have put together a sideshow of images from my visit to Egypt. I'll be doing another overseas trip for the Mentor Series in April. I'll be leading a Trek with Michael Clark to the wonderful city of Dubai, in the UAE. That Trek will take place April 20-27, 2012. For more information on this trek and other, please visit the Mentor Series Website.
Spyder Cube
Back sometime ago I did a review of the Spyder Cube Gray Card. As it turns out, I have 5 of these available for sale. Datacolor helped sponsor my workshops in Europe this past summer and these are the only ones remaining.
I'm asking $45.00 a piece for them, which includes shipping in the States. Please let me know if you are interested. DT
Barndoors - A Creative Tool
This past summer, I spent 2 weeks conducting workshops throughout Austria. At one of those workshops, I demonstrated the creative use of a really cool modifier. I carry a set of barndoors in my lighting kit at all times. I use a set of speedlight modifiers produced by Gadget Brando out of Hong Kong. I wrote a post about these modifiers back in 09.
This is a photograph of Wolfgang at one of those workshops. I used a Lumiquest Softbox LPT for the main light and one SB-800 with a set of barndoors for the background. Barndoors allow you to shape the hard light coming from your speedlight to almost any shape within the square to rectangle shape. Barndoors are very flexible in that they allows you to create more interesting backgrounds and also focus your view attention to specific areas of the photograph.
In my lighting kit I usually carry 2 sets of barndoors. Their light weight and take no space in my bag. I'll also use barndoors on lights that are place facing towards my camera position. I can use the adjustable blades of the doors to help prevent flare in my lens. You can see here in the photo below how that might be used.
I have a Small Strobes, Big Results workshop coming up on the 25th of Feb. here in Denver. If your interested in attending, you can learn more about that HERE. The full website for Small Strobes, Big Results is HERE. DT