Single light dog portrait

I finally broke down and bought something I've been wanting to try out for a long time - a light stand, umbrella, and an adapter for my flash. It turns out you can do a lot with a single light source. In these photos I used the single flash, shot into a white translucent umbrella. I placed a silver reflector opposite the light for fill. It's amazing what you can do with a real lighting setup.

Merry Christmas! Woof!

Rawhide!

Last weekend I attended a Missouri Rawhide Mounted Shooters event. That's right. A coworker of mine participates in the group and I asked if I could come and photograph them. It's a timed event where they ride a course marked with barrels, shooting balloons along the way with black powder old West-style revolvers. The horses were beautiful and the event was a lot of fun to watch. Here you go:

TBC

One of my coworker friends collects 80's movie posters, and has the classic poster from The Breakfast Club hanging in an office she shares with a couple of other friends. Someone mentioned that it would be funny to reproduce the poster with people from work. They asked me if I would help them, and I said "absolutely I would". We spent a couple of weeks figuring out who would play what parts and gathering props. On a Friday at lunch I dragged in all of my gear and lighting and a canvas backdrop and we had a photo shoot. After some Photoshop-ing, here is the result. I think it came out pretty well. (I included the original poster as well, for reference)

Urban Photo Safari

I participated in Urban Photo Safari on Saturday, and it was great! In this annual event, everyone gathers at a certain place to sign in and find out the geographic boundary (though this year there was no boundary). You have four hours to go out and shoot as much as you want (plus one self portrait), then return and hand over your memory card to be downloaded. You then go home, review your photos, pick your best 10, and email the file numbers to the coordinator. Once everyone's images are posted, then all participants go to the site and vote for their favorites. The winner gets mostly bragging rights. The event was a great excuse to just go out and shoot for four hours, and it was actually really nice and refreshing that I could not do any post-processing before handing over the images. In this age of the digital darkroom, I often get obsessed with tweaking and adjusting, and start to feel like it's a requirement of every image. With these, I had to just shoot and walk away. Here are my top 10 for your enjoyment. If you're really bored, you can see the larger gallery here: http://www.chriscampbellphotography.com/UrbanPhotoSafari09

We're goin' to the zoo, zoo, zoo....

My mom and I went to the zoo for Mother's Day. (Happy Mother's Day again, Mom!) It turns out moms get in free on Mother's Day, and it was a total zoo. We eventually reached our limit and bailed, but we had a good time and I did manage to capture a few fun shots. Enjoy.

Fun with Software

I'm a little late to the party, but I'm having some fun experimenting with HDR (high dynamic range) photography. The process involves making several different exposures of the exact same shot, from under to over exposed, and then using software to blend them together. The resulting images have amazing shadow details and really interesting light qualities. Here are a couple of examples from my recent tinkering.

More Old Stuff

There isn't much I like to photograph more than old cars. During our wanderings at the salvage warehouse we stumbled on a couple of old collectibles. Not for sale.