Henrique and Moritz

We've got a couple of Grade 10 exchange students staying with us for the winter.  Henrique from Brazil, and Moritz from Germany.  Since they weren't around to get their school photos at the beginning of the year, I thought I'd just grad a couple of quick ones in the studio.  For kicks, I thought we'd do something more interesting as well.

Henrique

Moritz

Tech Stuff

I lit the guys with an Alien Bee B1600 with the stock 7 inch silver reflector on it.  Another Alien Bee with an extra small softbox was used as a fill light to soften the effect of the hard main light.  This is not something you want to do with someone much older than a teenager unless they have perfect make-up on.

Camera:  Nikon D700

Lens:  Nikon AF-S 28-70mm f/2.8

Lighting:  Alien Bee B1600 x 2

Note

If it seems that I've haven't done any blog postings in a while, it's that we're in the shoulder season between winter and summer here and I'm not that busy.  Alan at the Urban Pie toodled off to thailand for a long vacation as well, so I haven't been doing much with those guys either.  I've been filling my time with long walks with my wife, fixing some badly needed things on my pick-up truck, and finishing some wedding albums for clients, and generally goofing off.  Come June, I get busy again for the summer season.

Sarah and Kris's Wedding at the Brew Creek Lodge

Sarah and Kris are a really nice and fun loving couple who currently live in the UK, although Sarah is from Vancouver. They had a great wedding at the Brew Creek Lodge, which is about half way between Squamish and Vancouver.


Sarah marshals her bride's maids


A beautiful day made for a great outdoor ceremony.




It's a really hokey photo, but sometimes it works pretty well.




I was doing some standard pics of the guests, and didn't notice this until I was reviewing the photos back in my office.


What's the secret? The bride's maid's were trying on Sarah's wedding ring.




The Brew Creek Lodge is one of the prettiest locations I work in.


The first dance.

Tech Stuff
Although I try not to let it show, almost all the photos have some degree to flash to either fill or light them. The portraits are shot with a SB-900 mounted in medium Photoflex softbox. All the interior photos are shot with on-camera flash, with the light bounced off either the ceiling or walls.

The main lens I use for weddings is the medium zoom 28-70mm. The couple portraits were shot with my 70-200mm, and the ceremony was the 17-35mm

Camera: Nikon D700
Lenses: Nikon AF-S 17-35mm f/2.8, AF-S 28-70 f/2.8, AF-S 70-200mm f/2.8.
Lighting: Nikon SB-900. Off camera flash controlled with the SU-800.

First Wedding of the Season

This is the first wedding of my 2010 summer season. Actually, it's the first one I've done since January, which is a break courtesy of the Olympic Games, which shut everything in town down for the entire winter. These guys were a lot of fun to work with, and really made for great photos.







Tech Stuff:
It was an overcast day with some light rain, which made for nice soft light, and not much need for any flash. The Edgewater Lodge is a great place to photograph a wedding, because it gives you a real range of locations and backgrounds, all within a short walk of the main lodge.

Camera: Nikon D700
Lenses: AF-S Nikon 28-70 and AF-S Nikon 70-200
Lighting: Natural

Alexandra and Zachary's B'nai Mitzvah

Alexandra and Zachary with some of their school friends
I've been doing wedding and event photography for over 13 years full time, and I've never had the opportunity to photograph a Bar Mitzvah (or in this case a B'nai Mitzvah, a Bar Mitzvah for twins) until now. I have to say it was a complete blast.

The Olympics on, my wedding business has been pretty much shut down since January. This was a really nice event to do, and it also got me ready for weddings, which start up again in June.


Alexandra and Zachary's dad Jack had a terrific party at the Whistler four Seasons Hotel.


Everyone danced well into the night.

Top of the layer cake

This a local three bedroom townhouse that is going back into the rental pool after a major renovation. While it's not the fanciest place I've been in, it's fairly typical of the work I do on a day to day basis. While it looks fairly straight forward, it's actually three separate photographs stacked on top of each other.


Here is the base image, except with the colour target in the frame. The lighting is very warm because of the halogen track lighting, and the colour target gives me a neutral tone to use to get an accurate colour balance. The biggest problems with this photo is that the light outside through the window is totally blown out, there is a big reflection in the painting of the strobe's softbox, and the fireplace is dark.


Here is another version with the strobe turned off and exposure set for the outside lighting. I dropped in the view of the exterior overtop of the original photo to balance the light outside. I also copied out the painting above the fireplace to fix the reflection in the glass.


In the final image, I turned off all the lights, and lit a big fire, and then dropped the image of the fireplace onto the final image.

The image was lit with an Alien Bee strobe with a medium softbox.

You can see more of my architectural work at http://www.davidbuzzard.com/

Tech Stuff
Camera: Nikon D700
Lens: Nikon AF-S 17-35mm f/2.8
Lighting: Alienn Bee B1600 640 w/sec strobe with a 24x16" softbox. Radio Popper radio slaves.