Picture of the Month – June 2010

I’ve been working with the folks at HALO long before I started my photography business and they’ve been a faithful customer since. Every few months they send me their latest products and I try and figure out some new way to photograph them that makes them look interesting. Hard to do when most of their products look pretty similar, and they also keep getting smaller and smaller which makes it tougher too.

This is one of the latest creations, the GEmini. The capitalization is meant to stress the mini part. Since they are used in ethernet applications, I used a Cat 5 cable to provide the scale. The background is a black tinted piece of glass with a blue gel, lit from underneath.

Picture of the Month – May 2010

Lori and I were coming back from Bear River Valley after a family portrait session when we came across these sheep. Ever since we went to the U.K., Lori has had a real thing for sheep, so of course we had to stop the truck. I liked how where ever the sheep went, the birds were sure to follow.

Picture of the Month – April 2010

I’ve been tutoring a friend on photography and every once in a while we schedule a session in the studio to just play around, experiment, and learn. I had wanted to experiment with light painting which is a technique where you work in a totally dark room, and use flashlights or other small constant lights to light the scene. It’s easier to do with more than one person, so in this shot my assistant worked with the background lights, pointing them towards the camera and moving them around which left the colored streaks of light. While she was doing that I was using a flashlight to light Captain Jack and his trusty Triumph Sprint ST.

Picture of the Month – March 2010

Becki’s maternity portraits were the last portraits I took before the surgery and first thing I did after getting back in the studio was to photograph her again, this time with her newborn son, Kaden. This portait session captured the many moods of a newborn, but this one came at the end after Kaden got tired of soiling every piece of clothing Becki brought and borrowed. Nobody said babies are neat, but they sure are cute.

Picture of the Month – January 2010

My first shoot after getting back from surgery was one I was looking forward to. Kaline, who has modeled for me since 2002 ( and is featured in two of my all time favorite photographs, Mountain Peek, and Lady of the Lake) had her second child and three days after Cecilia’s birth I visited the newly expanded family at their home.

Her husband, Ben, works for the Post Office so I figured if you work for the company that does more deliveries than anyone else, why would you trust your most important delivery to a stork?

Unfortunately, the Post Office doesn’t make Priority One boxes large enough to ship a 7 pound newborn. So Photoshop came to the rescue. We photographed Cecilia at their home in a generic box filled with pink peanuts. Then back at the studio I photographed the Priority One box with the pink backdrop. A few minutes of Photoshop work blended the two photographs.

As we were photographing Cecilia, we had to rescue her a couple of times as she would gradually sink into the packing peanuts as she wiggled around. But she looked entirely comfortable sleeping in her box. However the shoot came to an end when little Cecilia burped up. Well that is an understatement. Think Mt. Vesuvious. I didn’t realize a baby could drink that much. It pretty much made a mess of her and the peanuts, but fortunately by then I had the photos I needed.

Picture of the Month

One of the things we really missed by being in the Bay Area for the kidney transplant was missing Ferndale’s Christmas. The Victorian Village and Christmas were made for each other. Fortunately, we got back to Ferndale just before New Years and we got to see the town tree lit up one night. We also got to see Steve and Nancy Courtemanche’s house all lit up like a little gingerbread house.

Picture of the Month – December 2009

December 9, one day before I turned 49, my wife and I went California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco so that I could donate one of my kidneys to her. The operations were a success for both of us. I was lucky and got out the hospital in under 48 hours but Lori’s stay was longer due to her operation being more complex and a couple of complications that eventually got solved.

Most of December I was focused on this surgery or recovering from it so I didn’t do much photography. But the rooms at the hospital provided some nice views of San Francisco, a small consolation. I captured this sunset scene one night while doing my walking around the halls of the hospital.

Picture of the Month – November 2009

Becki has modeled for me several times over the last few years, posing variously as a sexy Ms. Claus, a sexy firefighter, and a 1920s flapper dancer. But this time Becki came into the studio as her self. Becki’s always been fun to photograph and she’s got one of the greatest smiles, especially when she’s cracking up, which is often.

But for maternity portraits I usually go with a more reflective expression. For this pose we wrapped Becki in some white fabric and went with very high key lighting and then processed it further to give the whole photo a soft, angelic look to it.

We squeezed this shoot in as my last shoot for the year before Lori and I took off for our transplant surgery. I should be back to work just in time to photograph Becki and Mick with their new addition to the family.

Picture of the Month – October 2009

We photographed Katrina in a few different Victorian outfits for our Vintage Fashion website. I took a few of the photos and gave them the old glass plate treatment. By layering different textures into the photo in Photoshop, I take a perfectly good photograph and make it look old and beat up. Just the opposite of what I’m usually doing on the old photo restoration side of the business.

Picture of the Month – September 2009

Because this month’s picture was created, rather than just photographed, I thought it would be fun to show you how it came together. I’ve done several pirate photoshoots both in the studio and on location, but this time I wanted to create something more theatrical.

The pirate was played by Michelle, who I met last year photographing her for her senior portrait. I shot Michelle against a blue backdrop that I new would be close to the shade of blue I’d want for the night sky. This made it easier to drop out the background and not leave a tell-tale fringe. The hardest part of lighting Michelle was getting the right balance of backlighting so that it would look like the moonlight was shining through her blouse. The color temperature for this shot was cooled way down to give it a blueish cast so it would look like a night shot.

A few days later I photographed the pirate ship against the same blue background. The pirate ship is a model that Andy Doerner built for Lori and I in 1999. It was lit in the studio to make it appear as the light was coming from the moon. I used one snooted strobe up on a boom to approximate the moonlight.

The sky and ocean came from a shot I took on a vacation in Mexico. Different treatments were done to both the sky and the water to get it to look like night. It seemed a waste to use such a colorful sunset, but I liked the highlights on the water and the clouds in the sky.

The moon was added from a public domain image shot by NASA. For the finishing touch, the stars in the sky were added on a separate layer in Photoshop.