Here’s a collection of photos I took at the Minnesota Polar Bear Plunge held on March 5, 2011:
Browsing Posts in Shoots
Rachel and Joe met me and my assistant (my wife Heather) at the Mill City Museum and St. Anthony Main area for their engagement photo shoot back in October. They were a fun couple and kept the smiles coming despite the brisk fall Minnesota weather. Here are some of the best shots from that day. Be sure to click on the photos:
Katie and T Broussard
This past Saturday, I had the pleasure of shooting an outdoor wedding in Roseville, Minnesota at the Muriel Sahlin Arboretum. Katie and T are a really fun couple with wonderful families. Several of T’s family and friends came in from as far away as California, Arizona, Texas, and Florida to experience the best August weather Minnesota has to offer.
Click here for the slideshow.
Special thanks to my second photographer, Nick Cecconi, for capturing some fantastic moments.
I assisted Dana Schoppe as a second photographer for a wedding in Stillwater, MN several weeks ago; I’ll be posting those pictures another day.
This upcoming weekend, I am shooting a wedding in Roseville, MN. Great couple, cute venue, and nice families. I’m looking forward to it. Stay tuned to this blog for updates!
I took a combination of photos and art and created the following two sets of business cards. First card (below) is for my wife’s up-and-coming event coordination business. I received permission from Gordon French to use the scroll graphic in his Ad Style Wordpress Theme (thanks, Gordon!) and used Gimp’s Edge Detect functionality to render Heather’s picture for the back:
Heather's Card (Front)
Heather's Card (Back)
I also created cards for Heather’s favorite hair stylist, Kim over at Shear Genius, using only photos taken with my D200:
Shear Genius (Front)
Shear Genius (Back)
All were printed at Vistaprint using some money-saving promo codes found at Retail Me Not. Except for some aggressive cropping on the back of the Shear Genius card, I believe the cards turned out pretty well.
Steven from Phree Range Fitness, a start-up fitness company in the Twin Cities area, hired me for a photo shoot featuring him and three other models. The pictures will be used for a website promoting his business.
Here are a few from the shoot:
Thanks to Steven and his fitness class for providing me this opportunity!
My wife Heather asked that I take some portrait/avatar shots for her various online projects. We went to Indian Mounds Park in St. Paul about an hour before sunset and took these:
Local photographer Dana Schoppe recommended the use of a “clamshell” technique for outdoor photos, which employs the use of two shoot-through umbrellas with two flashes in order to get really good coverage/diffusion across a face. Great recommendation, as you can see in the first three pictures.
My wife Heather and I were invited to a low-key wedding reception for one of her friends on The Knot. They graciously allowed us to photograph them, even offering to pose for a variety of shots. Below, I took the first 6, and Heather took the last 5:
I set up a quick booth at a Small Business Expo hosted at the Maplewood Community Center this past Saturday:
Small Business Expo, Maplewood, MN
The Pragmatic Photography Table
The show was organized and put together by “Lala” Taylor, shown here on the left:
It was a great time; the other vendors and patrons were very friendly and welcoming.
I made friends with Leticia (Party Lite consultant) at the table next to mine, and she agreed to an artistic shot of her daughter while she extinguished the candles at the end of the show. I was extremely pleased with the result:
The picture was taken with an SB-800 flash placed on the table (remotely triggered by the D200) with a full cut of CTO gel applied. I used a 55-200 at 55mm at its lowest stop (f/4). The background consisted of an ugly gray wall but the flash and camera did a great job of getting rid of it. The picture was cropped but no other modifications were made.
Special thanks to Leticia for the opportunity (and permission) to show the picture on this blog.
Most of the tips I found online about shooting hockey games involved the use of a 70-200 f/2.8, which I don’t (yet) have. I thought I’d wing it with my 55-200 f/4 and 70-300 f/4, and got, well, the results I expected (and feared). Some toying around in Lightroom Beta 3 helped a bit in post, but it’s pretty much a fact — you need fast zoom glass to capture hockey. Here’s one of the shots:
Others are available here.
I treated the shoot as a pure learning exercise, so from that standpoint, I wasn’t too disappointed. I used 4500 Kelvin on the white balance, which worked well for some shots I took with a 17-50 f/2.8. I neglected to re-white balance for the other lenses, so results definitely varied. The plexiglass was pretty badly scuffed up, so I took the pictures from above the glass standing on the bleachers, so the 17-50 was just too limited for that distance.
If I get another chance to do hockey, I’ll probably rent a 70-200 f/2.8 and see about incorporating the SB-800, now that I have a handy Justin Clamp.
