Luxe magazine, Colorado, Fall 2011

This summer, I was invited to photograph a beautiful residence in Telluride, CO for Luxe magazine. We were treated with both sunny weather for exteriors and overcast skies for the interiors. It was perfect! A very special thanks to Jodie Wright at One Architects for all of her help in making this shoot happen. Also a big thanks to Wesley Seburn for her mad assisting and styling skills. Definitely a really fun shoot all the way around!

Architect: One Architects

Luxe magazine, Colorado, Summer, 2011

This a feature I shot for Luxe magazine and Studio Frank in Telluride, CO.

CCY architects promo

I received this promo in the mail the other day. A nice little piece for CCY Architects in Basalt, CO. The photo is of private residence I shot for them a while back. This is actually the office and guest house for the main house. I'm very partial to it and if I could build my own home it would be a similar design.

LUXE magazine feature

In April, the spring Colorado issue of Luxe magazine hit newsstands. A home we photographed last fall was featured in the latest issue. The home was designed and built by Kogan Builders in Durango, CO. It was a Colorado Certified Green home.

Note: Colors are not 100% accurate due to PDF to JPG conversion.

 

USGBC San Digo site is up!

In February, I did a shoot for the San Diego chapter of the US Green Building Council. The job was to photograph a long list of LEED certified projects in the San Diego area. One of the first uses of the photography is for the new chapter website that was launched yesterday. I'm happy to see my photos gracing the site and they look pretty good. We're excited about some other projects that we have on the boards for the future.

Here is the link.
www.usgbc-sd.org

Cool jobs portrait: Poinsettia botanist

This time of year is personal projects season. One theme I'm working with lately is "cool jobs". It's fun to highlight people who do cool stuff for a living. They are typically pretty stoked about their job which translates to a good portrait of them.

One of my subjects is a woman named Ruth Kobayashi who is the head botanist for Ecke Ranches in Encinitas, CA. Ecke Ranch is a huge producer of Poinsettia flowers in the US and around the world. Her job is to tweak and manipulate the flowers to generate specific colors and leaf shapes. Kind of like playing god.

Here are a couple of portraits from the shoot.

 

 

In this third portrait, I discovered something that I knew but never experienced in this application. I used a 45 tilt shift lens for this shot and racked the tilt all the way over. Adjusting the tilt on a lens can create greater or less depth of field depending on how you adjust it. Greater DOF could be beneficial in an architectural situation where a maximum DOF is required but a larger f stop has to be used. The tilt can be used to decrease the DOF for create effect. This effect is fairly popular these days for miniaturizing scenes.

But there is an odd side effect of cranking the tilt all the way over to achieve a shallow depth of field. I'll explain it briefly, but if you really want an in-depth explanation, follow this link.

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/focusing-ts.shtml

By tilting the lens, you are essentially tilting the plane of focus. Instead of having a plane of focus that is parallel to the film(or sensor) plane, tilting of the lens shifts that plane of focus exponentially away from the film plane. Like I said, read the article above and it will make a lot more sense.

Either way, the effect in a photo like the one below is that objects both near and far can be in focus, yet everything around them is not. Ruth's eyes are in sharp focus but the hairs right above her forehead are out of focus. Then if you look lower in the photo, her arms are way out of focus, yet the table that is five feet behind her is tack sharp. I didn't really notice this while I was shooting but once it was up on the monitor, I found it really distracting. My eye keeps drawing down to the clutter on the table instead of to the bright flowers on the table. Had I noticed this while I was shooting, I could have manipulated the lens to get her eyes and the front row of flowers in focus. Next time.

With some practice, this technique could create some cool results. It could be used to get two subjects, on behind the other, both in focus while dropping everything else out of focus. I'm stoked to play with this more and see what effects I can get from it.

Enjoy the weekend!

Man is one with his work!

A while back, I shot a personal project of a friend of mine, Jim Mumford. Jim owns a business in San Diego called Good Earth Plants. Good Earth Plants is San Diego's largest provider of interior landscape design, installations and maintenance services. They also design living walls and roofs, which are plant beds and gardens located on walls and on roofs. 

This guy is super passionate about what he does and it shows in his work. I came up with an idea of photographing him immersed in his work. Literally, growing out of one of his projects. We met at his shop and looked at some ideas. He thought I was crazy but went along with my ideas. My original thought was squeezing him in a wall unit like the one pictured below.

This option had some issues like how were we going to fit Jim behind the wall. Also, we would have to take out some of the 18x18" crates that held the plants and then fill in the empty voids around Jim. On a vertical surface, that was tricky without strapping and taping plants on to the other crates and on Jim. There were some other vertical, wall options but each one was had its own obstacles. I left his shop that day and told Jim I had to rethink my plan.


A few days later Barbara and I were talking and she said "Why don't you just lay him down and bury him in plants?" Duh! That's why she makes the big bucks. Since part of Jim's business is plantscaping, or leasing plants to businesses and homes, he has a huge inventory of plants at his shop. We made up a plan to lay him down on the ground and surround him with plants making it look as if he were standing in one of his walls.


We started by putting down a tarp on the concrete pad. This made cleanup of all the spilled soil much, much easier. We then laid Jim down on the tarp and covered him in a dark brown sheet. The sheet was to keep the soil off of him and keep him clean. Since one of the shots called for him to be pruning the plants around him, we cut holes in the sheet so he could poke is arms out. 


Then came the fun part! We began stacking plants all around and over him. Placing plants on him proved tricky because they wouldn't stay upright and kept falling over whenever he moved the slightest. We chose to cover him in seedum with the intention of doing some retouching in post to fill in the voids with plants. 

We shot in the afternoon so the sun was present. The sun was not ideal for this situation because there was so much detail and layers with the plants. The sun and shadows would have made a very busy distracting photo. Fortunately, we were shooting underneath a shade enclosure that Jim stored all of his plants under. There was one strip between the shade scrim and the building where light was pouring in on Jim. We hung a big black sheet on light stands to block that out. 

You can see Jim's face to the right of the ladder

Now that we blocked out all of the undesirable light, it was time to create some good light! I set up a 7' Octodome of to one side of Jim as the main light. To create fill, I placed white panels at his feet and opposite the octobox. I initially set up a large softbox for fill but decided that the lite panels provided enough fill.  As you can see below, I shot from about 8-9' above Jim. I kept my aperture at f/16 to retain sharpness from top to bottom of frame. His feet were closer than his face, so I needed the extra depth of field.

Here a few of the final images along with the photo used for the San Diego Horticultural Society magazine.

Jim told us before he had an engagement that night so we had a limited timeframe. Thanks to the hard work from Barbara and Pari, Jim's office manager, we were able to stage and shoot everything in about 45 minutes. We pulled the plants and sheet off of Jim, he shook out a bit of soil out of his hair and he was off with time to spare! 

Studio Frank interiors project

In December, I was given the opportunity to photograph a project for Studio Frank. Studio Frank is an interior design firm in Telluride, CO. Recently, Catherine Frank invited me to photograph a remodel of an old cabin in Mountain Village, above Telluride. To call it a remodel is really an understatement. They took a cabin that was originally built in the 80s and transformed it into a modern piece of style and design.

 

Another cool day at work. Part II

A few weeks ago, I told a story about my fun shoot that included a flight in a 1929 Stearman biplane to photograph aerials of an architectural project. I thought it would be good to talk a little bit about the technique that was employed.

The Conditions
I was working in an open cockpit and the pilot was in a cockpit right behind me. Any equipment that wasn't clipped in or tied down could have the potential of flying out and hitting the the pilot. I chose to shoot with a Canon 5D mkII and 24-105mm lens, which I could really only use about 50-105mm of range. One parameter was the angle of view that I could shoot through. As you can see in the photo below, I was positioned right in the middle of the bi-wings . This forced me to turn around and essentially shoot backwards, which was difficult due to the deep cockpit and the harness.

I could open up to about 50mm before catching the wing on the right of my frame and the tail on the left.

Settings
When determining my settings, I knew I needed a high shutter speed because I was shooting a moving subject. Since the subject was so far away, I could set my focus at near infinity and shoot with a bigger aperture. Shooting shutter priority at f5.6, my shutter speed resulted in about 1/1200 sec at ISO 200. This would be plenty to stop motion and get a clear shot.


Other Stuff
As I mentioned earlier, I had to shoot behind me. This was tricky because I was held in by my harness that made me feel quite secure in that open cockpit. The problem was, I couldn't turn around to shoot with the harness tight. After making a few flyovers, I began to feel comfortable with Tom's flying. I decided to loosen up the harness a bit and slide the right arm strap off so I could get turned around to shoot. Since we were doing flyovers, I only needed to shoot off short bursts and then slide back down in my seat and harness.

Communication with the pilot is fairly paramount. Its always good to use landmarks when providing instructions on where to fly instead of just saying "go a little wider" or "fly up a bit". Landmarks give the pilot more definitive objects to fly towards or over.

Other than that, try to get a little more time up high so you can shoot some personal photos that you can use for other stuff. ...and just have fun!

Mountain Bike magazine article

Here is a job I shot for Mountain Bike magazine. It was a feature on Cotez, Colo and the mountain biking scene there. It originally printed in a subscribers issue and then reprinted with different photos in the newsstand issue. The cover image is unfortunately not mine, but I did get the opportunity to photograph Willow Koerber a couple of months later. See the photo in a previous blog post here.

 

For the same issue, I shot one of the Mountain Bike mag testers riding an Ibis Mojo HD. We photographed it up on Raider Ridge above Durango.

The newsstand issue

Another cool day at work.

Earlier this year, I got the opportunity to photograph a very cool home. I first discovered the home 3 years ago when Randy and I photographed a wedding on the property of the home. The wedding was pretty unique in that the ceremony was located on a grass runway on the property and the bride was flown in on a antique biplane piloted by the homeowner. The wedding reception was held in the airplane hanger. During the wedding, I saw the home from the runway and hanger but never got the opportunity to check it out. It looked to be a contemporary design and I was very intrigued.

A few weeks after the wedding, I followed up with the homeowner, Tom, to discuss photographing the house. At first, he was a little reluctant because the interior finishes were not complete but he did invite me to call him the following year. A year later, I called him to see if he was interested in doing photography. Unfortunately, the interior was complete but there was no landscaping yet. Tom was in no hurry and is a bit of a perfectionist himself, so it was on hold for yet another year. This past spring, I called Tom to see what was possible. He thought everything looked good and that we were ready to shoot.

Alrighty, persistence does pay off. I waited for three years to photograph this project and it finally happened.

The shoot was really fun! Since I waited so long to shoot this place, I put some days aside to put some extra time into it. Tom was very gracious and allowed me to spend several nights at the property so I could take advantage of the gorgeous light in southwest Colorado. It paid off and I got some incredible evenings and mornings to play with.

On one of the final days, Tom mentioned that he wanted some aerial shots of the property. My eyes lit up and a smile spread across my face. Tom had two antique biplanes and I was going to get to fly in one of them to shoot photos! He chose the 1929 Stearman which was the same plane he flew the bride in a few years earlier. We decided to shoot at dawn because the winds were light and the light would be sweet.  The next morning, Tom out fitted me in a classic leather cap radio headset, gave me a rundown of the rules and we were off.

Here's the view from the side right after takeoff

Control panel

View of Mancos, Colorado with the La Plata mountains in the background

Some days are a little better than others. This was one that I'll remember for a long time.