New place for this Blog

Hey everyone.

So, by now I hope that you've had a chance to check out www.joshuablaneyphotography.com! if you haven't, I highly recommend you do, that's where I'll be continuing to update this blog, so yeah, this will probably be my last post here, so go on over to http://www.joshuablaneyphotography.com/blog/. I just posted a new one! see you there!

~Josh

Lighting

So yesterday I had an outdoor photo shoot with my good friend Duke. Duke has one of those faces that just seems to be so dynamic and interesting. Most of the photos that were my favorite of the murder mystery dinner were Duke, so I thought it would be good to bring him out and do a shoot with him. They turned out well (I think, I just started editing them), but this blog is going to talk about what happened after the shoot. You see, Duke is living with this guy who does photography named Brian Gee (Click here to see some of his stuff) He let me borrow his 70-200mm 2.8/f lens for the shoot with Duke and after we were just kind of sitting there talking about design points of photography. We focused in more on lighting when Brian said, "Do you want to set up some and do a shoot here real fast?" Of course Brian, of course. 

So we got to work. we pulled out his backdrops and 4 primary lights. Because I've seen some incredible things that people have done with natural lighting I assumed that actual photo lights weren't as important. I was dead wrong. After about 45 minutes of setting up this is what Brian's living room looked like.

Normally the lighting would've been set up a bit differently but Brian wanted to try something new. so we tried a bunch of stuff. Most of the photo's I'm about to show with captions are straight off my camera to give you an idea of how the lighting worked. I'm going to call that umbrella light "1", the one near Duke's face closest to the camera "2", and the farthest light "3".

This is a head on photo with all the lights on. We used a wireless transmitter to make sure that all the lights fired at the same time.

A more serious Duke, same lighting as the one above.

Duke with light 2 off, Light 1 and 3 still on normally

Lights 1 and 2 off. You can see how the hair on Duke's head is a little more shaded than the one above

Light 2 is back on, but not as strong as the first set of shots, light 1 is still off

A closer shot on the same settings as above 

You'll get to know this, I love the half face shots.

It was a fantastic time, and Brian was incredibly helpful. He has all of this lighting stuff in his basement, and he was super gracious to let me play around with his stuff. You should go check out some of his stuff at his site linked above. I'm becoming more and more fascinated with lighting shots too, I'll write more when I've found out more.

~Josh

What a weekend

So there it is! The logo that I finally decided on. I had a lot of great advice from a lot of people that I really admire, but in the end I realized that especially in photography, you're selling yourself as much as your pictures, so the name in the thing is kind of a vital thing. I also joined back up with facebook, so if you are so inclined, go like my page, I'll appreciate it :-)

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Joshua-Blaney-PhotographyFilmmaking/183785438362926

I haven't updates since last week! That means I have a bunch of photos to show! Saturday morning I got to go to the Wheaton College football game, and that meant using my work's Canon 7d with a 70-200mm 2.8/f lens! It was absolutely fantastic. The picture from the last post was me using it to shoot video. Since my two jobs that I hold right now are editing and shooting video that's mainly what the football game was about, but that doesn't mean that I didn't get some great photos too. Check it out.

besides finding out that shooting a football game that starts in rain and ends in complete sunshine is kind of hard to figure out settings for, I also learned a great deal about shooting video using 200mm as a zoom, it's really difficult. I'll post here when I finish that video, it should be interesting and I definitely learned a lot. I guess we'll see how the whole thing turns out.

Saturday night was awesome. My friend Whitney was turning 24 and she had a 1920's murder mystery dinner. Armed with my 60d I went to work. I actually wore two different costumes to the party, so I was  a bit sad that I didn't get any pictures of myself while taking the pictures. Such is the life of a photographer I guess. I'll have to get used to that. Anyway, I learned a lot from this as well, namely that I need to get a 24 or 28 mm lens. A was backing into the wall a lot, which wasn't a terrible thing, but I would've liked to have captured more of the feel of the whole party. Anyway, here's a bit of the shots from the party.

Obviously I tried to go for a much more rustic feel, and I think I got the basic point across. I had a lot of fun, and it's a great thing to add to a portfolio. Anyway, that's what I've been up to as far as shooting goes. I'll write another blog here soon as far as meetings that I've had with other photographers and tips that I've picked up through the internet. Till then!

~Josh

Real Fast

Okay, just got to work this morning and a very professional photographer sent me this photo. I look kind of legit in the background! okay, back to work, just thought it was awesome!

Concert (also, help deciding!)

So a couple of days ago I went to Peoria Illinois to go see a band named Paper Route. They're a electornica rock band (That's as close as I'm getting to accurately describing them). Their music video for their hit song "Gutter" was easily one of my favorite music videos from last year, and as well as having just an electrifying presence on stage, they're just a fun group of people

 

Anyway, me and my two friends decided to go, and I was overestimated how long it would take us to get there (I always fall on the "We need to be there early rather than late" side). So, armed with my 60d, I asked if I could take some pictures to pass the time. My good friends Matt and Amber didn't have a problem with it, so I started snapping away.

I really like heavy depths of field, so I asked my friend matt sit a good ways in front of the band as they were setting up for the concert to get them unloading in the background. He was a trooper, and I think I got a really good profile shot of him. Matt is a drummer anyway, so I figured that it would be good to put him in a situation where he looks more at home. It was getting close to the end of the day so the lighting was already at a good angle, everything just kind of came together.




My friend Amber has some really fiery red hair that I wanted to show off. I noticed that the greens in the grass really accentuated Amber's hair, so I had her lay out her hair and shot the color juxtaposition. Overall I think it turned out really great.







Though the band itself has played to thousand of people at a time, apparently the college that they played at had never heard of them, because not more than 60 people came to the show. It didn't really matter, they completely lit it up anyway. The huge benefit as well was that I was able to get super close to the band to take some photos.

I'm a firm believer in being present where you are, so I didn't take more than 25 to 30 pictures of the band.I really want to be where I am spatially and try to enjoy the moment, so I didn't go all out. But it was a great night for photos. One of the interesting things that I learned was that I don't like to use flashes when it isn't absolutely necessary. I understand that you can get incredible lighting shots, but especially in real situations like concerts, it's much better to just use the lighting provided to get the original feel of the concert.

Okay, now I need your guys' help. I'm trying to figure out a logo. I'm switching between just using my name or using the squar3one logo. I like the squar3one because it reminds me that I'm still at the beginning, and it also has a loose connection to the Trinity, but I actually think that my name just seems cleaner. check them both out below and let me know what you think. Thanks guys!

~Josh

Rachel

Hey All!

So, the photoshoot yesterday was for all intents and purposes a success! Rach and I headed out to a forest preserve pretty close to where I work around 5:15. Rach didn't really have any props with her but luckily I had brought some random things that I owned. Overall I was really happy with what I ended up with! It was funny because for a while I thought that I wasn't really getting anything substantial. It's funny what can happen when you actually load the photos onto the computer and take a look at them. I think that I was trying to encapsulate the beauty of the whole place in every shot, which, while being there was way too much to do. What I realized while I was looking through the photos was that each photo held just a bit of the beauty that we saw and found. So, I'm encouraged. I'm going to try and go shooting every Monday so hopefully this will be a more permanent thing (actual photos for a blog). Hope you like em!

~Josh

Probably my favorite picture from the shoot. I thought I hadn't turned my shutter speed up enough when I first took it. What a happy accident.