The Munchkin's Notebook

Now that I have a little bit of down time, I took some time to work on other types of photography outside of portrait photography.   I recently shot a still life, because I wanted some photos to test my updated computer processing speeds in Lightroom and Photoshop.    I’m quite happy with the improved processing speeds of my updated computer, I’m also happy with how the still life photos came out.     The inspiration for the still life photo came from two places, one while I was eating some mandarins at work and the old Dutch Masters .   Several of the Dutch Master still life paintings are simple with only a few elements and very low-key.   I will admit some of the painting may look very low-key due the paintings age and it needing to be cleaned to remove the soot build up from over the years and the darkening varnish.   However, I’m going to stick with the darker images I have seen in art museums. Basic Shoot Set Up For this shoo...

Recently the Dayton-Columbus-Cincinnati Cosplay Photoshoot Group had two meets relatively close together.  The first was a Halloween theme shoot at PiattsCastle in New Liberty, OH on October 21 st and the second was an open themed shoot at the Oaks Quarry Park in Fairborn, OH on November 11 th .  I’m going to talk about both shoots. For both shoots, I was using a Cannon 70D with two 430EX III-RT speedlight and one lightstand. For all the meet-ups I keep my equipment simple and portable. It makes moving around the location a lot easier. The castle shoot was an early morning shoot, using the outside of Mac-o-Chee Castle. The day started out overcast and cold, but by the end of the shoot the sun came out and we had brilliant blue skies.  I had two images from the shoot, that I liked how the final edits turned out.   The first is of Bocchan as Bowsette. Bowsette is the female version of Bowser from Mario Brothers.  The second is the image is of Arman...

Back at the end of September I did a double session with Lady Chappell .  The fist session was using the rubber duck headpiece in a more editorial style compared to the pin-up style I shot earlier in September.  The second session was a Lolita session.  Both sessions were shot in studio. The lighting set up for both sessions was the same.  A 6x5 scrim was mounted on 4 light stands and hoisted up towards the ceiling on a 35-degree angle.  The scrim edge closest to the set was about two feet away from the edge of my floor drop. A strobe was placed at each of the far corners of the scrim and pointed down through it at a slight angle, thus when fired I got very soft light.  Another light stand with a speed light was placed to the models left to add a bit of fill light.  All stands were properly sandbagged.  The basic set used a white cloth background draped down across the floor.   A two 5x7 white wood floor drops were used, and a pie...

Last Saturday, I went on a morning photo hike at Glen Helen Nature Preserve with my husband and dog to take in the fall colors.   The fall colors reached their peak here just last week.   During the hike I learned my dog, doesn’t understand the purpose of a photo hike.    My dog, is a great dog but just doesn’t get the concept of stopping unless he is sniffing stuff.   My dog like to just keep going, he follows the path and want to just keep trudging on till we get back to the car.       Even though I had a dog in rush to get somewhere, I still got some nice photos.

I have started making headpieces for some of my photoshoots.  My first one was a simple flower headpiece, my second one was more daring and made of rubber ducks.  I’m going to discuss how I made the rubber duck head piece and subsequent photoshoot. I cannot lie, I like rubber ducks; they are just happy little things, that I use in a lot of my splash photos.  However, I wanted to go down a more creative route, then it dawned on me, a headpiece made of rubber ducks.  A headpiece made of rubber ducks would be creative, and lend itself to a more of a editorial type shoot. To make the headpiece, I started with a plastic headband and wire.  I wrapped the wire around a foam head to make a cage and wrapped that with electrical tape.  I then attached that to the headband.  I then used white foam and a plastic grid (used for cross-stitch) to wrap over the wire to make a base, to glue things to.   I then glued halves of a Styrofoam balls to the ba...