Wooden Tray, originally uploaded by mark.mortensen.

This wooden tray is made by Cliff at Bernwood Custom Design in Denver, CO. The kitchen, tea and counter is supplied by me. I spent this afternoon playing around with an idea for how to shoot a series of his bread boards. Also wanted another opportunity to use the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport. So far the passport is creating very good color profiles for my D-700. This image has only seen Adobe Lightroom (no Photoshop) and has minimal correction to contrast and saturation. I feel the colors are very rich and pleasing to the eye.

Technical Ramblings: 1 lonely Nikon SB-900 shoot up into ceiling with a Gary Fong light sphere attached. The lightsphere was used to spread the light all around the kitchen. Setup shots below in the comment section. The SB-900 was set to full power in manual mode and triggered with the onboard flash of the D-700.

Uploaded by mark.mortensen on 22 Nov 09, 5.14PM MST.

Setup shots of the SB-900. Please excuse the messy kitchen. SB-900 powered with additional battery pack that you can see strapped to the light stand.

Angle of final image.

Opposite end of kitchen.

Yet another view.

How I used the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport.

Step 1: Take an image of the grey card. I used this to set the in camera white balance so when I’m shooting I get a much better idea how the image will look from the LCD. I shoot only RAW so white balance can be messed with later as well.

Step 2: Take an image of the color patches. Of course remember the color patches need to be photographed in the same light the final image will be shot.

Step 3: Import the color patch image into Lightroom. Then export using the “ColorChecker Passport” preset. This does some magic and creates a DNG profile for Lightroom and other Adobe products. You have to restart Lightroom for it to see the new profile.

Step 4: Take killer images of a piece of wood on a kitchen counter and import into Lightroom. For the new images change the Camera Calibration to the newly created profile. Ta da! beautiful images. Serious it really has been working that easily.

Scotty ‘Woof’, originally uploaded by mark.mortensen.

Doing some product shoots this weekend on white seamless. Scotty volunteered to be my assistant as I setup the lights. I’ve received Scotty from my god-mother when I was 4 years old getting my tonsils removed. He’s traveled and stayed with me ever since. As you can tell he’s had some wear. On the bottom of the toy it reads “1972 KAMAR INC. JAPAN”. Remember when toys were made in Japan and not China?

Technical Ramblings: 2 Alienbee B800′s with 7″ silver reflector flagged with black foam paper shot at the background. 1 AlienBee B800 in a strip box above the camera. Flickr comments have the setup shot for reference. Triggered with Alienbee cybersyncs. Front of Scotty metered at f/20 and backside at f/25

Post work with Totally Rad Actions; Oh Snap! and Boutwell Magic Glasses (gives some definition to Scotty)

Oh, I also used a recent purchase of the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport. This now allows me to create custom DNG profiles for my camera for the location. I’ve done some preliminary testing and so far it’s created some very accurate and pleasing to the eye profiles.

Uploaded by mark.mortensen on 21 Nov 09, 11.32PM MST.

Setup shot for Scotty:

Flagged AlienBee B800 with black foam paper.

Lexi, originally uploaded by mark.mortensen.

The idea for Lexi and the Denver skyline came from Joe McNally’s Hot Shoe Diaries book. If you haven’t read that book I would highly recommend you go get the dang thing. It shows you how you can use those little flashes such as the Canon 580ex or Nikon SB900 to create some really nice looking images. Granted Joe is a major Nikon proponent I suspect you could do the exact same images with Canon gear. The chapter that inspired me was about shooting and elf or something with a city scape in the background. Basically it was an image of a girl with a hoodie and the city scape all blue’ish like. While I was reading the book I also was in conversations with Lexi’s mom, which is my boss as well at my day job, about getting some unique senior portraits for her daughter. You typically don’t see senior portraits like this image and I wanted to try something very different.

The critical item with this image was the time window of good light. The window was only about 10 minutes as the sun was setting behind me. During this critical window the sky was turning from daylight blue to night time black. By setting the white balance of the camera to tungsten and double gelling the single Nikon SB-900 with CTS filters made the sky go all deep blue. I also dragged the shutter as you can see from the car lights streaming in the background. Lexi is sharp because the flash exposure was only like 1/1000th of second on her face but the overall exposure was 1 1/3 seconds. I did have the camera on a tripod to keep the building lights a bit more crisp. The single SB-900 in the Lastolite Ezybox was triggered with another SB-900 in commander mode on top of my camera.

During the shoot the SB-900 in the softbox did a thermal shutdown, which has never happened to me before. Apparently it was pumping out light at almost full power and I was taking a ton of images because I only had one chance for this image.

Uploaded by mark.mortensen on 2 Nov 09, 10.28PM MST.