The owner of Cycles Xvelo, Steve, is a friend and co-worker at my day job.  He is big into bikes, like so big into bikes he once owned a bicycling touring company in France, and has now decided to start building his own bikes.  Bike #1 is a steel tube rig and Steve is currently working on making a frame out of Bamboo and Carbon Fiber.  You’ll see that bike on my blog when it’s complete but in the meantime Steve is really good at updating his blog with posts during the build cycle.  Bamboo is a really cool concept for a bike frame and is suppose to be really strong as well.  I can’t wait to see that bike when it is all done.

Steve is working on building a bike stand for future shots so it won’t show up in the images.  This stand makes it look like the bike has training wheels.  Lessons learned!  Setup shots are at the end of the post.

My favorite image from the series.

Technical Ramblings

The shoot was done in my living room on a 9′ wide Savage black seamless paper.  Three AlienBee B800s used with the 2 bees on the sides in large softboxes with grids.  The bee on the boom arm is in a strip box with grid as well.  I used the grids to control the spread of light.  Without the grids then the light goes everywhere and the black background doesn’t go real black. Steve is on the floor to the left helping out.

Another view of the light setup to show how I have the lights to the front of the bike.  I did this to feather the light onto the bike.

–
Mark Mortensen
Lakewood Colorado portrait and event photographer.
www.MarkMortensen.com

Finally got a new toy in today.  I had ordered this 86″ Paul C. Buff Parabolic Light Modification System (PLM System) what seems like a couple months ago.  They had been on back order forever but it finally showed up today via the brown santa clause (aka UPS).  Thanks to my friend Steve for that phrase. Whenever I get a new light modifier in I take some test shots to see the quality of light.  This is by far the largest modifier I have in my arsenal to date.  The intent was to get a hugh softbox to give the feeling of window light in a studio setup.  The PLM isn’t very deep either so it works well in limited space setups.  Plus to boot it’s actually quite affordable at only around a hundred bucks for the reflector and diffusion material. Wouldn’t want to use this outside as it would act like a hugh sail and fly away like our Colorado balloon boy.

This first image shows how the light fills the room.  As you can see it fills the room with a nice soft quality of light which I really dig.

This next image was shot to see the hot spots of the reflector.  It appears like a ring light in the reflector which again I personally like.  The two lines on the diffusion material are seams.

Finally, some images with a model.  Please note that the model isn’t necessary that good looking but he was hard up for some work.  I really like the ring light type of catch light in the eyes.

Overall, the PLM is great.  The only downside I’ve seen so far is putting on the diffusion material.  As you get one side hooked up the other side slides off.  I ended up using some binder clips to hold the diffusion material onto the reflector till I got all edges hooked.

–
Mark Mortensen
Lakewood Colorado portrait and event photographer.
www.MarkMortensen.com

Business is growing and had 3 shoots for the weekend.  This first one was to create images of 3 pieces of artwork by Charmaine.  Charmaine is a co-worker at the day job and  I feel she has some raw talent and needs to keep up the work.  I only wish I could draw this well and have the patience it requires to do these drawings.

Before I get to the technique of photographing artwork I’ll show you her drawings.

Shading with crayon

Pencil drawing of a Tarantula.

Charcoal sketch.

Technical Ramblings:  For photographing artwork I’m sure I could do it easier if I would spend the time to create a stand to hold the artwork.  However, I don’t do this type of work often and haven’t seen a need to spend the time as of yet.  I improvised this weekend and used blue painters tape to hold the artwork to the cardboard backer that was in turn clamped to the backdrop stand.  Two AlienBee B800s in large soft boxes were placed on either side of the artwork to feather the light on the piece.  This eliminates any glare and allows the texture of the paper to be shown in the photo.  I also used the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport to create a custom Adobe Lightroom camera profile for this lighting setup.  This allowed more accurate color matching to what you see in the actual drawing to what shows up in the final image.

Artwork is leveled and balanced vertically and horizontally between the strobes.

Another view from above to show how the strobes feather the light onto the artwork.

A third view to give some context to the positioning of the strobes and tripod.

–
Mark Mortensen
Lakewood Colorado portrait and event photographer.
www.MarkMortensen.com

It’s spring in Denver and the trees are in full bloom. Every evening for the last couple of days I’ve been wanting to go do some macro shots of the flowers. However, the wind would gust too much for any picture taking. With the weather forecast saying a high of 43 and 40% chance of snow tomorrow I figured this evening was my last chance. I have a plum tree in my back yard and it was sheltered just enough from the big gusts of wind to get in a few shots. I also wanted to use these shots to experiment with the ‘Totally Rad Actions‘ from Boutwell Studio I had picked up this morning. I’ve noticed pictures that just seemed to pop in color and wanted to know how they do that. The reason being is that I know of no camera that will capture that much saturated color in RAW format. I also can’t get Lightroom to do that much post processing either. I discovered that one way other photographers get images to pop (or snap in Butwell terms) is to post process in Adobe Photoshop. I guess I could of spent hours reading manuals on how this is done but I don’t have that much time on my hands. I needed a quicker solution and these actions seemed like they would do the trick. So for this blog post I’m going to show you the before and after shots of the flowers.

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