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

My iStockPhoto collection has been a tiny little side of the business.  I’ve been adding to my stock portfolio as I have time and have finally reached the 250 downloads and 50% or greater acceptance rating required for exclusivity.  I’m actually at 70% acceptance and iStock has definitely made me a better shooter in terms of composition and quality.  Today I got this email:

Dear Mark:

Congratulations! The iStockphoto administrators have approved your exclusivity

application. We are pleased to begin this new, mutually beneficial and

professional relationship with you.

Thank you for your time and effort.

Best Regards,

iStockphoto LP

Yeah me! So what does this mean?  Well instead of the nickel I make off of a sale of an image I make 5 pennies.  :)  Actually, my royalties do start going up as I start selling more images since I’m exclusive with iStock and their Getty partner sites.  You can check out my stock portfolio here.

–
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

Elk Mountain Wyoming, originally uploaded by mark.mortensen.

This past weekend I was driving back from Idaho Falls, ID and while traversing Wyoming on I-80 the light was just right when I came across Elk Mountain.

Technical Ramblings: This is a pano of 8 hand-held images merged in Photoshop. In my eye, the sky looked just like this, however, on the sensor is was a bit less impressive. So the pixels were punished to make them look how I remembered the scene.

Be sure to check out the image LARGE

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

Uploaded by mark.mortensen on 17 Feb 10, 6.02PM MST.

Photoshop is such a main stay in my business I don’t know what I would do without it.  This is a great interview with John Knoll, one of the co-developers of Photoshop.  More info of the history of Photoshop here.

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

Remember Alice?, originally uploaded by mark.mortensen.

Do you remember Alice? She made it to Explore and stayed. More is coming soon.

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

Uploaded by mark.mortensen on 3 Feb 10, 9.32PM MST.

Biggest and Brightest Full Moon of 2010, originally uploaded by mark.mortensen.

The moon this evening was the biggest and brightest full moon of the year. Denver had clear skies and the smog was low as well. Grabbed this image with my 70-200mm @200mm on a mono-pod. Other fun facts; Being the first full moon of the year it is also known as the wolf moon. Tonight’s full Moon was about 14% wider and 30% brighter than lesser full Moons.

Uploaded by mark.mortensen on 29 Jan 10, 10.00PM MST.

Today offered me another opportunity to photograph some DaVita teammates.  This time it was members of our compliance group and they requested business portraits for an organization chart.  It was a bit cold to take them outside so these images were taken in the lobby of the building.  I recruited one of the teammates to hold my reflector and taught her a bit about lighting.

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

DaVita is my employer during the day and I do a lot of pro-bono photography work for their corporate events.  Yesterday, the request came in to capture pictures of teammates from the business offices that are to be displayed in the new temporary office space in downtown Denver.  DaVita has plans to build a new corporate headquarter building in downtown Denver but that isn’t scheduled to be completed for at least the next couple of years.  The current building in the Denver West area is over flowing with teammates and DaVita needs more space.

Of course it isn’t all serious at DaVita and a few of the groups wanted some funny photos.

This next image was intended to be like a train but they couldn’t stop laughing.  I work with a good bunch of folks.

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

I got the opportunity this past weekend to finish photographing a custom made bedroom set by Robb Helmkamp of Kamp Studios.  Robb’s dad lives in the Lakewood, Colorado and Robb is currently based in Asheville, North Carolina.  His dad had commissioned Robb to build a new bedroom set for his home and it turned out amazing.  Robb’s sense of the use of the elements and form are nothing short of outstanding.  You definitely should check out his website and other woodwork creations.

During the shoot his dad’s two cats, Lewis and Clarke, decided to participate in the shoot and be my grip assistants.  Not sure they knew that climbing in my camera bag and chewing on my battery pack cords was bad grip assistant etiquette.

Originally, I had met Robb in October 2009 via another woodworker, Cliff Whitehouse of Bernwood Custom Design, who is based in Denver, Colorado.  I have photographed some of Cliff’s work and Cliff was renting shop space to Robb while he built his father’s bedroom set.  Robb wasn’t able to finish the end tables while he was in Denver and later shipped them.  The images above are the finished set.  However, I did get to shoot the bed and a bookcase Robb was building in the studio during his October stay in Denver.

Technical Ramblings: For those that like to see how images are created I’ve included a few setup images.  All the in studio furniture shots were done using 3 AlienBee B800s.  Two in large softboxes with grids and one on a boom in a strip box with grid.  I use the grids to make the white seamless background go black as it rolls out.  After the bed shoot I’ve come to discover I need a much wider background as my 9 foot seamless just isn’t wide enough.