Did a shoot about two weeks ago outdoor at sunset and I wanted to see how good the Profoto B2 TTL was in low light. Needless to say it performed fantastic. First shot was pretty much dead on exposure wise. Just had to do some minor tweaking to get the background to be the exposure I wanted it to be. Here are a few of the photos. Enjoy.
Happy New Year
Wanted to wish everyone a Happy New Year. I also want to thank all the amazing people and organizations I worked with in 2016. Thank you for all the support and I look forward to working with everyone in the future.
Holiday Lights
Wanted to do something with Christmas lights so I set up my black background and hung strings of Christmas lights on the backdrop. Its not the most original idea but I still like how they came out. Enjoy.
New Lighting
As an early Christmas gift to myself I picked up a Profoto B2 AirTTL lighting kit. First impressions of the Profoto B2 is it's absolutely incredible. The compact size, features, build quality, and functionality are amazing. Ill be doing a full review in the future but for now here are a few photos I've taken using the Profoto B2 system. Enjoy.
VHSL Football State Championship
Braved the cold over the weekend and drove up to Hampton University for the Virginia High School League 5A and 6A State Football Championships. Stone Bridge and Highland Springs played for the 5A championship and Westfield and Oscar Smith played for the 6A championship.
Even though it was pretty cold it was still nice to get out and shoot some football during the day. Here are a few photos from the Stone Bridge vs Highland Springs game.
Norfolk Admirals vs Reading Royals
Went and covered another Admirals' game over the weekend and the big story of the night was the Admirals had a new head coach. Unfortunately the Admirals lost both games but here are a few of the photos from the game. Enjoy.
Portrait Shots
While Im trying to get outside and do some more location shoots before the weather gets too cold I've been doing quite a bit of studio work lately. Here's some of the recent portrait I've done. Enjoy.
NCAA D1 Field Hockey National Championship
Covered the NCAA Division I Field Hockey Championship over the weekend. Semifinals were on Friday afternoon with the Delaware vs North Carolina Championship game on Sunday. Delaware ended up upsetting North Carolina 3-2. Here are a few of the photos from the Championship game. Enjoy.
Norfolk Admirals vs Idaho Steelheads
Along with several other events over the last week I covered the Norfolk Admirals vs Idaho Steelheads series. The Steelheads won 2 out of the 3 games but it was still a pretty good series overall. Here are some photos from the series. Enjoy.
Outer Banks Marathon
Covered the Outer Banks Marathon over the weekend. Here are a few of the photos. Enjoy.
Marshall vs Old Dominion Football
Went out tonight to Old Dominion University to cover the Marshall vs ODU football game for a newspaper in West Virginia (where Marshall is from). To say the least the game was both fun an challenging at the same time. It was fun because I really enjoy photographing college football but it was challenging because I was primarily photographing Marshall who ended up not doing very good and had a low time of possession. ODU ended up winning 38 to 14 with Marshall scoring their second touchdown of the game with only seconds left in the fourth quarter. Here are a few photos from the game. Enjoy.
Winter Sports Kickoff
I wrote last week about a short break before winter sports kick off. Thankfully I have about 2 weeks of light coverage before I start picking up the pace again with winter sports. With that being said, this past weekend was not a light weekend for me. I ended up covering three games in two days along with some other work on the side.
Two of the games were Norfolk Admirals hockey games. As embarrassing as this is, I've never had the opportunity to cover hockey before. To say the least it was quite an experience. Here are a few of the photos I got at the Saturday night game. Enjoy.
Sports Round Up
Playoffs are just around the corner and so is my break before winter sports start but games are still happening every night. Here's a few photos from games I covered last week. Enjoy.
Who Do I Shoot For?
I get asked all the time if I still shoot for newspapers and wire services. The short answer is yes I do. The long answer is yes I do, but not as frequently as I have in the past, and there are some limitations to what/when I am allowed to use the photos as portfolio work.
The majority of what I do now comes from individual schools and newspapers that hire me to photograph single games. However, with that being said over the last several months one of the newspapers I have been contributing to on a consistent basis has been the VIrginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Virginia. Here are some clippings of work that I have done for the Pilot over the last several months. Enjoy.
Last week in sports
Sports seasons are always a busy time for me and because of that I don’t get much time to update this blog. Last week was a slower week and I only photographed three games. Here's a few of the photos I got from those games. Enjoy.
Lightroom Graduated Filters
One of the ways you can get your photos to pop in Adobe Lightroom is by using the graduated filter tools. In Lightroom there are two types there is the straight graduated filter and radial graduated filter. Personally Im not a fan of the radial graduated filter because a lot of times it leads to halos around the subjects.
What graduated filters basically do is add an adjustment layer on the photo that you can edit to add more color, contrast, exposure changes, etc but because its graduated there is a transition between the area that is covered by the layer and the area not covered by the layer.
Another thing I use a lot is the adjustment brush. I use this in the same way as the graduated filter but its not going to have the transition between the adjusted and non adjusted area. Both are great tools to use but like I say in the video you have to take your time and be patient for them to render good results.
Check out the video above to see how I use both.
White Seamless in Studio
Hurricane Matthew is behind us and it gave me the chance to get some editing done from shoots I did in studio over the last few days. Decided to go with white seamless for these two shoots and here are a few of my favorites. Enjoy.
Sports Roundup
High school sports are back in full swing and I've been covering more games now. Here are a few of the photos I've taken over the last week at different games. Enjoy.
Back in the Studio
Was back in the studio over the weekend to do a shoot with Chriss Reynolds. Chriss is a fantastic model to work with and we got a ton of great photos from the shoot. Check out some of the other work she's done here. Here are some of my personal favorites from the shoot. Enjoy.
Outer Banks Triathlon
Last weekend I went down and covered the Outer Banks Triathlon. This was a two day event with two different length triathlons on Saturday and a sprint triathlon on Sunday. Since I was one of several photographers contracted to cover the race we all had different positions to set up and photograph at.
Mine position was covering the cycling portion of the race both days. I set up at the foot of a bridge so I could get the cyclists coming down the final hill. I shot these with my D500 and 200-400 f4. This gave me the length to start photographing them towards the top of the hill so if there was a group I could easily zoom out and have time to capture the whole group.
Another thing I also did was I put the camera on my tripod with Manfrotto 502HD video head. I did this for a few reasons. The first reason was I knew the race was going to be long and I didn't want to wear out my arms over several hours handholding or using a monopod. The second reason was using the video head I could get very smooth pans and tilts to track the cyclists. Since the 502HD also has a counterbalance system I didn't have to lock the tripod head when I let go which gave me the ability to wait for cyclists to come down the hill then grab the camera and start shooting without having to unlock the head. Check out the video to the right to see the movement and counter balance.
Overall it was a good weekend and got a ton of great shots. Here's a couple i got from the triathlon that I liked. Enjoy.
