Jim Larson Photography

One of the aspects my photography business is shooting portraits.  My wife owns a music studio and a lot of students and parents coming through on a weekly basis.  This gives me an opportunity to show some of my work to potential customers.  As soon as I get this one printed, it will be up on the wall not only as advertising for me, but for this particular shot, as an inspiration to the music students.

The image was captured by placing the model on a white seamless paper background and a white, somewhat shiny floor.  After the image was copied to the computer, it was edited to take out any slight shading on the white background and to add a light brown gradient.  This was all done in Photoshop in about 10 minutes.

Now it is off to the printer for a nice 16×20 print!

The last time we were up in northern Idaho, we ran across a few old cars that were being shown off by their proud owners.  This one was particularly nice and caught my eye.  I love all the awesome detail the designer put into this car.  They just don’t make them like this anymore.

This is one of the few pictures where I’m actually in the shot.  If you look closely, you can see my reflection in the bumper.

When you are shooting an object such as a car, in addition to getting a shot of the whole thing, try to pick out a favorite piece of the detail and set up your shot to capture that piece of the object.  There will be a dozen great photos when you are all done shooting, all from a single object.

It was a great privilege to be asked back again this year to photograph the Tiernan Irish Dancers.  They are a local group of very talented dancers ranging in age from probably 4 years old to the early 20′s.

This year was a bit more difficult from my perspective because the lighting was not quite as bright as last year.  Because of this I got to try out the high ISO settings of my Canon 5D Mkii.  I cranked it up to ISO 5000 which allowed me to keep the shutter speed up above 1/250 of a second.  These dancers are so quick that I really needed to be shooting at 1/500 or faster to stop the motion blur.

I had a second camera set to its highest ISO setting of 1600, but it didn’t work too well during the fast portions of the dance.  There was one exception to that.  The blurred looking image was purely an accident, but is has a very interesting effect.  This shutter speed of this shot was 1/3 of a second.  That is extremely slow, but looks kind of cool in this shot.

You can check out the whole show by going to my portfolio web site by clicking HERE.

Enjoy!