Jim Larson Photography

I had a great time yesterday photographing our friends new puppy.  His name is Zappa and he was one of the most well behaved puppies I’ve seen. Zappa is an interesting mix of a Rat Terrier and a Chihuahua. Here is one of my favorite images from the photo session.

To see the rest of Zappa’s photos, click HERE to be redirected to my gallery site.

Enjoy!
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

This evening I had the opportunity for a senior portrait shoot.  The weather was great with a perfect temperature.  The sun was shining brightly through about as clear a sky as you could imagine.  I really prefer to have a slightly hazy sky as it turns the sky into a giant “softbox” wrapping the subject in soft sunlight.  That wasn’t to be today, as the sun was quite harsh, making it difficult to capture a perfect shot.

In many of my shots I used a flash to fill in the shadows.  In others, I had an assistant hold a large white reflector to fill in the shadows.  The shot pictured here was straight on sunlight with no added light, but I think it turned out quite nicely.  It took a little bit of  tweaking in the Adobe Lightroom software to get the exposure just right and to add a bit of darkening to the edges to bring your attention to the subject.

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!

I’ve missed a few opportunities to show off our little white dog, but couldn’t pass up this shot from her 2010 calendar.  Yes, we truly print out calendars every year of various photos taken of her.

This was a very simple setup from a technical point of view.  Alle was sitting on a black piece of plexiglass to give a nice reflection.  The background was black seamless paper and the lighting was a single 2×3 foot softbox.

When shooting pets, or any living subject for that matter, a good starting angle is to get at their eye level and experiment from there.  Make the subject look larger by shooting up at them, or smaller by shooting down.  I was pretty much at eye level with Alle.

It’s winter in Idaho and with that comes fun in the snow.  We are blessed to have a great ski resort just 15 miles from Boise.  On this particular day, there was an occasional hint of blue sky peeking through, but for the most part, it was foggy and sometimes snowing.  This lead to some very flat lighting.  I took my Canon 40D with me this day in hopes for some great shots, but didn’t end up with too much, but did end up with a couple.

Even if the day isn’t the best for shooting, try to make the best of what the day has to give, no matter which end of the camera you are on.

We were invited over to a friend’s house the other day so that we could see their new puppies.  There were about half a dozen of them and they crawled all over each other.  Where do that get all that energy?  It wasn’t too long after their play time that they started to settle down which gave me some time to photograph a non-moving subject.  Here is a straight on shot of one of the little guys.

I’m very surprised that we didn’t take one home with us.

See all the photos at the following link:

More Puppy Photos

Not long after the new goslings hatch, they are off eating all the grass they can, pretty much all day long.  Here is a shot of a mother showing by example how this is done.  I’m sure it is quite instinctive, but it makes for a good title to the photo. 

Here is a photograph I captured last spring and is a glimpse of things to come in just a couple of months.  The place where I work is home to hundreds of Canada geese.  We have a couple of large ponds which the geese love and the general landscaping makes a nice place for the nesting geese.

Of all the places for a goose to lay her eggs, this one decided to nest in a flower pot on the sidewalk just outside our lunchroom.  I’m not sure what the attraction was, but this is where she chose to be home for her new chicks.