Patara + John = Patarohn - Engagement Bloopers

There are times that being a photographer just makes me LOL.  There were a couple pics during this photo shoot that did that for me.  To set these up, we were taking some engagement shots in the middle of the street on a bustling University Ave in Palo Alto.  Patara and John waited for the lights to turn green and walked out to the middle of the crosswalk and posed, Jason was right next to them with a flash connected to my off camera flash(he actually walked further into the street closer to moving traffic).  I was in the other crosswalk on the other side of the street with my camera.  In the time it took for the lights to change, I was able to fire off a few frames each time we crossed.  Here's what I caught in a couple of those frames:





 Wave HI to the strangers in the middle of the street!

Homeboy's diggin' for gold!  I wonder if he found any?

Let this be a lesson to all of you.  Whenever you see a group of people who look like they're on a photoshoot around you, please refrain from picking your nose.

2010 Family Christmas

This year was pretty insane.  One of the larger family gatherings we've had in a while.  Tons of food, lots of people(41 to be exact, 41!!!), and more kids.  The child demographic is growing, last year we had 3 kids and this year we had two more newborns(yay!).  Throw in the traditional Christmas Mah-Jong table and Christmas in our family is pretty much complete.  Hope everyone had a fantastic Christmas!

Patara + John = Patarohn - Engagement Palo Alto

So my old roommate John called me up for an engagement session before they went off to Thailand to celebrate their engagement/wedding with Patara’s side of the family.  They didn’t have a preference on location so we met up in Palo Alto.  We raced around Stanford University chasing sunlight and avoiding rain.  In all, I think our shooting time was less than an hour.  So we were a bit rushed, but I was pretty happy with our images.

The last shot we took with Christmas lights lining University Ave was something I had in my head for a loooong time now.  It was inspired by another San Francisco photographer, Dustin Diaz.  I LOVE the lighting in his images.  It took a few tries to get it right.  We got honked at a few times, but once people saw what we were up to they were pretty patient with a couple of crazy photographers running around the intersection.

Special thanks to Jason Ku for helping out on this shoot(and for not getting run over).

Teaser! Patara + John = Patrohn

John and I used to be roommates when I used to work down in San Jose.  In fact, he practically let me live at his house for free.  We used to bowl for fun every week at Fourth Street Bowl because they had some steep discounts on Monday nights.  One night, Patara came out to bowl with us and I just remember laughing all night long.  John’s a really laid back kinda guy and Patara seemed like such a bundle of “happy”, from the beginning they complimented each other SO well.  When I found out they were engaged, I couldn’t have been happier for them!

They’re heading out to Thailand to celebrate their engagement with Patara’s extended family and wanted to take some pictures with them.  I was honored when they asked me for a quick mini-E-Session.  We goofed off a bit like we always did and raced against the sun, but I was pleased with the images we got.  Here’s a little teaser, more to come later:

Special thanks to Jason for helping me out on this shoot

Cindy and Rob - September 11, 2010

I love Cindy and Rob.  I first met Cindy a little over three years ago.  We bonded over some difficulties in our lives.  She is like a sister to me and so it made me especially excited to finally see Cindy SO happy.

Going back 3 years or so, she was a real estate agent transitioning to a new career as a paralegal and he was a student in dental school, about to graduate.   Cindy had a friend also in dental school and met Rob at a party.  Rob was instantly drawn to Cindy.  Cindy was...a little terrified, rumor has it she hid in the bathroom for a while, =).  But Rob persisted and the two fell in love.  Fast forward three years, Cindy is now in her first year of law school and Rob is now a practicing Dentist.  Through these years, Cindy and Rob have worked through all their transitions and have grown closer together.  On a personal note, I’ve never seen Cindy happier.  So when they announced their engagement and asked if I would be their wedding photographer, I was super excited for them and truly honored to be the one to document their special day.

Here’s their slideshow in HD(720p), enjoy:

Cindy and Rob Wedding from Brian Lee on Vimeo.

CREDITS

Music:

Jack Johnson - Turn Your Love

Relient K - The Best Thing

Special thanks to Jason Ku for shooting still images and video

Gellin’ again

I’m on this light balancing kick recently.  I’ve created softer light via shoot-through umbrella, played with putting different colored gels on my strobes for different effects.  But I had never gel’d a strobe to shoot through an umbrella.  I wanted to see if a gel’d light would lose any of its color, or what would happen.  So just to compare, here’s a straight up strobe shot through an umbrella(located in frame, camera left).

Now here’s the same shot but with a 1/2 CTO gel(NOTE: I goofed a bit on this, I actually thought it was a full CTO gel, didn’t realize it was a 1/2 ‘til the next day):

As you can see, the light is definitely warmer even with the 1/2 CTO.  One thing to note is that the gel ate up some light so I had to make some adjustments to make sure my exposure was correct.  In this case, I adjusted my aperture two stops.  Now to apply this out in the field during an actual photoshoot!  I have an idea in mind... and it involves tiki torches lit with fire!  =)

Breakfast of Champions

So I'm in a weight loss bet with six other guys.  Whomever can lose the most weight, by percentage, by November 1st.  On November 1st, we're all weighing in and going to eat a fat bowl of pho at Pho Garden in SF.

Anyway, here's what I ate for breakfast: Oatmeal with egg white, granola(with dried berries), raw almond slices, and a banana on the side.  =)  I actually love eating like this.

I wanna win this bet!

Running Stairs...

I had seen these stairs before.  I remember thinking it would be a killer workout to run up these stairs.  I remember looking a them and thinking it would really suck to run up these stairs.  I remember walking my dogs past these stairs and thinking there'd be no way for me to run up them.  Then I got to thinking about other stuff going on in my life.  Goals I have yet to reach, things I've always wanted to do but haven't, obstacles that get in the way of those goals.  Sometimes all I see are the obstacles that get in the way.  Whenever I think this way I think of a little piece of scripture that says "Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus." - Philippians 3:13-14.  It helps remind me of what I'm striving for.

So I went and ran those stairs.  I ran them until my legs felt like jello, which didn't take very long.  I had accomplished something I always had in my mind that I'd do one day.  I got my milkshake(that's another story).  I know, its just a set of stairs.  Not a big deal, but it was just something I had always wanted to do but never took the time to do.

A few things that ran through my mind while I was running.  The first is that it doesn't as bad as it looks, once I took that first step and kept stepping it was much less daunting than standing at the bottom and looking at the stairs. The second, it was 2:00 pm and I still hadn't eaten anything that day so after I ran the stairs a handful of times, I was getting light headed and nauseous.  I made a mental note to not do those stairs again on an empty stomach.  And finally, the view seems so much nicer from the top afterwards.  The stairs don't seem as bad from the top.

We're mic'd!

So I was at the WPPI Roadshow a few weeks ago and it was a great time.  One of the inspiring moments was a talk by Lawrence Chan of Tofurious and the emergence of "Fusion" Photography.  Still not sure what it's all about, but I guess thats the fun thing about things that are up and coming.  Inspired by that, I went out and bought a "shotgun" mic from a local store.  Here is the Sennheiser MKE400.  MSRP $199.  I want to use it this coming weekend for a wedding, but will do some tests and things in these couple days leading up to the wedding.

Playing with the new gear while enjoying a little froyo.

It's actually a LOT smaller than I thought it was going to be.

Creme brûlée

Creme brûlée
Originally uploaded by bglee818

I have a ton of food in the fridge. A ton. I had a bunch of eggs, so I decided to make some creme brulee. I love, love, love desserts. Here's a simple but oh-so-good dessert that always seem to impress people. Actually, more than the taste of it, I think its people are more impressed by the blowtorch I use to caramelize the sugar on top...  The two on the right are just with vanilla custard.  The two on the right, I just did a little experiment and added some coffee.  I think I made it a little too strong, it'll be better next time.

OCF 9 - Basketball Composite

So, I wanted to do a couple things this time around.  First, I wanted to continue this little series on sports portraits and decided to try basketball.  I was hoping to do this while there was still some daylight out, but by the time we got everyone together and took a little video, all ambient light was pretty much gone.  Going into the shoot, I envisioned taking a sequence of Chester driving to the rim and dunking.  Then taking each image and compositing it together into one image.  The second thing I wanted to do was test out my two new LP160 flashes.  Check it, this was a sequence of 11 images put together:

The Talent - Chester Lui
Photogs - Myron Yeung, Jason Ku, and Brian Lee


The setup:


Canon 5D MarkII, 17-40mm F/4L@17mm, ISO 2000, F/5, 1/100.
LP160 @ 1/64 camera left, hand-held(by Mryon) and tracking Chester
LP160 @1/64 camera right, hand-held(by Jason) and tracking Chester
Flashes triggered with Paul C. Buff Alienbee Cybersyncs


This was super fun.  We can do it better, but for the first time I'm not complaining with the results.  Hope you like!

OCF8 - Behind The Scenes Video

I know we're a little nerdy.  But we love this stuff!

20100615 - High Speed Flash Photography Behind the Scenes from Brian Lee on Vimeo.

OCF 9 - Tennis Action!

So we decided to pull drag our lighting gear one of the local tennis courts to play around.  Myron, Jason, and I showed up around 8pm to start setting up our lights.  For talent, Burgess and Judy were gracious enough to be models for us that night.  The nice part was that we had two courts all to ourselves in a fenced in area so we had some privacy and some security knowing all our gear was enclosed in one area.  We actually used both courts one to shoot, while we set-up on the other, and back and forth.  That is until someone came to play tennis...

Anyway, while doing some setup, I thought it'd be a good chance to get another OCF self portrait in.  I almost look like I can play, huh?  As far as strobist info:

-one SB24 camera left with 1/2 CTO gel

-one 580EXII camera right, bare flash

-Sun for a little back light, but was already set by the time we got everything set up

This was just a test shot for images we came up with later that evening:

OCF - Week 8 Ghetto High Speed Flash Photography - Behind the Scene

Now that I’ve had a couple days to digest what Myron, Jason, and I did this week I wanted to jot down a few things that came to mind.  Lessons learned:

-Preparation is KEY - I think we took about an hour to setup, maybe a little more.  Shot for probably 45 minutes to an hour, then took about 45 minutes to clean up.  In addition, we had talked about it a few times the week or two prior to wrap our heads around the idea and how best to capture the image.  We knew where we wanted all our lights, reflectors, and camera setup.  We had some minor adjustments, but that will almost always be the case.

-Having said that, I wished we improvised a little more.  Myron took some at different angles from different positions.  We gel’d some of the strobes in different colors.  If there’s an area I’d like to work on is being a little more creative with the materials and situation at hand.  Although, I'm pretty happy with the results, I always can't help but think we could've done more.

-On the technical side - Don’t get me wrong, I love my camera.  I think its a fantastic piece of photography machinery.  But here’s what happened when I shot with a shutter speed of 1/250th of a second.

See the black band at the bottom of the image?  What the heck???  For those of you wondering what that is, the shutter closed before the light could get in.  Myron’s D300 sync’d just fine at 1/250th.  I didn’t notice it while we were shooting(it was dark out). Although Pocket Wizards and other flash triggers say the max sync speed is 1/250, I think the 5DMk2 handles is better at 1/200.  As a side note, editoral photographer Zack Arias says he goes all the way down to 1/60th to make sure he doesn’t get any banding with his 5DMk2.  Sheesh...

Here are some other images from our high speed flash photography shoot:

Another good one shot by Myron

Shot of the setup.  You can barely seen them, but there at two black lightstands on either side of me with SB24's at 1/16th power on each.  We stuck some gobo's on them to prevent flare.  That bigh silver stand you see is "The Beast", Myron's avenger stand.  There's a make-shift boom with another SB-24 flash hanging off it for some hairlight.  Just in front of me is a large white reflector disc.  I was shining a flashlight on myself to assist with the focus in the dark.

Here we tried it while putting red gel's on the two side lights.

Now again, with all strobes with red gels.  Spookier, huh?  Almost sinister, huh?

We didn't like the all red gel look, so we tried putting a blue gel on the hairlight.  It's a different look.  This is where the hairlight starting giving out on us.

Quite literally, a shot from behind the scene.  Here you can more clearly see the two gobo'd strobes on either side and the reflector in front.

And since Myron's a Nikon user, I'm just putting this up because he's shooting with my 5DMk2.  Yes, I'm wearing a rain jacket and yes I'm wearing my snowboard pants for this.

Now what should we do next time???

OCF Day (I have no idea) - Ghetto High Speed Flash Photography – Take 1

First off, my apologies for being away for so long.  I just haven’t been as diligent with this project.  Trying to get back on track.  I have a list of excuses, but I’ll spare you from listening to me whine.

So, I was talking with my buddy Myron about different images we’d like to capture.  Partially inspired by a Chase Jarvis video(as seen HERE), I had an image I wanted to capture of splashing water on my face and freezing water droplets as they splashed on me and on their way to the ground.  Even though it was FREEZING this past Tuesday night, Myron, Jason, and I decided to just go for it.  Here’s what we did:

1. Timing - We waited ‘til after the sunset for the shoot, but setup our lights prior.  This way, we kept the ambient light to a bare minimum and freeze the action with our strobes.
2. Location – OUTSIDE.  Which was why we waited ‘til after the sun set.  Also, we wanted to keep the water outside.
3. Lighting – Myron picked up a HUGE Avenger (combi)stand which he attached a boom(it’s actually a reflector holder), superclamp, cold-shoe, and an SB-24(at 1/16^th power).  We used this for a hairlight directly overhead.  Two lightstands on either side(SB-24’s at 1/8^th power with a 35mm spread) of the subject(me) slightly behind pointed at the water(and for a little rim lighting).  We also used our own DIY gobo’s attached to prevent flaring into the camera.  And finally, to get just a hint of light in on my face we put a white diffuser panel in front.
4. Cameras settings  - Tripod mounted 5DMk2 with 70-200mm at ISO800, f/9 or 10-ish, 1/250.  D300 with 70-200mm.  5DMk2 with 17-40mm.

We started at 9pm and ended around 12:30am.  I lost track of how many takes we did, it was fun tho.  Ridiculously fun.  Towards the end we experimented with putting on some red and blue gels to see what kind of look we’d get.  But the batteries were giving out on us and we were getting tired, it was a school night after all.  Here’s my favorite one.  Pretty much straight out of camera with a little sharpening in Aperture:

(Photo taken by Myron) - See the full rez image HERE or its actually kinda cool lookin' on black HERE(Zoom in on the water droplets – I still squeal a little when I look at this).

I’ve never done anything like this before and this 3 hour exercise was fantastic.  Can’t wait to see what else we can do with this technique.  Lesson’s learned with a behind the scene images and video coming soon!

Special thanks to Myron Yeung and Jason Ku for bringing all this into reality.

Vegas!

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So this past weekend I was in Las Vegas with the family for my cousin Sandra's wedding.  I brought all my gear to take some pics with OCF and everything... only to find out the venue wouldn't allow me to set up a light stand or anything.  No flash even... Oh well, while we were checking in, I loooked up to see some cool, colorful umbrellas at the Palazzo.  I feel like I've seen someone take this shot before, but my sister Judy was just sitting there waiting for Burgess to check us all in so I had about 5 minutes to put this together.  Just one off-camera strobe sitting on top of my luggage camera left.  =)

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DIY Snoot!

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So... I got a little lazy and didn't do an OCF weekly portrait this week.  Instead, for some reason my mind was preoccupied with snoots.  I was browsing around and it looks like the honl speed snoot retails for 29.99.  When I saw it, it was just a piece of fabric with velcro.  I wanted to buy one, but just couldn't justify the cost.

SO...  I went to the fabric store.  I came back with foot of canvas.  I wanted to get some sort of black fabric that was thick and could hold shape.  I ended up with canvas, but they didn't have black.  And instead of waiting or going to another store, I bought the darkest color they had which was a Navy Blue.  Add to that some sew on velcro and I spend a total of:

1 Foot Navy Blue Canvas = $1.86

1 packaage of sew on velcro = $3.49

Tax (9.25%) = $.50

Total Spent = $5.85

After almost 2 hours of careful measuring, cutting, pinning, and sewing.  This is what I ended up with.  I was pretty happy with it.  It fit nicely over the velcro speedstrap on any one of my strobes.

But does it work???  Only one way to find out!

GAH!!!  I was afraid the light would be tinted.  And as you can see, it's totally blue!  Not at all what I wanted.  But it wasn't unexpected.  It was good to make one though and the next time should be much quicker than 2 hours to complete one.  Gotta go find some black canvas.

Not bad for $5.85 worth of materials.  I save almost $25 from making this instead of purchasing one.  DIY FTW!

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OCF Week 7 - How YOU doin'???

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So this week is a little different in that I did not use any strobes as light sources.  I've always wanted to shoot by candle light so this week I thought I'd give it a shot.

A couple lessons learned off the top of my head.  It's super hard to shoot wide open at F/1.4.  This is one of maybe 3 or 4 images that were in focus.  But since there wasn't much light and I didn't want to use too high of an ISO.  Also, you can see the candles I used as a light source, but there were a couple other LED lights I used.  Different temperature lights actually made it tough to figure out what WB to use.  I wanted to see what would happen, and you can see the blue-ish light on my head and left shoulder.  I'm thinking about picking up some CTO gels to compensate for the WB differences.

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Week 6 - OCF - Ghetto Greenberg

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Was talking to my buddy Myron a while back about different lighting setups we wanted to try out and stuff.  One of the types of images we wanted to try out was a setup made popular by photographer Jill Greenberg.  She's done a portrait series on crying babies and another on animals.  A couple examples of her work are:

and

But her studio setup can be pretty complicated.  I think there are at least 7 light sources going on.  So its much more complicated than my little strobes setup.  But I decided to do what I could with what I had.

So here's my Jill Greenberg inspired self portrait:

What do you think?  I was going to drip some water from my eyes and nose, but decided that would get too messy.

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OCF Week 5 - Half Moon Bay - Outtakes

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Just wanted to share a couple of outtakes from last week's OCF self portrait before posting up this week's image.  After taking last week's image, we took some more just to make the most of driving out to the coast:

I was actually debating between the image I posted last week and this one.  I still like this one tho...  Which do you like better?

And just some silliness:

Hot, hot, hot!

Need to drag the shutter a little more here to get more ambient.

Sun is YUMMY!

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