Author: Chris Smith

As the official photographer of the tournament, I really enjoy being a part of the excitement surrounding the Family Circle Cup. But this year, I got even MORE excited when Felicia, who works the tournament each year, asked me about photographing her daughter’s wedding. My good friends Tucker & Dan, who help train the ball crew, had recommended us. And as it turns out, Louisa is a huge tennis fan (and player) like me. So we hit it off right away!  (No pun intended.)

Joe is a Citadel man. And oddly enough, they met in the library. 🙂 He proposed to her at Waterfront Park. According to Louisa, Joe distracted her by slyly asking her to explain the Charleston Light to him. Then as she began to explain, before she knew what was going on, he slipped off the bench and onto his knee to ask for her hand in marriage. I love this guy!!!

Their ceremony was held at the historic St. Philips Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston. And their reception immediately followed at the beautiful Carolina Yacht Club. To check out the rest of their photos, head over to www.chrisandcami.zenfolio.com.

CONGRATULATIONS Joe & Louisa!!!

When Anna called from Dixon Hughes Goodman to set up some more head shots, I was very pleased. I’ve been doing staff portraits for their company for many years. Everyone there is always so nice to work with!

Anna is from Russia orignally, and had just returned from visiting her home land. Her father is a professional photographer and will be coming to the States later this year. Since I love to travel, and share a passion for photography, we had lots to talk about. 🙂

Since I’ve gotten such positive response to my other posts on using remote cameras, here’s a fun remote wedding rig I used at Rachael & Romaine’s wedding at the Kaminski House in Georgetown a few weeks ago.  I was working with the fabulous Elizabeth Hodges.  Before the guests arrived, I mounted a Nikon D300 with a 10.5mm fisheye lens onto the arbor they were getting married under.  The first image shows where the rig was mounted.  But of course for the shots I delivered to the couple, I took care to zoom a little tighter to crop it out, or to photograph from a position where the camera blended into the tree behind it.  Recently I’ve been using a Bogen Magic Arm to mount my remotes.  But for this setup, a simple Bogen Super Clamp with a Bogen Ballhead was a more compact solution. 

The remote camera had a PocketWizard Plus II Transciever on it, with a Flash Zebra cable connecting it to the 10-pin remote shutter release terminal.  A second transceiver was mounted to one of my D3 bodies and connected to the pc sync terminal.  Whenever I wanted the remote camera to fire, I simply turned on the transceiver on my D3 and squeezed off a shot.  The D300 would then fire simultaneously.  So in the second image, you see a tight shot of Rachael & Romaine exchanging rings.  I photographed that while crouching down in the isle, shooting up at them with a D3 and 70-200 VRII lens.  In the third image, you see the the shot from my D300 on top of the arbor, taken at the same time as the previous image.  You can even see me in the isle, in action, shooting that photo.  It’s great to see the close-up of he couple smiling sheepishly while trying to get the ring on…and see the parents giggling in the background…capturing the “moment” from both sides at the same time. 

Pretty fun stuff!!!  If you’ve never tried it before, I encourage you to set up a remote camera sometime.  Now you know how to do it…so what’s the excuse? 🙂     

My good friend and fellow photographer, Gary, and I went out the other day on his boat to cruise the Kiawah River in search of wildlife and just enjoy the great outdoors. As you can see by the shot he took of me, I mounted my Nikon D300 + Nikkor 200-400 f4.0 VR + Nikkor TC14eII onto my Wimberly Sidekick gimball head on top of my Bogen 3221 Tripod. Why the D300 instead of the D3? Because the 1.5x crop factor on that camera gives that lens an effective focal length of 300-600. Add the 1.4x converter and I’ve got the equivelent of 840mm of reach at f5.6. The whole setup fits snugly into the bow of his boat like a gun touret! As you might guess, we had a BLAST!!!

 

Kathleen Cartland, my friend and colleague at the Charleston Metro Sport Council, just shared this video with me…

Kathleen was instrumental in helping me get the assignment to photograph the ESPN Charleston Classic basketball championships, which I’ve covered for them the last three years.  Part of the assignment is photographing each team as they arrive at the Welcome Banquet, held on the flight deck of the USS Yorktown.  The folks from Tulane Athletics recorded this video of me photographing their team’s portrait.  Click Here to see what the final shot looks like, and others from that evening.

I had NO IDEA I was being recorded.  But it’s kind of funny to see how much I look like  a midget next to these guys!!!  🙂  I’m shooting with a Nikon D3 with Nikkor 24-70 f2.8 lens.  Since standard house-hold 110 outlets are scarce on old retired aircraft carriers, I’m using the wireless Nikon CLS system instead of studio lights.  There are 4 SB-800 flashes being used, 2 per light stand, firing into Westcott 43″ Collapsible shoot-through umbrellas.  These flashes are being controlled by my camera-mounted SB-900, which is in Commander Mode.  I’m using Bogen/Manfrotto light stands and tripod, and Sandisk media.  Here are detail pictures of my lighting setup.  And here are a few of my shots from this year’s tournament.

I got so many great comments from the Colorado HDR posts, so here’s one more.  This time I didn’t actually shoot multiple images with the intent of creating a High Dynamic Range photo. But in looking at the original image, it just didn’t seem to capture the beauty of the barn.

So in Adobe Lightroom I right-clicked the file and selected “Create Virtual Copy”. I repeated this again to make a second copy. Then on one copy I adjusted the exposure of the RAW file down by -2 stops. And on the other copy I adjusted the exposure up +2 stops.

Next I exported all three exposures of the image into Photomatix via the Lightroom Plugin. Once in that program, I adjusted the sliders just like I was working on multiple images, saved the changes, and PRESTO…the final HDR image appeared back in Lightroom.

As always, there was a little tweaking still to do…curves, saturation, clarity…and I was done. What do you think of the final image?

Today was the big Lightbending 411 Workshop in Denver. We had a packed house! One attendee came all the way from Minnesota!!!  Every single photographer that joined us was so nice and fun to be around. They all had great questions about off-camera lighting for me, and really caught on fast.

Many thanks to Bill & Kelli Nixon for organizing the event, and to Katy Tartakoff for hosting it in her beautiful studio! Josh, Holly & Tyler were fabulous models and such a joy to work with!

Next Lightbending411 Workshop is already in the works for Dayton this August. So let all your Buckeye friends know we’re coming. 😉

After my post on Colorado HDR, someone asked me how I make my High Dynamic Range images. Here’s a new one from Red Rocks…along with the 9 images that made it.

For this image I used a D3 with the fabulous Nikkor 14-24 f2.8 lens. I set the frame advance to high-speed continuous. And I turn on the auto bracketing to 1 stop increments. Depending on the scene, I’ll set it for 5, 7, or 9 brackets. Since I didn’t have a tripod with me, I hand-held while squeezing the shutter and let the camera fly through all frames as fast as possible to prevent camera movement between frames. All images are shot in RAW.

After importing to Adobe Lightroom, I check all images for brightness, color, and contrast. Then I export to Photomatix. Photomatix is a specialized program specifically designed for HDR. It can run as a stand-alone program, or as a plugin. In Photomatix I play around with the various sliders until I get the look I want. When I’m done, I save and it imports the new HDR image back into Lightroom. There, I’ll do some final tweaking to the contrast, saturation, and exposure. At this point I’m done and export the final JPG.

Today I had so much fun sightseeing downtown Denver with Bill in the morning and mountain biking with Kelli in the afternoon, that I didn’t take a single picture!

But Bill & Kelli just started getting hummingbirds at their feeder a couple weeks ago. They are SUCH amazing creatures! Yesterday morning I was eating breakfast on their deck and they kept zooming in right over me. So after breakfast I set up three strobes, mixed them with the morning sun, and got some great shots of these beautiful birds!

I shot with the Nikon D3, 70-200 VRII, and SB-900 in Commander Mode only. You can see two of the remote SB-800 flashes in the first shot. The third was a little further away on this side of the feeder to my left. I shot around f7.1 at 1/250th of a second with ISO 100. The three flashes were firing at 1/8 power and triggered with my trusty RadioPoppers. Enjoy!

I’ve been a big fan of Trey Ratcliff’s for some time now. His blog at www.stuckincustoms.com has some of the most AMAZING High Dynamic Range photography I’ve ever seen!

Since I’m in Colorado, I thought what better place to experiment with HDR than at Red Rocks Park. So Bill & Kelli Nixon and I went hiking and shooting there yesterday. Here’s a few of my interpretations from this beautiful, scenic, and historic location.

Driving home from photographing a wedding in Georgetown last week, I was enjoying the solitude of my ride home, when all of a sudden this scene opened up in front off to my right. A wise photographer once told me, “God only gives us one sunset a day…and no two are ever alike”. So I couldn’t resist pulling over and photographing it…a simple gift.

The Children in the Son photography project was the brain child of my friends and fellow photographers, Bill & Kelli Nixon. What better way to use our gifts, than to serve others and help those who can’t help themselves!!!

At the end of my photography time on Saturday at Waterfront Park, this beautiful and colorful young lady came up to me and introduced herself as “Deedee”. She is a former gypsy girl from Romania, and a holocaust survivor, living right here in Charleston. She saw the article in the Post & Courier about the event and wanted to come out personally to thank everyone for this wonderful service they were providing.

What a pleasure to meet someone who knows FIRST HAND what a huge benefit the Gepis learning center, that we are raising funds for, will be for the Roma people! To read the Post & Courier article, head over to http://www.postandcourier.com/news/2011/may/15/local-photographers-to-help-gypsy-children-in/.