Student Transportation Inc at Francis Marion Hotel

I had the pleasure of photographing this AMAZING event at the Francis Marion Hotel for a wonderful organization named Student Transportation Inc.

Unlike some of the other school bus services around the country, these guys really care about the safety of their kids! One of the ways I know that, is by the mere fact that they have this fantastic Awards Banquet to honor their top drivers! These folks are true heroes!!! We’re talking records like “driving for 30 years without a single preventable accident” or “never ever ever having missed a day of work to drive their appointed route”.

It was a humbling experience being a part of this incredible occasion. I salute all the award recipients! And I want to send a HUGE shout out to the amazing folks at Student Transportation Inc. Keep up the great work!!!

Buss Family at Waterfront Park

Thanksgiving time is a time for family!

This morning it was such a pleasure to meet up with the Buss family at Waterfront Park with that beautiful rising sun, to photograph a fun session together! Here on vacation for the Thanksgiving holiday, it was so much fun showing off our gorgeous city to them. We had a BLAST exploring the beautiful backdrops of the park, the harbor, and the surrounding French Quarter.

Thanks for the good times, Erin, Steve, Audrey, and Owen. HAPPY THANKSGIVING to you all!!!

Double Trouble Family Session

Photographing Lindsay & Tracy’s beautiful family over the years has always been a highlight of the holiday season for me. This year, they so kindly offered to split their session with wonderful new neighbors, Krista & Marc! How’s THAT for exemplifying the true spirit of Christmas!?! 🙂

We all had a BLAST on the shoot…in spite of the mozies. And I think the kids really enjoyed watching each others pose in front of the camera. I could feel little hands making “bunny ears” and silly faces over behind me to make each other laugh…muffled giggles giving away their tactics.

Happy Holidays to all my special families, wherever you might be this year!

Taylor’s Modeling Portfolio

Last night our friend Robin brought her beautiful daughter, Taylor, to model for me and a few of my crazy fun photographer friends!

All images were shot with a Nikon D4 and Nikkor 70-200 f2.8. I used a Nikon SB-5000 as a Master flash to trigger 3 SB-800 Remote flashes. Two SB-800 flashes were ganged together as Group A in a 24″ EZY Box as the main light. One bare-bulb SB-800 in Group A was used as a kicker/rim light. All flashes were triggered with the RadioPopper Px system. After sunset, I placed full CTO gels on each flash and switched the cameras White-Balance to tungsten, giving the sky that electric blue tone.

Many thanks to David for the use of his classic Porsche, and to Michelle for hosting the event and finding this incredible location. But most importantly, a huge thank you to Taylor for braving the mosquitoes and looking absolutely FABULOUS!!! 🙂

Head-shots at The Cedar Room

Yesterday I photographed another fun set of head-shots in The Cedar Room at The Cigar Factory! Lee & Associates is one of my favorite corporate clients. Plus I always love working in this beautiful space!

Shot with Nikon D4, Nikkor 70-200, an SB-5000, and 4 SB-800 flashes.

Head-shots for ATI

Advanced Technology International (www.ati.org) is an organization that builds and leads technology development collaborations. They help team members reach consensus, establish priorities and produce technology solutions.

Working with their marketing department was a real pleasure. And everyone I photographed was super nice and fun to work with! We set up and photographed head-shots all morning, as well as a team photos and group shots.  Many thanks to Rebecca for all her help coordinating everything!

Being a technology solutions company, ATI wanted a clean and modern style to their shots. We accomplished this using six Nikon SB-800 remote flashes, a Nikon D4, and a Nikkor 70-200 f2.8.   All the wireless off-camera flashes were controlled by an SB-5000 using RadioPoppers for communication.  Everything was tethered to a laptop so individuals could view their images immediately after their shoot.

If you, or an organization you know, is in need of new head-shots or executive portraits for marketing and promotional material, we’d love to hear from you!

Nikon SB-5000 does Head-shots for Clawson & Staubes

After receiving the new Nikon SB-5000 a few days ago, I put it through all the rigorous paces to make sure everything was working perfectly, and that I knew what every button and menu item did. This is Nikon’s latest, most advanced speedlight…and it has a few new tricks over previous models. I’ll get into those in a later post! 🙂

Yesterday was my first assignment with the new flashes, and they worked BEAUTIFULLY!!! I was photographing environmental head-shots of new attorneys for one of my favorite clients, Clawson & Staubes.

The images were made with a Nikon D4, Nikkor 70-200 VRII, an SB-5000 on the camera, running as the Master in CLS mode, and two SB-800 flashes as remotes, firing through a 24″ softbox. Everything ran beautifully! The new flash recycles extremely fast…the size is smaller…and the design of the button layout is even more user-friendly than all previous generations I’ve worked with.  The best part is, it’s completely backwards compatible with all other Creative Lighting System flashes!

Next, I’ll be working with the new Advanced Wireless Lighting (AWL) radio mode. Stay tuned…

First Corporate Event with the Nikon D500

I’ve had the new Nikon D500 for a couple weeks now. It’s been fun putting it through its paces on a battery of personal projects to make sure it was good to go for paid assignments. (I NEVER shoot an assignment for a client with a new piece of equipment without testing it thoroughly first.) Here are a few images from my very first outing with the D500 with ISO ranges from 800 to 12,800:  https://chrisandcami.com/first-shoot-with-the-nikon-d500/.  In the end, I was very pleased with the performance and the results from this little camera!!!

Here are a few shots from this event using the D500. If you’d like to see the full spectrum of images, and compare how it stacked up against the D4, check out this post: https://chrisandcami.com/withit-professional-womens-conference/.  I doubt you’d be able to spot any difference without some serious pixel peeping at 100% enlargement.

I knew that photographing in the Gold Ballroom at the Francis Marion Hotel was going to be a great challenge for this little crop-sensor camera. It’s a very dim conference room. Most of these shots were done at ISO ranges of 1600-3200…yet were completely usable! There is definitely a stop or so difference between this camera and the legendary D4 in terms of noise at these higher ISO settings. But that’s pretty impressive considering the D4 is a 16MP FX camera, and the D500 is a 21MP DX camera!

My kit for the last decade or so has usually comprised two identical full-frame flagship cameras, and one crop-sensor camera. I like shooting with two identical cameras with different focal lengths to make sure I never miss a moment. But I also like having a third camera that has a different set of “skills”, which I often use as a remote camera or a telephoto camera. Ever since the days of the D3/D300 combo, I’ve tried mixing in the D7100, D7200, and D810 as my third camera body. But none of them truly resonated with me. Now I feel like my third camera body has that magic mojo again!!!

For this event, I started out with a D4 + 70-200 f2.8, D4 + 24-70 f2.8, and D500 + 14-24 f2.8. For corporate events, I find the 14-24 is just TOO wide. I’ve often wished Nikon had a 16-35 f2.8 like Canon does. I do have Nikon’s 16-35 f4 VR as well. But it just isn’t as sharp, or as fast as the legendary 14-24. By mounting the 14-24 on the D500 crop-sensor body, I effectively make it a 21-36mm…which is a much more useful range for general event coverage.

Since this was a relatively small event, the D4 + 70-200 combo gave me PLENTY of telephoto power. But in the larger corporate events I shoot, I’m often yearning for more reach to get a tight crop of the speaker, for example. This is where the real benefit of the D500 comes in! Switching the 70-200 to the D500 gave me an effective focal length of 105-300 f2.8!!! Plus, the 14-24 goes back on the D4, allowing me to have those super-wide shots if I want them.

I haven’t even mentioned the phenomenal new focusing system in the D500, the super clean files, the spot-on white balance, the wicked fast processing engine, the whisper quiet shutter sound, the cranking 10fps, and the speed of the XQD cards. In the end, I was VERY pleased with the Nikon D500. It is definitely here to stay! Eventually I’ll probably replace the D4 bodies with D5 bodies. I think the D5/D500 combo will be a formidable setup indeed!!!

Hotel Room Head-shots

While photographing the Withit Women’s Conference at the historic Francis Marion Hotel this week, part of my assignment included creating head-shots for the professional ladies attending the program.

The motivational conference was held in the elegant Gold Ballroom. So as not to distract from the speakers, and to give each lady the time and privacy they deserved for their photo session, I was asked to setup in one of the hotel rooms down the hall. The point of this post is to show that with a little knowledge, a smart selection of compact lighting tools, and some beautiful subjects to work with, professional portraits can be created just about anywhere!!!

My entire portable studio setup included 6 Nikon SB-800 speedlights, 4 Manfrotto light stands, 2 60″ Westcott shoot-through umbrellas, and a white pop-up style background. Utilizing the given space to suite my purpose, I arranged everything around using the white doors as a reflector for extra fill. A couple of the flashes were used as background lights to create the modern high-key look I wanted. A couple flashes were used to evenly disperse light through one umbrella as the main light source. And the last two were used similarly through the other umbrella as a fill light. This entire lighting kit fits into a large Manfrotto tripod bag for compact portability!

All the flashes were triggered through RadioPoppers, using a Nikon SB910 as the Master flash. The images were photographed with a Nikon D4, and a Nikkor 70-200 f2.8 VRII, tethered to my laptop. After each client’s portrait session, we reviewed the images together to make sure there was something in there that they LOVED!!!  🙂

Super Secret Proposal

I recently had the exhilaration of photographing a SUPER Secret Proposal at Magnolia Plantation!

Due to privacy concerns, and the sensitive nature of the subject, I am not allowed to post any photos/videos of the proposal itself…especially since NOT EVEN the bride-to-be will know the whole thing was captured until he reveals it to her at their wedding reception! 🙂

However, I get a lot of questions about how I set up for Secret Proposals. Although the situation is different for each one, I thought it would be fun to share a few behind-the-scenes photos of how I set up for this particular wedding proposal.

We don’t normally provide video service. However the groom-to-be requested we add it to his package, which I was happy to do.  Here you can see the general scene as viewed from their perspective. Can you pick out my cameras from the landscape?!? I set up one Nikon D4 + 24-70 f2.8, shooting HD Video, to get a wide perspective of “the scene”. I set up a second D4 + 200-400 f4, also shooting HD Video, to capture tight shots of “the action”. And I laid in the reeds with the Nikon D810 + 70-200 f2.8 + TC14eIII to capture all the action in photos.

Normally after photographing The Proposal, the gentleman reveals to his new fiance that he’s secretly had the event photographed for her! That’s when I come out and meet them…SURPRISE!!! Then we do a fun little mini-engagement session together. In this case, since everything was being kept hush-hush and I wasn’t going to be able to meet them, I arrived early and blended in with the other tourists to capture “sniper shots” of them as they toured the property…holding hands, reading the map, taking selfies…before our timed rendezvous under the oaks.

Anyway, I thought you’d enjoy seeing a little behind-the-lens action. It was an awesome event to be a part of.  CONGRATULATIONS to the amazing couple!  I only wish I could be a fly on the wall at their reception when he surprises her with the video/slideshow from this special day!!!  🙂

Off-Camera Flash in Daytime

I get a lot of funny looks and silly questions when by-standers and tourists see me using my off-camera light-stand, especially when I’m on the beach, and in broad daylight!

So I decided to take a before-and-after to show what a difference it makes. I’m using four Nikon SB-800 flashes, attached to my home-made Quad-Bracket, mounted on top of a Bogen light-stand. Each is triggered by a RadioPopper Px receiver, and controlled by an SB-910 mounted to my Nikon D4. All flashes were in Group A and manually dialed in at 1/4 power. Camera settings were f5.6 at 1/250th and ISO 50. The stand is placed 30-degrees to camera right.

Many thanks to the Clark family for another AWESOME annual family photo shoot!!! 🙂