So for the first week, I’ve decided to select a picture that I took of Ryan when the Sam Chen Studios gang went out to explore an abandoned building in the area. It was a great location under heavy tree coverage which makes for some great lighting.

Here’s the before picture:

After seeing this, I really saw Ryan as kind of a gangster almost from an old western. So I cranked up the contrast and the color temperature. Desaturated the green and the red that was kind of distracting from the image. Did some minor retouches to the glasses and cloned out the Mickey golf logo.

Here was the result:

The Sam Chen Studios team (Me, Ryan, Jonathan, and Danny) decided we’d make a tradition of going out weekly to explore the Orlando area and all that it has to offer (with a camera of course).

Last weekend we made a trip out to the Lake Eola area just in time to catch the end of the Downtown Art & Living Expo.

We took our basic lighting setup and our new toy the Polaroid PoGo printer fueled by ZINK technology (Zero Ink). We’re going to start taking this everywhere we go so any of lucky subjects (read: models) can take something home with them.

We found some parking around the library downtown and hit Jimmy Johns for some quick food and head out to find some inspiration.

There were some interesting statues right outside of JJ and we took a few shots of them against the buildings in the area:

After walking a little bit we ran into a guy doing tricks on his bike:

We stopped and talked with Richie for a while and found out he worked at Kyle’s Bike Shop. We asked him to do a couple more tricks (pictures in the gallery below) and pulled out the PoGo for a quick print:

We headed further towards Lake Eola were the event was happening. As we walked around we ran into lots of furry friends. You can check out the gallery for all of the pictures later.

It’s kind of ironic that I remember all of the dogs names but almost none of the owners.

Here’s Lily!:

And our friend Radar… Radar Love:

Last but not least, one of the furriest dogs around that day…. Fox:

And one last image for the road, a nice picture of the Sam Chen Studios crew (minus the guy behind the camera):

This day was a lot of fun, we’re going to be doing it more often so let us know what exciting things are happening in town that we can cover!

Also I dusted off the old camcorder after going out to Lake Eola, picked up a charger and an extra battery. The plan will be to kinda put together mini-videos of some of our outings.

Here’s the gallery as promised, hit the full screen button to get better quality/interface:

I know it’s been a while since we’ve updated the site… I’ve been busily working on getting business cards done as well as touching up some of our old work.

We also went out to Lake Eola yesterday (Sunday) and had a great time going around and snapping pictures (there were lots of dogs). We’ll be writing those up in a post hopefully later today.

But the exciting news for today is that we finally got some business card designs done! Courtesy of my friend, and talented designer, Christina Le.

These cards have a more grunge/industrial feel to them but I really like the design. She said she’s going to work on something more classic/sleek/frilly in design. But I thought I’d let you get a sneak peak at the design for now. Enjoy!

As you can tell if you’ve hit the site before… we’ve updated to a new theme! We’re running on a modified mistylook theme for Wordpress… I’ll need to update the default image once I find something I think would go well…

The second, and more major update, is the addition of the slickr gallery and lightbox 2 functionality.  What did that mumbo-jumbo mean? Hit the break and try clicking that picture of Zombie at the bottom of this post. Notice that the background goes to black and pops up really nice? Thank you lightbox 2

Now you might notice there’s a nice Gallery link at the top of the page. Hit it and you’ll see all of the flickr albums I have linked to the site. Click on it and you’ll get a nice gallery of thumbnails and click one and you’ll see lightbox pop up the bigger picture and you can even click left and right switch pictures!

Now that more framework is there I’ll have a lot more time to get more content and posts up!

Zombie part 2!

So the shoot started about 1:00 after it was planned, Andy and Yari were running late but it gave Ryan and I some time to scout out locations around Oasis Cove where they live.

We took about 50/75 pictures inside of the studio on our white muslin backdrop. Some of them turned out pretty well; I’ve noticed I need to work on more of the human element and bringing out more emotion in the pictures. The majority of the pictures were your standard poses and then look at the camera. I tried to shoot a couple that were more photojournalistic in nature but had a hard time bringing more out of Andy.

Anyways, after the studio portion we went back to their place to get some pictures there. Their house is very nice, it’s got a kitchen and bathroom downstairs with a living/dining area and then the rest of the house is on the second floor (which I think is three rooms not including the laundry room, and a den where the TV and some other seating is).

The house has a very artsy/minimalistic style to it which made it a great take to take pictures in. It really did show my need to pick up another flash though. I was running on 1 speedlight (my 580exII) with a shoot-through umbrella and 1 5-1 reflector.

We took a bunch on the couch and then on the lower part of the staircase. I couldn’t get the lighting right with the off camera & umbrella (not enough light to get the back) so I went TTL with my Gary Fong Lightsphere on camera.

We then experimented with some more creative stuff on the staircase to the 2nd floor. Ryan was kind enough to hold the speedlight over the railing pointing down. I guess I hadn’t bungeed my cybersync receiver correctly because it came crashing down… so it was a good 15 foot drop onto carpet… and it still works! (thank god…)

I couldn’t disperse the light the way I wanted but the effect that I did get was really cool. You’ll see some in the gallery when I put it up.

Then we moved outside to take some pictures. They have a very scenic background outside their back porch overlooking a little lake. I put on the Canon 50mm f/1.4 and just let it go at f/1.4. The lighting was a little too bright so I put on a circular polarizer which bought me 1-2 stops but the sun wasn’t at a good angle to get a blue-tint on the sky…

We tried to take some pictures using the pool as a backdrop but the sheer sun outside made it impossible for me to really get a good idea of how the shots were turning out. Ironically the light was quite good with some flash help but I couldn’t tell on my LCD.

Anyways it was a good learning experience as far as the shoot goes. I definitely need some more couples to take pictures of and try harder to draw out more emotion. Also probably need to pick up a cheap Vivtar flash and another stand/umbrella/Cybersync for when I take the show on the road.

I’ll try my best to get some of these pictures up later in the week.

I’m not as excited as Sam and his studio are…meerely for the fact that I hate snow. The problems it causes! You have to worry about LIGHTING! >:[ It is such a pain! But no worries. I’m sure these will turn out lovely. She’s a very pretty girl…I took some photos of her for a photograpy class a few years back and they turned out amazing. Hopefully wants the Studio gets the gallery functions working I can post some of my work!

Anywho! It’s nice to meet all of you! And if you’re ever in Indiana, you should definitely give me a call.

My good friend Ryan, also known as the studio’s Marketing and Sales guy, was nice enough to set up some time with his newlywed brother and sister-in-law.

This will be our first shoot with a couple in the studio. Hopefully I’ll keep to the blogging and post some recap information after the shoot.