I was briefly in Toronto a few weeks ago and had an hour or two to roam around exploring. As with many cities, it was difficult to just jump in and out of the car while I was downtown, but as I edged away from the city center, I had a little more flexibility. I thought this was an interesting image – the contrast between the fancy downtown skyscrapers and the tatty transitional neighborhoods.
Toronto Contrasts
I love this city. Even the French Quarter, although I like the Quarter much better during the day than at night. I didn’t have nearly enough time to explore during my recent visit, but was able to get out for a couple of quick excursions. Here are a couple of images from those expeditions:
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British artist Alan Parkinson is artistic director of Architects of Air, a company he founded in the early 90s to design and construct interactive pneumatic structures he calls luminaria. While it looks like a glorified bouncy house from the outside, a luminarium is actually an elaborate structure that uses natural and artificial light to create a cathedral of colors and forms inside. Much as it is difficult to concisely describe Cirque de Soleil, it is also difficult to put into words the experience of being inside one of these luminaria.
Parkinson’s most recent creation, Amococo, is currently installed at the Mesa Arts Center in Mesa, Arizona and I was able to get in to photograph the structure this morning before it opened. Here are a few of the images from that shoot:
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I spent a couple of days over the past week photographing a small college in Phoenix that is launching a new website. One of the shots we wanted to include was of a large social room on the top floor of the residence hall. The shot posed some challenges because of the amount of sunlight that floods the room through the floor-to-ceiling windows that comprise the southern and eastern walls.
As you can see in the image on the left above, if you expose for the outside light, the interior falls into deep shadow. If you expose for the interior, however, the exterior and any sunlit areas of the interior will be overexposed. The trick is to set the camera so the sunlit areas are properly exposed and then use strobes to light the rest of the room.
Setting up a photograph like this generally requires a little trial and error, although using a light meter helps mitigate the number of test shots necessary to get the right exposure. Though I have had a light meter for years, I have only recently become an avid user, thanks to the acquisition of a small accessory that allows me to wirelessly trigger my strobes with the meter, greatly simplifying the process of balancing natural and artificial light.
We began the process of lighting the room by setting up two 1600 w/s strobes in the corners of the rooms on either side of the camera. Because we were trying to balance bright sunlight coming through the windows, I knew we were going to need a lot of light, so neither of the strobes had soft boxes or umbrellas. We just attached simple reflectors to blast out as much light as possible. Which led to this problem:
To spread out the light more evenly with less loss of power than we would experience using a softbox, we simply tipped the strobes up to use the ceiling as a giant reflector. That helped, although at 1/250th of a second and f/8, the sky is now washed out, as are the sunlit areas of the room.
So, we stopped down the aperture to f/16 and tweaked the strobes again. In addition to correcting the lighting of the room, the smaller aperture added depth of field so the final image would be in focus from foreground to background.
In the final step, we moved the furniture around, positioned our models, and warmed up the white balance on the camera to give the room a cozier feel. We also cropped the image in post, to get rid of the distracting open space of the ceiling and the obtrusive spotlights. And this is what we ended up with:
Finally, the technical info: Nikon D3s, Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8G ED AF-S Nikkor zoom, two White Lightning X3200 strobes on 13 ft. light stands, and a Sekonic L-358 light meter. Here is a diagram of the lighting set-up:
At least once every Christmas we brave the crowds at the Mesa LDS temple to attend one of a series of outdoor concerts. Last night we went over to listen to the amazing Mountain View High School Chorale and stuck around for a few minutes afterward to take in the Christmas lights. It was a warm and almost perfectly still night which, as you can see in the photograph, turned the reflecting pool into a mirror. The grounds were very crowded and I wanted the image to have as few people in it as possible, so I shot at ISO 200, stopped down to f/18, which allowed me to leave the shutter open for a long time. As long as people are moving at a reasonable pace through the frame, the long exposure will cause them either to disappear or to be barely visible in the image. One guy on the far right of the frame was standing still and wearing a sports jersey with a reflective number 15 on the back, so I had to cheat and photoshop him out.
I spent several hours recently wandering around Guadalupe, which is a small town – you might even describe it as a village – situated right in the middle of greater metropolitan Phoenix. It is kind of surreal to turn off Baseline Rd. in Tempe and suddenly find yourself in a place that feels like it could be in Mexico. The town is home to 6,000 Latinos and Yaqui Indians and is perhaps best known to Anglos as a place to go for authentic, inexpensive Mexican food. I ate lunch at Del Yaqui, which I highly recommend. Great food and nice people. I plan to spend some more time in Guadalupe over the next several months, but here are a couple of images from my first foray:
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Like a lot of the smaller towns and cities that make up the greater Phoenix metropolitan area, Gilbert is in transition between its agricultural past and its suburban future. It still has the funky vibe of an old Western farm town, but there are also some cool new community spaces, espresso bars and restaurants serving wood fired margherita pizzas. We went out to dinner at one of those new restaurants last night and I took the opportunity to grab a couple of images.
Gilbert Road
Liberty Market
Parking Ramada
Sculpture, Water Tower Plaza
Water Tower
