So now the Strobist has led us to lesson 1.2. Distance. This lesson leads us to explore the affects on the subject and background when the distance of the main flash is changed while the angle remains the same. Pretty interesting stuff. The closer I got the flash to Abbie's face the darker the background became. David(strobist) briefly explained how light falls off harder at close distances. The difference in the background was subtle moving the strobe from 20ft to 10 ft but 5ft to 1ft was a huge difference. At 1ft, the background was almost completely black. This is one of those things that with enough practice become second nature.

See how much darker the background is? And when you have the background dark you are free to develop it how you like. For example, I just received a sample gel pack from Lee filters with a million different colors. So now with the dark background, I can color it however I want. I can't wait to experiment with that.

Speaking of second nature, I made my second trip to a house here in Atlanta to take pictures of the progress to renovate this place. During the first visit, I felt a little awkward and wasn't really sure where to place strobes in each room. This most recent visit, I felt way more comfortable. And this is with some serious distractions. First of all I was friggin exhausted. I was up until 5am hosting a bachelor party for a very good friend of mine and then had to work the next morning for a few hours. I tried to squeeze in an hour nap before the shoot but no way. Too much on the mind as usual. Second thing was the heat. The house was pretty much gutted and of course no AC. It was a green house. I wish I had had a thermometer to see how hot it was. I would guess well over 100deg. I'm not one to sweat too much but it was poring off of me. You know its too hot when you go outside in the sunshine for relief. But with all this going on I really felt at home and with an innate sense of where I wanted the light. I was delighted to see that the picks came out great. I look to have a web developer friend create a flash slideshow soon.

More to come soon. I will be focusing more on the business side this week. I have some potential paid work coming up so I need to be ready.

Lighting 102 update. So the first shoot was way too hasty. I need to lose the line, " Can I have five minutes of your time?". It always last longer than that and I get rushed. Second shoot turned out great and my homework has been turned in. This time I used the bare green wall in the b'fast nook as a background and the marvelous 50mm 1.8 lens. Flash was set to 1/16th for proper exposure and placed at different angles to illustrate the affects light has on the subject(the wife) from those angles.

This is one of the better ones. See my photo stream at flickr.com

Wow! Ok, I find that keeping a blog up to date is a bit difficult. I guess it is just a matter of getting in the habit of setting time aside to keep it updated. I keep hearing about the benefit of keeping a blog for a developing photog, so focus and promises will be kept dammit!

I went pro on Smugmug and secured a domain name for my galleries. I will now be at zazenphoto.com. It feels so good having your own domain name. I was planning on doing this later but I noticed this month that my counters were showing quite a few views of original size photos. Later I read that this was most likely done so someone could download the photos. With a pro account I can now lock that stuff and enable right click protection.

I just got back from the USGP Formula 1 race. This was my 3rd visit to Indianapolis but the fist visit since my interest in photography. I took the trusty Nikkor 70-300 VR. Again this lens proved to be amazing. Even at the full 300mm (which I was at most of the time), it created stunning sharp pictures. The only difficulty I had was panning to shoot cars at 180mph. ; ) See the gallery at zazenphoto.com.

So Lighting 102 has begun at Strobist. The first assignment is to shoot a subject a many different angles to learn the affect the light has on the subject at each one of these angles. The wifey gets home at 2 so I'll get to buggin her as soon as she walks in the door. See more off camera lighting info at http://strobist.blogspot.com/

This is the begining of Zazen Photography. Zazen Photography is an effort to journal my experiences as I endevour to become a professional photographer and to record my thoughts on photograhy , life and zen.