January 11th, 2010 by Brian Cooney

My Brother went to school for digital arts.  What this means, is that he is kinda descent at hacking with graphics, and layouts, and has some nifty tools on his laptop.  Anyway,  with a little help from him, I am ready to actually let the world see this blog!  As a thanks,  I drug him out in the cold to spend time in front of the camera.  From my first test shot, to my last image, we spent 8 minutes outside.  I would have loved to be there longer… but it was COLD!  Here are the images as recorded by the camera… no editing.  Not bad for 8 minutes.

So heres how I did it:

Take a few test shots with the camera in manual exposure mode.  Underexpose the crap out of it to keep the sky all pretty.  My first guess was right on….  1/200 as f5.0. At this point, Tommy is a Deep Dark mass.  Then I put One light on a stand, and use it to bring him back.  I adjust exposure on Tommy by moving the stand around to control the light power.  If I needed a major change, I could have adjusted the flash power, but for little tweaks varying the distance is better.

A second light would have made him look a little better, and let me control the shadows.  However, its cold out.  I knew going into it that this would be One light job….  thus avoiding frozen (well, too frozen) fingers.

See?  He doesnt look that bad if you get him out of thoes Nintendo shirts  Thank you for helping me with the Blog Tommy!  Feel free to steal whichever pic you want for your Facebook Profile