New model for this week - Shamim

I was fortunate in finding a new model this week. Her name is Shamim. She's originally from Tehran studying at my almater mater, SJSU. During the shoot, I noticed she had an uncanny resemblance to Angelie Jolie. When I mentioned it to her, she told me that she gets that all the time. While I was able to get over 20 finished, edited photos there would have been more except for when I accidentally formatted the memory card when I meant to just delete 5 photos that I didn't like on the LCD screen. In 15 years of shooting digital photography, this has never happened until now!

Fortunately I got some rather nice photos in the last 30 minutes left of our session. I shot with my D200 and my nifty-fifty 50mm f/1.8 lens.

I also just got my Nikon D300 back from the repair shop. They did an awesome job of fixing the navigation button. If I can find a Nikon 85mm f/1.8 lens, I plan on doing more shooting in the near future.

P.S. I'm hoping one of the next sets will be some sample guy photos. I have a couple candidates that I'm trying to schedule a shoot in the next week or so. Once I have a good number of samples photos, I'm going to update my photo website and start an AdWords display campaign for Senior and other portraits.

JP

Final Batch of Senior Portrait Samples (Charlotte)

Exactly one week ago, I did a photo shoot with Charlotte as part of my update and focus of [Senior] portraits for my photography website: www.johnpaulphotography.com

I see real progress taking these most recent photos versus one month ago, a year ago and when I first started doing portraits going as far back as the mid 2000's. I  took a cue from my fellow photographer buddy, Ian Young. I've fully embraced getting the exposure, sharpness and color balance in the camera. This allows me to do less "correcting" of the photos during the post processing stage. Using one of the newer versions of Adobe Lightroom, I can concentrate and batch my photos so that they come out more consistent with my "photography" style. I now use Adobe Photoshop for the final editing which is mostly correcting blemishes, composition and levels adjustment. The last part is adding my custom frames and logo to the photo. Presto! The result is what you see with this last and latest batch of photos on my blog.

Hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed taking and editing the photos.

Cheers,
JP

Second Batch of Senior Photos

Ok I'm on a roll. This is the second night I've spent about 2-3 hours editing the photos from Sunday's Senior Portraits photo shoot with Charlotte. The finished photos will end up not just on my blog but also on my photography website as well as some AdWords Display Ads.

Without further ado, here's the latest edited photos.

JP

First batch of Senior Portaits

Here's the first batch of photos from my Senior Portaits model shoot from the weekend. Although I did some full and half body composted photos, I ended up falling back on my headshots specialty. Working with a fabulous model like Charlotte, the photos simply turned out amazing. As usual, minimal posting processing during my Lightroom editing. Added my frames and logo using Photoshop. I admit I did use my magic brush and clone stamp to touch up some minor blemishes but nothing that diminishes the beautiful face of Charlotte.

Hope y'all enjoy the photos!

Fyi I brought my Nikon D2h with a 50mm f/1.8 lens and my trusty D200 with my Tamron 18-55mm f/2.8 lens. The new "used" D300 I bought a couple weeks ago is currently being repaired at a local San Jose Camera Repair store. For fill flash (especially in the oh so tough afternoon Sunlight), I used my SB600 as a slave flash unit which was set off by the built-in flash commander on my D200. My Nikon D2h did take a dump during the first 5 minutes of the shoot. At this point, I'm going to retire my D2h. I've spent over a thousand dollars in repairs but its a bad camera. 8(

JP

New photos from the weekend

With my renewed interest in photography, I want to get back to portraiture especially senior and family portraits. I hired a beautiful model this past weekend to do some Senior theme portraits. We shot on location at one of my favorite local spots - The Rose Garden in Santa Clara.

Here's one of the first edited photos. The first one is minimal post processing. The other one I used some actions to add a "whimsical" look.

JP

Cool Astronomy event this past week

While I didn't take this picture, I'm uploading it to illustrate this really cool event this past week. A friend of mine at work mentioned this event has happened in 2000 years. I only wish I lived in a rural area without any light pollution to really enjoy seeing this with a pair of decent binoculars or a long 500mm lens.

Can you imagine seeing Jupiter's moons? There's still plenty of interesting things to see in our own solar system much less our Galaxy or the entire universe. It simply makes you stand in awe of our existence!

JP

Happy 4th of July!

In honor of our nation's birthday today, I'm re-posting a fireworks photo I took several years back near the Shoreline Amphitheater.

Hope everyone is having a safe and fun 4th of July weekend!

Cheers,
JP

Interesting thing happened while on my way to work this morning...!

While I always carry a camera in my car (Nikon D2H) for any photo-op opportunity [Peter Parker eat your heart out!], I saw something unusually brief event this morning that I didn't have time to bust out my D2H especially while driving in the morning traffic. As I was going Northbound on 101 to work near Dela Cruz Blvd, I saw what appeared to be a plane landing towards Mineta Airport. While using a plan landing or taking off is not an unusual sight on a typical morning commute, seeing a single prop engine going towards the airport is definitely not a usual sight. I've literally seen hundreds of commercial and private corporate jet planes going to and fro Mineta Airport but never what looked like a Cesna single prop plane before. Point of fact, I've lived near Reid Hillview Airport most of my adult life. I see plenty of single or more prop planes over there. This leads me to conclude that what I saw this morning was likely an emergency landing for that single prop Cesna. It's probably not going to make the evening news but it was still an unusual event to witness on my morning commute. I truly hope that the pilot of that plane made a safe landing.

JP

P.S. Here is a photo that my buddy Ian took a month or so ago when we were commuting home from work one day. Like today's event it was special because what we saw was a WWII era B-17 Flying Fortress flying around the sky that day! Fortunately I did have my D2H in the car and Ian is an excellent photographer who took advantage of being the passenger while I was driving that day. 8)