A New Year, A New Beginning

Intro

Hello all, and welcome to my 1st blog post.  I've been toying with the Idea of this for sometime and now is the time.
 Like most of us up and coming photograhers I am a student of  David Hobby, Zack Arias, Mark Wallce and a slew of other online photographers. With their advice I have started to study some of the old masters, but for the most part they have been the main source of my photo education.  Like alot of others photographers most of my work resides on flickr.  So what are my goals in creating this blog? 

Getting above the pack.
Flickr is a great place with a great community and a lot of people have been discovered there  (Most recently Dustin Diaz- Love the book Strobist crack) .  However I've come to think of flickr as a nursery and after a fair amount of suckling the next logical step is leaving the nest (comfort zone) and stepping out on your own.

Sharing is caring.
From every Strobist dvd to One light, Creative live or website/blog I have visted I have taken something away from them.  It is only right to give back what you have learned and taken.  Most times I believe I would make a much better photography teacher than a photographer.  If  I'm able to reach just one person with this blog and teach them one thing or inspire them then I think mission accomplished.  If your reading this and say I can do this and shoot circles around this 2-bit hack, then again you've been inspired and mission accomplished. 

Picture above:

Above is a pictue of model Babyann.  She was more than a pleasure to work with.  This picture was shot in midtown manhattan.  This picture was made during mid-day with bright sunlight. How do you tame that sun? First bring the shutter speed to its max synch speed. with my d700 the speed is about 200th of a second.  Next I took control of the aperture to further  bring the exposure of the sun down.  I dialed my aperture down to  about f\11 or f\16.  so now the ambient (sun-light) is just where I wanted it to be.  I now bring in a alienbee-800 in a medium photoflex softbox and light my model until she looks right.  Unfortunately,  as you can see the meduim box does a fairly decent job of light coverage but starts to taper off on her legs.  Which is the reason the camera left leg looks oddly dark.  Maybe a fill in speed light with a kiss of light, but when you don't have it with you, do the best you can with your available options.  I would like to thank my good friends over at Mad'art studios Mad'art Studio's work for setting up this shoot.  With the type of pictures these guys take, they are well on there way to becoming big names in fashion photography.

     So, now that we have a few of the formalities out of the way lets look towards the future.  I hope to blog as often as possible trying to give you (anybody out there?) as much information as possible.  I look forward to the start of a new year with bright possibilities and new beginnings.