I have just installed Adobe CS4 and was looking for a photo to work with. I ended up finding a photo from the challenge. This one,

For this project, the photos had to be submitted in black and white. Here are a few of mine:

I love the cow lick here. He says it is no big deal. Wait until I show it to him when he is older.

Then we had to take the obligatory family shot.

The next two photos were shot by Richard while I held lights for him and then entertained the little man by throwing rocks in the lake. It is a guy thing.

Congratulations to you three!

Today I visited one of them. I chose it at random from this list. Cameron, North Carolina. Population 151 according to the 2000 census. It is a nice little town. It is old with more antique stores than churches, an oddity in this state.

The drive down was nice. The weather today was clear, dry and warm. Cameron is located about an hour south of Raleigh down US1 and just past Sanford.

Here are some shots from the remainder of the shoot with Courtney Kibler at Milburnie Dam in Raleigh, NC. After shooting some in the water and then under the shade of the trees beside the river, we moved back to the waters edge. Courtney changed into another outfit she had brought. We were not certain about this because it was fairly transparent. The idea for this shoot was deep thought so that you wonder what the model is thinking. After seeing how the light went through the white dress, we were curious of the effect with this dress. The results came out great.

There were some technical issues. The sun was very strong and reflecting off the water which was to the camera right, in front of and behind Courtney. I still wanted a shallow depth of field and opted for shooting at f2.8 which is crazy hard to focus on eyes from a distance with. Combine that with the fact that I was using a neutral density filter to get rid of some of that light (and allow a wider aperture) and the fact that I could not see the images on the back of the camera very well and I was shooting blind. It kind of reminded me of shooting with film.

At the end of the shoot, we crossed the river and shot closer to the dam. The place was nasty with broken glass everywhere. Still, I think it was pretty cool. Hopefully Courtney did not pick up any glass in her foot…

I really liked this location. It was in the edge of a dense grove of trees with a dark background. It also kept the direct light off of her. The river was directly in front of her for most of these shots which acted like a big ole soft box for a really soft light. As with most of the shots, I shot close to 2.8 to really blow out the background. Enjoy and I’ll try to get more from this shoot up tomorrow.

BTW, if you click on the image, you get a larger version. All images copyright 2008, Keith Warren.

The shot above has the river in the background and thus it is washed out. Big soft box, remember? We did use a reflector here.

Actually between the water and the tree shots above, Courtney saw this tree hanging over the water. She got a gleam in her eye and just smiled looking at it. The she asked if she could climb out for a few shots. I said sure, but had my camera ready to drop so I could chase after her if she fell in. If you read the earlier posts from this shoot, the water was high and running REALLY fast. I have a model out on a dead tree over rapids. OK. Seriously, it was fun like all of this shoot.

So after introductions of the support staff (Amber and Richard) and the model (Courtney) we were ready to begin. We scouted out the river below the dam only to find the water was extremely high. I have gone to this location multiple times over the last 15 years and have never seen it so high. But, you work with what you have. Courtney chose her white dress first. We shot a few beside a tree. Richard aimed the gold reflector at her and I positioned her so that the strong sun was behind her. This offered excellent hair light with no strobe. The gold reflector warmed her skin to an extreme. That was fine because as I cooled the image in Photoshop, the water and such shifted towards the blues.

We shot at a few different locations and also at the generator on the dam. I’ll add more photos and descriptions this week.

This is the first teaser from my shoot with Courtney Kibler. Special thanks to Amber and Richard for assisting. The shoot took place in mid/late afternoon with a strong sun which proved to be very challenging. But you take what you get and make the most of it. We shot at Milburnie Dam in Raleigh, NC. It is a great location for portraits as there are nice wooded areas, a nice river with rocks and a fall of about 15″ high across the width of the river.

This shot was setup in the edge of the woods using an interesting tree. It is a half body shot, but I cropped it when I saw how much her eyes jumped off the screen in post. Here is the original,

The lighting was great here. She was under the shade of the trees and facing the open river. This created a huge natural softbox and thus no additional lighting was needed to capture this shot. I’ll post another one or two tomorrow.

This years show had a bit of a twist. We did much of it to music. Normally, we are just showing old experiments in new ways and adding a little humor here and there (yes, physicists can be funny). But this year it was more of a theatrical show. Too much fun. The final act was all pressure demos and was played to David Bowie’s song in the background. I put these photos and a few others to music if you prefer a short slide show to David Bowie.

Each year there is a two day workshop before the conference dealing with physics lecture demonstrations. A group of physics demo types selected the top 200 demonstrations that are commonly used several years ago. They are presented each year at this conference. It is a great time for us all to get together, have fun and teach others how they work. After the workshops, there are bunches of talks and then a large physics demonstrations show. That is coming up fast and I am helping with that so I am not sure how many pictures I will get. I promise I will get a few though.

So here are some pics of my friends and partners in crime from Minnesota, Iowa, Brown, Syracuse. There were also friends from many other places (Utah, Rutgers, Michigan) and several other places there.