Paco Romero Photography

My daughter Christina is learning to play piano.  My son Pablo is also learning piano and violin.    I really enjoy listening to them and slowly developing their skills.  Recently I caught my son actually enjoying his practice, as the piece was pretty cool, some sort of blues theme.   It gave me hope that all these scales and boring times in front of the piano will somehow translate into love for music.  Not just the joy of listening to it, but the pleasure of performing or even creating it.   When I was growing up I didn’t have any musical training, it was not available to me growing up in the 60s as a child in a working class family in Spain.  But my father loved music and he would sit me down and asked me to listen to his LPs - still remember Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos.  At the time I did it for him, because I loved him, but didn’t really enjoy it too much.  But it’s funny how these early childhood experiences get imprinted into your memory and your personality… now I love music, and Rachmaninoff in particular.  

Last night Christina was practicing his sonatina and I saw a picture of her from behind in front of the shiny black piano.  I set up a grid to her left, and later another behind her.  I shot the image I had seen in my mind, but I wasn’t pleased with the coldness of her back facing the camera.   So I asked her to turn and she gave me this natural, loving, pretty expression.   I love this little girl!

Did you enjoy my music, Dad?

This afternoon I spent an hour or so photographing Alicia in Frisco, a town north of Plano where I live.    Alicia has really beautiful facial features, and is very comfortable in front of the camera - I enjoyed working with her.  We started at Starbucks, where we did a couple of window light portraits.  Then we went to a shopping area on Main St., some of it still under construction.  We saw a very nice looking bar under construction, so we went in, chatted with the owners and took some pictures there.  The first two below are from the Starbucks, and the other two are from the bar.

Hope you like them!

By the window at Starbucks

Pensive

Alicia facing large window

Reflection

I am enjoying this book “America at Home” by Rick Smolan - I love the simple images of people inside their homes… some are done with ambient light, but many use flash so skillfully that it’s hard to tell it’s flash.

As I have shared in other postings, my photographic goals for 2010 are (1) improve my ability to tell stories, (2) use multiple planes in my photos to help with the story telling, and (3) continue to experiment and gain skills in using strobes on location. For every photo I create for fun I try to advance these goals above.

I decided to photograph my wife in the bathroom while she was doing some makeup stuff, and my daughter was on our bed reading a book. It looked like a perfect moment to capture with a candid snapshot. The problem was that the light coming from the windows in the bedroom and the tungsten light in the bathroom were different colors — and it wasn’t enough for it. I could keep one or the other, and then replace the other one with gelled flash. Or I could simply use flash and kill ambient - but the flash had to preserve the feel of the ambient light I could see.

I bounced an SB800 off an umbrella to the right of the bed and used that to fill the bedroom with light. I bounced another SB800 off the bathroom ceiling - I diffused it first with a small softbox and then bounced it. Just softer light. One complication was that bathroom is lined with mirrors and I didn’t want to see myself/camera and the softbox in the photo. I had to play with camera and flash placement.

Let me say that I am posting this not because it’s my best image, or is a perfect image. I am sharing it because I am inspired by other photographers that share their ideas and experimentation approaches, and I want to do the same. The hope is that some of you may pick up your camera and flashes and make some portraits at home inspired by this posting. I may also get lucky and get some insightful suggestions about how to tell the story better, or how to better achieve my goals above.

Here is the image, and a photo of the setup below it.

Day at home

Lighting setup

There is a tobacco store, newly reopened, in the shopping center at Coit and Legacy in Plano. This store has a beautiful humidor where the fine cigars are kept. I love the look and smell of this place, even though I am not a smoker. Yesterday I stopped by and talked to the manager, Patrick, about making a portrait of him in the humidor. He kindly agreed.

I took my 7 year old assistant with me this morning and we took this portrait at 8:30. The lighting was provided by two Nikon SB800 flashes. The key light was an SB800 in a Xsmall Photoflex softbox to camera left, and the background light was an SB800 with a 20 degree grid to camera light, putting an accent light on the rich cigar boxes behind Patrick. The light on the table in front of him was spill from the key light.

Took 24 exposures in 5 minutes. I like his friendly smile on this one.

The Tobacconist

I am offering my second lighting workshop in Plano at the end of February.  The details are available here.

There are many workshops out there.  There are excellent workshops on studio lighting for portraiture, on using portable flashes, and, of course, on doing weddings and seniors.  My lighting workshop is a bit different in that it’s more focused on the principles of lighting, across both natural and man-made lights,  with practical application to multiple situations, both in the studio and on location.   Light is light, regardless of whether it’s the sun, house lamps, powerful strobes,  ceiling flourescent tubes, or work lights, but each has different attributes - but a proactive photographer that knows how to see and control light will be able to apply a small set of principles to almost any situation to get the results he or she wants.

An idea came to mind while my daughter was practicing her piano. I envisioned a cozy little space where she’s reading quietly, with a color palette that overlapped cool and warm colors. I wanted to show her as a little person that was almost ready to have her own space.

The problem is that there is no space like that in the house-walls are mostly off white, the furniture in her room is off-white… not exactly what I had in mind. So I challenged myself to construct this cozy, intimate space for her, and then bring her in and make the portrait.

One more thing I wanted to do was to experiment with props in the foreground - I was really impressed with how Mark Robert Halper uses the foreground plane as a creative element - this image is a good example. So I used her blue lava lamp to bring the cool color palette and also the foreground element. I moved her night stand to bring the lava lamp closer to the camera.

In order to achieve the cozy space idea I took a hand-woven orange patterned blanket we just bought in Peru and threw it over her bed’s headboard. Christina was also going to sit on this blanket, which would bring the warm colors to the composition.

The lighting was straightforward. I placed an SB-800 flash with a 20 degree grid on a light stand to camera right, in a near-butterfly position. Because I wasn’t using a modeling light, I instructed my little model to spot correct placement of the grid on her face, and to help me position the light. In order to get the blue very blue, and the orange more saturated, I decided to put 2 cuts of full CTO on the flash. When I adjusted white balance in post, I went for a warm tone that made the blue bluer.

And the only thing left was camera placement to have the lava lamp well present but without dominating the entire frame. It took a few trials - I used a tripod even though I was shooting at 1/160 or so. The lens was 85mm f/1.4.

My little one was an excellent model, patient with light placement. I like the results - hope she does too when she sees her portrait in the morning. I think I got pretty close to the image I previsualized.

Click on the thumbnails below to see a larger image:

Reading moment

Lighting diagram

On Sunday I worked on some fitness images with  Eric.  Because my garage studio is not climatized I went to Home Depot and bought 3 $10 500W halogen lights to keep the model warm. Then I decided to use them for the shoot, so I rigged them to light stands. This image is done with those three hot lights only.  The Home Depot lights are really something. First of all, they get super hot, so don’t think of putting them close to anything flamable, like foam core boards, reflectors, or seamless paper. I didn’t use the metal mask in front of the glass, I was lazy, but it’s a good idea to keep the glass from getting close to stuff in the studio. I did most of the work on a tripod, as I was getting f/60 at 1/4 or so, instead of the 1/250 and f/8 or f/11 I am used to working with - so it’s a challenge to be messing with the tripod in the studio. And finally, as I said above, there is no way to adjust them out of the box. I used them raw, both as rim lights and also the one in front of them - they project a pretty wide beam and act as 7-in or 11-inch photo head reflectors - you gotta know how to deal with harsh light.

Eric

Lighting diagram

My eight-year-old has been learning to play violin for a couple of weeks now, so it was time to make a portrait of him as a violinist. Both he and my daughter have also been playing piano for about a year, so I asked her to play the piano, so that we’d have a violin sonata setup. I wanted to create a low key mood, reminiscing of the old times when players would perform by candlelight.

The kids were not very cooperative, as my intentions were competing with Club Penguin (an online world) for my son and her story time (my job) for my girl. So I had to do this pretty quickly. Lighting is explained for each image below. It’s an experiment on light with no other purpose that just fun.

Image 1. A single SB800 flash with a 10 degree grid to my daughter’s right, to produce a very dramatic Rembrandt pattern on her face.

My daughter at the piano

Image 2. This is my favorite, as I am trying to create more planes of interest, and in this case I wanted the foreground to be out of focus, with the focal point in the background. I used two SB800 flashes, the one with the 10 degree grid on my daughter, as above, and a second one with a 20 degree grid behind her and pointing at my son.

Violin sonata

Image 3. The least dramatic image, I used the 20 degree grid in front of him and nothing else.

The violinist

Here is the lighting diagram for the image with the two musicians:

Lighting diagram

My wife and I took the children to Santa Fe and Taos this Thanksgiving weekend to enjoy the beauty of New Mexico, and avoid eating and shopping too much. We spent three days in the area, and we had a wonderful time.

I tried to capture with the images below what I like the most about New Mexico:

• The precolombian Pueblo heritage (#1, #2, #3)
• The beautiful landscapes (#4, #5)
• The high sierras and the snow (#6)
• The Spanish influences (#7, #8)

Taos Pueblo

Taos Pueblo at the end of the day

Pueblo woman selling jewelry in Santa Fe

Aspen trees near Santa Fe Ski Area

View from Capulin volcano near Raton, NM

Taos Ski Resort slopes

Lobby at Santa Fe motel where we stayed

St. Francis in front of Santa Fe cathedral

Here is an image from today. The key light is produced by a gridded beauty dish, which produces this beautiful shadow around her neck and doesn’t spill light all over the model. The other interesting aspect is the use of rim lights on each side, as I wanted to have some control of where the rim highlights would be. So lots of lights, but the effect is pretty simple, and hopefully does not appear over-lit.

Lovely Siri and her attitude