Paco Romero Photography

I started using Lightroom 2 a couple of months ago and decided to use it to regenerate the galleries for my website.  The images at my site have been stale for a while and I needed to upload new ones.  Also, I wanted to add some architectural images, because I don’t plan on renewing my Livebooks website.  While I like Livebooks, I cannot justify the cost, and I like to have full access to my hosted website.   So I used Lightroom Web galleries and was able to get new images up in no time.  I really need to create side-by-side composities of my vertical images to create a more visually appealing format, and I will be doing that shortly.

I also rehosted this log from Wordpress.com to my own website.  It was really easy and quick - while I still don’t have exactly the same look and feel as my website, I have picked a very simple theme that I can modify later.  It’s hard to believe how simple it was to move my blog to my own website, including all the postings I had.  Very nice!

So there is this park near Fredericksburg, TX, in the Hill Country, named Enchanted Rock State Park.  The name comes from a massive pink granite dome that rises over 400 ft above ground.  Indians believed that the rock was enchanted because of the weird creaking and groaning noises resulting from the rok’s contracting by cold at night.     We drove to San Antonio this (2008) Thanksgiving weekend and spent half a day hiking at the park.  The children really enjoyed being outdoors, Pablo especially, as he almost ran to the summit way ahead of us!   Here are a couple of pictures from our time there.

I had an opportunity to photograph my friend Camille and her two dogs near her house in Plano.   There is a pretty trail near her home and we went there to get some images.   I located this green space, canopied by mature trees with enough room for her to walk the dogs towards the camera.   I really liked the framing effect of the trees and the natural setting.   Here is one of the images from the session in this location:

Camille and her dogs

Stella invited some friends over on Saturday to watch the Olympic games and have a potluck dinner.  I set up a small studio to create portraits for fun.   I used a large 8×4 ft foam board “book end” with a large Photoflex softbox and a white reflecting umbrella as fill.  The board ended up being too small for families, but I didn’t feeel like hanging seamless paper and deal with that for just fun portraits.  Overall the images are cute, spontaneous for the most part.  I have attached one here below,  Alan - I loved his pose and decided to give it a modern look - you can see the rest of them here.

A portrait of Alan

I had a photo session with Gena this past Sunday, 7/27.  We got together at the Makeup Academy studio and create some clean, casual images for my stock library.  She had nice, colorful outfits, which look very natural and fresh on a white background.  Julia from the Academy did the makeup and my wife assisted me.  I am pleased with the images - here is the set we used and one of the images from the session.

I enjoy shooting against a white background, which is sometimes tricky to do well on camera - fixing it later in photoshop is no fun. The most difficult technical complexity is getting a pure white background when doing full-body shots - next time I will try extra lighting on the reflective boards I use on the floor; this time I didn’t have enough light reaching it to achieve a white-without-details look. It takes more practice!

Gina was a joy to work with, she was very flexible on set, had a very slended yet curvy figure and a broad range of expressions to contribute to the images.

Last weekend I did a photo shoot for my stock library. I asked my wife Stella and her friend Holly to be manager types for me, and I shot against a white background. I enjoy the simplicity of isolated portraits. The lighting was conventional, with my Photoflex HalfDome Q39 softbox high and in front of the models. I used two monolights to light the white seamless paper independently and a fourth one with am umbrella as fill. The white background required some minor post-processing to get it to be completely white, it’s to be expected. The images are already available for sale on a microstock site and I hope they are good sellers.

Michelle was the makeup artist, and you can see her below working on Holly:

The images can be seen here. Here is an example of Holly looking like an accountant… and no wonder, she IS an accountant!

My digital workflow  - This Powerpoint slide deck describes at a high level the set of steps I follow to process my digital images.   This is called a digital workflow, and is done on a computer.   I have enhanced it recenty after attending Jeff Locklear seminar at the Kerrville TPPA seminar.  If you’re trying to define your workflow, take a look and you may find a couple of helpful ideas.

I haven’t made an entry into my blog in some time! It’s July 1st and I am back from the Texas Professional Phtographers Kerrville Workshop. I really love the Hill Country and this seminar was excellent! I participated in two day-long seminars, plus a couple of mini-sessions. I was also exposed to the print competition and learned a few things about what it takes to win an award. I am thinking of submitting a print to the Dallas PPA later in the fall.

I also have done a couple of TFP shots in the last few weeks. One was with Cecile, a pretty girl from Cameroon, as part of my African series. The other was last Saturday with Marshall, and I am pleased with the results. In both cases I worked with Pam Reeder, a make-up artist, who came with her husband Don, a photographer himself.

On Saturday May 26th I invited a local aspiring model, Tamara, and a make-up artist, Toby, to create some images with an African theme. It was Tamara’s first time doing studio modeling, although she had done runway before. She came with Kris, her boyfriend, a really nice guy and a terrific designer. We all enjoyed the collaboration and we ended creating some pretty cool shots. You can see them here. Tamara and Toby have portfolios on ModelMayhem.com - cool site where photographers, models, MUA’s and other professionals network and have fun.

Last week my mother came from Spain to visit. She’s in her late 60’s and lives in Seville, Spain. She was very excited to return to the US to spend some time with her two grandchildren. My plan is to take several images of her, alone and also with the kids. She was kind enough to help me test some lighting ideas a couple of nights ago; most of the pictures weren’t that good because I was experimenting. At the very end of the session I took this image where she looks natural and beautiful. The original image has a bold warm red background, which I was testing for a shoot this Saturday with an African theme. I decided to convert to B&W and use a Platinum toning effect to add more elegance and simplicity to the image.