Delphine is an extremely elegant and beautiful woman. Slender, tall and with a dazzling smile. She is also very easy to work with. What else could anyone ask of a model? I didn’t have much time to work with her but all the images I got were pretty good.

This is Delphine. A very quiet and beautiful lady from the model mixer. After spending every free moment for the past 2 weeks to do editing and post-processing I  am starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Another week more and I’ll wrap this all up.

Moving on to a completely different topic, will the insanity ever end? Check The Register article The war on photographers - you’re all al Qaeda suspects now. Quite scary and another sign of the times to come. Or of the times that are here already.

Same lighting as the previous shot, in this case it is more accentuated due to Maurice’s relationship to the lights. It is a nice lighting that adds a sense of dimension and depth to his face. About the pose, well, I can only guess this is what they learn in model school.

Maurice was all business. He veni, vidi, vici, and in five minutes gave me an assortment of poses, all of them very good. The bright red suit probably had a hue outside the gamut the sensor, any monitor and for that matter the printer could represent and what you see here is the best compromise for getting both a saturated red color in the suit and a realistic skin color. Lightning is a main light on camera right and a secondary one at 1:2 on camera left, both with softboxes. Another monoblock is lighting the wall behind.

After a quick change of clothes Ruby came back and this time we played with another of her most salient features, her gorgeous hair. We didn’t have a fan available (we finally got one late in the evening) so Ruby had to do all the hard work to simulate the wind and motion by moving herself.

On a completely different topic now I was impressed by this opinion article by Errol Morris in the New York Times regarding the power of one particular photo. This might be old news by now but if you haven’t read it you might want to. As  a result of reading the article I got the book Emotions Revealed by Paul Ekman. Very interesting stuff.

This is Ruby with a Hawaiian outfit. It was a beautiful day outside and many models were enjoying the sun outside. Luckily for me I had set up my gear next to the entrance to the swimming pool so that some of the models would stop for a studio shot after their outdoor shot by the pool. Ruby has incredible big eyes that are the most striking feature on her face. Unfortunately my lightning here wasn’t good enough to light them as they deserve. Although we had fun trying different poses and expressions.

For last Saturday’s model mixer I rented a 3-light Novatron M600 kit that was very reliable and powerful enough for the job at hand. Every light was a 600 watt/s strobe that could be independently controlled, with a 5-stop range. My lighting schema for most, if not all, of the shots consisted on two softboxes in a cross lightning pattern with equal power, or in a classical main light at camera right with a secondary light at half the main power on camera left. The third light was bare and pointing towards the background with power varying from 1/4 to close to main light depending on the look I wanted.

I didn’t bring a background so I had to use a white wall as background and creatively incorporate some of the decoration elements hanging on it. After reading the excellent tutorial on white seamless background written by Zack Arias I know what I will be bringing to my next model mixer.

Last Saturday I attended a modelmixer organized by Mario Benton in Oakland. I had a very good experience at the mixer. There was plenty of space to set up lights and backgrounds. It also helped that only 5 photographers brought lights. There were plenty of models through the day. Some models stayed all day long and kept on changing costumes and rotating through all the sets.

Having an outdoor pool helped for swimwear shots although the space in the pool was very limited. An open pool or more space between the fence and the pool would have been nice.

It was long though. I was there from 1 to 11pm ! and I shot over 2000 frames, a personal record.

I ran out of batteries and space in both cameras, Nikon D200 and Mamiya 645 with Imacon back. Shooting RAW will do that to you. Good thing I brought the charger and my laptop to download photos to. I also had my trusty Hasselblad loaded with film just in case but I didn’t have to use it. Other photographers ran out of space in their cards too. If you plan to go to one of those and stay till the end you might want to bring plenty of empty cards or a way of downloading the ones you have used.

I set up my own lights which gave me both the opportunity to shoot at my convenience as well as to give back to the community for the times I have freeloaded off other photog’s set ups at other model mixers.
Overall, it was a pretty good experience.

Janika was the first model that walked in. It was early in the day so I had the opportunity to work with her alone for quite a long time.

Cathy and Rita were splashing in the water, rolling on the sand, and in general, just having a jolly good time while I was trying to get my photos done. It was way past lunch hour and we were getting hungry. Fortunately, they stopped for a few moments and we took a sequence of nice photos of them together. Just in time to pack things up and go have some lunch in one of the resort restaurants. We had a table in the patio and although the food wasn’t anything to write home about the company sure made it all up for it.

Rita is Cathy’s friend and she has a very fun and ebullient personality that is contagious wherever she goes. She was also dressed in white and had wrapped around her another of Cathy’s fabrics. They were having way too much fun to the point they forgot about me and went in the water, which was gelid (as it is usual around this area). Obviously, I, carrying a very expensive digital back didn’t follow them and had to wait till they came out. I don’t think the salt water would have mixed well with the image bank tethered to the back.  They had to dry up a bit before we continued the session. I like the regal pose Rita has here.

Lighting was again sun in the back and ring flash around the lens.

Cathy is a lovely, artistic and spirited soul. When she heard about the project she was immediately in. We wanted to do the photo session on the beach and she just knew the perfect place, Seascape Resort on Monterey Bay, Aptos. With several miles of private beach it is her favorite resort location and once you are there you understand why. The weather on the beach in this area is always a dicey proposition and you have to be prepared for everything, from scorching sun to very chilly and foggy, cold days. We were lucky and had nice weather. Cathy brought several colored fabrics to play with that made a very nice contrast with her white dress.

With the sun behind her I used a ring flash and very small aperture, around f/16 to darken the background and the sky.

This is one of first photos of them I took that day. Less than 2 minutes into the photo shoot and we pretty much nailed it, I knew this one was going to be a winner. I took it right at the portico at that entrance of the Filoli house with the marble columns nicely framing Pedro and Xiaohong. And, so you know we where at Filoli, I had to include the yellow tulips. As I mentioned yesterday, there were tulips everywhere you looked.

Xiaohong agreed to Pedro’s crazy idea and she also dressed up. The funny thing is that he is a Portuguese national, she is a Chinese national and they were dressed with Indian outfits! All very eclectic, multicultural and cosmopolitan.

After a few photos inside, most of them a bit dark we went outside, and strolled along the beautiful rows of flowers. It was my first time at Filoli Gardens and I didn’t know what to expect. Every season they change the flowers and the arrangements. I guess this season tulips were the “in” thing because there were all over and all colors, red, white, pink, violet arranged beautifully.

Lighting here is sun behind as hair light and ring flash in front of lens for that shadowless look.

Pedro loves Filoli Gardens, one of the historical country states of the early 20th century. Built by Mr. and Mrs. Bourn, on the southern end of Crystal Springs Lake the name was made up by Mr. Bourn by combining the first two letters from the key words of his credo: “Fight for a just cause; Love your fellow man; Live a good life”. Which, as credos go, is as good as any I have heard. You can read the whole history here.

So, of course, that was where we met for this photo shoot. We took photos inside the house and outside in the gardens. Of all my friends that signed up for this project Pedro and Xiaohong were the only ones that dressed up.

Because they were dressed up and I had a professional looking camera we were harassed told repeatedly by the security captain inside the house that professional photos are not allowed in the estate. I had to explain, several times, that this was a personal project, that I am not a professional, and that my friends weren’t getting married! Anyway, he was very polite at all times, and so were we, and eventually we were left alone to continue our photo shoot.

The interior was very dark and I only had one flash on tow because you can’t set up tripods or lights. This was taken with a flash with diffuser on camera left. Pedro is standing in front of a wine cellar in a room used as a studio. That imposing looking door behind is a safe door. Somebody took protecting their wines very seriously!

It was the end of a very long day, photographically speaking. Wei and Nick were my fourth photo shoot of the day. I was getting a bit tired and so were them. Dinner was ready, the sun was down and we had to rush to finish this. I only took a few shoots of them on the sofa and that was all. Fortunately, they are so photogenic that I could have used almost any of them.

I wrote yesterday about my publishing woes with blurb. After several emails with their customer support explaining the issue they acknowledged it, recommended I use the values their software BookSmart uses and promised to fix their documentation. These are excerpts from two of those emails.

… Thanks for your message. Please go by the information you found when using your booksmart software, as it should be the most reliable. This means that you will need to re-size your images, sorry about that.
… Thanks for this information. We will soon be updating all of this information, as we have received a few other complaints. We apologize for any confusion caused.

I hope they do. It will save time and pain for a lot of people in the future.

If you follow some of the most prolific SoFoBoMoers like Paul Butzi or Gordon McGregor you’ll notice a common pattern. None of the Publish On Demand providers is perfect. Paul has written about several of them here, about Akusa books here, Blurb here, CreateSpace here. He, like Gordon ended up using blurb, which probably are the best of them all. In the past I had had a good experience with them too with my Memories of Africa book and it’s probably the one I’ll use too. It’s reasonable priced, the print quality is as good or better than any of the others and the customer service is not too bad.

But of course I also have my gripes with blurb. An area they still haven’t fixed and that has created unnecessary confusion, for me, and if you read their forums for a lot of people is the inconsistence between the information they have published and their software BookSmart regarding page and image sizes suitable for double spread and full bleed pages.

Following their published information for page sizes for 10×8 landscape books and their recommended in their Blurberati blog here:

For Standard Landscape 10×8 pages:
9.6 inches wide by 8.24 inches high
24.4 x 20.9 cm

If you do the math at their recommended 300DPI the resulting images are
2880×2472.

I used the useful templates from The Art Of Engineering here, that were made following those measurements and processed all my images to that size. Imagine my surprise when I started putting them in their BookSmart application (v1.9.5) and found out that for the same size book their software requires images that are 2888×2475!. Sure, you might say the discrepancy is small, (a mere 1.3 millimeters in width and page 0.3 mm in height) but hey! all my images got resized and I don’t trust their software to do a good job resampling and resizing and I’d rather do that on Photoshop myself.

So now it’s back to the drawing board, err …, Photoshop, and redo all my pages, not fun.

Nick is a really fun and intelligent kid, but, like all kids, so full of energy that it was hard to get him to be quiet for a few seconds to take his portrait. He was making all kind of funny faces and chatting at the same time. I was thinking on the portrait that I just had taken of Wei and wanted Nick to have a pose that would match Wei’s for the triptych. I asked him to sit cross legged and finally I had the pose I wanted. Lighting here is cross lighting with flashes reflected on umbrellas on either side of the camera. I didn’t want to have 2 shadows behind Nick so I reduced the left flash power by a f-stop or so.

After the session was done Nick showed me a thing or two about playing the Nintendo Wii.

If it hadn’t been for Wei and Jasmine I wouldn’t have made my SoFoBoMo deadline. Some of my friends that were lined up for some of the shoots and that I had scheduled with enough time in advance canceled or had to reschedule, not their fault but of those strangers that kept either getting cold feet or allowing their busy lives to interfere with my project (just joking) and canceled on them! So, in an almost state of panic I sent an email to Wei, Jasmine and Connie asking them to help me out. Well, not only did they agree but Wei and Jasmine invited their neighbors to be my strangers, even for Connie!

Wei’s dad passed away after a very brave fight against cancer last year and we wanted to pay homage to him. I really like Wei’s Zen-like pose holding his dad’s portrait.

I used two flashes with umbrellas on either side of Wei. We were getting some reflections on the glass until Wei had the genial idea, let’s take the glass off the frame! It worked like a charm.

The number of projects at sofobomo.org keep growing and growing and I am amazed at the quality of the books being produced. Check them if you have the time. Last week the number of visitors to this blog soared to an all time maximum, 171 visits, in one day May 5th. I was a bit baffled until I found out the reason. Gordon McGregor, of PhotoExpressions fame, and one of the first to finish his SoFoBoMo book had posted an article about SoFoBoMo on The Online Photographer, and the rest is history.

I mentioned yesterday Jasmine’s wonderful Japanese pizza, well, wonder no more, here it is in all its glory. The only final touch missing is the thick, syrupy, sweet soy sauce. Yummy!

Susan is Peter’s lovely wife. At first she felt a little bit uncomfortable and didn’t know what to do. Fortunately for her, she is one of those really photogenic people. Her very expressive face always have a ready smile so I wasn’t too worried. I knew that after a while she would forget the camera and she would let her natural self to come out. One of the techniques I learned during this project working with people is that after a while, especially if the session takes a while they can’t keep their guard up all the time and eventually they let go. It’s what I would call portrait by attrition. There is a fine line though, you don’t want your subjects to be tired, or bored or worse, mad at you.  I read somewhere that a famous photographer, whose name I can’t recall, back in the days of film used to start his sessions with no film in his camera. He would go through the motions for 10 minutes just chatting and shooting away without using film. After that he would load the camera and start the real session, his subjects, now at ease, none the wiser. With digital that’s not necessary anymore, and I have found that in some cases the best image is in those first 10 minutes.

Fudge, their beautiful and energetic ball of fur helped Susan forget she was in front of the camera and I took this candid of both of them. Lighting was a flash with umbrella on camera right. The one on camera left didn’t fire so I had to bring some of the shadows back up in Photoshop. Kudos to the Imacon 16bit files for being so forgiving.

Jasmine is a fabulous cook. Although we took some standard, sitting-on-the-couch type of portraits she really wanted her portrait to be taking while cooking. Here she is preparing a Japanese pizza (that’s what she called it) that was absolutely delicious. The base was not made out of bread but out of sliced vegetables and it wasn’t baked but fried. The smells coming from the kitchen were so good that I got a bit sloppy in my photography. I didn’t pay attention to the window behind her and the reflection the flash might (and did) cause. When I had the flash (with diffuser) on camera right it would show up reflected in the windows. Fortunately I also took some of the shots with flash on camera left and these came out great. I ate too much of the pizza she prepared it’s no wonder they all kicked my butt at the Wii, well that and the fact that it was my first time playing.

As I mentioned before Peter hadn’t tried wushu before but he sure looked the part when Connie asked him to strike some of the poses. We didn’t have much time for this photo session because I had two more to go and the sun had started to set. I took a couple of others in which Connie is doing the wheel that are pretty impressive too.

This was Peter first encounter with wushu other than the Jet Li or Jackie Chan movies he had seen and he handled it with grace and aplomb. He seems to be a natural at this. He pretty much nailed the pose we asked him to do. Of course, he didn’t know we were going to ask him this. He, innocently, thought we were going to do regular portraits and  have dinner afterwards. But I’m sure he would have been so accommodating even if he had known in advance. He and his family were very gracious and a pleasure to meet. And we had a lot of fun playing with the Wii afterwards.

Connie is a great dancer, an accomplished researcher in the area of stem cell research and a fearsome wushu warrior. She carries several swords and spears in his car at all times and she can kick your butt into oblivion with any of her weapons or with her bare hands. Fortunately, she’s a sweetheart and a very fun woman. The day of the shoot the only weapons we got to handle were the Wiimotes at Wei’s place. She got to kick my butt using those too. In my defense I’d say that my belly was full thanks to the great dinner Jasmine prepared for us and my reflexes weren’t as sharp as they usually are (I wish).

Now that the photo book is done I can get back to sleeping 8 hours a day. It’s been a fun ride but it sure has been challenging balancing a demanding full time job with a demanding full time photo book project. I haven’t had a chance to present all the selected photos before my time was up so I will continue doing that in the coming days although you can see the finished product here.

This is the first version of the book Two Degrees Of Separation in PDF form. Note, it’s a big file to download, 32Mb, and my server is a bit slow.

I still have a few days to make final adjustments if I get any feedback. Enjoy.

I had the book’s layout figured out and decided since the beginning of the project. But I had never thought about the book cover. After seeing Gordon McGregor struggling with the cover for his book, here and here, I started to fret and freak out. The book cover was something I hadn’t thought much about. I had the book pretty much finished two days ago but I’m still undecided about the cover. And this is not helping. I have narrowed it down to these two.

I think, I’m going to go with one of them and hope for the best. I still have a couple of days left before making the final decision. So if you have any suggestions I’ll be more than happy to hear them.

The official SoFoBoMo website is up and running thanks to Paul Butzi. Check out other projects and finished books.