Happy New Year

Well, it will be a New Year in a couple of hours here (already New Years in most places) so time to make the resolutions. I have three. First is to lose the extra pounds I have put on (this must be the most common resolution for most of us), second is to really concentrate on my photography and third (which kind of ties in with the first) is to cut down on the beer (but not tonight). Hopefully I will stick to the plan. But tonight I will drink too much beer and spend time with my family. I don't go out on New Years Eve because I like to spend it with my kids and there are too many drunk drivers on the road. Better to stay home and party.

Been a real interesting year for me here. Job kind of sucks and the typical girl problems. But end of year started to look much better with my girlfriend and I getting back together and her getting pregnant. I'm looking forward to being a Dad again.

Well, I hope everyone enjoys their New Year. Thanks for visiting my blog.

lighting ala strobist (ok, not nude)

Ok, this is not a nude photo, but it's my blog and I posted a nude shot earlier so what the hell...... I was asked to photograph a basketball game today and considering I have ZERO experience I didn't really want to but figured would give it a try after explaining they should have zero expectations (can only go up from there). Wasn't sure what to expect so brought my canon 100-400 lens (which ended up being a too long) and two canon 550ex with pocket wizards. I was told the gym was bright but was glad I brought the flash as when I got there there were no lights and I would have to be at ISO 1600 @ f4.0 for 1/125 (which was too slow for basketball - or at least I think so). there was a higher level behind the net (about 5 feet up) so I ended up with a speedlight to the left and right behind the net on light stands. Power was at full and triggered by pocketwizards (manual of course). Got a couple of good shots but next time would actually use my 17-85 as even at 100 I was too long from where I was standing. I think these ended up being iso 800 f4.0 for 1/400 (or thereabouts).

The hardest thing is that the action is so fast I had a really hard time focusing. I used servo mode on the camera but it sure is a lot harder than shooting a model standing still. I give these sport shooters a lot of credit.

abstract

Well I did it. I purchased the CS3 upgrade last night. I felt it had enough enhancements to make the $199 upgrade worth it. I also am a frequent visitor to RadiantVista and all his tutorials are with CS3. If you use photoshop and have not checked out the radiantvista site www.radiantvista.com, you don't know what your are missing. Wonderful tutorials on a wide range of subjects and it if FREE. The only trick is you have to check back every couple of days to see if there is a new tutorial posted. Once archived, you would have to pay to view. I have learned so much on this site (although mostly for my landscape photos).

The photo to the left is an abstract of (well you know). Just goofing around in photoshop and came up with this. My friend and I had enjoyed the night and although she didn't want me to take any photos of her, I did convince her to let me take some photos of body parts that no one would be able to tell it was her. I always respect a person's wish not to have photos posted and always get a model release (unless it is a photo taken in public and there is nothing potentially embarrassing for the person).

Well tommorow is New Years Eve here (in some parts of the world Today is New Years Eve) so I'm thinking up my resolutions. Remember to party safe so you can enjoy 2008.

erotic black and white

No posting yesterday. After work I decided to go out to a nice dinner (I love to eat Sushi) and then went to see the movie I am Legend with Will Smith. I like these types of Movies and thought it was a great movie. I guess it didn't get great reviews, but I don't care. It's a movie you can sit back and enjoy without thinking too much. I do too much thinking all day at work and when I see a movie, I just want to relax. A lot of people don't know that it is based on a 1954 science fiction novel (bit of trivia).

Some of my photos are inspired from other sites. Hotel nudes is a blog that I really like and I especially like the simple lighting that he uses to achieve such great photos. This photo was taken in a hotel not too long ago and I liked the way it turned out. It was converted to black and white using an action in photoshop. I thought the photo looked much better in black and white and the expression on her face was very natural when I took this photo. Now I did use one speedlight fired into a 60inch umbrella for this shot.

There is something erotic about a woman playing with herself and I asked her to relax and do what comes naturally. There was a mirror in the hotel room that she enjoyed looking at and this was one of many photos I took. I feel this is an erotic photo, but in no way would I consider it pornography.

Girls

There is something about two girls that men find attractive. No not everyone, but I bet if you asked 10 men if they thought the idea of two girls was exciting, 8 of them would say yes. Funny thing is, a lot of women I know also feel the same way. Could be the type of people I hang out with, who knows.

These two girls are truly lovers. Been together for a while and although the one girl used to date guys, the other told me she just likes women. Actually great to hang out with and drink beer and not have to worry about anything except being friends. Too many people get the perception that two people of the opposite sex can't just be friends and I disagree. I have had some great friends that were women (one was an avid fisherperson like me and we would get up early and go fishing every weekend). Funny thing is my girlfriend at the time just couldn't understand our friendship and became so jealous we finally broke up. I figured it came down to trust in a relationship and she had a couple of friends that were guys and it didn't really bother me.

Day after Christmas

Hope everyone had a great Christmas. If eating too much turkey counts then I had a great Christmas. The kids liked their presents and actually didn't fight all day so my day was complete.

I'm still working on learning how to convert my photos to black and white. If you check out some of my favorite links, many of the photos are in Black and White. Granted, they are light years ahead of my photos and many are shooting film, but I really like the look of a nude photo in Black and White.

Great body and a great smile, what more can I say. Just another girl I was lucky to know.

Jill

Thought for a while what to post today on Christmas. Decided to be anti-festive and post a photo of Jill. Jill is a wonderful girl who fights for her sanity almost every day. I decided to post her as I remember her telling me how she never got a Christmas present in her life. A lot of time we think we are poor, but until you see how some people live overseas, you don't realize what poor really is. She figured she wasn't good enough for Santa to bring her presents when she was young and later figured Santa was only for the rich kids When I met her she was 19 years old and still had not received a Christmas present from anyone. I first met her in November and then later spent two days in December tracking her down just to make sure she got a present. In fact, bought her a whole bunch of stuff just for the heck of it, including her two younger sisters and brother. Never saw a bunch of people more happy and really made me feel good.

When photographing Jill I wanted to convey her somewhat dark mood and her feelings of solitude. I tried to capture this by having grainy and underexposed photos. A very simple photo.

In the second photo, I added some stuffed animals, but kept teh phto the same dark grainy appearance. Although I have other more happy photos of Jill, this is how I remembered her.

Night before Christmas

It's the night before Christmas so I guess I better post some sort of photo with a Christmas theme. My girlfriend on a night out recently with me. Luckily no snow where she lives or she would have froze to death :)

No snow here, but we are getting a slight rain instead. It has dropped down to a chilly 84 degrees outside. Did the last of the Christmas shopping and the presents are wrapped for the kids. I'm trying to convince the kids Santa prefers Beer and chips instead of cookies and milk, but no luck. Kids really make Christmas special. I also have a Turkey ready to go for tomorrow.

Merry Christmas everyone!

beach fun

There is something exciting about being nude when you have the chance of getting caught. We had hiked in to a beach we heard about for about 15 minutes. When we arrived it was still kind of early and given the remote location and the difficult hike (which included crossing a span of about 40 feet along a cliff where if you fell you would be toast) we were confident no one would come around. I had originally planned on getting some nice landscape beach shots and I did just that. Then my friend decided to go skinny dipping and tore off her clothes and jumped in. I took a couple of photos before joining. the funny thing is, when we finished, her bikini bottom was no where to be found. This left us in a situation where she had no bottom. It took my knife and my shirt to fashion something for her to wear while we hiked out. Luckily no one came around and we made a clean exit.

This shot was just natural light with a slow shutter speed. Hand held (thank you image stabilization on the lens). Just a great day having fun at the beach.

strobist style

Photo of a friend. Trying out some backlighting with my speedlights. The setup was quite simple. One 550ex fired through a diffusion panel to camera left. to camera right was another diffusion panel with gold fabric to bounce some light back as fill. Behind the model is another 550ex pointed at the back of her head. All fired by pocketwizards. I like how the light spills from behind her in this shot.

In a small rut with christmas coming up. Also have Carol coming back from a trip to Hawaii, which will make things interesting. I'm hoping she can help set up some new models for me to shoot over the next weekend.

I decided that Santa is going to give me a trip to the Philippines in June. Yes, a long way off but work is crazy and it will give me something to look forward to. From where I live it is a two day trip each way to get to Manila, which really sucks. I'm hoping to get to Guam for work next year which will put me about 4 hours or so from manila and also allow me to travel to some other SouthEast Asian countries.

Lovers

My friends wanted a photograph that was erotic, yet something they could put up in their apartment. They wanted it not to be the typical portrait type shot. I had never photographed a nude couple, let alone two friends. They are also not shy about their excitment, which made it a little uncomfortable for me. But in the end this is the photo that they really liked.

I goof around with the photos a lot in photoshop. Heck, it gives me something to do. For this photo I took the original shot and then duplicated the layer. I changed the mode to soft light and it added a lot of contrast. Next I ran an action called professional retro and went in and played with the saturation. Lastly I ran another action called Midnight Black. I probably couldn't duplicate this again if I tried cause I also played with the curves adjustments for a little while.

Art/erotica or just plain porn

Is it Art? I don't know but I liked the way the photo came out. This photo was taken with two friends who ended up getting a little bit too frisky. Straight out of the camera I felt it was just too hardcore. I started goofing around in photoshop to see if I could make it more subtle. I ended up running a bunch of different things on the photo until I came up with this. More of a drawing than a photo at this point and since I thought it looked good I stopped.

How do you define art anyway? I'm sure there are a million answers to this one. Same for erotica.

simple post

Been feeling the Christmas blues today. Not really sure why, the kids are getting excited about Christmas and it is a festive holiday here. I even have a girl from the cook islands that will be posing for me this weekend (she finally said she would as long as the photos are tasteful). I have been trying to convince her for some time now.

Just a simple photo of a young woman I photographed. I liked this photo with her head turned down and eyes closed. Nothing special on post processing either in photoshop.

Braces

I don't know why but there is something about a girl in braces that I find attractive. Carla is a beautiful young woman and is actually not shy at all. We made this photo when we had just moved in together and we didn't even have any furniture yet in our apartment. just a couple of beds and a tv set. Cable wasn't even hooked up yet. I knew it wouldn't last with her going to college and me working some long hours at work. But we made it through a couple of months before we parted ways. She ended up finishing college and is actually working in Hawaii as an Registered Nurse. We finally lost contact but I'm sure she is doing fine.

With Christmas coming up I also figured I would post a photo of my fiancee around a Christmas tree. We were out that night and when I look at this photo I realize why so many people were looking at her. She is a very beautiful woman and I'm lucky to have her. For me, my christmas shopping is done. All I need to do is wrap the kids presents and I'm good to go. For me, ended up buying a tronix explorer portable battery which will allow me to power my strobes outside. I plan on doing a lot more nudes outside next year with much better lighting.

Built for sex

Some women are just built for sex. I'm sorry if I ruffle some feathers but it is true. Take the girl on the left. Everything about her is natural. If you met her, everything about her is exciting. But, she actually thinks she is not good looking with is unbelievable in my eyes. Not much on posing cause she is shy, I was able to get a few shots and agree to signing a release. I think it is more because her prior boyfriend always talked down about her and she actually started to believe the things he was saying.

I'm amazed how sexist the men can be at times in the Pacific. This is especially true in the South Pacific. I'm a man, but it is the truth. At my work, nearly 80% of the women are abused. Mostly physical abuse that makes me sick to my stomach. And those who are not physically abused suffer mental abuse at their husbands hands. Although it is slowly starting to change, abuse is still very widely accepted in these societies. I guess I'm angry because I just spent a couple of hours at the hospital with one of my workers who was beat up by her so called boyfriend. It makes me want to pack my bags and leave this place.

So just a short post tonight as I'm still pissed off. Time to open a beer and relax.

Getting Old

I'm getting old. I admit it, my days of going out and drinking all night long are getting lame. Recently pulled an all night session with a girl I met. We started at 10PM and went all night (drinking and partying that is).... At least it wasn't me dancing on the table. Damn wild night and we left with the sun comming up. By then I had only one thing on my mind and that was sleep. I slept all day but luckily didn't wake up that afternoon with a hangover. She was feeling the "love" from drinking all night long but by 9:00 she wanted to go out again. I had other things planned like getting rid of her so I could get some sanity back in my life. Took another three nights/days before the sanity kicked in an I had finally had enough. I guess I'm at the point in my life where going out to dinner and seeing a nice movie is a good night for me.

This was taken at about 4AM (I think). I have been using my 550ex attached to a Canon camera shoe cord. it allows me to hold the camera in one hand and the flash in my left hand. At least that way I get it off camera and have some more control. It still allows me to use E-TTL which lets the camera control the flash. I also have pocketwizards but for something quick this works well. I use is a lot with my 17-85 zoom lens and it works well with my wide angle and nifty 50 also. Try to hold a long lens (like my 70-200) in one hand and the flash in the other and you will die unless you have the kung fu grip.

Speedlights

Life is tough sometimes. My girlfriend is more than 5,000 miles away and I probably won't see her for at least 6-months. There is a very cute Filipina girl I really want to photograph, but she has other things on her mind. Funny thing is all I want is to photograph her but she made it very clear she wants more. I would normally jump on it (no pun intended), but I'm trying to stick to one girl. So I sit here alone on a Friday night with my cell phone ringing. She just finished her work and I hope she doesn't decide to pop in to see me at the house. After a couple of beers I want to pick up the phone and call her but I know I will regret it in the end. Besides, my girlfriend knows I have kids and accepts that and she is pregnant. I guess that is why the cold shower was invented.

Okay..... This shot was made using two speedlights. The first speedlight is to camera left and slightly above her shooting down. I used a grid on the light to control the fall off. I pointed it at about shoulder blade height. The second speedlight is positioned inside the door to camera right. It is skimming the closet doors and has a red gel attached. Both are triggered with pocket wizards. I had to be careful to watch the light on the girl as when I had the power too high, it was hitting the closet doors and washing our the red gel effect from the other light. Again, get the light in close to control the falloff.

relationships

Yes, I kind of like the retro lomo look (if that is what you call it). Another girl met through a friend of a friend (you know how it is). It is amazing how in the Pacific, if they know you are single then they are trying to land you. It becomes almost like a contest here. Look, I'm not crazy and I know that for the most part a young beautiful woman going for an older man is looking primarily for either (a) money or (b) security. But I also found that many of these girls are truly looking for a long lasting relationship. I am lucky that I finally found that person. At dinner last night, my boss was telling me how can I settle down with one girl when I have a lot of options and played the field so much. I told him that you need to dig through a lot of rock until you find that diamond in the rough. Not that any of these women are in the rough, it is just you have to look until you find someone you are truly compatible with. I played the other game where I jumped right into a marriage with a woman I know for only a couple of months. Things changed almost from the beginning and I stuck it out for 10-years. Now, after playing the field and being with the girl for more than 3-years, I hope I found my soul mate. Of course, only time will tell.

Tomorrow will be the kids Christmas party at school so I am looking forward to taking some photos of them and having a good time. I try my best to spend time with them on the weekends even though my work keeps me quite busy. At least this year it is inside so no problem if it rains.

Soft Light

Raining hard tonight and I was once again out all day with the boss. Had a nice dinner but after eating breakfast lunch and dinner (all out) for three nights, I'm looking forward to him going home tommorrow night.

This was a simple one light setup using a grid to control the light. The background is black fabric placed about 10 feet in front of the model. To keep the light from hitting the background, the light was placed very close to the model (the closer the light, the faster the light falloff). Simple portrait and post processing was very minimal (curves adjustment and I ran an action called Kodak Digital Gem Airbrush Professional - allows for some automatic skin smoothing). This plug in costs a little more than $100 but I like the results which require minimal effort.

Flash

Just got home from being out with the boss all day long on client calls, which ended in a dinner with another client. Come home and get the kids lunch ready for their school tommorrow, clean some dishes and I'm beat. It's not easy being a single parent at times. I wasn't going to post but since this is a new blog and I'm trying to build up some content I decided to post something.

What can I say? I love asian women and find them very attractive. I met her one day just walking around and we struck up a conversation, which soon led to her coming back to my room where I got this photo. I sometimes like the look of direct flash, with the harsh shadows it creates. Mix that in with a little bit of tungsten lights and you can get a look I like. Now the processing on this photo included a photoshop action called professional retro. I thought it gave the photo and interesting look and feel.

Two more days until the boss leaves.....

Color or black and white

When I first started out, I was only interested in color. Why would anyone post in black and white I would ask myself. But as I became more interested in photography and more interested in nudes, I started to understand how powerful a simple black and white photo was. When we strip away the color, we can concentrate more on the body and I have become an admirer of black and white photos. Photos like that found on some of the blogs I have linked are very erotic and sensual and this is done without color.

This is a simple shot made in a hotel. It was lit by a single 60 inch umbrella fired from a canon 550 speedlight. The 60 inch umbrella gave very soft light and was placed close to the model. I converted to black and white using actions found in an action set I downloaded called blanco y negro. It has a number of actions that you can try that emulates different black and white film. This shot was converted using Ilford Pan F action found there. It is a free download (just Google) and has a number of different looks that you can obtain.

I like the simplicity of this photo and felt it worked better in black and white. Besides the conversion to black and white, very little else was done.

Now this post wouldn't be complete without some rambling by myself. I'm lucky in the sense that my boss resides over 5,000 miles away and it takes him two days to get here. I'm also lucky that he is actually a good person to work with (and no he doesn't read this blog so I'm not just saying that). But when he comes (which is usually for a week) it is early morning to night work and then when I come home, I need to catch up with my regular work. But I wouldn't trade it for the world.

In two more days will be the big song/dance festival here for Christmas. I looking forward to taking some photos of the event. On Friday the kids will dance so looks like a busy week leading up towards Christmas. I am leaving you with one more post of the prior festival for you to look at. For those living in the snow and ice right now, take care of yourselves. It is a chilly 83 degrees outside right now here.

Glamour

Okay, not a nude shot, but one that I like alot. The lighting was just two 550 speedlights. One of the flashes was bounced into an umbrella and the other was bare flash against the white wall. I put the flashes close to the model to control the fall off as I wanted the bottom of the stairs to go dark and impart some mystery. I trigger my flash using pocketwizards (those things are great) and just look at the histogram until I get what I like. I have a flashmeter but don't use it all that often.

Post processing was some curves etc. Nothing special here

Christmas is almost here (as if you didn't know). It's always hard for me to get in the Christmas spirit. Maybe it's because in my whole life I have never seen snow. Yep, you read correctly I have never seen snow. I have spent my entire life in the Pacific. Mostly in Micronesia and more recently in the South Pacific. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy living here and being able to go to the beach and even throw a fishing line in the water right outside my house and catch dinner. But without snow I just have always felt something is missing.

Of course there are some unique and wonderful things here also. Song and dance is huge here and all the people put on shows where they sing and dance. It is great and everyone takes great pride in their group and they are very competitive. For two nights they get together and perform.

Now buying Christmas presents can be a challenge, with no big malls to shop at. However, given the recent tragedy with the mall shooting, that is okay by me. Through the magic of online shopping I can normally get what I need to get in regards to christmas presents.

I guess that brings me to one of the best things about living out here in the middle of the ocean. Violent crime is very very low. I don't worry about someone getting crazy. The kids (yes I have kids) go to school and I don't worry about them either.

I'm going to leave you with a photo of one of the dancers that will be dancing at the Christmas performances going on. I liked the photo as it shows the carefree and happy nature of the people here. I guess this is actually better than going to some of the Christmas shows on the mainland. At least we don't have to wrap up in winter coats here.

Well one last comment, I wanted the other photo down here but ended up at the top. Trying to figure out how to fix it but give up for now.

Nude/Erotica/Porn

Let's face it, photos of naked girls get hits. It doesn't matter if the photo is junk or not, in fact the more pornographic the photo is, the more hits it gets. I've tried it on pbase posting my worst photo of a girl with her legs spread and another of the same girl in more of an artistic nude pose. Guess which one gets more hits and more comments......

It is raining crazy here today, which means I will be inside for awhile. Later I hope to meet up with a young woman who has these incredible traditional samoan tattoos on her legs. If I can only get her to agree to pose. We will have to wait and see.

Christine was photographed in a hotel and she is from the Philippines. She was working at a restaurant when I saw her and we started up a conversation. She agreed to come back to the hotel after work and this is one of the photographs I took.

The post processing was done in photoshop. I used an action I had downloaded called Lomo_v2. After I ran that action I ran midnight black. I kind of like the effect it gave.

I'm still debating whether to download the newest photoshop CS3. So far I have been fine with the older version and with Christmas coming up I will probably wait a while. Plus, Santa needs to bring me another hard drive as I have almost filled up my most recent one.

Surprises

November was an interesting month to say the least. I had broken off a long term relationship with a girl I truly love (stupid jealousy on my part) and was off to the Philippines to enjoy the single life. As fate would have it, we ended up together and more in love than ever before. She had even tatoed my name on her beautiful breast. This photo was taken during that trip. And now, I have found out she has given me the best Christmas present ever (she is pregnant). With more than 15 years separating our age, it is a little daunting to say the least, but we have been together for more than 3 years which is longer than a lot of marriages. I feel I am very lucky.

This photo was taken in our hotel room. I had brought along my trusty Canon 20d and had two 550 speedlights on stands. These were shot into umbrellas. The main light was feathered and set up on the end of the bed. Fill light was provided by a second light above me and shooting down. The kicker to this story and I had asked her after what she was thinking about and she had said how she wish we would have a baby together. It was almost like she knew, which was strange as I have to admit for the prior three years we were not using protection.

1st Post

A while back I suffered through some difficult times and was very shy. A friend of mine suggested I pick up a camera and use it as a way to get over my shyness and to express myself more. I have since become hooked on photography and everything about it. This is my journey as an amateur photographer.

Monica was the first woman to agree to pose nude for me. So many things wrong from a technical sense, but I ended up getting what are to me, some very memorable photos. This is a photo that I have come to know and love. She was also a great girlfriend at the time and we have since moved on but remain friends (i'm 15 years older so it was expected not to last).

Processing was done in photoshop using two actions combined. One is called professional retro. I then mesed with the saturation until I got something I liked. Next, I ran an action called Midnight Black. Now I'm the first to admit I don't have great photoshop skills but I liked the artistic mood of the photo.