Portrait Shoot: Tiffany & Britt

With her sister Britt moving away to teach English in Chile, Tiffany and her sister decided to have their photos taken as a surprise gift for their Mom’s birthday coming up. =)

Taken at the Lincoln Park Conservatory, It was nice to be warm when the last few weeks haven’t given Chicago very much promising weather.

Some of my favorites:

Happy Holidays Print Giveaway!

Click on the Facebook logo to get to my fan page and sign up for a chance to win an autographed 16″ x 24″ print from me!

For the next 3 weeks people that are members and sign up and become fans on my Facebook Fanpage will have the opportunity to win a 16″ x 24″ print from me!

I’ll be picking a winner every Friday from December 18th-January 1st from my fanpage list and contacting them to let them know they’ve won.

The winners will have these choices for prints:

“A Lonely Heart Beats”

“Love at 75 Miles Per Hour.”

“One Morning In Brooklyn.”

“Ground’s Eye View.”

Click on the Facebook logo to get to my fan page and sign up for a chance to win an autographed 16″ x 24″ print from me!

Image of The Moment Monday: “One Morning In Brooklyn”

I call it Synergy.

That combination/dynamic where you know exactly what the setting you have the camera at will do, how the image will look, and what your subsequent viewers of the image will see over monitors and print.

This was the very first image where that occured to me.

It was in New York, in October 30th of 2007 when I took this picture.  It was early morning, and I had gotten up extra early to try and take pictures of what I came across in NY.  All my friends were at work.

It was me, my camera, and The City.  By myself.

I was so scared to be honest.  I didn’t know if I would survive the entire day without seeing a friend or hanging out.

Would I panick and give up?  Would I call a friend and just hang out with them, or could I gut it out and see what happens?

I saw someone walking towards me.  With my D200 and 17-35mm f/2.8 on it, I thought I saw something-composition/idea/whatever,  I just knew that if I positioned him at the bottom and slightly over exposed the image, the bridge would just barely be there, but his black clothing would make him the emphasis of the image.

This was the first picture I took that day.

And it decided for me that I could survive and make it.

My Gear

“What Gear do you use?”

I get asked this question a lot actually, so I figured it was a good time to answer it along with several other questions I’ve gotten. I should have done this one a while ago, but unfortunately, I haven’t had time until now.

That being said, I’ll get the basic gear questions I hear a lot out of the way:

1. Which is better? Canon or Nikon?

Neither. I actually use gear from BOTH Nikon and Canon. There’s a saying “Different horses for different courses,” which I adhere to strictly. There’s advantages Canon has that Nikon doesn’t, and there’s advantages Nikon has that Canon doesn’t. In the end it’s a tool, and won’t improve your photography unless you already know what you’re doing and know how to use the tool.

2. I want to get ________ cus it’s the newest gear.

A good friend of mine actually said something like this the other day-he had just bought a new Rebel T1i and was now yearning for a 5d Mark II.  What I ended up telling him was that professionals are more impressed with what you can do with basic gear than what you can do with professional gear. The professional gear simply makes it easier to duplicate the great shot through easier access to buttons/settings and advanced menu systems.

Yes the new high ISO of 25,600 will help you get images that you couldn’t before, and upgraded AF will let you capture images faster then you could before. But what good is all that if you never saw the image in the first place?

Now onto the gear list and a little background story…
I started out with Nikon because of my father. When I was around 8 or 9, I remember seeing that he had a Nikon 8008 (Still has it!) and on it, there was a 50mm f/1.4 (That I now use =D). I was utterly enamored with the sophistication and how pretty the camera was. I also remember that I ruined at least 1 roll of film playing with his camera =P.
So I went with Nikon first, which is why I have a larger amount of Nikon gear than Canon.

The list:

Nikon Bodies:

D3 (Two Bodies)
D200
F6 (Two Bodies)
F100
FM

Nikon Lenses:

20mm f/2.8
35mm f/2.0
50mm f/1.2
50mm f/1.4
85mm f/1.4
80-200mm f/2.8

Canon Bodies:

5D

Canon Lenses:

85mm f/1.2 LII

Here’s where I tend to get my next question.

Why don’t you have more zoom lenses?

Sheer, brutal, unadulterated weight.

I normally use digital bodies (D3, 5D) when I do my wedding and portrait work. I also used to own the 70-200mm f/2.8 and the 17-35mm f/2.8.
The sheer weight of those two lenses when combined with my D3 bodies (I’m a dual body user) would weigh close to 15-20 lbs.

15-20 lbs all day back and forth can really tired someone out.

And having to travel and lug all that gear around in a Thinktank bag between shoots was honestly not something that was easy to do for mere mortals.

So I went the route of prime lenses. In general Prime lenses are more clear, accurate, and contrasty than their zoom brethren, and they tend to weigh less also. (Sole exception being Nikon and Canon’s 200mm f/2.0). This is something that definitely mattered to me at the level of photography that I wanted to go for.

That, and the weight difference singlehandedly saved my back. =P

Feel free to ask any questions or leave comments about gear. I’ll be more than happy to answer them.