Trevin Chow

Tonight I wrapped up a photo shoot for the Hot Summer Days Fashion show in Kirkland at the Lake Street Nightclub sponsored by 88 Kirkland Salon and Bikini Beach.

Everything fell into place for me tonight and we got some absolutely fantastic shots.  I’m so pumped that everything worked out, I’m totally beaming!

I can’t wait to go through the shots and upload them to Flickr. But alas, that will have to wait until I return from my trip to Vancouver to visit the familia.  Stay tuned!

I spent 2 full days this week in a shoot sponsored by Cirque du Soleil helping to promote their new show that in town called Corteo.  They hired 4 photographers and 40 performers to roam various parts of Seattle handing out flyers and CDs to promote the show and my job was to photograph them in action.  The performers were a mixed crew with a wide-range of talents that are oh-so-different from my usual walk of life.  Let’s be honest, when you’re in the software business, you don’t often encounter people that do sword-fighting, acro-balance, clowning and interpretive dance for a living.  So needless to say, the scenes I got to capture were absolutely stunning and to say I was nervous was a bit of an understatement. How do you get hired to shoot something like this and not be nervous?!

I ended up capture about 1200 images in total and loved every minute of it despite it being 12+ hours each day of activities.   I learned some ultra-valuable lessons along the way:

1. For this type of photo-journalism style shooting, I didn’t need my long lenses at all. I used my Canon 10-22mm lens exclusively.
2. A flash was critical as filling in shadows on people faces was one of the most important elements that would either make or break the shot.
3. Shooting in E-TTL and either in Aperture or Shutter priority was also critical. If I chose to shoot full manual, I would have missed a lot of shots.
4. I had to abandon all fears of getting up close and interacting with people.  In order to capture facial expressions of the crowds and give a sense of "being there", I had to get ultra close.  Leave your self-consciousness at the door!
5. My new extended battery grip proved valuable for exactly the reasons I bought it — more comfortable position when shooting portrait and double the battery capacity.  With 24 hours of total shooting time, I put this f’er through the paces and it performed flawlessly
6. SterlingTek batteries rock!  They are nearly 1/10th the price of Canon branded batteries and are nearly double the capacity.

You can see the other 28 shots that I’ve gone through so far on Flickr.

I had the fortunate pleasure of photographing Megan, Didi and Rachel a short time ago for Green Is Sexy.

During the shoot I made the mistake of concentrating too much on individual portraits, instead of really nailing the group shots which, in retrospect, should have been the no brainer to start with, since promotionally, it should have been obvious to me that they’d want to use shots of them all together. By the time I realized I was missing essential group shots, we lost a lot of the best light. Not my finest hour in group portraiture

If you are ever doing a group portrait session, and have a limited amount of time, don’t neglect the group shots like I did. Otherwise you’ll be kicking yourself like I still am!

The shoot resulted in about 350 photos in the final handover package to them that I cut to DVD. They are using some of the photographs on their About Us section, and I think the ones they’ve chosen work really well with their current fall theme.

I had the pleasure of doing a small informal shoot last Saturday for Mata Muros, Seattle-based muralist company. They were in the middle of a job to complete a mural for Noc On Wood Records on the corner of Fairview and Thomas in downtown Seattle.

I met one of the Mata Muros artists, Jill Rothenberger, a few weeks ago at a friend’s birthday and we’ve been in contact trying to plot out when would be a good time for me to go shoot them in action. I got a call last Saturday afternoon since there was a lucky break with the weather and they were planning on setting up for a few hours. I ran home to grab my gear before heading out to meet them. I got a few great photos, but mostly they were pretty drab due to the poor lighting. I had to spend more time in Lightroom than I would have liked, but I did manage to find a cool preset that helps me replicate the saturated look of Velvia film. Sweet!

The complete set is on Flickr with some samples shown below.

Phew. I am Jack’s sense of relief.

I just got back from doing a model shoot this weekend of some friends for a web project we’re doing on the side. I’m always nervous after my regular shoots, since you’re never really sure if you have a keeper by by simply reviewing them on the 2″ screen on the back of my camera. You absolutely need to be viewing it at 1:1 on a full size monitor if you’re eventually going for large scale prints, or 1:4 if you’re doing something reasonably smaller. My normal shoots are normally of urban landscapes, so this particular shoot was stressful since I was photographing real people that are not only all gorgeous in real life, but also were counting on these photos to be able to use for their project.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot — they’re my friends as well. No pressure Trevin.

The weekend couldn’t have been turned out any worse for shooting conditions. The shoot was set to take place out in Olympia, which is an hour outside of Seattle. Saturday morning started off great, with sunny blue skies. I planned on leaving about 3pm to be there in time for the afternoon sun, which is one of my favorite times to shoot due to the warm lighting and strong shadows I can get. While I’m on the road, I mysteriously see really dark clouds roll in above me pretty quickly as if someone had pressed the button on the weather machine. Go go gadget clouds.

“Hmmm.. not a good sign, but overcast skies won’t be terribly bad. At least it’s not raining.”

Immediately after that thought passes through the vast expanse of my head, I start seeing drops of rain on my windshield, followed by one of the strongest downpours since May. Crap. Not only does this spell doom for the photo shoot, it also causes traffic on the I-5 to grind to a halt with drivers now driving at 30mph. I must’ve really done something wrong to the wilderness and pissed off Mother Nature when I was a tiny boy scout.

To make matters worse, I almost got into 3 accidents on the ensuing drive due to crazy Seattle drivers that have no idea how to breathe and drive at the same time.

The downpour thankfully lightened up as I get closer to Olympia, but it was still raining nevertheless and the cloud cover was pretty dark. After settling in at my friend’s place, we decide to brave the weather and the girls get ready for their shoot. I was pretty nervous when we started off, because I’ve never had to direct people to pose for me since all my previous people photography has always been candids with no planned poses or lighting. As the shoot progressed, I felt more comfortable giving direction to get exactly what I thought would look good and what would match what I was seeing in my head. It made it better that the girls were getting more comfortable with me and less self-conscious about this tiny Canadian guy shouting things like “tilt your head” or “think about sex”

The absolute life saver in this photo shoot was my 22″ gold reflector, which I coincidentally purchased 3 weeks ago. The gold reflector gave me the much needed warm light that I was lacking due to the pissy weather. It was also great that I had 3 girls to shoot, since I could get one of them to act as an assistant and hold the reflect for me.

In terms of lenses, I primarily stuck to my 70-200 f/2.8 lens and shooting mostly between 100-130mm at f/5.6 so I could sufficiently blur the background out with a shallow depth of field and really make the girls “pop” out of the frame. I’ve only had this tele-photo lens for a month and it’s my favorite lens bar none due to the great contrast. I’ve discovered that the lens is even better in portrait shots since I’m able to stand sufficiently far back to make the subject feel more at ease than if I was standing closer and trying to use a 50mm prime stuffed right into their face.

After taking 567 photos over a 2 hour period and with the light fading, I was keeping my fingers crossed that we had enough photos to choose from and the ones I did have would be sufficiently sharp and workable for what they needed them for. In the end, it doesn’t matter if I love the photos, because it’s what the client loves that matters.

After getting home and going through the photos, I am completely ecstatic at the results. The gold reflector made the shots really warm, and there was barely any post-processing required on the majority of the shots. The biggest work is weeding out the blurry photos and some minor cropping on the remaining ones. This is a huge difference from when I started out on my photography career — my compositions and exposures are already noticeably improving to the point that I’m spending less and less time post-processing. The less time I can spend in Photoshop the better. (Repeat that last sentence twice).

I never liked the idea of live model shoots and posed portraits, but after this experience I’m really excited by the prospect of doing something else like this. I realize now that the quality of the shoot really depends on my confidence, having the right equipment and a set of models that trust you are making the right decisions. The past month has been a really eye opening experience for me, opening up my world to different types of photography and how to really capture the best photographs in each situation.

Unfortunately you won’t any of the photos for awhile until they are posted up by the client on their website. Trust me, they’re worth the wait!