Postcards from Phoenix Arizona

For the last couple of weeks, I've been in Phoenix Arizona working in the heat of summer.  It is very hot and I did not push myself to shoot out in the heat.  However, I did managed to go out a few time to shoot in downtown Phoenix and a couple of attractions.

I've to say, there are not a lot of interesting stuff to shoot in the city itself.  Most of the interesting stuff are out in the desert which I did not have the time to go out to.  Here are a few photos I shot which I think are worthwhile.

The Hole in The Rock Phoenix

View from The Hole in The Rock

Civic Space Park

Interesting structure in the park called "Her Secret Is Patience"

View from below.  The sculpture is by Janet Echelman 

View from another angle

I am hoping to take more photos from this trip very soon.

Summer Shoot in Russell Square

I had a quick photo shoot with the lovely Ali Valenzuela in a park near Russell Square in London at the weekend.  The idea was to shoot some summer type images.  The weather was unpredictable with wind, rain, sun and cloud.  It made accurate exposure more difficult as lighting was changing all the time.  I’ve decided to shoot the images with my 85mm f1.8 lens at f1.8 as much as possible for shallow DOF.  At times I had to put a polarizing filter on the lens to reduce the shutter speed below 1/250s.

Shooting at f1.8 made focus critical.  With the model moving between poses, it resulted in quite a few out of focus images.  I had to shoot a lot more images than normal to make sure there were a good enough selection of images in focus to choose from.

Again, I used my Strobeam DL4 lighting kit with my 43” umbrella softbox for lighting.  I was using very low power so I could have used my speedlites, but decided I was to large modifier.  This is the second time I created this shallow DOF over exposed look.  I think it has its place but don’t want to over use it.  I am going to wait a while before shooting in this style again.