The Blog of Photographer Jacob Vorpahl.
I had some spare time yesterday and I decided I would try and relax a little bit, then work on some photography stuff. So I turn on the Xbox 360, hoping to get in a game of Madden ’09 (I’m 13-5 right now online) and it starts freezing. So, I reboot and go to play and it freezes again. This happens a few more times. Then I get into a game and right after the coin toss, boom, it freezes again (I’ll probably get a loss for that one, which stinks). Then it happens: three flashing red rings of lights, or, as it is more commonly known, the Red Rings of Death. My Xbox 360 died. So, I call up Microsoft support and now it has to go bye bye. I guess that will give my Wii, PC, or DS some more play time as Madden has pushed everything else aside.
Beyond, videogames, which only take up a small part of my life, I have few other hobbies beyond photography. Everything else wouldn’t be considered a hobby: a better classification would be considered a responsibility, or even a job. The Marines, my day job, school- all jobs, so to speak. Volunteer youth teacher- responsibility. So, when you want to relax, what do you do? Well, since I’m not that big of a TV watcher and I didn’t feel like sitting and reading a book, I go to my next relaxing hobby: photography, and that’s what I did yesterday. The above picture, which I call ‘The Worst Portrait Ever’, is one of the results.
I finally decided I was going to set up all the gear I’ve acquired and try and do a real portrait. I busted out everything. I had the lightstands out with a shoot through and a reflective umbrella attached, 3 SB 800s and even an SB-25 set up fired via Skyports triggered by the SB800. I had gels, reflectors- almost every piece of gear that I owned was put to use. Now, I don’t claim to be a professional photographer, but I also think I’ve got a little bit of skill. Well, there’s nothing like being humbled a little bit. Here is the first result:
Now, I know what your initial thought is: my, that is handsome man there. And you may be right are right, he is. However, that devilishly cute prince charming there is also underexposed and overpowered by the light behind him, as some fellow strobists pointed out over in the forums on Flickr. Now, the great thing about my putting this whole set up together is that not only did I get a better understanding of where to put all this stuff in relation to the person, but I learned a few valuable lessons.
The first is that the LCD screen on the back of the camera is a pathological liar. I mean it just doesn’t even flinch. It’s like it kicks you in the shin then looks at you and says “I didn’t kick you in the shin”. Everytime I took a photo it looked properly exposed with nice and even light. I take the memory card, pop it into the ole card reader and then it pops up on the monitor and, gasp, half the picture is black! I do a double take, move my head around the monitor to make sure I’m seeing things, then I repeat until I finally get things right, or so I thought, which leads to lesson #2.
If you stare at something long enough, you start to not notice some things, such as the underexposure of this picture. I thought the light levels looked great until the first, second, and all following comments on Flickr consisted of ‘underexposed’, ‘needs more light on the face’, etc. Then I saw exactly what they were talking about, but for some reason I couldn’t before hand. I looked at the thing for so long I couldn’t see the flaws anymore.
So, I’ve gained a little bit of experience, learned a couple lessons, and I have at least one unique picture out of the whole process (that being the above ‘Worst Portrait Ever’). I’ll get better, but, in the meantime, I’ll just keep taking pictures like this one:
On second thought, maybe I shouldn’t.
