Portrait & Family Photography - Jacob Vorpahl» Flash

365/69 – Just a Quick Headshot

Portait & Family Photography | Jacob Vorpahl - OneBrightSpot.com — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 16:10:31 +0000

I wanted to try a little rim/side lighting set up and, as always, my friend Nick was faithful to stand in front of my camera while I continued to blind him for 10 minutes. At the end, we had a simple, quick, down and dirty headshot. This isn't my favorite shot out of all the ones we took, but it is the one that has the least amount of distractng background elements in it. You can see from the setup shot that this was quite the busy area.

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365/67 – You Can Never Be Too Creative

Portait & Family Photography | Jacob Vorpahl - OneBrightSpot.com — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 15:40:39 +0000

Saturday night rolled around and my wife and I were dog tired. We both took an unexpected 4 hour nap. When we woke up, we realized we'd slept away our entire free, unplanned time for the day and had to get ready to go visit a few people. I had actually thought to myself, "Great, another lame 365 shot where I just grab something and photograph it." That was not the case. We stopped by a graduation party for a teen graduating out of our youth group, who've we've been with for 3 years. Her name is Debra. Well, there's always gonna be food at a graduation party, but I was not expecting this awesome, grad-themed cupcake. I was so impressed by the look of it that I snagged one on my out to take home to photograph. Tell me you don't look at that and think that's pretty clever.

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365/35 – Cornered Against a Wall

Jacob Vorpahl — Mon, 17 May 2010 13:13:21 +0000

Ok, this 365 shot is kinda funny. See, I had a busy day and had already scheduled a "guys night", which basically meant I had some friends coming over to hang out and play some Worms 2 on Xbox while my wife was going to have our friend Audra come over and play New Super Mario Bros. Wii. Well, I still hadn't taken a 365 shot so when Audra walked in the door I asked her if I could take her picture. Well, she's such a sweet person that she hesitantly said yes, even though she didn't feel like she was in "picture taking" form. Perhaps I should learn better ways to approach people about taking their picture instead of hitting them with it right when they walk in the door.

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365/31 – Serious Face

Jacob Vorpahl — Mon, 03 May 2010 16:54:38 +0000

I decided to play around some more with bare flash and added fill with a Lumiquest Softbox III and my by buddy Nick was willing to partake of the experiment. We tried a number of different poses and angles of light, but nothing really worked until I got close and he randomly decided to make a serious face, which gave us this. I really liked it once I saw it, especially the close nature of it. Very intense looking.

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365/29 – Vinnie

Jacob Vorpahl — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 19:31:07 +0000

I asked my barber to take her picture, but she declined. So after I went to a youth meeting for the senior guys, I asked one of them, a buddy name Vincent Cheng (who we call Vinnie), if he wouldn't mind taking an impromptu picture in front of his car. He said he had a free 20 minutes or so, so we get set up a quick shot against the sunset.

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365/28 – Scars on the Wedding Band

Jacob Vorpahl — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 14:05:17 +0000

For my last day of the theme "things that fit in the palm of my hand", I chose to photograph my wedding band. Whenever my and wife and I went out looking at bands for me, I decided I wanted something very, very simple and inexpensive. I also wanted something someone could cut through in case it needed to be cut off (at the time I was going to be heading back to Iraq), so we went with a lightweight metal, the type of which I can't remember. The thing is ridiculously light, to the point that sometimes I forget that it is there.

Nonetheless, it has seen some better days, and now it is marked showing it's very young age of a little over 2 years at the time of the picture. 2 years of constant abuse (I mean, I do forget it is there). So I setup a macro shot showing some of the dents and scrapes it proudly bears.

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365/27 – My New Shades

Jacob Vorpahl — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 13:38:49 +0000

For today's 365, I decided to try and do a shot that might be good in an advertisment. The subject was a new pair of sunglasses I bought over the week, a pair of Arnettes. Recently, Oakley bought out Arnette, so the Sunglass Hut in St. Augustine, FL had these on sale, 40% off. Being completely honest, I'm frugal, borderline cheap, and since I've been in the market for a pair of sunglasses for a while, I pounced on the deal. They're polarized and they're a pretty decent fit, on top of being a good price.

So, I thought about how to light these to make it look dramatic, and I tried positioning the light all sorts of ways, until I decided that I wanted to isolate them completely...

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365/23 – Textures of a Rose

Jacob Vorpahl — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 15:44:25 +0000

Here we have a simple rose, my 365 shot for the day. I wanted to get up close and show the textures, which were, as always, beautiful...

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365/22 – Ball of Light

Jacob Vorpahl — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 14:58:30 +0000

For this 365 shot, I had a weird ball made of some kind of glass sitting around in a drawer for years. My wife decided it was time to go (it was), but not before I could get a chance to put some light through it to show just how cool it looked...

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Some results from my G11/SB800 portable kit

Jacob Vorpahl — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:06:16 +0000

I know that sometimes I write about something and leave you guys hanging and waiting for more info (like my year old promise that I'd review the 28" Westcott Apollo Mono softbox) but today that is not the case. I was so excited after putting together that portable kit that I went ahead and did some preliminary shots using models a few of my buddies as subjects. It took me a brief moment to put it all together (including the Lumiquest Softbox III), I used the light meter to get my readings for aperture and distance, and then we were set to go. This is exactly the reason I put this together and am so excited going foward: its quick, its light, and for what it is it produces respectable results. Remember: this is a point-and-shoot.

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