Portrait, Wedding, & Family Photography - Jacob Vorpahl» Flash

365 2012/37 – Edgy

Portait & Family Photography | Jacob Vorpahl - OneBrightSpot.com — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 23:04:58 +0000

I've got a bunch of different lighting techniques that I want to try out, and one that I've been REALLY wanting to try is an edgy, side lighting technique. It only works well on men, though, and mainly on ones that don't have a lot of b...

365 2012/23 – Sunset Portrait with a Twist

Portait & Family Photography | Jacob Vorpahl - OneBrightSpot.com — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 02:15:30 +0000

I solicited my Facebook and Twitter friends for a volunteer model this afternoon and my friend Victoria quickly jumped on the opportunity. I took her senior photos and we had, what may have been for me, one of, if not, my best photo sho...

Some fun engagements photos with friends.

Jacob Vorpahl — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 20:13:50 +0000

From my last update, which was quite some time ago, you'd think I dropped off the face of the earth, photographically speaking. But that couldn't be any further from the truth. Though I'm now working at photography a full time career, I never quit taking pictures. Since we're getting close to the end of the year, I though I'd go back and highlight a few of my favorite shoots of 2011. It'll be a good transition into new blog posts detailing new adventures that are now beginning.

The first sessions comes from back in January. A former coworker of mine got engaged and had seen some of my work previously. She hired me to take their engagement, and knowing how fun she was at work, I knew it would translate into a fun photo session. I was right.

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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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