Mayo

This is Mayo, one of the girls in my newbie group. This image was made during a photo walk at Bay Walk in downtown St Petersburg in the late afternoon.

Making this image was very easy since Mayo is not camera shy at all. It's very difficult to get someone who is camera shy to look natural in a photo. This was made for her new profile shot in our group.

I was careful to compose this so her eyes would be at the top third in the frame, following the "Rule of Thirds". It was shot at ISO 400, using Partial Metering off her skin, at 109mm, which provides a perfect focal length for rendering a natural looking portrait. Other settings were 1/250 (because I was handholding the lens), at F7.1. No post-processing was needed other than conversion and resizing for the internet.

Street Musician

While on a photo walk with my Newbie group on Sunday, I spotted this street musician playing the sax. He wasn't just playing the sax, he's a blues player! I love the blues, and love to photograph musicians.

This guy has been playing for over 35 years and he's really, really good. I gave him a tip and he let us make all the photos we wanted of him.

After processing this image, actually I didn't have to do anything to it other than RAW processing, I decided to fool around with it a bit in Lightroom 2.4. One of the latest trends in photography is the "grunge" or "edgy" look. I fooled around a bit and came up with this. I kind of like it and I think it's a good fit for a street musician. Let me know what you think of it.

The original image was shot with ISO 400 in the late afternoon, actually early evening. I used aperture priority mode at F7.1 which is the sweet spot on my lens, and a shutter speed of 1/60th. I used partial metering off his face and exposed at -1/3 exposure compensation to prevent the highlights on the sax from blowing out. I used a focal length of 154mm on my 55-250mm lens to give him some space and to further blur the background.