Forza Vale!!

Hats off to Valentino Rossi for winning the 2008 MotoGP Red Bull U.S. Grand Prix at Laguna Seca. After a breathtaking battle with Stoner he won the race for the first time here at Laguna...and right in front of us!!

You can see a few more pictures of our weekend here.

>> See full post and comments

..and one from Deborah

This photo is also one of those we discarded. It was a little too static for what I wanted to represent but I still think it's a powerful portrait of Deborah and I like it a lot.

Her pose and her expression are really "important" to me. She has an austere look, she seems like a goddess, if you know what I mean.
Anyway, I wanted to show it because I like it, that's all.
I hope you enjoy it.

>> See full post and comments

A couple more from Bradley...

Now that the rush has gone, I have time to show you a few more photos from Bradley's shoot. These were taken at the same time but didn't make it to the final two we chose for the "Elements of Dance" project.


I'm not gonna describe how I took them since I explained that already here. I just wanted to post them because I think they deserve better than being forgotten on my hard drive.


There we go. I will soon post a few more also from Deborah's shoot and then I'll move on to the next project...stay tuned!

>> See full post and comments

Back from San Diego

I just came back from the annual AP-S conference in San Diego and I posted a few photos on my flickr page inside my Personal folder.
This year at the gala dinner Nuria, Andrea, Giampiero and Peter got a wonderful recognition for their work. Here is a snapshot of Nuria at the dinner!


Join me in congratulating Nuria and her co-authors for their achievement. You can see some more photos from the San Diego trip here and the whole slideshow here.
Have fun and feel free to leave a comment on this blog!

>> See full post and comments

Mission accomplished...

...at least on my side!
Early this morning I dropped the package with the selected photos to the Pasadena Playhouse Association. I had to go there in person since...today is the deadline for the early submission so....I saved $50!
I'll keep my finger crossed and see what happens.

On a different note, a good friend of mine just opened up a new website. Check him out at www.ChrisMathisPhotography.com. I also put his link over to the right, among those of other suggested photographers. He's a really good one. We met him during John Free's class at Pasadena and occasionally we bump into each other while aiming the camera in the same direction. He has some remarkable stuff on his site. Unfortunately at the moment he's having problems with his home page, but everything else works fine.

>> See full post and comments

Elements of Dance...completed!

Wow, it's good to realize that...we made it!
Elements of Dance is complete and you can enjoy the photos that have been selected by just scrolling down here.
You might want to start from Cesar's images that are 4 posts down...and work your way up to Deborah's. This way you follow the development in time of those images.
I was asked by some of you to make the photos a little bigger and add more of my personal perspective that contributed to creating those images so... enjoy and let me know what you think by leaving a comment so we make this blog more lively!

>> See full post and comments

Deborah on "earth"

Finally... earth, that along with fire, water and air concludes our "Elements of Dance" project.


With Deborah I wanted to represent a really earthy landscape, so after thinking about it for some time... Marta came up with the idea of the oil wells... like a place were there is a connection between the surface and what is underneath... and I liked it a lot. So, I went around looking for a nice spot... until I found this place near Culver City. I believe Deborah represented this idea very well indeed. I love her pose in the first photo where it looks like she's slowly coming out of the ground, like she's being born...

In the second image instead she's making the first step in this unknown territory. I love her foot strongly planted on the ground. That gives me that idea of robustness and stability I wanted to achieve with her.


But not everything was as nice as it looks like. First there was an ugly fence all around those wells. Second this place is right at the edge of a very busy road with a lot of traffic... at least around sunset! So I needed to set up the lights so that you wouldn't see the fence or other distracting stuff all around... including the road.

Anyway, beside some people yelling at us stuff I can't repeat from their cars... it worked! We managed to "hide" all the unwanted stuff from the images by playing with the lights. I underexposed the sky to make a silhouette out of the oil well until it was dark enough not to see the road behind Deborah.

As for the lights, I had a flash right over her with 1/2 CTO and one camera left with a red gel on it. This time I used cloudy WB to keep the real colors of the sky. Everything was fired by the on camera flash as usual. I wanted an image that overall looked really warm, also to make contrast with Bradley's photos that are very "blue".

After all I'm very pleased with the results of this little project of mine. I learned a lot experimenting with those two lights... who knows, maybe it's time to get a third one...
But most of all I started learning to work in the field, with the sun moving fast, the batteries of the flash dying on me... very different from a studio... very different!

To conclude, I want to thank again Cesar, Caitlyn, Bradley and Deborah for allowing me to work with them; thank you guys!
And last but not least, thanks to Marta for helping me out all over LA in doing this, your help was precious!

>> See full post and comments