I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted, I’ve actually been working on a good number of things as well as living life and going to so many WEDDINGS! I’ve finished 7 and have one more in a month then I’ll be done for half a year, so we’ll see what happens between now and them. I’ve got some fun stuff coming up on the horizon but I wanted to share a video that I just finished for Wheaton College called “Wheaton in Network”. Basically, the idea is to connect alumni and friends of the college with current students to help them when it’s time to find a career. It’s a cool project and I was so blessed to be able to work on the project for them. Anyway, check out the video below. I shot and edited the whole thing, and it’s super exciting being able to finally show something that I’ve been working on here and there for a couple of months.

Yesterday I got to hang out with my good friend Brian. If you recall Brian is the guy who helped me set up a lighting studio in his house a couple of months back. He’s a great guy that is always willing to show how to use new equipment or how to shoot something to get a slightly different effect. We were hanging out in the “Day-after-christmas-blues” type of day when he asked if I wanted to grab my camera and do some shooting (the answer to that question is always a yes, in case you were wondering), so I drove back to my place, grabbed my 60d with my 85mm lens and headed back to Brian’s. What we ended up doing was taping up a 4 foot section of white background paper to the shadow side of Brian’s house and just started shooting.

Besides the fact that I look like I haven’t slept in 3 days (which I kind of hadn’t, sleeping at my parents almost guarantees a bad night’s sleep) the pictures turned out a lot better than I had expected. the lighting was well rounded, and save for a reflector on the face it’s hard to tell the difference between these type of shots and a studio shot. Luckily for me, Brian had just a reflector on hand

Overall it’s a really nicely lit picture that literally only took about 5 dollars worth of white backdrop. Brian has been setting these style of photos up in public parks and asking strangers if he could photograph them, and he’s yielded some amazing results. I guess all that to say that you can achieve professional looking shots without having a professional setup, all it really takes is some creativity, a few basic necessities, and some beer (if you are so inclined).

So that’s about 5 pictures slowed down to 15 seconds. As you can tell the video is less than perfect, and there’s a good amount of fragmentation, but I have a feeling that it’s more because I didn’t shoot it the way that it’s meant to be used. This effect can be very cool and really boost a video from pretty good to professional looking, and it only takes a few minutes. To explain, I’m going to show you the video that taught me how to do this. Let me know what you think or if you have a different technique for capturing slow motion.