My video demonstrating how to photograph fireworks

Equipment

While you can use virtually any camera can take photographs of fireworks, you need a camera that gives you manual control over your exposure — manual ISO, manual aperture, and a bulb mode — to get the truly beautiful shots. The bright lines of fireworks streamers also mean you need a stable tripod to avoid wiggling streamers. Since you often view fireworks on beaches or grassy areas, you need to tamp your tripod into the ground as solidly as you can, and try not to touch it or your camera during an exposure. To do this, you’ll also need a remote shutter release. A simple one-button one will do fine.

You also need to turn off auto-focus (thanks to Kanal von un1qu3ger for this tip). Your camera’s attempts to focus on fireworks will have no predictability, so having your camera auto-focus on every shot will give you lots of out-of-focus shots. You can alternatively turn on back-button focusing on your camera. I use this mode exclusively because it makes focusing in every situation more predictable.

Exposure

Fireworks give off a lot of light, so you need a low ISO and a small aperture to get a good exposure, at least as a starting point. Before the show starts, I usually set my camera to ISO 400 and an aperture of f/9. That leaves the shutter speed. To make fireworks appear as beautiful long streamers, a slow shutter speed makes sense; as long as several seconds. But setting a slow shutter speed on your camera will just frustrate you.

How do you set your shutter speed then? Most DSLRs and some compact cameras have a “bulb mode” setting. In this setting, the shutter stays open as long as you hold down the shutter button, and closes as soon as you let go. You want this for fireworks photography, and during a fireworks show the amount of time you hold the shutter open has two aspects: the artistry of the fireworks, and the amount of light you capture.

Fireworks Photography Technique

As you hold down your remote shutter release button during a show, keep a preview in your mind of what your camera’s sensor has recorded. Too many fireworks from too long an exposure leave a confused mess. Too few leave a boring photo. Collect as many explosions as you think will look beautiful in your photo, then close the shutter.

Keep in mind how much light your sensor has collected too. If you see plenty of bright explosions in one spot, you might want to close the shutter to avoid having a big blown-out spot in your photo.

And chimp; yes, chimp away — I urge you, at least until you get the hang of it during a show. You need to see how well you’ve captured the artistry of fireworks, and how well you’ve exposed them. Based on your camera’s display, you might find you need to adjust your ISO or aperture or both early in the show. But once you have the technique down and your exposure nailed (and this probably only takes minutes), you’ll find you can just sit back and capture the rest of the show without looking at your camera. See the video I linked above to see my technique during a simulated fireworks show.

Lastly, if you have a choice, find a location where the prevailing winds don’t push smoke towards you (thanks to David Pugh for this tip).

Trick: Multiple Exposures

Nearly every fireworks show has a grand finale where they unleash volley after volley of fireworks, and capturing that with your camera by taking shot after shot gets you some incredible shots. In some cases, you can get shots like that during a show. You can do this by simply holding your shutter open for a very long time, but that can cause other parts of your scene to expose too brightly — things in the scene with lights, or twilight on the horizon.

To avoid this, you can bring something black that’s not shiny to quickly cover your lens — a black piece of foam from a craft store, or what I’ve used: a black glove. After you’ve captured some fireworks on one frame, cover the lens with the black card and wait for the next volley. Then uncover it as that starts. Keep doing this until the preview in your mind completes.

This technique often gives you a blown-out mess because a lot of fireworks shows launch all their fireworks from the same place, so all the explosions you capture on that one frame overlap. This technique best works for shows with multiple launch sites that go across your scene. Even then it might not work. The San Francisco show in front of Crissy Field, for example, has two launch sites — but they’re synchronized with each other, launching the exact same kinds of fireworks at the same time. This technique takes practice; possibly more than one show can give you.

Trick: Focus Blur

Want to make your fireworks photos look like…nothing else in the world? Give this technique a try for a few shots during a show. Start with your camera in focus, open your shutter as a fireworks explosion starts, gradually move your lens’s focus ring to close focus as the explosion spreads, then close the shutter. Alternatively, start with your camera at close focus, then gradually move it into focus as the fireworks spread.

This means changing your camera’s focus during a show, so you have use care getting it back in focus again. Canon lenses can focus beyond infinity, so you have to take special care with that system.

Getting your camera out of focus enough for this effect means you’ll likely have to open up your lens’s aperture too, and reduce your ISO to compensate, or be sure to keep your shutter open for a shorter time than usual. That gives you an awful lot to change during a show, so you can take advantage of the preset modes of your camera if it has them. Make sure you set up your presets before the show.

This event involves the sun in all its intensity, making cutting down the light the main importance for capturing it on a digital camera, which in my case is the Canon 5D Mark II. I decided to use the same setup I used for the May 20 annular eclipse: 70-200mm lens at 200mm, a 0.6 neutral density filter stacked with a 0.9ND, and a circular polarizer. I still haven’t found information I can rely on about whether the sensor with these filters can survive this intensity or not, so my shooting pattern would be the same as the eclipse as well: point, shoot, then point away immediately. My camera survived the eclipse with this technique without problems, so I feel fine about it. I’m guessing I could get away with quite a bit more, safely.

See a video animation of the photo above!

At 5:50 p.m. PDT, I left my shooting position at home to meet Jack Andrys at Baker Beach, just southwest of the Golden Gate Bridge. My research with Google Earth and The Photographer’s Ephemeris told me that from this location, the sun would set with Venus still in transit right over the Point Bonita lighthouse.

While I brought my Celestron Nexstar 4 telescope to the beach, the thought of lugging it from the parking lot to the beach didn’t sound great. Plus we learned through the flashing lights of a police car that the beach closed at 9:00 p.m., so hurrying back to the car with that telescope wouldn’t have been fun at all. I used the same camera setup as I did at home, and I was surprised how low the sun got before it was dim enough for me to start to remove filters.

What’s great about the Venus transit, the recent “super moon,” the annular solar eclipse, and the rush of conjunctions of the moon, Venus, and Jupiter we’ve had early this year, I’ve been very happy to see so many people become so interested in what’s happening in the sky. The cosmos is an amazing place to watch, and to live in; and appreciating it gives us a nice sense of wonder and perspective.

On May 27, 2012, the San Francisco bay area celebrated the 75th anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge that first opened May 27, 1937. Knowing the crowds that were likely to be at the celebration, my plan was to stay away — I can take photos of the bridge any old time, after all. That was until I read that there would be a fireworks display at 9:30 p.m. that day, right at the bridge.

The Preparation

As it was already late afternoon when I read this, I quickly gathered my camera equipment, and stripped out as much as I could, bringing only two lenses (24-70 f/2.8, 70-200 f/2.8), one camera body (Canon 5D Mark II), tripod, and shutter release cable. I planned to hike down to Kirby Cove, a campground right along the water not far from the north tower of the bridge, on the Marin side. To get there, you have to hike a mile-long (1½ km) trail from Conzelman Road, so traveling light was the key. I would get there four hours before the start of fireworks, so I figured it would be OK, traffic wise. But just in case, I made a Plan B for Baker Beach near the south tower of the bridge in the Presidio, and a Plan C for parking at the large free lot just above the Sutro Bath ruins, then hiking the trail towards the bridge until I got as close as I could or got tired. The main festivities would be at Crissy Field, but I knew traffic and crowds there would make it a non-starter, as even if I got there early, I’d probably be shooting over people’s heads.

Coming from the east bay, I went north over the Richmond bridge instead of crossing the Bay Bridge so that I wouldn’t have to travel through San Francisco’s traffic, and I’d get directly to the Marin Headlands for Plan A. But once I got there, Plan B became a reality because SFPD had closed down Conzelman Road, the main road through the Marin Headlands — a big “Parking Full” sign mocking my failure.

I got back on the road and crossed the Golden Gate Bridge to the Presidio. The road to the main parking lots of Baker Beach was also closed (though I later saw plenty of parking there, so I’m not sure why), but nearby street parking in front of very nice houses was easy to find. Baker Beach was a short hike away.

The Setup

To photograph fireworks, I set up the camera with the 70-200 lens on a tripod, and the shutter release cable. Most fireworks photos need to be at least a second long to capture the trails, and just to get enough light. Initially I’d set the ISO to 800 and the aperture to f/7.1, and was ready to change it after a few fireworks. I set the camera to bulb mode, where the shutter’s open as long as I have the cable release button pushed. This gives you a lot of flexibility as the brightness and darkness changes with different fireworks.

After the fireworks started, I could see my exposure was causing the fireworks to blow out even with fairly short exposures, so I adjusted things down to ISO 200. Keep an eye on your camera’s display (yes, go ahead and chimp) to make sure you’re getting the shots you want. You’ll quickly get a feel for how long to hold the shutter open to get the exposure and effects you want.

During the show, bright beams of light sometimes turned on. These are way less bright than fireworks, so if something like this happens during fireworks shows you shoot, make sure you take that into account in your exposures. For this one, I simply held the shutter open longer to make sure they got burned into my image.

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What is an annular eclipse?

The moon is coincidentally so close in apparent size to the sun that it sometimes looks smaller than the sun during solar eclipses, producing the annular “ring-of-fire” eclipses; and sometimes larger, producing total eclipses. We just had the “super moon” on May 6, 2012 in which the moon was full at the same time that it was closest to Earth in its slightly elliptical (or oval-shaped) orbit. Since the Earth is towards one end of that oval, the moon then swung out to its farthest distance during the next new phase on May 20, and solar eclipses have to happen when the moon reaches its new phase.

Choosing a viewing site

You can only see the entire ring of the sun around the moon along a narrow path on the Earth. Unfortunately for most people, most of that path on May 20 cut across the Pacific ocean. But early risers in southern China, those enjoying breakfast in Tokyo (for Asia, this was the May 21 solar eclipse), late-afternoon sun-seekers in northern California, and post-dinner sun-gazers in Arizona were able to see this ring of fire.

I’m in the San Francisco Bay Area, so I originally made plans to go to Shasta Lake, dead center on the ring-of-fire path — until I saw very few places to park along Interstate 5 using Google Earth. I then chose nearby Whiskeytown Lake, but at a recent Tri Valley Stargazers meeting a person from Whiskeytown said that the eclipse was huge news there, and he expected hordes of people to crowd into the town. I didn’t feel like driving over four hours just to find no parking, so a look along the path of the eclipse showed it cut across Lake Oroville in the Sierra foothills. It had plenty of parking all over the place, and a search of their local news showed little mention of the eclipse. I selected five spots I scouted in Google Earth, with the prime one being a parking lot at the north end of the Bidwell Bar Bridge. Even better, I could get there in less than three hours.

I left about noon and arrived at the green Bidwell Bar suspension bridge at 3:30 after a couple of rest stops. The 92°F (33°C) temperature didn’t feel so bad because of a nice mild breeze. I saw only one other car in this big parking lot, and this well-equipped group even brought a telescope.

My observing equipment

My prime viewer was my Canon 5D Mark II, 70-200mm f/2.8 IS USM lens, a 1.4× teleconverter, and a stack of filters comprising a 0.6ND, 0.9ND, and a PL. I had already done tests with a full sun and found I could safely photograph it using Live View to frame the shot, even discerning its sunspots. I couldn’t find any information I felt I could rely on about whether I could safely leave the camera pointing at the sun, particularly with Live View on (Live View flips up the mirror, exposing the sensor). I decided simply to point my camera away from the sun immediately after each shot, just in case.

I also had my Canon 40D with a Tamron 11-18mm lens for photographing the environment during the eclipse. The parking lot had a clear view of the sun during the eclipse, so I waited, and recorded a video of how I photographed this eclipse while I was at it. You can see this video and how I post processed the composite photo above on YouTube.

The eclipse

I was chatting with another photographer who had taped a couple welding lenses to his DSLR lens to view the eclipse when it started. I noticed that with my car’s rear hatch up, I could use its tinted window as another filter, so until about the time the ring-of-fire effect started I had this as an extra filter. After a while, the angle of the sun meant I was shooting at an angle through this window so I abandoned that idea for the rest of the eclipse in case the angled window would cause any distortion.

Processing the photos

I took the photo below just as the edge of the moon touched the edge of the sun, after the ring-of-fire effect. You can see some jaggedness along that thin edge which probably comes from sunlight bending around the edge of the moon slightly, exaggerating the moon’s mountains.

I brought this image into Photoshop CS6 and duplicated it into a second layer which I then blurred using the Gaussian Blur tool. I set the layer to Screen blending mode to make it overlay the original sun image. Last, I made a dark blue solid-color layer behind these layers and used a radial gradient in its mask to make it fade to black from the center.

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Licensing

These two images are available for Creative Commons Noncommercial licensing. See their Flickr pages for terms:

May 20, 2012 solar eclipse
The hoop of the May 20, 2012 solar eclipse

The equipment I used was my 4″ Celestron NexStar 4 Maksutov-Cassegrain reflector telescope with my Canon 5D Mark II attached to it with a telescope adapter (see my video about using a telescope adapter).

Exposure

The first complication involved the exposure. The brightness of the lit side of the moon varies radically as the relative position of the sun changes. The ISO 800, 1/250s exposure of the full moon (you have no aperture control with the telescope) quickly became inadequate as darkness spread across the moon’s face — even the lit part of the moon became much darker than it had been with the full moon. My theory here is that I see far more shadows than I can resolve as the sun moves to an oblique angle to me, so the apparent brightness falls dramatically. To compensate, I had to increase the exposure as the moon waned and decrease it as it waxed. Near the new moon, my exposure had increased to ISO 2500 at 1/80s — dangerously close to causing motion blur.

Apparent Size

I told my friend Jack Andrys about this plan last November, and he brought up the issue of the moon’s apparent size changing as it moved around its elliptical orbit.

“Sure, but the effect isn’t very big,” I replied. Foolishly.

The effect is quite big actually, so I’d either have to compensate for the changing size of the moon, or figure out some way to smooth it out.

Libration

I’d known since I was a kid that the moon appears to wobble as it orbits the earth — a phenomenon known as “libration.” It’s not actually wobbling; the moon moves around the Earth in an elliptical orbit, so we see a little more of its left side at one part of its orbit, and a little more of its right at another. The plane of the moon’s orbit isn’t exactly the same as the plane of the Earth’s equator either, so we can see the moon’s north pole sometimes, and sometimes its south pole.

What didn’t I know until now? The effect of libration is huge. One day to the next I can see just by looking at my photos that the moon has tilted and rotated a lot. My plan of simply cross dissolving between moon photos was itself dissolving; the effect wouldn’t look very impressive if you can see craters shifting their positions between frames.

Making a movie of a moon tilting and rotating and growing and shrinking wasn’t going to be quite so easy. But I’m a technophile; I should be able to figure out a solution with my computer and a set of tools. And a solution I did find.

Fixing the Exposures

The first step was to make the photos’ exposures match what I thought it’d be naturally. I did this by using Lightroom’s eyedropper tool to sample corresponding bright areas of each of the photos, and adjusting the brightness and exposure until they all came fairly close. I did compensate for the darkening of the lit part of the moon in camera, but that’s only an approximation; just to get good image data to work with. The fine tuning had to happen in Lightroom.

Aligning the Images

With the moon changing its orientation each night, and with each photo showing the moon at a different angle because I took them in different positions in the sky on different nights, realistically reproducing the moon’s libration and apparent size changes seemed difficult at best.

A fairly quick Google search brought me an iPad app called Moon Globe that accurately shows the moon’s phase and orientation at any time of any day going far into the past and future. I took screen shots of this app for each night I took a moon photo at the time of day I took each photo, then brought each of those screen shots and each of the corresponding shots of the moon and aligned them using Photoshop layers. The figure at the right shows Moon Globe’s display on top and my corresponding photo below. The phase looks different because I increased the contrast of my photo in Lightroom.

Seamless Animation

I then had 21 shots of the moon with matching exposures and proper sizes and orientation. Now, how to get a seamless animation with all this?

Morphing software occurred to me. People typically use this kind of software for fun, to make movies of one of their friends or family members gradually morphing into someone else. It made sense to me that I could morph each moon shot to smoothly transition between two frames of the moon with different phases and orientations.

I don’t plan on ever morphing images again so I had to find a free one that seemed to have good quality, and I found one called Sqirlz Morph for Windows only. I use a Mac exclusively, but I also have Parallels and Windows XP, so this isn’t a problem.

For each of the 21 pairs of photos, I placed control points at corresponding major features of the moon, typically the edges of craters or small spots in the maria (“seas”). Then I have Sqirlz Morph generate an AVI that animates between the two photos of each pair. I convert each AVI to a QuickTime MOV file, import each into Final Cut Pro X, placed them in sequence in the timeline, and I had a nearly seamless animation from new moon to new moon. Small errors in various parts of this process mean you can see small glitches in the animation.

I hope you enjoy the video! Click here to bring up the video on YouTube.

Many, many thank-yous to Mitch Aunger for featuring this post and video on his Planet5D blog! Thank you also to PetaPixel for republishing this article on their site. If you’re visiting my site from their sites, welcome, and thank you!

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If you followed my tutorial on building a photography website using WordPress, you probably already have some WordPress plugins on your new photography website. But my video listed several other plugins. This article goes into detail about all the plugins I listed so you can have some nice extensions to the functionality of your site. I listed them in alphabetical order.

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The question many photographers pose…

As I say on my home page, “Your business needs a website.” Why? Quick, furtive glances at people’s laptops, tablets, and phones at the local Starbucks…es (five reside in my small town) show games, YouTube…and people looking at business websites. Is your photography business on the Web? And I don’t mean on Flickr, where lots of people browse, but few photographers can stand out when it receives thousands of photos per minute. I mean your own site with your own domain name that you control and promote yourself.

Many options exist, from simple free blogs to a site customized to you by a Web developer, which is what I do for people. An easy-to-see example of this is this very site that I designed and coded as a WordPress theme.

WordPress is the path I take you in a four-part video series I’ve published on YouTube called “Your own photography website without coding.” This series is an answer to the question: “What service should I use to build my photography website?” I don’t mean WordPress the free blogging service — I mean WordPress the CMS, a very flexible and powerful software platform that can drive any website you can imagine.

Why WordPress? After some not-so-satisfying experiments with CMSs like Joomla and Drupal, I found WordPress’s CMS model to be the perfect combination of power, customizability, and ease-of-use. So enthusiastic have I become for WordPress that every single one of the last several websites I’ve designed use WordPress as the backend. I think it’s a great solution for photographers to put themselves on the Web with a great quality website for very little cost.

You can watch this series to start a website from my YouTube channel, or you can watch them right here.

Part 1 covers different options you have for hosting your website, including WordPress. It answers the question, “What is WordPress,” then begins the WordPress path by describing different hosting options, and how to get a hosting service that’s suitable for a WordPress-driven website.

You install a complete, default WordPress website in Part 2, visible to the world, though not (yet) customized to you.

In Part 3, I show the way around the WordPress dashboard for administering the site, such as creating blog posts with photos, pages and their menus, and WordPress themes. You start to have a custom-looking site by the end of this part.

I close out this series by finishing the example site with a home-page slideshow and an image gallery, I customize the menu, clean up the thumbnails, and finally discuss Search Engine Optimization.

In this series, I use an example theme which you’re free to use for your own photography website. You can download this theme that I call “CleanPhoto” from my gallery shop for free. Just “purchase” it for $0 and you’ll receive an email with a download link for the theme.

Lastly, you can run through the slide presentation I used in this series below.

I hope that, from this series, you’ll be able to create your own photography website, or that you’ll have the knowledge to use other solutions.

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1. Even lighting
2. Faithful color
3. No distortion

While an artist publishing work for magazines and high-volume prints should go to a company dedicated to making reproductions, you can go far with a DSLR and a couple of strobes, as well as a couple of other affordable tools.

Even Lighting

Light needs to spread evenly over the entire surface of the artwork, so you need a large light source. The light from that source also has to come from the sides of the artwork to avoid reflecting any light into your camera lens.

I found that a good way to do this is to put large reflectors on either side of the artwork, and large sheets of foam core do nicely. Then point one strobe on each side of your camera with their light crossing in front of the camera to land on the opposite reflector. You need to flag the strobes so they don’t light the artwork directly — their light should only touch the reflectors.

Lighting artwork with two strobes and reflectors

In the video below, instead of crossing the light, I simply pointed each at the reflector on its own side. After making the video, I found that crossing the light made it easier to make the light on the artwork even.

Faithful Color

Faithful color is more critical here than with any other kind of photography, so you need the right tools. The best tool for this job is the X-Rite ColorCheck Passport. This combination of a color card, gray card, and software creates a color profile for each lighting situation.

First, you need to get the in-camera white point set properly. Set up all your lighting, then open the Passport to the gray card and place it where your artwork is. Take a shot of the card close-up with all your lighting turned on, then use your camera’s custom white point based on this photo.

Next, flip open the Passport’s color panels and place it where your artwork is again. The X-Rite software finds the Passport in your photo, but you have to set it up so that the panel with the three rows of gray is on top like in the picture. The software might not be able to find the Passport in your photo if it sits in a different orientation.

Proper orientation of the ColorCheck Passport, with the panel with three rows of gray color chips on the top

Now you can continue with the rest of the shoot. Since lighting shouldn’t be changing during a shoot of artwork, this one shot of the Passport should do ya. You only need to reshoot the passport when lighting conditions change.

The ColorChecker Passport software includes both a stand-alone app as well as a Lightroom plugin. As I use Lightroom, I’ll describe the plugin here.

Choosing a color profile

Once you copy all your photos — including the one of the Passport — into Lightroom, edit the Passport photo. First, set the white point to neutral by clicking the gray square with a notch in the second row of the upper panel. It should already be pretty close because of the custom white balance you set in camera, but this just sets it to perfect. Then export this photo with the ColorChecker Passport export preset. This doesn’t really export the file — it sends the image to the Passport software to find the Passport in the photo and create a color profile based on it. It immediately asks for a name for this profile, so name it something identifiable for this shoot.

The Passport software alerts you when the processing is done. Lightroom presets can’t tell Lightroom a new color profile exists (at least in Lightroom 3), so you have to quit Lightroom and relaunch it. You then go to the Camera Calibration panel at the bottom of the development panel, then go to the Profile pop-up menu. Choose the profile you just named. You should immediately see the colors of your image shift a bit, especially blue.

Now you need to make the darks and lights of your photo of the artwork match the darks and lights of the original artwork. To begin this process, look at the bottom row of the upper panel of the Passport for the row of gray chips. The left-most is a reference black and the right-most is a reference white. These two chips have to go to the ends of your exposure histogram.

Begin by turning on highlight clipping in Lightroom. You do this by clicking on the two triangles in the upper corners of your histogram.

Lightroom buttons to turn on clipping highlighting

Now any blacks in your image that are pure black turn blue, and any whites that are pure white turn red. Your task is to adjust your Exposure and Blacks settings to put these two chips right on the edge of purity without crossing into it. Move the exposure slider to the right (most likely, unless you over-exposed the photo) until the right-most chip turns red, then back off until it’s white again. Do the same with the Black slider until the left-most chip turns blue, then back off until it’s black again. If you think the resulting image has too much contrast, you can simply back off the Exposure and Black sliders a bit more.

You can now copy the White Balance, Basic Tone, and Calibration settings from this photo to all the other photos in your shoot by selecting all the photos in your shoot, and making this Passport photo the most selected. Then click the Sync Settings button at the bottom to copy the now-calibrated color settings to all the photos in the shoot. You only need to click the White Balance, Basic Tone, and Calibration check boxes.

Your image of the artwork now has colors faithful to the original.

No Distortion

Lastly, you need to go to the image of the entire artwork that just received the proper color calibration to fix up any distortion, either from the lens, from you not shooting the image from exactly directly in front of it, and maybe from the sides of the artwork not having exact right angles (you may or may not want to correct this last one).

In Lightroom’s Develop module, scroll down nearly to the bottom to the Lens Correction panel. First, turn on automatic correction which automatic barrel distortion. Click the Profile tab, then check the Enable Profile Correction checkbox. If the lens you used is in the Lightroom lens database, it’ll automatically correct the lens distortion the proper amount.

You then need to correct the edges of the artwork so that they’re square (unless they aren’t square in the original; in that case, you may want to place a frame known to have square corners that completely surrounds the artwork when you photographed it, then correct the image using that frame). Click the Manual tab of the Lens Correction panel. You then need to manipulate the Vertical, Horizontal, and Rotate sliders until the edges of the artwork line up with the grid that appears over the image. Each slider affects the other settings, so you’ll need to keep adjusting each one and correcting what each one does to the other settings until your artwork appears exactly square.

Conclusion

Now you have a photo of the artwork ready for reproduction. You may want to produce two versions of the photo cropped differently — one that crops to the very edges of the artwork, and one that includes the Passport. That lets people receiving that image do their own color calibration.

Many thanks to X-Rite for talking about this blog post on their blog!

Dave Reckart Headshot

Pacific Color Graphics, a commercial printer in my own town of Pleasanton, CA, asks me to photograph some new products they’ve produced every few months. This round is for November 2011, and it included a big variety of products from shirts, caps, key rings, storefronts, and a headshot of their CEO, Dave Reckart.

I Dave’s headshot in their front lobby where they have a beautiful dark-blue wall. I set up an entire studio including a soft box for the key light and a shoot-through umbrella as fill, and a gridded flash to illuminate the wall behind him.

Another unusual request was to photograph an AT&T storefront in the Town Center at Corte Madera. Pacific Color produced the front window display and asked me to photograph it. Reflections of the parking lot in the window was a big problem, and so I arrived there in the evening just after sunset and used a very long telephoto to avoid a reflection from the sky.

AT&T Storefront, Town Center at Corte Madera

They made a beautiful keyring that I photographed in a light box and made a YouTube video showing how I photographed it.

Lexus keyring

EA Sports Keyrings

SEGA Skateboard

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