Engagement Ring Photo Shoot

I got engaged on December 12.  :) Since then, there's been only two questions on everyone's mind: the date and the ring. Everyone wants to see the ring in all of its sparkly goodness, but it's been hard for family who lives far away. On the night John popped the question, I took a photo in all of the excitement but received complaints that the photo was "too orange." You can thank the brick and human-skin friendly lighting in our apartment for that one. Anyway, I set about figuring out a way to take a decent photo.

Jewelry is notoriously difficult to photograph without the right lighting and equipment. One of my first assignments as a reporter was to cover the reopening of a jewelry store in town, and I had a lot of trouble trying to capture the jeweler's designs. So I knew going in that trying to take a decent photo was going to be a difficult task.

I did some reading on the good ol' Internet and tried to copy this design using the materials I had on hand,  which included my Canon (regular ol' lens), a clip-on desk lamp, a clip-on work light, a ring box, a wine glass,  a cheap tripod and some tracing paper. I only had enough lights to do a light on one side of the ring, which I taped tracing paper to in an effort to diffuse the light. The other clip light I positioned below and aimed directly into the diamond to try and catch that sparkle.

The next hour and a half was trial and error over and over again, adjusting the light, adjusting the camera, adjusting the settings on the camera, moving the ring, moving the light, moving things just a fraction of an inch, having a cat sit on my whole set up. It was frustrating, but out of the 150 photos I took, I wound up with four good ones. Doesn't it always go that way?

The very last photo I took, which I posted above, was taken at last second with my iPhone 4 and then converted to black and white. I also edited out some minuscule hairs and dust on the ring box. I thought that turned out to be the best of the lot, and I am equal parts pissed and pleased about that.

Overall I think I did a pretty bang up job.  :)  It's a goal of mine to learn more about lighting in the next year or so, and how to illuminate things, and how to control where light hits things. I can already see it's going to take a lot of patience.

More photos of the ring after the jump.

I won a contest!

My photo of Oscar won first runner up in the San Francisco Chronicle's Naughty or Nice pet photo contest! Wahoo!

The writer commented on my photo, "This is a beautiful shot all around and perfectly captures the kitten's dainty attempts at some holiday reorganizing."

This was actually another photo from my Christmas Card Photo Shoot/experiment with lighting. And as always in my three cat household, you can never do a project without a cat sitting on it. Law of Nature. This time it actually worked out and I got a few nice shots of Oscar's path of destruction.

Little Brother

Published in the Reedsburg Independent, 2010, under the headline, "Spring cleaning at the skatepark." Taken at the skatepark on Granite Avenue, Reedsburg, Wisconsin.

My brother and his friends were cleaning the skatepark of all the leftover fall leaves one afternoon, maybe around March, and they called me to come take a photo. It was a slow day at the office, and besides that, I love making those punk skateboarders look good. Sure, there are always a few bad apples in any group, but that park has been maintained solely by local skateboarders since they campaigned to build it a few years back. They really put their minds to projects when it's something they care about.

Anyway, it was one of those crisp, early spring days that still have a slight chill of winter but the hope of spring, with sunshine and all that complimenting the crisp air. The guys had mostly finished by the time I got there but they still broke out the brooms so I could get a few shots. The one above is my little brother (not so little anymore) doing a trick off the box.