Photo Traveler

Bob Krist’s Travel Photography Blog

More Fun at Home….

Destinations, Events, Ironies, Lighting, Photo Gear, Photo Techniques, Technology, Travel — March 7, 2010

Photo © Bob Krist

Well, I know this is supposed to be a travel photography blog, and I have been traveling lately (but again, can’t show the results just yet due to legal issues), but I am having a stone-cold blast working on my “New Hope: In Character” community portrait project.

New Hope, or Coryell’s Ferry as it was called at the time, was the place where Washington and his men crossed the Delaware to defeat the Hessians and the Brits in Trenton on Christmas Day all those years ago.

These guys re-enact that crossing every Christmas Day here in Bucks County. They get in those longboats, and unless the river is choked with ice, they row across Delaware come hell or high water. It’s an amazing sight to see and a Christmas morning tradition in these parts.

Now, I don’t want to say that they take their roles seriously, but some of the guys who re-enact the crossing had ancestors who were actually involved in the original crossing three hundred years ago. Can you say, “tradition?”

I was so appreciative that these gentlemen decided to come up and participate in this portrait project. In these parts, these guys are almost as famous as the men they are embodying.

For a look at the lighting setup, hit the jump. Read more…

Drop, and Give Me….How Many????

Destinations, Events, Lighting, Photo Techniques, Travel, Workshops & Seminars — February 26, 2010

I’m heading off to San Francisco, blizzard gods willing (update: they’re not, I’m holed up in an airport hotel watching it snow after a two hour battle up here because my flight showed “ON TIME” until I pulled into the airport!), to teach a seminar for National Geographic Traveler with my buddy Ralph Lee Hopkins. I’m going to hang a few extra days and shoot some stock.

Okay, stop laughing. Travel stock of San Francisco? Good luck selling it. Yeah, yeah, I know.  But I’ve never really shot there, so I’m doing it for the therapy value. Peggy and I lived in the Bay Area when we were first married and I was in acting school (at the American Conservatory Theater), and I hardly ever get back and I always wanted to shoot it. So who cares if it never sells? At least that’s what my therapist says….

So the blog will be a little quiet and I thought I’d share a couple more shots from the New Hope portrait project. Like the one above of Dan and Katie, proprietors of New Hope Fitness. Now that’s what I call strength training. This shot was a lot easier for me to pull off than it was for Dan. All I did was use the regular big softlight I wrote about in the previous post.

A more difficult challenge came lighting Adele, the Ghost Lady of New Hope. Adele gives ghost tours of town, and you really need a scorecard in this town because it’s full of them, from as far back as the Revolutionary War and beyond.

To get the basic “ghoul” lighting, we took the big lightbox off the stand and aimed it up  from the floor. That was a cool effect, but the lantern candle wasn’t quite cutting it, and we had a shadow of her arm across her face.

We bypassed the candles (truth is, I knew they’d never be bright enough) and instead put in a little Morris mini flash slave in the lantern to simulate the lantern light. Then all we had to do was balance the light from the box hitting all the black of her outfit with the light from the slave hitting her face—-piece of cake.

Only took twenty minutes until we had enough ND material in the lantern to provide a good balance. Then we had to work out a position where the highlights in Adele’s glasses weren’t too distracting (couldn’t get rid of them altogether—-the studio space we’re shooting in is said to be haunted too, and the ghost just wouldn’t let me have an easy time of it!).

But, thanks to Adele’s patience and good relationship with the spirit side, we got off a fun shot.

In My Little Town…

Events, Lighting, Photo Gear, Photo Techniques — February 22, 2010

Photo © Bob Krist

Every time I spend some time around New Hope, PA, where I live, I’m always blown away by the great array of talented and interesting folks we have living in town. It’s a little art community on the banks of the Delaware River, and it’s home to great music clubs, art galleries, restaurants, funky shops, artists, sculptors, actors, musicians, cabaret artists, female impersonators, brewers, screenwriters….well, you get the picture.

I’ve always wanted to document my neighbors, and I have some studio space this month (courtesy of the New Hope Arts Center) to work on a project I’m calling “New Hope: In Character.”  I just started shooting this week and thought I’d share a couple with you. Right up top is Andre who runs a great restaurant called Zoubi.  Andre is from France and is the quintessential restauranteur—friendly, charming, and sophisticated.

Below are Sam and Stasia, the girls from Love Saves The Day, a funky shop (the original was in Greenwich Village) where you can find vintage clothing, toys from the 50’s and 60’s, and, um, all kinds of other stuff. There’s always a wacky mannequin outside the shop, and so we just had to include her.

And finally, Brendan the master brewer (so young, and so accomplished) and his associate, Dan, from the Triumph Brewery, where I often rush the growler to bring home some fresh, delicious suds that really make it hard for me to even pretend I’m leading a low-carb lifestyle!

Photo © Bob Krist

Photo © Bob Krist

———————————

As part of this project, I also spent last weekend offering pro bono portraits for area families with a member serving in the military. We photographed 45 families in two days!

It was an incredibly busy and rewarding weekend. We met some amazing folks who have put a lot on the line for us all, and it was a real pleasure to give a little something back.

My friend, Rich Kennedy, photo editor of the Doylestown Intelligencer, volunteered two days of his time and did all the computer work (plus some excellent art direction when I started to melt down on occasion…like when 13 people from one family showed up)!

We also had help from photographer Arun Paul and Rose Gutekunst, not to mention Peggy (aka SWMBO).

For a look at the studio space and a quick discussion of my basic light setup, hit the jump. Read more…

L.E.D. Candlelight

Lighting, Photo Gear, Photo Techniques, Technology — February 11, 2010

Photo © Bob Krist

If you’ve ever tried to shoot people by candlelight, you know that you really need a lot of candles to cast light more than a few inches and your subject has to be really close to those candles to pick up that light.

When I was working on the shoot for Nikon Japan with the 24mm f/1.4 lens, we had a nice setup with the lovely Rose, a family friend, in period clothes at the piano of the Parry Mansion lit with several candelabras.

But the candles weren’t casting a clean, usable light.

So, how to keep the feel of candlelight, but boost the volume? Hit the jump to find out how some video technology came into play. Read more…

One Light Tango

Career issues, Destinations, Lighting, Photo Gear, Photo Techniques, Travel — February 1, 2010

I’m back from Africa (a marathon 50 hour door-to-door return trip with delays, rerouting, and all the things that make travel a joy these days). More on that later.

Photo © Bob Krist

In the meantime, I got the word that my Buenos Aires piece is laid out and published in National Geographic Traveler, and I’m allowed to share some outtakes with you.

One of my favorite shots that didn’t make the cut is this one of tango dancers in the San Telmo neighborhood.

It’s one light, an SB 800 or 900 (I forget which one) on a long boom pole, held above the dancers by my friend, Bernardo Galmarini, the best travel photographer in Buenos Aires, who helped me on the assignment.

We used a Rode boom pole, less convenient than everybody’s favorite paint pole, but it collapses down to under three feet, as opposed to just over four feet, which makes it infinitely easier to fit into standard sized luggage. Bernardo is up on the staircase on the left (you can just see it in the corner of the picture).

We zoomed the flash out to its longest setting, gelled it double orange, used Tungsten WB, snooted it (alas, I forgot my Honl snoots, so we created the snoot with newspaper and gaffers tape). Bernardo kept re-aiming the light until we got the shadows more or less where we wanted them. I had minus two on the camera, and plus one on the strobe. ISO 800, 16-85mm.

That’s the tech part, and it’s fairly straightforward. For the the real-world part that makes the strobist degree of difficulty pale in comparison, hit the jump. Read more…

The Sins of the McNally Shall be Visited Upon the Father…

Career issues, Ironies, Lighting, Photo Gear, Photo Techniques, Technology — January 4, 2010

I don’t know why I let McNally talk me into these things. What can I say? He’s irresistable!

So now I know for sure I’ve got a ringside seat reserved in hell; but at least it’ll be warm….

Strobist Spider

Destinations, Lighting, Photo Gear, Photo Techniques, Travel — November 23, 2009

Photo © Bob Krist

Photo © Bob Krist

Long before the advent of the internet and The Strobist, I was toting small flash units all over the globe on a variety of editorial and corporate assignments, learning to do more with less.

In fact, even my buddy David Hobby, who single-handedly put small-strobe lighting on the map with his incredible Strobist blog, admitted early on to reading my book Secrets of Lighting on Location (published in 1996—I know, that qualifies as pre-history for many of you), and picking up a thing or two about collapsible umbrellas and compact lightstands.

Now I’m not going to pretend to know as much about lighting as David, but I know he talks a lot about using  a direct, off-camera main light with an on-axis fill. He likes it for people photography.

Personally, I don’t like direct light on people whether I’m filling or not (Again, I’m showing my age. This type of direct light is a very contemporary look for people pix. And David is nothing if not contemporary. Why, he even wears shorts in the wintertime…in Baltimore).

But I’m an old dog….I like a big soft directional light source for my people pix, ala Annie, Vermeer, and all those other highly-paid portraitists.

I do like a direct, off-camera main light with an on-axis fill for critters though….like this Pink-Toed Tarantula in the Peruvian Amazon. To read why and how I shot the hirsute arachnid this way, hit the jump. Read more…

Little Big Man

Destinations, Events, Lighting, Photo Techniques, Workshops & Seminars — November 1, 2009

_DSC6960 copy

Photo © Bob Krist

Well, I’m just wrapping up a weekend workshop at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs for National Geographic Traveler and it was a wonderful experience for me and my co-teacher, Dan Westergren. I think the 40 students enjoyed it too!

We certainly worked them hard enough. Saturday afternoon, after a full day in the classroom, we visited the Garden of the Gods. Dan led the landscape shooting group and I had three dancers from the Seven Falls Indian Dancers group as models for a lighting demonstration.

Young Micah was a favorite with our group. After the sunset and as the dusk light was moving in, we put him up on a stone bench, threw an SB 800 on a stand and diffused it through an umbrella, placed at about a 45 degree angle on the left, and did a little slow synch flash.

We got the students up for a predawn shoot at the hotel this morning. When you get skies like this, you don’t mind getting up at Oh Dark Thirty! But then we had another full day in the classroom doing more critiques and programs. The energy level and enthusiasm of the students carried us all right through to the end of the day.

_DSC7048A copy

Photo © Bob Krist

Sleepless in Buenos Aires

Audio, Destinations, Lighting, Photo Gear, Photo Techniques, Travel — October 8, 2009

_DSC9670

Photo © Bob Krist

Well, I told you it was going to be slow, and now that I’m almost a week into the assignment to shoot this incredible city, I can say it may be slow for my blog, but for me, it’s been a whirlwind.

As I mentioned (and confirmed with my editor), I’m contractually forbidden to share the pix I’m shooting here in Buenos Aires until after National Geographic Traveler publishes the story.

BUT, I’m not forbidden from sharing a production shot or two, like the above shot, of my fixer Bernardo (a great guy and a wonderful photographer) holding my “SB 800 on a stick” to shoot the action at Salon Canning tango milonga…taken at about 2 am on a freakin’ Tuesday night!

Yes, the Portenos tango to a different drummer from this old Norte Americano.  I like to go to bed at about 11pm. By midnight, I’m a pumpkin.

But this is my schedule here: Up at 9am (yes, I hear you calling me a lazy S.O.B., but just read on) Download, caption and backup until 12 noon. 12 noon to 8pm=shoot the restaurants, shops, hotels, sites, street scenes, twilight scenes, required for the story.

Eat dinner and try to lie down at about 9:30pm. Try to sleep…until midnight! Then get your old Norte Americano keester out of bed and go out at midnight….and shoot tango, jazz clubs, dance clubs etc. until 3-4am. Then go to bed for real, and start the whole cycle over again at 9am the next day.

Oh yeah, it’s a glamour profession…if you’re 19-year-old lounge lizard!

BTW, that pole Bernardo is using is a RODE mic boom. It’s not as easy to use as the paint pole that the Strobist and McNally folks have been raving about (it has, like, 5 sections) BUT, and this is a big but, it breaks down to under three feet, as opposed to just over 4 feet of the painter’s pole.

That means it will fit into normal sized rolling duffles. The 4 foot model requires oversize baggage, and that means excess size and charges, and that means less money to spend on tango shoes! I’ll keep you posted….

Friar Photos in a Flash

Destinations, Lighting, Photo Gear, Photo Techniques, Travel — September 21, 2009

_DSC1235

Photo © Bob Krist

You’ve heard me whine talk about it before; how travel photographers, unlike the portrait artists, often have to photograph people on the run with little or no control over subject, placement, or even posing. It’s a chronic situation, and it requires you to think on your feet.

This happened to be several times on my latest trip, a fantastic assignment in Slovenia.  This little country is full of great photo ops, and they’re all packed into a place a little bigger than New Jersey.  You want authentic old Europe, great scenery, and interesting people, you come here.

Among the better stops was the old Olimje Monastery in the northeast part of the country. Friar Ernest Benko was giving a tour of the facility, including the monastery’s old pharmacy, built in 1663. It’s said to be the third oldest pharmacy in all of Europe, and a good shot of the Friar here would be the “money” shot for this stop.

But while the Friar would agree to be photographed, he wouldn’t pose and he wouldn’t stop the tour. To see how I worked around those restrictions to get the above shot, plus some other tries, hit the jump. Read more…

Older Posts »