
Under the bridge

After my assignment this morning, I took a stroll down to the Texas State Capitol to shoot some features figuring and made a mental note to return on a slow news day to shoot a feature or two.
When life gives you salad, make photos, as the slightly modified saying goes. My main assignment today was to photograph salad at a downtown restaurant called Leaf. I don’t do food photography very often if at all so the photo below is my best attempt at it using a single light. The second photo is of the restaurant’s owner. In that one you can see my biggest bad habit this summer: using a crop lens on a full-frame camera body. That’s the result at 17 mm.
One of my goals this summer is to get more comfortable shooting lit portraits. As the saying goes, practice makes perfect. I’m not perfect by any stretch, but I’m much more confident than I was two months ago when it comes to strobing someone. For most of my portraits I’m asked to do, I don’t have a lot of time to scout locations or think up ideas. In these cases, it’s an additional challenge to think up a lighting scheme, background and expression for the portrait on the fly. Such was the case with the portraits below. Luckily for me, I had a subject who was pretty open and creative and had some ideas when I arrived.