Christmas in Saint Louis...

Christmas Day at my sister's house with my wonderful nephews. I did not feel like being a photographer this Christmas Day... so I decided to only put on the Nifty 50 and snap just a few.

If you buy any one lense for a Canon Camera.. make it this one. The fixed 50mm f1.8. It is the only non-L series Canon Lense I really love.

Merry Christmas!

Click the title of the post to get to the Flickr set.

Action Figures...

My eight year old nephew helped me pose some of his Action Figures on the Air Hockey table.
He was much more than just a voice activated light stand. He helped me pick the ones best lit and even pressed the remote shutter release a couple times.

These are from a the 24-105 f4L IS lit by an 8 year old boy with a 580EXII triggered with a pocketwizard at 1/128 power. Just me playing in manual. Nothing fancy this time. He wanted immediate results. Next time I will play with some gobo or cookies and flag off some of the spilled over light.

Click on the title of the post to see them ALL on their Flickr set.

Anthropologie Christmas...

For Christmas, I arranged for her to have a private shopping experience at Anthropologie. They were wonderfully accommodating... i highly recommend using their personal shopping service.

She was sooooooo happy! You can see it on her face!

Theatre Lab Cabaret Benefit & Auction

Photos from the Theatre Lab's annual Cabaret Benefit & Auction held on 09 Nov 09 at the Sphinx Club at Almas Temple in Washington, DC. The evening was hosted by William S. Cohen and Diane WIllkens with Special Guest Presenter Peggy Cooper Cafriz, honoring Jeffrey Z. Slavin. The event was much more powerful this year than the last... some great presentations and performances - a great amount of money was raised for the theatre and its programs!

I love the space the event is in but am praying that someday they will have a powerful single non-gelled spot that could hit the stage so I could key off of that. A lot of pink and green and blue gelled lights I have to fight through in Aperture. I was not feeling well that night and did to want to fight parking so I did not bring the off-camera strobes and PocketWizards. The whole night felt off for me.

Majority of this was with the 24-105L f4 IS... with a 580EXII on camera. I should have brought something faster like the 16-35 f2.8L since I used the flash sparingly to start with. I get hung up about not having IS.

Click on the title of this post to view the whole set (106 photos) in Flickr.

First Star Shine The Light Reception...

Photos from First Star's Second Annual
"Shine the Light on Children's Rights"
Cocktail Reception and Benefit.. complete with a silent auction.
Lots of DC beautiful people showed up and it was a very fun event.
I like what this group does.. and this was their most fun event yet that I have captured.

A challenging space.. basement lounge with reds, yellows and darks. I was going to go with an off-camera 580EXII justin-clamped up high camera left but that got complicated and I was never happy about the angle. Plus, my improvised stand ended up getting moved anyway so I used a single 580EXII bounced up with a stofen. What turned out to be a large space quickly filled up with lots of people - FAST... so it worked.

Google them.. a worthwhile non-profit here in DC.
Click on the title of the post to view them all in their Flickr set.