ISO-1600 cover picture

The April cover of Ride Oklahoma Magazine picture was shot on my D3 at ISO-1600, unheard of speeds in older digital cameras. In the past I would seldom shoot my D2x at speeds above ISO-800 and at those speeds the grain was quite noticable. The D3 pictures look great at ISO-1600 and even ISO-3200. This provides me with opportunities to get pictures I just was not able to do in the past.

For this photo, I hung out the side of a 4 door Jeep with the rear door open. An assistant held an SB-800 flash out on a pole in front of the rider on the bike, while I held my camera about 12" above the ground. I triggered the flash with Pocket Wizards. The flash really helps clean up the image in these low light conditions.

Tombo Racing

Last week I went to lunch with my good friend Tommy Bolton of Tombo Racing. He has been promising me "soul food" for some time now. He took me and "Country Boy" to lunch on NE 23rd Street to a cool little hole in the wall restaurant owned by a friend of his. It was jam-packed and I was the only white person in the place! It was fun and I felt very comfortable there. Tommy knew EVERYONE and is one of the funniest guys I know.

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Upon leaving he pointed out where the "brothers" gather on Sunday night with their motorcycles. It was just a small car wash on 23rd, right in the middle of the action. I said "let's shoot that new motorcycle you just completed there!" He agreed.

Sunday morning saw me in Tishomingo photographing a story for Ride Oklahoma magazine, and the wind forecast for that evening was 15-25 mph hour winds. I was not too optimistic about shooting that evening, since I needed to use a big soft box on the bike to control the specular highlights. But that evening the wind was not nearly as bad as forecast, although still around 10-12 mph - a problem when you have a 42" strip softbox mounted to a light stand. I often see these behind the scene photos of magazine shoots in California and New York, and they have these huge soft boxes, sun scrims, all kinds of things at their outdoor shoots and think "you just cannot do that in Oklahoma, ESPECIALLY in March!" All your equipment would soon end up in Kansas.

My solution on Sunday was to scrounge enough volunteers to hold the one softbox on the bike, and then use bare strobes for the rest of the shoot. In about 30 minutes we had drawn quite a crowd of bystanders. Rap music was playing, a couple of dozen tricked out motorcycles were parked around, about 100 people were milling about in the background, and I was again the only white person in about a 2 mile radius! That was OK however, they were all very friendly and we had quite a fun time at the shoot.

Tattoos

My daughter Emily recently decided to get some new tattoos and wanted me to photograph them for her. Don't ask! She quit asking my permission for stuff like that a LONG time ago. I just have learned to live with it and go with the flow. Plus I really like her!

Anyway, I had never really focused on the tattoos themselves. This was our first attempt and showing them off as part of the picture. She still has some coloring left to do in her right arm. We spent about 30 minutes in my studio and had some fun.

Custom Chopper

I had fun today photographing a really cool custom made chopper. It is actually a cross between a dirt bike, flat track racer, and a chopper. The owner is Monte Frank, AMA Pro factory supermoto racer, and built by Tony at www.tfabmetal.com. We were doing this shot for a national motorcycle publication.

Brought it into the studio yesterday and set things up. I started working on it last night but had brain fade. The pictures were just not turning out like I wanted. It was a very long day.

I slept on it and came back early and refreshed and came up with these two shots, plus lots of detail shots that help tell the story of the bike for the magazine. Next week we are doing a location shoot with the bike and some girls to give it a sense of "place" for the story.

This is certainly my idea of fun!

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Performance Cycle

My friends at Performance Cycle hired me to photograph their building for an industry award as one of the top 100 motorcycle dealers. I was glad to help. We planned the photograph for a nice fall evening. They emptied the parking light and I set up my lights inside and out. We needed a few extra lights outside to enhance the look of the building.

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After all the lights were set up, it was time to wait for just the right sunset. Closing time came and went and we still waited. Some of the employees couldn't figure why we were waiting so long, until well after sunset, but the I had worked with the owner many times before and he was very patient. After about 40 minutes of waiting the sky had darkened enough to be balanced with the interior lights and outside. I only had about 10 minutes to get the final exposures. In the end, the owner was extremely pleased with the shots.

A Little Roller Skating Fun

My daughter Emily is involved in a fast growing sport, womens roller derby. She has a blast at it and and they foster this image of rough, tough, ready to rumble girls on skates. She and I came up with this photo shoot concept to make it look like they were fighting. Amber, our makeup artist and the second girl pictured, created all the fake blood, bruises, cuts, etc. We had a fun time at this shoot and could barely get through it because we were laughing so hard!

Hooters

We recently completed a job to photograph several Hooters girls for their calendar contest. It was the dead of winter so we couldn't photograph outside, and their budget would only allow us to shoot in their restaurant or my studio. No budget for props or makeup artists.

Lindsay was unable to make our shoot at their restaurant so she came to my studio the next day for this quick shot. She was very inexperienced but after much coaxing and reassuring, I thought she did very well.

A Blue Tutu

Emily came up with the idea for this shoot in our studio. I had hoped to shoot all the bikes for this calendar on location, but the weather turned cold and the models were not too wild about shooting outdoors in skimpy outfits, so we decided to shoot indoors instead.

Again we had our makeup and hair artist Amber take care of getting Emily fixed up. My regular assistant Wayne Srotyer helped with the lighting. Click on the image below for a larger view.

Kaiser's Ice Cream

As part of the 2008 Performance Cycle calendar, we decided to photograph a beautifully restored 1926 Triumph motorcycle in front of one of OKC's retail icons, Kaiser's Ice Cream store. This building has been around for well over 50 years and is now run as a non-profit fundraising business by a local charity. To shoot at this location required permission from the charity board. I wanted to make an iconic photograph representing a classic time in Oklahoma history.

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This was our first time working with a new makeup artist and hair stylist, Amber. She has worked extensively in Hollywood and her experience shows. We set up the lights an hour before sunset, with strobes inside and 5 strobes outside. I wanted to blend ambient light with our own lighting for this shoot. Our models ran a bit late so we did not get as much ambient light as I would have liked but the customer was still very pleased with the photograph.

Performance Cycle 2008 Calendar

Sorry folks, I have been remiss in posting updates to my Intelephoto blog. Ride Oklahoma Magazine, one of my new ventures last year, has kept me quite busy instead. Not to mention a 3 week vacation to Australia, lots of photo shoots, the holidays, bla bla bla. You know what they say about excuses!



Last fall I spent quite a bit of time and energy putting together a 2008 calendar for Performance Cycle in Bethany, OK. The owner Gerald Tims has dozens of old motorcycles in his collection and we decided to put together a calendar of pretty girls and his old motorcycles. But instead of the "girl in a bikini on a bike" theme, I wanted to do something a bit more classy. Of course our goal is to highlight the bikes, and the girls are props to make the bike look even better. I will be posting pictures from the calendar over the next few weeks and explaining briefly how we came up with the concept and the photos. My daughter Emily Murray was instrumental in most of the photos and works with me as the designer for the magazine and creative director for many of our photo shoots.

The photo above was taken at Farmers Market in downtown OKC. I had scouted out the location the day before and invited Sharis Fajardo, the model, in for the shoot. Gerald sent an employee with the bike and we set up early in the morning for the shoot. We kept the lighting fairly simple on this one - just a single Nikon SB-800 fired into an umbrella to camera right, behind the bike The natural light was great so no need for extensive lighting. Just use what was available and enhance it just a bit. Someone asked me recently how many lights do I normally use for a photograph. My answer is "however many it takes". I have done shots with 10 lights and shots with one or no lights. I normally try to find and take advantage of existing light and then use my strobes to just enhance that light to create the mood I am looking for. I like how this turned out and Sharis is looking very good.

New Photoshop Techniques

Over the past few weeks I have been working on some new Photoshop techniques for post processing my images. I do my RAW image processing in Nikon Capture NX and then final post processing in Photoshop CS3. I have wanted to add some "pop" to certain commercial images and give them a desaturated, yet vibrant look. After much reading and studying, I processed this image of one of my favorite models, Crystal Peake, in a 1938 Ford Coupe built by Steve Cook in Oklahoma City.

I am not even sure I can replicate this look exactly. Each image is unique and requires custom processing to get the look I am after at the moment. I used a combination of HDR (high dynamic range) processing, multiple levels and masks, and several sharpening filters for certain areas of the picture.

I am looking forward to fine tuning these techniques to create some really cool, unique images. I am booked for several weeks on photo shoots so hopefully I can squeeze in a bit of time to do some more Photoshop experimentation!

Suzi Uzi

My daughter Emily Murray works with me as the designer for Ride Oklahoma Magazine. She is also a regular subject for my photography experiments and is also very involved in women's roller derby. Her skate name is "Suzi Uzi" and I always wanted to do a picture of her with a real Uzi submachine gun. She told me about a contest for a magazine so we decided to shoot this picture for her.

I scouted around and found an Uzi submachine gun at H&H Gun Range and a location at the Skky Bar in Bricktown. I provided a Kar K9 pistol for the leg holster.

To light this shoot, I used a large 72" softbox on a photogenic monolight to camera right. It basically provided the fill light and was NOT the key light. The key light was to camera left, a photogenic monolight with a 30% grid, focused on Emily' face. An SB-800 speedlight was beside it, zoomed to 105 mm and pointed at her skates to bring the light up on those.

Behind the bar I had to SB-800 speed lights. One aimed at the back wall with a purple gel, zomed out to 25mm or so. The other was pointed at Emily's back for a highlight and zoomed to about 50mm. All lights triggered via Pocket Wizards from my Nikon D2x mounted to a tripod.

Lots of fun but lots of work!

Ducati Test Ride

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Originally uploaded by jamest210

Thanks to BMW/Ducati of Oklahoma, I was able to test ride their new Ducati Hypermotard motorcycle recently. What a blast! Without a doubt this is the most fun motorycycle I have ever ridden. I will be doing a full review in an upcoming Ride Oklahoma Magazine issue.

I wanted to capture a picture of the Hypermotard that represented a gritty, urban feel, since this bike can be classified as a "street fighter". I also wanted a pretty girl to photograph with the bike, so I contacted one of my favorite models, Crystal Peake, for this shoot. She is always professional and on time, and is beautiful to boot!

To get the urban look I was after, I scouted downtown OKC and chose an alleyway right off Broadway & 4th street. As always I previsualized the photo in my mind before setting things up. After unloading the bike from the trailer, I set up three lights for this shot - one down the alleyway to give the shot some layered depth, one to camera left behind the bike, hidden by a wall, to backlight and edge light the picture, and then the key light to camera right with a 20" beauty dish. No softboxes or umbrellas in this photo, since I wanted a hard-edged look.

First shot from the camera was nearly spot on. I adjusted the light in the alleyway just a bit then when Crystal arrived we were ready to start shooting as the sun went down to camera right. We got several great pics from this shoot, one in a vertical format that will go on the cover of Ride Oklahoma.

I post processed this photo more than normal in Photoshop, since I wanted a gritty, hard edged look to the photo. It is oversharpened on purpose to get the "look" I was after.

NOTE: Sorry for the gap in postings, had the blog off-line for a while.

Cataloging old images

With all the nasty weather we have seen, I decided to stay in today and spend time cataloging some of my older images. I currently have 32,395 pictures fully cataloged and indexed. Not sure how many slide I have left to catalog, probably around 8,000. It seems to be a never ending process to get these old slides cataloged. It is a huge benefit that allows me to quickly find any image I have taken, organized by subject matter and extensively cross referenced. My wife is always amazed that when I browse my image catalog, I can find any image and have it on my computer ready for delivery to a customer within 5 minutes.

I took this photo at the Oklahoma City KART Grand Prix in 1997. My friend was the promoter and I have literally hundreds of images taken at the event. The race was held on the streets of downtown OKC. Wish they still did this event, it was quite fun to watch.

Shelby Syed

Shelby is a long-time friend of the family. My daughter Emily used to babysit for her mother when they were both younger. My wife and I saw Shelby at Jamba Juice a few weeks ago and I was amazed at how beautiful she was and how distinctive her features were. I asked her about modeling and she indicated that she was interested.

Roll forward a few weeks and her mom calls Kay to find out if I was serious. She confirmed it with me but didn't have a date yet. On Christmas Eve Kay and I didn't have much planned, so I invited Shelby over to our house for an impromptu photo session. Her mom brought her over. I set up some lights in the living room and we got started.

At first Shelby was a bit nervous because being just barely 16, she had never modeled before. Her poses were a bit stiff and she was acting more like the pictures were for school rather than for a modeling portfolio. I just kept encouraging her and telling her "these are NOT senior portraits". I encouraged her to act like she does in front of the mirror when she is dreaming about being a model, just do fun poses and don't worry about what anyone thinks. After a bit she loosened up and got into a groove. Although she would laugh at what I was asking at times, she kept working on being serious and before long she was giving me pose after pose that were just stunning. She had some awesome looks and all I had to do was adjust the lighting, keep encouraging her and periodically show her on my laptop what we were doing so she could see and understand.

I have included lighting layouts for some of the photographs. Our living room was cramped for space and we had to move some furniture around. My primary light was a Photogenic 1500 monolight with either a large softbox with a grid, or a strip softbox. Fill was a white or silver reflector, and sometimes on SB-800 for a hair light. This was very impromptu and nothing very formal, so I didn't want to drag out of ton of gear, we just went with simple lighting setups.

I am certainly looking forward to our next photo shoot!