Bob Keefer
Is a writer and photographer who lives in rural Oregon.
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Tag Archives: portraits
Chinese restaurant
photo: Chinese Restaurant, 2009
Evening ramble, with flash
Not perhaps the most striking portrait ever shot, but I love the creamy look of the background, which is thrown into a blur by a quick twist of the zoom during a long exposure (1/15th or so, I think) before the flash popped.
And in other news, as the newscasters say, I’ve finally wrestled the website to ground. It may not be totally beautiful yet (will it ever be?) but it’s pretty darned functional. People can come here, see my work, and, if they want, can easily buy it.
Now all I need to do is market. And market. And market! Oh, yes, and shoot, and shoot, and shoot.
photo: Evening Ramble, 2009
Light
The key ingredient to all photography is light — interesting, variable, colorful and dramatic light, wherever you can find it.
I’ve been playing a lot this week with simple and not-so-simple flash setups and realizing, once again, what a waste of money high-tech and high-cost TTL flashes are. Everything you can do with that $350 X-TTL dedicated flash can be done with a $75 Vivitar 285HV. And, for what you pay for that single dedicated flash, you can own an entire functioning portrait studio’s worth of useful lighting equipment.
For details, read Strobist.
And, no, this is not a flash photo.
photo: Rick Bartow, 2008
Face in the window
OK, doing a little more apres-ski photography this afternoon and this odd scene came up.
The real accomplishment of the weekend, though, was a thorough revamping of my website using the LRB Portfolio plugin for Lightroom. It has a few limitations — I wouldn’t want to do a huge site on it, and there’s a surprise and poorly documented gotcha about saving your work — but for the price (10 euro) it’s excellent. Once I’m sure I’ve got the content under control, I’ll devote a little more time to appearance; I want to spend some time with Adobe’s kuler.
At this point, in all honesty, color tweaking the site is probably a time-waster. What I need to do next is start marketing my work, with a vengeance. One of those things I know how to do — and don’t much look forward to doing.
photo: Face in the Window, 2009