They’ve been somewhat cooperative in having their pictures taken, but a bit skittish – being able to remotely adjust flash power via Nikon’s CLS/AWL has been invaluable, since they fly away and won’t come back for about half an hour any time I go out to move things around a bit.

The rest of the shots are out on Flickr already.

But while the ladybugs were munching away, I took the opportunity to do some outdoor macro photography using a Tamron 90mm f/2.8 and an SB-800 off-camera in a mini-softbox. Loads of fun, works flawlessly.

The rest of the photoset can be seen on Flickr.

Strike Near Saguaro Lake

Originally uploaded by John Groseclose

For the past month or so, I’ve been playing with a lightning trigger that I build based on this DIY page’s instructions, slightly modified to take into account the fact that I shoot with a Nikon D80 and the original schematics call for a Canon plug on the trigger.

Being able to photograph lightning strikes in daylight has opened a whole new world to me – I no longer have to simply machine-gun the shutter and pray that lightning strikes while it’s open.

Of course, the trigger’s been “magic” – once I built it, the storms that I’d been expecting for this season have not been anywhere near what we were expecting.

I still shoot a lot at night, balancing my shutter speed against the ambient to get long exposures.

Now that we’re coming into the last month of the Arizona Monsoon, I’ll have a little more time to update on a regular basis. Last month’s CLS/AWL workshop with Don Giannatti, for example, needs a write-up.

More daylight lighting photographs.

Stage lighting is rarely bright enough for photography, so I need to work with their lighting director to rebalance things just a little bit – the human eye has a much, much greater dynamic range than a digital camera, or even film.

Add this to the multiple temperatures of “white” resulting from different lighting instruments. An incandescent bulb is much more “orange” than a halogen or LED-based instrument, so things look a little strange straight out of the camera.

In trying to keep their lighting moods as close to the actual performance as possible, I typically have the actors “freeze” and hold a position while I get the shot so I don’t have to get the lighting much hotter than “normal” for the performance. In some cases, I allow a bit of blur to suggest the action being taken.

In a “normal” production session, we’ll start right after a performance and run the scenes backwards, so the stage ends up being set for the next performance. And since we’re not shooting during a performance, we don’t have an audience full of people annoyed at the photographer… and I’m not fumbling with a “blimp” to silence the camera, either.

The complete set of columbinus images can be seen in my columbinus photoset on Flickr.

I had some minor eye surgery last week, and I haven’t been shooting much during recovery.

But I knew I was going to have to reset the diopter on my D80′s viewfinder for my new vision, so I took a few minutes to go out in the back yard and see what the bees were doing with the new blossoms on our Chihuahuan sage bush.

I’ve been very happy with the results.

(And if anyone’s interested, Dr. Granberry over at the LASIK Vision Institute in Phoenix is the one who worked on me. I’ve been more than pleased with their service and results.)

Over the March 14-15 weekend, one of my best/oldest friends asked me if I’d attend her wedding and take some photographs for them.

A few other people showed up, some of whom I hadn’t seen in quite some time. So, I took a few pictures for them, too, to share with their significant others and friends.

The weekend was a rather wild mix of CLS/AWL-controlled remote strobes, on-axis fill, and pure natural light like this shot of Tam on the deck rail during our brunch cruise around San Diego Harbor. That’s Coronado Island in the background.

I spent last night at the Chryo Arts Venue shooting for Minor Demons.

Production photos are always an interesting mix of ambient light (from the stage lighting) with a bit of pop from strobes here and there depending on whether the stage lighting is doing what we need for still photography.

The rest of the set can be seen here.

I spent last Friday evening shooting some promo images for Stray Cat Theatre‘s production of columbinus, the story of the Columbine High School tragedy in the vein of The Laramie Project.

Kevin Herrmann apparently holding a gun to Hanna Leister – I say “apparently” because we used a little bit of forced perspective to make it look like the gun was pointed directly at her head, and I’m not comfortable with even a prop gun pointed directly at someone if I can avoid it.

This is not to say I’m anti-gun. Quite the contrary. I own firearms myself.

One bare SB-800 behind Kevin to camera left, and another SB-800 in a 45″ bounce umbrella to camera right (stage left). I wanted the harsh light, like a window, combined with the soft light of a classroom’s fluorescent lighting. I think it worked.

The complete set can be seen on my Flickr pages.

Bee – On the Rocks

Since my wife’s name translates from the Hebrew as “the bee,” I’ve been taking quite a lot of pictures of bees… Mostly in our front yard. Using a D80 with a Tamron 90mm f/2.8 macro lens, they’re fascinating little creatures to watch – and to photograph.

Given the close-focus distance involved, stopping the aperture down to f/16 or more gives me some better depth of field. At such apertures, however, not much ambient light gets to the sensor.

Adding a few Nikon SB-800s on lightstands and using Nikon’s CLS/AWL built-in wireless system lets me put lights exactly the right places.

By opening the aperture a bit, or closing it down, I can put my focus exactly where I want it.

While doing a documentary/assistant shoot with Dan Coogan, a lightning-caused wildfire started down south of Phoenix.

It did interesting things to the light.

Over the course of the shoot, we’d been firing small battery-powered strobes like the Nikon SB-28 and SB-800, using large softboxes, bounce reflectors, and Dyna-Lite pack/head systems.

In the end, my favorite shot of the day used no lighting modifiers other than the huge cloud of smoke from the wildfire. So, if I wanted to recreate the lighting conditions, I’d have one heck of a carbon footprint…

Some other photos of the fire, and lightning from the storm rolling in from the southeast:

All in all a good shooting day.