Here in Maryland there is a light dusting of snow on the ground, temperatures in the high 20’s low 30’s. My wife and daughter are out to see a play, and my son is upstairs taking a nap. The only football game on right now is the Eagles/Giants game — yawn.

I’m bored.  What to do? I know, take some pictures of the Christmas ornaments on the tree we recently put up.

These shots were taken on a tripod with my 135 f/2.0 lens. ISO 200 and a tungsten WB. The average shutter speed was about a third of a second.

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Recently I’ve been shooting a lot of headshots, and am finding myself really enjoying this type of photography. Perhaps it has to do with those windows to the soul — the eyes. Getting these tight headshots gives the person viewing the photograph an excellent view into those windows.

I had been using many off-camera strobes for lighting the previous headshots I’ve taken in the past, which generally means I must stop down my lens into the f/8-f/11 range and thus increasing my depth of field. Which is perfectly fine for a portrait or corporate headshot. With this photo session, I decided to try something different , using the giant softbox that Mother Nature provided — gray cloud-filled skies — and a white foamcore board just below the subject to fill in the shadows. This allowed me to use my 135mm lens at f/2, with a sliver of DOF, and really concentrate on getting the eyes tack sharp to draw the viewer immediately to the eyes.

I’m going to use this technique much more in the future.

As Forrest Gump’s momma used to say, “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what your gonna get.”, well the same goes with photography.

Yesterday I was out shooting a boy’s soccer game for the Baltimore Examiner. Before the start of the game I was shootin’ the breeze with Examiner sports writer Sean Welsh. I haven’t seen Sean in a while and we were catching up on what was going on with each other.

The girls at the scoring table noticed me with my camera and started shouting to take their pictures. I am surprised how often I get asked, when shooting sports for the media, to take pictures of people in the stands, sidelines, etc. I was about 50 feet away from the scorer’s table, but I did have my trusty 120-300mm lens and proceeded to snap a few images of the girls. In the back of my mind I’m thinking, “ok, these will go right into the rejected bin”, for as hard as it is to believe, the paper wants images from the actual game.

When I got home and began to go through my images to select the shots to submit, I was pleasantly surprised to see the image above. Other than the white scorer’s table in the background, this shot looks as though it was taken during a photo shoot.

Hmmm, maybe I should just have clients show up at football and soccer games and take their pictures during timeouts.

Oh, by the way, Fallston defeated Dulaney 3-2.

My son was playing on the floor the other day and I was noticing his beautiful blue eyes. I grabbed my camera and took a nice closeup of him.

I processed the image using Nicole V’s actions and was extremely pleased with the outcome.