Michael Lopez Photography

Lighting The Basketball Player - Chris Clayton.

Every once in a while I get bored or I want to try something different in my work. This night I called over my good friend Chris Clayton to take some photos. I wanted to see if I put a black background up could I easily knock him out of the background using Photoshop.

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The Making of the Louie Cruz Beltran Photo for Mas Magazine

Anytime I get an assignment for a magazine I like to talk to the art director to get some input for the design. The AD wanted energy, excitement, and plenty of options to choose from to fill the cover and inside story. They also wanted me to create my own look and come with my own ideas.

So since I only had an hour with the subject and had very limited space, I was able to create a few different looks and I will show two of them to you.

So for this shot I used an Alien Bee Ring light for my main key light. I exposed for Louie’s face at f8 @ 1/125th of a second. I went ahead and changed my shutter speed to 1/200th of a second to make sure there was no ambient light that would affect my picture. I chose an aperture of f8 because I wanted the congo’s and Louie to be sharp and not out of focus. My other two lights were set to about 1.5 stop hotter at f14. This creates the hard rim light and also gives the photo the feeling of him being on stage with lights beaming down on him. The ring light fills in the rest of photo with soft even lighting with no shadows. I also shot this photo with my Kodak DCS Pro

For this photo I just made a few changes to give it a different look. I also made sure that there was enough room to add copy around the image if needed.

I shot this photo at f2.8 @ 1/60th of a second. I used an Alien Bee 800 with a 22 inch beauty dish. I shot this with a Nikon D90 with an 80 - 200mm lens.

The reason I opened up my lens was because I wanted to get a little more depth in the photo. I wanted the instrument out of focus and because of the slower shutter speed create just a little movement. Louie was great with his action. I just told him to play and let me capture him doing what he does best.

Here is the final cover shot. If you have any questions please just ask or if you want to hire me for an assignment visit my web site M329.com

What I Learned Photographing Project Bookface

I learned a lot about people. I shot photos of over a hundred people in 5 months. People that I knew and people that I had meet for the first time.

What I learned the most was about people and their willingness to give. People want to support organizations that are really trying to make a difference in their communities.

People want to be apart of something bigger and creatively different. I feel as though I was able to accomplish that with Project Bookface.

What I learned from taking the photos more importantly is that a project like this takes time and lots of detailed work. I had to make sure each photo looked it’s best.

I also learned that preparing the images to be put on display took a lot of hard work. I was blessed to have great people around me who gave me such great support.

But I think the biggest lesson that I took from it all was the promotional side of it. How important it is to promote your photo projects or business. I sometimes only like to say something once because I do not like to be annoying. “Here comes that photo guy with his project thing…”, is what I think most people will say about me. 

I only hope to inspire people to make change. Think outside of their box and challenge themselves to be the difference in their community.

You can view the Project Bookface photos by visiting http://www.m329.com/home/project-bookface-gallery.php

I again want to thank everyone who participated in this amazing project.

Arthur Charles Jr., The New Toronto Blue Jay

I met this young man when he was just a small child. I knew his parents and they also lived around the corner from my family. Well, he has grown up into a big powerful baseball player.  He was just drafted the other day by the Toronto Blue Jays.

His mom and dad are absolutely some of the best people you will ever meet. He too is a great person and has a bright future in front of him.