Leo Kowal » Studio http://leokowal.com Leo Kowal's Photography and Photography Tutorials Fri, 25 Jun 2010 04:04:26 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Portraits with Kyle http://leokowal.com/2009/04/portraits-with-kyle/ http://leokowal.com/2009/04/portraits-with-kyle/#comments Mon, 06 Apr 2009 23:51:51 +0000 Leo Kowal http://leokowal.com/?p=95 Last week I got a chance to shoot (almost) 5 year old Kyle. Kyle is the son of an old friend that I’ve known since Freshman year of high school. She actually originally contacted me because her computer was on the fritz and I mentioned that I do photography as well. When I first met Kyle, I knew that he would be great in the studio and the images show it!

I don’t have much experience shooting children, but the few times I have, I ended up working with boys and I think they start to feel more comfortable in front of all the lights when I show them how good my fake fart noises sound (Thanks to my friend Kurt for teaching me). Some of the poses in the shots below are pretty much your standard portrait poses, while others were totally spur of the moment. During this photo shoot, I thought to myself, what if I told Kyle to tell me a story. Turns out that it really helped get some great shots. By telling a story, he forgot that he was being photographed and started acting more natural. In addition, some of the better laughing photos were  the result of fake flatulent sounds. I’m 26 and I still think farts are hilarious!

Like my other white background shoots, it is fairly straight forward. Two umbrellas bouncing Alien Bee 800′s at the seamless white background and one medium softbox for the key light. Whibal for white balancing roughly 5300K. Camera’s shutter set to sync speed 1/200th of a second and the aperture at around f/11, ISO 100.

]]> http://leokowal.com/2009/04/portraits-with-kyle/feed/ 1 Witch Hazel Portraits and Gallery Event http://leokowal.com/2009/04/witch-hazel-portraits-and-gallery-event/ http://leokowal.com/2009/04/witch-hazel-portraits-and-gallery-event/#comments Thu, 02 Apr 2009 19:13:01 +0000 Leo Kowal http://leokowal.com/?p=38 The idea for this started just like every one of my Halloween shoots. I just wanted to shoot Halloween related stock and just started going down the list of things I could possibly shoot. Mary and I decided that she would make a great witch… we were right!

We went to a local Spirit Halloween store and found all of the fixins for a witch: fake chin, fake nose, special glue for the fake parts, wax for missing teeth, makeup and a witch hat and gown. Prior to the shoot, we went to the library and checked out some books on theatrical / studio makeup to help us since we were new to the whole make-up and prosthetic thing.

In the studio, we simply placed an Alien Bee 800 with a white shovel background reflector pointed at the black seamless background paper behind the witch and used a medium softbox as the key light.

While shopping my Halloween Collage at the local Gallery’s Choice art gallery in Downers Grove, IL. The owner approached me and wanted to know if we would be interested in doing a portrait session. Something similar to “Get your photo with Santa or the Easter Bunny”,but a bit more of my style. Dark and Haunted! We decided to go ahead with it! Check out some of the results!

One of the images was chosen as iStock’s Free Image of the Week. This file was downloaded over 35,000 times by the iStock community!

]]> http://leokowal.com/2009/04/witch-hazel-portraits-and-gallery-event/feed/ 0