The Digital Photo Guy

Photographs from Around Town

The Wickenburg Photography Group promoted an event to create photographs showing life in and around Wickenburg. For my part, I made arrangements to photograph at Date Creek Ranch, a working ranch where Mary & I get our beef and pork. Four intrepid photographers from Prescott, Sun City West and Goodyear joined me at Oh-Dark-Thirty. Fortunately, there was a cloud cover so the morning temps were around 45F instead of the 32F it had been the day before. Here are a few of my favorites from the shoot.

Chaparral Moves Into New Location

Chaparral Homemade Ice Cream, a real Wickenburg success story, has moved out of it’s historic but crumbling building to a spiffy new location right off the busy highway leading into town from the south. Doubly cool, it’s now located in the same plaza as the Arizona MVD so people renewing drivers’ licenses or registrations can calm their nerves afterwards with a sweet treat at Chaparral. Tony & Pam Rovida are among the hardest working people I’ve ever met and I wish them huge success in this new store.

The shelves are still a bit sparse since they’re not yet officially open but they were kind enough to stock the display case and soda barrel for my photos of A Day in the Life of Wickenburg. Marah is the cute cashier who was one of my first models in Wickenburg.

All the photos on this post were made with a Canon 5D MkII and Canon 24-105/4L IS. Although I carry the Canon EOS-M mirrorless 98% of the time, I still find myself grabbing the 5D MkII when heading out to a shoot. It never fails me except when I screw up which is often. All photos were processed in Adobe Lightroom 4. I have a few more that I’ll post after PP in Topaz Labs Adjust.

Finding Models in Arizona

I had the opportunity to photograph Alyssa this past week. She’s an experienced model who’s finishing a Masters at ASU. I found her to be pleasant, professional and very good at striking a pose on cue. It took us a few moments to get used to each other but, within minutes, we were both pretty comfortable. I’m hoping to work with her on the “Arizona Surfer Chick” project I’ve been thinking about for the past 18 months.

I used my standard “go to” rig – Canon 5D Mk II with the 24-105/4L. This was in a studio so I used their Alien Bee strobes triggered by some generic wireless triggers. There was a 48″ octobox as a key light and a smaller (24″?) softbox to camera left. I set the 5D to Manual and dialed in f/10 at 1/125, ISO 200. Lest you think I used some magic formula to set my exposure, I simply “guesstimated” and fine tuned with two test shots. I won’t embarrass either Alyssa or me by posting my first test exposure!

The photos were brought into LR4 and cropped, levels & WB adjusted and a few skin blemishes removed. Then, I used Topaz Labs Clean3 to smooth out her skin, not that she really need it. I just wanted to play with Clean3. As always, any comments or questions are welcome.