Andriy Zolotoiy Photography Blog

Top grade bison burger meat, home made bun, Swiss cheese and veggies from backyard. Gulp!

A lot of cool photography this year, check it out here. Truthfully yours scored two honorable mentions in fashion and music pro categories. Thank you everybody who helped to create that imagery! We always have mixed feelings about any sorts of contests but I guess those feelings get warmer when your work gets mentioned in good light.

It’s been exactly one year since my bestest friend Iggy started cycling on regular basic, and so we did “anniversary” photoshoot in a park near my house. Shooting in the midday sun, overpowering it with two AB800s, sync at max and aperture goes all the way to f/18-f/22.

Next part is action shots. Much tougher, since shutter had to be slowed down to 1/60sec to get proper blur effect. ABs are not exactly fast strobes, and stopping action is not easy with them but we’ve managed to get couple of good shots.

You wake up in the morning because of strong incredible smell of fresh made cookies. It’s beginning of a one good day.

Fashion photography is mostly associated with large setups – lots of lighting gear, power packs, assistants running around, etc. While, if theme allows, it is possible to create good fashion photos with just a camera, nothing else. Your setup time will be close to zero and you’ll be shooting very fast. Important part of such shoot is to choose location properly. Soft light in the shade is probably the easiest to work with.

Camera settings. Set white balance to either Cloudy or Shade depending on the mood you want to achieve and ambient light temperature. Note that Shade setting will produce warmer images. Set camera into Aperture Priority mode, Spot metering and choose single focusing point. Setting camera this way will allow you to base your exposure on face skin tone of your model, though you might need to correct it with Exposure Compensation dial depending on the desired mood. Always put your focus point on model’s face, eye preferably. Set aperture for your liking, I prefer to have it open wide to blur the background.

Following images were shot with Nikon D700, 50/1.8 lens at f/2.8. Shutter speed was chosen by the camera depending on available light.

I love food photography as much as I love shooting people, and while some might consider all still life shooting a simpler form of photography it is not always the case. Dealing with the items that melt or loose their shine puts quite a pressure on photographer as you need to set your exposure and composition, and watch that your main subject isn’t “dead” yet. Still, all of the process brings anticipation and excitement if you get some good shots.

Here are few yummy cakes (which were consumed afterwards ) I shot recently for a small bakery in Toronto. Used 100mm macro lens, 2 speedlights with 15×15 Alzo softbox, and 5×7 LumiQuest Softbox II. I prefer strobist shooting style for food photography as I can really dial down the speedlights and they still produce plenty of light at 1/8 – 1/16 levels. At those levels I can use flashes almost all day long on single battery charge, though I would always have spares in my bag.

Recently I received a request from an interior designer to shoot few rooms in a fairly large house. The only quirk was that owners didn’t want to have any lighting equipment on the premises (go figure why?), and I had about one hour shoot everything. In situation like this the only possible solution is to use bracketing feature in the camera since most of the interior shots would exceed dynamic range of digital SLR. So I pack my D700 along with 16-35 f/4, tripod and shutter release cable. Cannot get any stealthier than this.

I set camera to Aperture priority f/14, ISO 200 and fire 5 bracket shots at 1-stop intervals. Here is one mid-frame as it came out of the camera:

Frame is not good enough on its own, definitively needs some work. After loading all 5 bracketed frames into Photoshop HDR Pro things start looking better. After fixing some geometry photo becomes more useable.

This particular room was the most challenging as most of the light was streaking through a small opening in the window and walls projected quite bright orange color onto everything

The master bedroom was the easiest one due to its size and color palette.

I tested last night native tethering support in LR3 against Nikon Camera Control Pro. What can I say, good folks at Adobe done pretty amazing job. LR tethering works about twice faster than Nikon’s own software, and although you cannot control camera settings via Lightroom itself, you can see current aperture, shutter and ISO. File management could have been better to allow date folder selection but it will do as it is. The most important factor is stability and here LR performed really well with my Nikon D700. I used 2 meter USB cable with gold plated connectors (my old audio equipment hobby taught me to always use good cables) and took about 200 frames in short bursts. Didn,’t encounter any dropped or corrupted images. Two meter cable would be sufficient for product or food photography but I intend to test next the limits of USB connectivity. Will report on that later.

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Was shooting a fashion story at Scarborough Bluffs other day. We were going for mix of retro and gothic looks and it was planned to be in b/w. Promised rain never happened that day which was good but sky was going from clear to overcast all day long. The images are the mix of natural light when clouds covered the sun for a softer look and some hard light with AB800 and 8.5” high efficiency reflector to get that edgier look. Full set is here.

ClientSelects v 1.1 is available now, it addresses multiple search fixes and adds support for searching in collections and collection sets.
Download latest version of plug-in here.