Environmental Portraits

For my photo documentary class this week, I was assigned an environmental portrait assignment. I chose to do my friend Amanda Nesci, who works at Dunkin Donuts in East Syracuse, and my grandfather Ken Sweeney, who operates his own Knife making and Sharpening business.

The photo of Amanda was pretty straight-forward. She was sitting in her chair in the manager's office, and counting money.

For lighting, I used my Canon 580ex flash, and bounced it off a white wall to the left, which blew out the highlights there, but I liked the effect. It also lit everything else up nicely.




My grandfather, Ken, owns his own knife making and sharpening business out of Jordan, NY. He has been doing it for many years. I was happy to use him as one of my subjects for my environmental portrait assignment. Now for my Grandfather's portrait, lighting proved to be more of a challenge, but I felt I could get more creative with the background of his workshop. I also felt that the sparks he made when he sharpened his knives, would add that "extra something" as Nick Lisi says, to the photo.



For this photo, I took a 430ex flash in slave mode with a blue gel and positioned it behind him to backlight the chains behind his head and himself, and bounced my 580ex off a white wall to the left on low power. I really liked the results!

Washington DC Photo Trip

Last week was Fotoweek in Washington, DC. The photography club at my college bussed us down there for a cheap price and let us stay in a nice hotel room for the night. I arrived at about 12pm on Friday and stayed in the hotel room recovering from my bus ride until about 6pm. Then a friend who lived in the area was nice enough to show us around DC.

Some nice photos of the monuments and buildings in DC were to be had. Here's a photo I took of the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial Wall with the Washington Monument in the background:

Eventually I got closer to the Washington Monument, in a little park nearby. I saw a cool view from the park, so I took a photo of that:

Moving on with my group which consisted of Ashley, Amanda, Theresa, Colleen and I, we made it to the Lincoln Memorial. Here is the photo I took of that, from below the steps. You can see the writing on the stone floor in the foreground of the photo:


We kept wandering the streets of DC. While on one particular street, Colleen looked back and saw a beautiful view of the Washington Monument from the sidewalk. She suggested I take a photo of it, so I did. This was the result:

It was getting late, and time for us to make our way back to the car. At the end of the adventure, while going through a beautiful park, I saw a beautiful park scene with contrasting orange and green colors. I liked it, so snapped a photo. This is that photo:

And then we made it back to our car, where we took a short ride back to the Hampton Inn on 6th street, and retired to our hotel rooms for the night.

Part II, Mount Vernon Coming Soon....