Day 20

20/365, originally uploaded by Aaron LaRue.

Day 20 had to be Jordan. The explanation is after the jump...

 
Jordan is one of my best friends, we've been tight since high school. More importantly, we made movies together all through high school. He's a ham, and likes being in front of the camera (I obviously prefer to be behind it, so we get along great). We played football together, and our numbers were 20 and 21. Our movies were 20/21 productions. Day 20 just seemed right for him. 


I asked him yesterday what he wanted to do for his picture, and he said he didn't know yet. I figured I would just set up a nicely lit portrait in my front yard, use my new lens to get a nice blurred background and we would be done with it. He came over this morning and said "It was between a full tuxedo, a button up, or this. And I liked this." Then he whipped out his duct tape shirt. 

Jordan has a very interesting relationship with duct tape, and it has been an ongoing joke since high school. If you don't know the story, you should ask him about it, I'm sure he'd be glad to share it with you. The duct tape shirt didn't look right with my flowery front yard, though, and I needed a new location. The manliest place in my house is by far the garage, so we went into there. Once inside, I lit him up and let the background fall a few stops darker. Voila! The whole thing took 10 minutes, and I'm happy with how it turned out. I even got a close up that I like a lot.


On a side note, I'm loving my new lens. The image quality is great, I can get the nice blurred background, it's super fast when focusing, it's great up close and there is way less noise than my 18-55mm kit lens. I am also realizing that I'm addicted to soft light. I even took some of these frames with some hard light, and I ended up choosing the soft ones. I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing yet, I guess we'll see. 


lens: 28mm f/2.8
strobist: SB-24 camera left @ 1/4 power through an umbrella