Since I started watching all these Youtube videos for photography tutorials I’ve been really interested in trying some of these techniques myself.

Here’s one of the videos that I watched and really enjoyed.  These guys take better photos with a shit camera than I do with my real one!

I’m on a huge Brian Woelfel kick lately because he has so many unique ideas.  I wanted to try and recreate the reflection of the rainbow with a CD like from the video and the many shots I see with “fairy lights” that are all over Pinterest.

Jason even wanted to play and had an idea to shoot a red umbrella in the forest like this one:

Unfortunately, we don’t own a red umbrella so we grabbed my lucky kitty one that I bought in Japan and another random one from the stand by the front door that probably belongs to mom.

First up are the fairy lights… which are way harder to work with than would originally appear. These are tiny LED lights embedded into a thin wire that I hooked up to a small USB power pack.  Super easy to tangle and super hard to untangle. This wasn’t what I expected.

Verdict: fairy lights are the devil. I want to try it again, but inside with a different lens and someone to hold the other end.

The next thing we tried was the CD.  I have a lovely shot of Rashell’s face lit up like a rainbow, but I’m not posting it here under threat of death. After realizing that shooting rainbows at someone’s face is actually brighter than you’d think and way more “pride” than I really intended I left Rashell alone and moved on to shooting through the CD itself, which worked way better.

So there’s Jason laughing at something and holding our beautiful umbrella in a border of rainbow bliss. This is a technique i could actually use in a different type of photoshoot… I’m intrigued!

Verdict: kind of fun! Will definitely try this again!

So that leaves the umbrellas!

Verdict: I bought an umbrella on Amazon that I think will work 1000% better.  Good concept, just need to go try again. Worst case scenario is that we’ll be protected from rain, so it could be worse overall I think.

We were out shooting during a random sun break during one of the biggest wind storms of the season so far.  Sure, it wasn’t raining and the sun was out, but the wind was really ripping through the trees.  Jason got this photo of them with the tripod and the 16-35mm lens.

Since Jason had the wide angle lens, I grabbed the 90mm macro and found a random colored flashlight in my backpack.

Overall it was a good time.  We heard a huge tree fall over due to the wind and hauled ass out of there shortly thereafter.  I have a better idea of what works and what didn’t with these new things and how I want to try to use them again more effectively.  So overall…SUCCESS!