I’m coming off a busy few days of photography having completed three fairly large stock shoots and two studio shoots in the past week.  The largest of these was a doctor’s office shoot on Saturday night.  Even though medical themed images are in an (over?)abundance on iStock, I have done quite well in the past with my healthcare series.

Saturday night’s outing gave me the opportunity to add to my existing collection with some fresh faces and shot ideas.  Since we had over a dozen models, I had the chance to work on some larger shots.  One of my main ideas was to recreate a ‘busy waiting room’ scene.  Today’s image is a quick edit from that set.

Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 24-105 f/4L lens – 1/125 second, f/4.5, ISO 100

Yesterday’s post comparing studio portraits taken with a Canon 5D Mark II and a G11 elicited a lot of comments.  It was great to read everyone’s guess and their reasoning behind it.

The above image (the one on the right yesterday) is the version photographed with the 5D Mark II.  A few of the commenters (Harley, Nicole, Eric…) touched on what I felt was the obvious “Tell” – the fact that the expression was better in the 5D version.  There are a couple of reasons for this.  The first is that I spent more time on the 5D image since it was to be the “Keeper” for Melinda.  The second reason is that I found it a bit uncomfortable taking a studio portrait with the G11.  Lining up the composition on the back of the LCD was a bit disconcerting.  Even though the G11 has a viewfinder, the fact that it only has ~75% coverage means it cannot be used to properly line up the composition.

As I said yesterday (and the reader comments back this up), it is extremely difficult (impossible?) to discern the difference at this resolution.  If I had shown these images at a size of around 1500+ pixels (long side) the difference in sharpness would become readily apparent.

Lastly, it wasn’t mentioned yesterday, but even though there was a $3,000 difference in camera cost we can’t forget something that was a major factor in the difficulty in telling the images apart – this was a studio shot using a couple thousand dollars worth of lighting equipment.  The four light setup I used definitely helped to even the playing field between the cameras.

Thanks everyone for chiming in yesterday.  It made for a fun afternoon reading the guesses as they came in through the comments and on Facebook.  And thanks Melinda for allowing me to use her headshot session for this experiment.

This morning while photographing some professional headshots for a friend of mine, I decided to do a quick test.  After finishing the “real” session using my 5D Mark II with the 24-105 f/4L lens, I picked up my point-and-shoot G11 and took a similar image.  Since the lighting was already set I simply put the G11 in ‘Manual’ mode, set the exposure to match the scene (f/8) then attached the PocketWizard to trigger the strobes.  For processing I used the same steps in Lightroom for each image and then combined them in Photoshop.

From the sample I have posted, can you tell which image is from which camera?  I know, I know – you would like to see larger images to evaluate.  If that were the case the 5D’s result would be obvious, but for the sake of this little experiment I wanted to see how noticeable the captures would be at a typical web-usage resolution.

So – which is which?  Can you readily spot the $3,000 difference in equipment cost?  And what would clients think if they showed up to have a “professional” portrait taken and saw the photographer using a little rangefinder-camera-looking G11?  Or maybe, what would Judge Joe Brown think?

Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 24-105 f/4L lens – 1/125 second, f/5.6, ISO 100

Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 70-200 f/4L lens – 1/160 second, f/4, ISO 100

One of the challenges of doing last month’s movie theater audience stock photo shoot was keeping track of what models were in each particular shot.  To help me do this I took several “Index Shots” once the models were in place.  Each person was assigned a number which corresponded to their model release.  They then held these numbers up for the index photo.  When it came time to match the model releases to the individual images and put the index shots to work, I noticed that more than a few of the models added their own unique touch that made me smile.

It appears that the mugging mainly falls into three categories:

1. The Model Face
2. The Sad Clown
3. The Grinning/Twisted/Open Mouth

oh, and then there’s Scott’s (#47) always changing take on number placement.

Now that the editing is done and the images are making their way through inspection, I want to say another THANKS to all the great folks that came out early on a Saturday morning to make the shoot happen.  We had a great time!  To see the images (as they become available), check out my “At the Movies” collection on iStockphoto by clicking here.

I’ve been hearing about my top-selling image of Alyssa appearing on billboards in Davis County for the last month or so, but until yesterday I had not seen one of them.  Blog reader and fellow photographer Scott Smith (check out his blog at ScottOSmith.com) remedied this when he took time out of his commute to capture an image of the billboard.  Thanks Scott!

Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 24-105 f/4L lens – 1/125 second, f/5, ISO 100

Here’s a quick panorama I stitched together from 5 G11 images of Friday night’s University of Utah gymnastics meet.  Since my seat was nowhere near the caliber of Ann Torrence’s front row throne, this is about the only image I created at the outing (click the image for a larger view).

How about an “image in use” for this Sunday morning?  Long time blog reader (and my good friend) Mark spotted this shot of Andrew and Katie while doing some morning reading.  Thanks Mark!