Perfect Day for Making Christmas Cookies!

It's been raining pretty steady for the last few days but today takes the cake. The rain brought it's close friend fog along for the ride and the streams of water pouring down my window makes me want to take a nap with my dog. But I know I don't have time for a nap today since it's cookie making day!

Every year I make cookies for my friends and family for Christmas. Some of whom are already getting restless and asking for an ETA on their cookies. It makes me feel good that so many people enjoy my cookies. Early on in my cookie making days, there were some unsuccessful cookie creations that have since been scraped from my cook book. My sons call them my "experiments". 


To make my life a little easier this year, I have narrowed my list of cookies to 4 maybe 5 if I'm feeling frisky. I'm making Hungarian Kifli's, Snow Balls, Peanut Butter Kisses, and Chocolate Dipped Sugar Crescents. I might make Hungarian Butter-horns on Christmas Eve just for my family. They are more like a breakfast pastry than a cookie anyway.


I'll update this blog post later with photos of the cookies as I complete them. 

Update: My large oven died today so I've been making small batches of cookies in my convection toaster oven. Here is a photo of the snow balls.

Here is a quick cam phone photo of the peanut butter kisses that I'm making. Only have 24 cookies done so far. Gonna be a long night.

I finally got a majority of the kifli cookies done. Still have to motivate myself to continue. Making small batches in my toaster oven is taking its toll on me.

My Christmas Wish List

Thank you all for following my blog. I hope you all have a happy and safe holiday season this year.
If you'd like to send me a little gift, click here to view my Sephora wish list.

Happy Holidays!
xoxoxoxo
Lynda Ray

Final Project COLOR!

I had my friends from Dirty Hands come through the studio and help me work on my color portraits for my final studio lighting assignment. 
Here are some of my favorite images from this shoot featuring Dre, Roman, and Hassan.

The Shiny Object Project

I had a lot of fun with the shiny object project. I had been working on a concept for this project for several weeks to get everything just right when it came time to actually shoot this. Here is the image I turned in for this assignment.

In Studio Fine Art Family Portraits (Mendez Family)

The Mendez Family came into the studio this semester and it was a pleasure to give them some new images with their new baby boy. Here are some of my favorite images from the session.

My Photo Session with Actor Hassan Johnson!

I had an awesome time shooting actor Hassan Johnson in studio during the semester. I used my speed lights and set up two lights on the background and used two soft boxes for the main lights. 

He was great to work with and brought lots of wardrobe options for this simple shoot. Here are some of my favorite images from this shoot.

Multi Light Fine Art Family Portraits (the Plazola Family)

During the semester I brought in friends and family to the studio to work on my fine art portraiture. This day I used multiple hot lights and got my friend Karen and her two children in the studio. Here are some of my favorite images from this shoot.

High Key Images

The High Key Assignment was probably one of the more difficult I have to say. Getting the exposure just right is harder than it looks. Here are some of my favorite images from this shoot. I used my son Victor again. Having children gives you built in models.

Soft Lighting using Strobes

I made my son Julian be my model for this assignment. He hates to take photos so this was a good excuse to have some fun with my son and gets some photos of him at the same time. 

Everyone in class loved my boys so he had a lot of fun being there. I used soft boxes with this assignment and three or four lights total. 

Julian was having fun with my classmate Sandra in this image. They are silly.

Now on to Strobe Hard Lighting

For this assignment I wanted to step it up a notch and I got an amazing makeup artist Lexxi Belle and a great model named Saree. I used a beauty light for this session and speed-o-tron strobe lighting. 

Here is a photo I took with my camera phone of the actual setup.

Here are some of my favorite images from this shoot.

The Chair Assignment

Our instructor decided to give us a little extra credit assignment during the semester that ending up being harder to do well then expected. We had these very basic chairs in our studio that he wanted us to photograph with all the techniques we had learned so far while showing as much detail and making it as interesting as possible. 

It took some assistance from my classmates Sandra and Phil to help me get the shot that won me the extra credit A for this shot. If anyone needs product photography, I think I'm pretty good at it.

Multi Light Still Life

I also had to work on a still life project using multiple lights. I didn't need to use all 5 lights this time but got pretty close. The thing that I had the most difficulty with was finding objects that I had to shoot that were not shiny. 

It's harder than you think to find objects that are not shiny. So I had these gloves and had some fun with it. Here are some of my favorite images from this assignment.

Multi Light Assignment

I know I've been a bit behind on posting my work. Here is the multi light assignment I did during my studio lighting class. 

Five lights are required for this shot (as seen in the image below):

1. Main (key) Light: sets the mood and exposure of the shot.
2. Fill Light: puts light in the eyes helps to fill in the shadows.
3. Kicker Light: accent light to show the edges.
4. Background Lights: creates depth and puts light on the background.
5. Hair Light: creates separation in the hair and gives shine.

Here are some others images from the same shoot.

Happy Holidays to All of my Readers!

Thank you all for following my blog. I hope you all have a happy and safe holiday season this year.
If you'd like to send me a little gift, click here to view my Sephora wish list.

Happy Holidays!
xoxoxoxo
Lynda Ray

Hard Light Portrait Assignment

I had so much fun shooting my classmate Amanda for the hard light version of my first in-studio portrait assignment. Amanda worked perfect for this assignment since I wanted to capture an old school Hollywood type of image.  I used I hard light with the spot light directly on her face creating butterfly lighting. I still want to experiment with this type of imagery on a larger scale.

I was also able to capture a profile image of her casting a softer light on her face. I really like how she looks very siren in this image.

Than I just wanted to have a little fun and took another image from the shoot and created a more artistic approach and colored her eyes blue and made her lips red and made the image more dramatic. I hope you enjoy these images as much as I do.

Typography Class Experimental Type Project

Another class that I totally love is Typography. I get to play with type and create my own fonts and I finally get experience with InDesign which is really great. So for our first assignment we had to experiment with every day objects and create a text type and choose a quote to go with it.

So I played around with a few things and decided on a quote from Shakespeare and used grocery bags to create my font. I used one bag for each letter and hot glued each one to a piece of card stock that I later scanned and than removed the background digitally. Very time consuming to say the least. Here are some of the versions that I created.

This last one is the version that my instructor liked the most. We have some very interesting projects coming up. I will post my work as I complete the assignments.