MYP Studio

Best seller – February 2013

Best seller – February 2013

Best seller – January 2013

Best seller – January 2013

Best Seller – 2012

Best Seller 2012

Best seller – December 2012

Best Seller December 2012

Best Seller – November 2012

For the second time, the best selling photos of this month comes once again for the series made with Sarah-Monica Branch, back in 2009. In this photo we can see her in a race strip bikini, holding a toy guitar, from the Guitar Hero video game, in front of a pink background. With her very naughty expression, we can see why this photo has gotten such a great response! You can find the photo in the following agency:

Best seller – October 2012

In a first since we’ve been tracking our best seller, the same photo gets the mention 2 months in a row.

The cupcake series has gotten a lot of success and we hope it will continue.

You can find this photo in the following stock agency

Bird feeder

After a great experiment in our studio with the onOne software DSLR remote control app (see our review in a previous post), we decided to take on a new challenge, do an outdoor photo shoot.

As a first test, we decided to take photos of a bird feeder, which sounded easy enough. Thankfully, some of our friends have a nice backyard with bird feeder that is frequently visited by many different species of bird and we’re nice enough to let us use the space for a weekend.

The set up consisted of 2 flashes with soft boxes, placed about 3 to 4 feets aways from the bird feeder and a thered the camera. Being close to the house, we were able to use our friends WIFI to network everything and enabled us to use the onOne software DSLR remote control app. Once everything was ready, all we had to do was to find a good window in the house, sit and wait for birds to come and eat.

Within 10 minutes we had our first customer, a bright red, male cardinal, talk about lucky! And that was just the start, from a hairy wood pecker to some sparrow, the succession of bird was incredible. The birds didn’t seem to disturb by the equipement, often landing on the softbox and even in one case, inside the lens hood for an extreme close up.

The set up perform beyond expectation and allowed us to mix the flashes with natural light changing throughout the day, giving us very different shots depending on the time of day.

You can find the images in the following stock agency:

Best seller – September 2012

This month best seller comes from a photo shoot done in the spring of 2011. With the help of Laura and Pam, two amazing cupcake designer, we set out to make made a series of great image.

These three red velvet cupcakes really pop in a turquoise plate, don’t you wish makes you could take bite into them.

You can find this photo in the following stock agency

onOne Software DSLR remote control

A couple of weeks ago I decided it was time to try shooting tethered to my laptop again, something I had tried it long time ago without much success.

My first logical step was to go to the Canon website and find all the software I would need and start happily shooting away. Some of you might know this already, but I didn’t, Canon doesn’t offer any of their camera software for download, they only have software update. Which in my case sucked, since the installation CD with all those software, that came with my camera, has been lost to me for many moons.

My second logical step, was to look on the web for some gentle soul who shared the install file, that wasn’t to fruitful either. Except for a couple of hack site that were very hard to understand and kind of sketchy, I couldn’t find anything worth investigating.

So I took my last desperate step, searching for a third party remote control software…and that was a very scary thought to say the least. I was sure to only find some expensive, windows only, not user friendly, piece of custom software, that was created by someone, in their basement and that wasn’t going to be very stable, but instead I found an incredible gem, onOne Software DSLR remote control app.

After a quick review of the product web page, to make sure it was compatible with my camera, I found the link pointing to the iPhone or iPad app. The apps themselves aren’t expensive, specially since they were on sales, 10$ for the iPhone app and 25$ for the iPad. Personally I’ve always preferred to try apps before I buy them and luckily I found the free version of the app. It only allows you to fire the shutter and review the photos, but that in itself pretty much did the job for me, at that time.

Now being an over excited photographer, I thought that was it, no extra step needed, just plug the camera to a laptop, through the USB port and that’s it, all the parts would talk to one another and it would magically work…well, it didn’t…after cursing the computer gods, telling them that magic was real and it should be that simple, I went back to the app web page and started to read a bit more about it. That’s when I saw the server application that must be install on the computer you will be connecting your camera into, thus enabling the connection between all parts, which made a lot sense after I thought about it. After quick install, a couple of set up clicks completed and I was making my camera shoot some frame using my iPhone!

Now that’s really cool in itself, but I couldn’t control any of the camera setting with the free iPhone app. I figured, even if for 10$ all your able to do is just control a couple of setting, like change the exposure, the ISO and the aperture, that’s a good deal. But that’s only the beginning of the app, you get Live View, interval shooting and burst shot, on your iPhone!!! That’s just insane. And the iPad app is even more user friendly, and allows Live View window to go full screen.

As a test, I did a table top product shoot using the app. The first thing this app changed in my workflow is the product set up. Instead of going back to the camera to review the lighting and arrangement, I could use Live View to see exactly what the camera was seeing on the iPhone. My set up time was cut in half thanks to that and my back wasn’t sore from all the squatting behind the camera and back to the product, I usually do when shooting product.

If all of this sounds amazing, the software does have a couple of limitation. The app doesn’t allow for focus point selection, which mean you need to go back to the camera when you want to change the focus point, not a big deal, but it would be cool to have that control. Also, files can either be save on your card and computer or in the computer only, that’s pretty cool, but being able to choose saving on the camera card only would be very practical. As for the Live View, it only shows you what the camera sees at it’s current setting, unlike the view you get from the LCD behind the camera, which boost the brightness. Again, not a bad thing, since rising the ISO setting will allow you to see better in low light situation, but don’t forget to bring down then ISO when your shooting flash or like me you’ll end up with a lot of white frame.

All of this to say that, I would strongly suggest this app to anyone who wants to shoot thetered. Stay tune for photo shoot done with the app.