History of the photograph and drawing

I have this photo, water on an apple splash:

atlanta photographer water splash-hi-speed photography

High speed photography: water splash

I’ve done it 2 years ago, while playing with  Canon Speedlight strobes: that time we did not have much assignments and I spend time in studio exploring new techniques, a lot of resulting photos found a place in  our stock collection.
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Visit to Maharaj: small piece of India in Atalnta, GA.

It was unusual from the beginning: Guard at the entrance asked my first and last name, grass lawn with “please do not walk” sign, mostly Indian people around and amazing, unbelievable beauty of the place. It was like a tele-portation from dirty and boring streets of  Lilburn to opposite side of the globe. This is how our visit to BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir began.

Inside, the temple  look much smaller then outside, but still very beautiful and unusual: white marble lit by colored lights, ceiling and columns all covered with amazingly detailed carving,  golden gods sitting around the room… Better see yourself  at temple’s website. Photography prohibited inside, but I can only wish they hire a professional guy to do a job (yes, I can do it better :-) ), falling walls does not help to see a beauty of the place.
You can’t have shoes on inside, walking on a cold marble with a bare feet (I forgot to take socks with me)  was not the best nor long experience for me, I was outside withing 20 minutes. Our toddlers, Sonia and Liliana were glad even more then me: running, jumping and screaming was much more fun then looking at Gods inside of the temple :-)

lifestyle photography mandir by Atlanta photographer Alex Koloskov

Lifestyle photography: Mandir at Atlanta


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Atlanta Photographer Sunday: Twin toddlers on my neck:-)

This Sunday I was left at home with my lovely two daughters (we have twins), wife went to therapeutic shopping, and had great opportunity to do nothing and just watch our kids. Well, it lasted for about 5 minutes, after  we have played for a while, and.. I’ve jumped to what I really like to do:

Brought 3 Paul CC. Buff monolights (1x800ws, 2x1800ws) and placed in 3 corners of our living room. One with small dish-like reflector pointing to a wall and a ceiling (far center of the photo), second (on the right) with standard 8” reflector was aimed inside a room, and third one (left) with 43” parabolic umbrella mounted was highlighting the floor, placed just opposite of the  second light.  I do not use a flash meter, so no light ratio information will be given.

atlanta photographer sunday photoshoot setup

Atlanta photographer strobe lighting setup


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Stock photo-session in downtown Atlanta

That day was one of unusual for Atlanta windy, cold and low humidity days, when we gathered with our friends from PhotoSniffers.com to shoot a spectacular Atlanta Downtown sunset.  We found a few  places for the shoot, got a permission to shoot form one of it (one month of waiting).

Below are several images from these photo-sessions, more you can buy at our stock collection: AKELphoto.com

Sunset in Atlanta, GA

Sunset in Atlanta, GA


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Free stock images to download instantly, updating every week

Would like to announce that we start to release free to download images at our Stock images website. Now, most of the new images  will be free for download. Also, we decided to release a full resolution photo in our free collection, in opposite to a limited version (1920×1200 pixles)  we use to have there, all images has uncompressed (100%  quality) JPEG format, 300 dpi.

Free stock images to download

Free stock images to download

Any time you see download button you’ll be able to download the image for free after registration, which is free as well. We provide Royalty-Free license for all of our collection. However, we can always provide you more exclusive usage rights on the photos never was sold or downloaded before, if you’ll need such.

Hope our collection of free sock images will be useful for a designers,  advertising professionals, bloggers (most looking for  images to illustrate  posts), or just for anyone who may need high-quality images.

The photos we  provide  usually our  in-studio still life learning shoots, landscapes or life-style images.  We have thousands of the photos waiting to be released, but the biggest issue is a lack of time to prepare and upload them. But we’ll keep it up:-)

Water splash photography (water splash with berries and apple)

Once again we were playing with water and fruits. Small inflated pool, 3 Canon Speedlite Flash units and some handy support hardware makes it possible. Around 1/10.000 second flash duration can freeze any splash, only you need to worry about is a light distribution: reflectors and white backdrops are must to be here.
I was using canon 180mm Macro lens with f16 aperture to increase DOF, as water was moving berries away from a focus plane during a splash. Berries and fruits were hang on a rails with help of tiny fishing line.
The results are below

Water splash photography with fruits

Water splash photography with fruits

Hith speed photography with fruits and water

Hith speed photography with fruits and water

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Self portraits as promised:-)

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Just portraits of friends.

We had our very good friends visiting us for a 1.5 weeks. That was a fun! Have not seen them for about 10 years. They are still very nice and creative guys, we had a few (unfortunately) photo sessions done. The rest of the time was spent together in St.Pete, FL with vine, ocean and sun:-)

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Chocolate cake for a food stock photography

A cake from a Whole Foods Grocery, same technique as we have used HERE, except white background. White because it was for a microstock, as they like products on a white. Start feeling that we’ll need to shoot more like this, as these images age quite popular on iStock and Shutterstock.

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Water strawberry splash: stock photography photoset.

Some examples oh high-speed photography we did a while ago. I have used 3 Canon Speedlite 580EX II Flash units, synchronization was done by hand:-)

Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III camera, manual shooting mode, 1/250 sec, F4.5. Shutter speed does not really matter, as actual flash duration was about 1/3000 sec.

Do you like the result? Let me know if you want to see detailed explanation on how it was done.  BTW, most images from this photoshot (and similar ones) I have for sale on my mini-stock site: www.akelphoto.com

Update: Waiting for my Paul C Buff Einstein to arrive, will see if they will be capable to do the similar action freeze.

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