Meanwhile, here are a few highlights. Click for larger images…

Once you have entered basic information about your shoot, for each release you just add some quick details about your subject, an image from the built-in camera or photo library, and get a touch-screen signature – it is that easy! The app creates, stores, and emails you a pdf file of the signed release, including the embedded photo of your subject.

If you are a professional filmmaker or photographer, student, hobbyist, or anybody else who needs a release, mRelease is designed to make your life easier so you can focus on creating the content you love.

Get mRelease

1. Give the tagged people at least one really nice photo on their Facebook pages.
2. Drop a subtle reminder that I am a professional photographer available for portrait (and other) sessions.
3. Build up the number of fans of my photography page before the inevitable anti-Facebook fan page backlash begins.

It was a pretty simple lighting setup, big softbox in the front left, and a gridspot in the right rear. And notice the big difference in lighting in the last shot. There I took the gridspot off, so it was a bare reflector, which casts a much much wider beam of light. So intead of just lighting Ava, it lit the whole room.

(click images for larger versions)

Burning Man 2008: A Photo Essay by Matt Freedman
Think of the app as a coffee table book for the iPhone. It contains over 300 extraordinary Burning Man photos, packaged in an easy-to-use full screen photo viewer:

• View the whole set, or browse by categories (People, Art, Art Cars, The Man, Dust, etc.).
• Mark photos as favorites, for quick retrieval.
• Every image has an informative caption, which can be displayed, or left hidden.
• Slideshow mode, or manual “flick” paging.

In addition to the photographs, you will find essays:

• A foreword, by Marian Goodell, Burning Man’s Director of Business and Communications, explaining what exactly Burning Man is.
• An introduction describing my own personal 10 year journey with Burning Man, along with my views on the evolution of the event.
• My 4000 word Photography at Burning Man how-to guide, which gives you detailed information on how to take better photographs at Burning Man. What gear to bring, how to carry and protect it, when and where to shoot what, and perhaps most importantly, rules and etiquette.
• My own annotated Burning Man packing list. What to pack for your own visit, and why.

You can visit my site to see sample images, excerpts from the essays, and a complete version of the packing list. Or better yet, go directly to the iTunes App Store and get the app. And if you do get it, PLEASE go back to the app store and enter a numerical rating, and if possible, a brief written review. This is absolutely crucial for its success.

Please share this link with anybody and everybody you know who has an iPhone or iPod touch, and/or an interest in Burning Man (if you could post it to your Facebook newsfeed, twitter, etc. that would be great!)…
http://www.silentcolor.com/projects/burningman2008

Burning Man 2008: A Photo Essay by Matt Freedman has been reviewed and approved by the Burning Man Organization, and a portion of the proceeds from every sale goes back to the organization as a contribution to the community it supports.

There are two reasons for this. First, I have been going to the same spot to shoot the same blossoming plants for several seasons now, so it is getting harder to come up with shots that I have not done already. But mainly, I forgot one of the key principles of outdoor macro photography – don’t do it if it is at all breezy out. Shooting a flower through a macro lens in a breeze is like trying to shoot in a hurricane – the movements are vastly magnified, so it is much harder than normal to get sharp shots (which is already hard enough).

But without further ado, here are the five shots from the day that I kept….

Click for larger images.

Clear glass is tricky to shoot well – if you do not do it exactly right the glass either completely dissappears, or becomes covered with unpleasant reflections (I recommend the book “Light: Science and Magic” if you want to learn how to do it). However tinted glass is much easier. Basically you just need to back light it. I.e. have the light shine through the glass rather than bounce off the front.

Click on the images for larger versions…

And we also did some water bottle shots for a story about green shopping…

(click for larger images)

We shot these on location at Fuerte Fitness. Here is my portable studio setup. Black velvet backdrop, and three SB-800 flashes. The umbrellas are actually Photek Softliter Umbrella/Softboxes….

Here is one of the lighting set-ups I used. Note that the big softbox on the right is turned off – this is just a two light arrangement. A strip softbox coming in from the left, and a gridspot coming down from above and behind…

(click for larger versions)…

Here are a couple shots showing what I got with this set-up…

The first food arrangement we did involved melon…

But the really good stuff we got involved radishes. The results were spectacular – expect to see one of our final images from this arrangement on the wall at the Seattle Erotic Art Festival…

Our model brought along a friend who happens to be a talented photographer by the name of Jason Wolf, so we actually got some behind the scenes shots of me for a change…

http://imageevent.com/pmattf/bestof2008

These are probably not my absolute top 100, as a) I wanted to give an overview of all the kinds of work I did last year, and b) most of my favorites from last year are actually from the La Figa: Visions of Food and Form project, and we need to keep the large majority of those images offline until our book is published. However you will find some previously unreleased La Figa work, as well as various studio and outdoors portraits, the Dalai Lama visit to Seattle, Burning Man 2008 (also including some previously unseen ones),  macro photography, the Fremont Solstice Parade, a few from a friend’s wedding in Chelan, and summer hikes.

The photos are in a visual, not chronological order.  I get a little obsessed about putting my online albums together. Actually a lot obsessed. Once I had selected 100 images (which took maybe 30 minutes), I spent literally two or three hours to find the right ordering for them. Each row of three has to work as its own mini tryptich, and there has to be a rhythm and flow from row to row. It is a lot like solving one of those sliding tile puzzles. I hope you enjoy it.

The image on the left is a standard portrait lighting. A large softbox provides the key light, coming in from the left, and a less bright softbox comes in from the right, providing the fill light. A small softbox on a boom stand shines down from above, providing a hairlight for separation from the background (which is black paper, not lit). Because her face is more towards the darker fill light, we see more of the bright side of her face, which is considered “broad lighting”. If her face were pointed more towards the key light, we would see more of her darker side, and it would be short lighting.

The second image is a standard “beauty lighting”, also called “butterfly lighting”. There is a single light shining down from above and in front. In this case a large rectangular softbox turned sideways (and I am shooting from underneath it). There are also two lights shining on the white paper to overexpose it (see my previous posts on high key lighting). In this case there is quite a bit of shadow under her chin and back towards her ears. I could have added a fill light to shoot up from near the ground, or had her hold a reflector out flat in front of her out of the frame, either of which would have filled in those shadows more.

However, what I think really makes these shots look so different from each other is not the lighting at all, but the fact that the first is shot from slightly above her face level, and the second is shot from slightly below. A slight change in your perspective can make a huge difference.

This is probably my favorite shot from the day…

The lighting is a combination of the above two – key and fill softboxes on the sides like the first image (though in this case the lighting ratio is more even, so it is not really broad or short lighting), with two lights on the background. A fifth light for the hair would not have hurt.

I am following three basic rules for posing women here:

1. Never let the shoulders be in a perfectly horizontal line.
2. Never let the spine be in a perfectly vertical line.
3. Always pay attention to where the hands are.

Of course rules are meant to be broken, but nevertheless it is worth knowing what they are so you can decide when to break them.

My full set of images can be seen at http://imageevent.com/pmattf/misc/burieninterimart, but here are a few highlights. Click on any images to see a larger version…

Firepod doing its thing with The Passage in the background…

The Spinergy fire performance group. To get fire trails like this and still see the performer you need to shoot with slow synchro flash mode. Shutter priority mode can be a good way to go here, so you can vary the length of the exposure to get the amount of trails you want. This one is 1.3 seconds, which is definitely on the long side…

Detail from The Passage…

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Burning Man in Burien…

Just to give some context, this is The Passage being installed at Burning Man 2005…

And my favorite shot of The Passage from 2005. A 60″x40″ print of this one was hung at the 21 Days of Black Rock City show last summer in Marin County…

In terms of shooting, visible is harder in a way, because it can be challenging to get an even shade of white across the entire background. With pure white you don’t have to worry so much about evening it out, once it is overexposed it doesn’t much matter by how far. On the other hand, it makes judging the exposure by the histogram on your camera trickier – most of your image is one big blown highlight.

Recently I have been liking the pure white effect better. This lighting – which is typically used in fashion photography – is also a lot of fun to use with kids (it is not just fine art erotica around here). Here are some recent samples:

There are four lights. Two softboxes just on the background, set to overexpose it to pure white. Usually when I shoot white paper I try to keep the paper visible – white, but not pure white, so this is a bit different. When the paper is visible you need to think about keeping it evenly lit, which can be a bit tricky. With it overexposed like this, you don’t really have to worry about it too much. The key light is a large rectangular softbox turned sideways and put about eight feet high in front. There will be a little bit of bounce coming back up from the paper as well. There is also a kicker/hair light up high and behind. Since one of our strobes is in the shop,  I used a Nikon SB-800 flash unit in SU-4 remote mode (so it slaves to any flash) here. This worked very well, and it had no trouble keeping up with the studio strobes. Since it is only a providing a little bit of highlight I wasn’t too concerned about whether the color temperatures matched.

Here are a few shots that show the set-up…

As usual, I am not going to show the final images we got, as those are being saved for publication in the book. However, here is a sample image that shows the results of this lighting set-up…

The next set-up – Zucchini Lingerie – was almost the same. The only difference was that we pulled the table out, and had two models standing on the paper. Here is Tiberio putting together the Zucchini Lingerie…

During most of the Dalai Lama events press photographers were generally locked down in one location, which was quite far from the action. I had a 70-200mm lens with a 1.7 extender, on a 1.5 crop sensor, which gave me an effective focal length of just over 500mm, but that was not nearly enough to get much good stuff. The exception was an event at Bagley Wright Theater where we crept down the aisles and got close enough to get some some good head shots of the Dalai Lama. But the fun of hanging out with the other photographers from AP/UPI, Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, etc. made up for it.

Photographically, I think my best shots were from the workshops and the general scene on the Seattle Center grounds, where there were no security constraints.

I shot about 2000 frames over the give days, and I have posted a gallery of 123 of my favorites over on my “friends and family” website… http://imageevent.com/pmattf/misc/seedsofcompassion