I went to the Japanese Garden at the University of Washington Arboretum last week to shoot some macro while everything is blossoming. I believe I set a new personal record  – out of 315 frames that I shot, I ended up deleting 310, for a success rate of just 2%.

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….

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Here are some shots I did for the premiere issue of JUST CAUSE Magazine (which will be launching extremely soon – stay tuned for more on that). These wine bottles were for filler for a story about recycling.

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…

Here are some photos I shot of my trainer Adriana Medina – owner of Fuerte Fitness – before she won the Women’s Fitness division at the Vancouver Classic bodybuilding competition at the end of March.

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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….

Tiberio and I did another La Figa shoot last weekend, this time with a much curvier model than we have shot to date, and the results were phenomenal. After a series of very high key shoots with the white seamless paper background, I felt drawn back to the black velvet backdrop. The black velvet gives a totally different effect than the black paper (which can be seen in our Strawberries Redux shoot). The black paper can be anywhere from medium gray to almost black, depending on what you do with the lighting. The black velvet on the other hand reflects almost no light at all, so as long as you don’t light it directly, it pretty much disappears from the shot.

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…

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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…

Since I hate crowds, I have waited until the “Best of 2008″ rush was over before posting mine. You can now see a selection of 100 of my favorite photos from last year over at my “friends and family” image sharing site…

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.