Baking the Mountains

I went over to Reuben's dad's house tonight to catch the sunset on the mountains. Reuben had texted me a picture of the mountains in the morning, which was really sweet, so I thought I definitely needed to get out there for the evening. Good choice to do so.

When we first got out there, it was very beautiful. The sun was just going down, and the mountains were beginning the light show. Took a few pictures, but then waited a few more minutes for the colors to really start. It was pretty good at the time, but it's always brightest before the dark as they say.

Waiting definitely paid off. The colors at around 4:15 were just freaking amazing. Mt. Baker was just lit up orange and the sky was a beautiful shades of purple and orange. I tried a couple different framings, but I settled on doing a long and skinny panoramic. Not too skinny, but three shots long that would really capture the mountains. There was a little bit of the islands in the foreground, lit up a deep deep shade or orange.

I shot with my 70-300 lens at 300mm. That lens isn't very sharp wide open, so I had to shoot at f/8. To get a good shutter speed for handheld (we were on a very steep roof), I needed 1/250. The stabilization is really good on that lens, but I don't dare go any slower than that. With those settings, I needed to use and ISO of 400.

The first thing I did in post was to make the panorama in Ps. After I had cropped it down, I proceed to adjust the tonal ranges with a curves adjustment. I pulled the whites up quite a bit, as well as the shadows just a tad. This gave the contrast a lot more punch, especially in the highlights. I didn't pull much out of the shadows, they were about perfect as is. I wish there was less haze, but with it being so cold and with no clouds, I really doubt there would ever be any better conditions.

Next, I used the stamp tool to remove a tree in the left edge of the photo. It was actually incredibly easy, all I had to do was pick spots with constant tones and paint away. Took about 5 minutes, max. Photo shot really is an all powerful tool. The one spot that gave me a bit of pause was the mountains. I had to pick spots to clone that would blend with the spot I was healing. This really just meant matching angles and shadows, which is much easier than it sounds.

I didn't do any editing in Lr, all in Ps. Enjoy!

See you tomorrow!

Water Front

Victors grandparents own property on the west side of the island, and so we went out there tonight for some pictures. They have an amazing house, and quite the collection of art! We ended up getting a tour for about an hour before we shot, which was okay because the collection was really awesome. But we were there for photos, so we eventually braved the cold and went outside.

To escape from the icy wind, we went into this little nook at the end of the beach where a stream flowed from the island into the bay. Perfect place to avoid freezing, perfect to get a picture too!

I shot with the18-135, at 30s, f/3.5 and ISO1600. Not the greatest settings for image quality, but you do what you gotta do. With the quarter moon lighting up the foreground, and the stars shining brightly, the exposure worked out really well. Being so cold, there wasn't as much as there could have  been, and in post I could push the image further.

Starting with a simple panorama of the bay and the stream, Victor and I came up with a plan. We'd brought along a really cool light globe thing, and Victor wanted to use it. He put his flashlight in it, hung it with a whisk and cable, and then followed the contour of the stream and then the beach. In camera it didn't look like it worked, but once I started editing I saw it worked perfectly! He did a run on both sides of the beach, and then I light painted the stream to get the green water. The stream was going to be the focus of the photo, so it needed to be lit well. My plan for these type of shots is to light everything I possibly can, and if I need to use all of those parts I'm glad I got them. If I only need a few, then at least it's good practice and I've covered my bases.

To composite, I just use layer masks in Ps. Really, really simple stuff. Watch any 5 min video on YouTube and it's explained. Just paint black where you don't want, and paint white where you do!

Since it was a panorama, I opened all the layers in Ps, the made the canvas 200% taller than the individual photo. This gave me room to stack the photos appropriately, and then I just cropped down again once they were good. I think this one is 4 photos high. Not that hard to blend this, since the water and stars mix really well. Just a couple of soft layer masks and that's all it takes. Blend with the lest detailed parts of images, it makes it so much easier. That, or parts that are a texture or something. Most people won't notice if there's a slight discrepancy in a texture where you blended, especially if it's something like rock or water.

In Lr, I first adjusted the sky and the colors. I cooled things down a bit, and then added more magenta. That just gives a beautiful blue/purple tint to it, which I really love. I also increased the clarity and contrast a bit with the stars, to make them pop more.

Next, I brought out some more detail in the shadows with selective adjustments. Nothing complicated there. Finally, I lowered the highlights in the rocks, as they were just a tad over exposed.

To finish off the photo, I did some chromatic aberration correction, sharpening, and noise reduction.

See you tomorrow!

Water Breaker

I partook in picture taking a heck of a lot today. Probably filled up a card and a half. In the morning, I went to this cool little inlet that I found the other day. The sun was just rising, and the colors were amazing. I haven't edited those yet though. Later in the day, we went back to Botany Bay and Botanical beach. I walked on the beach, getting a bunch of pictures of tide pools and a very docile heron. During the last part of the day, we went to Sombrero Beach (I think it's called?), and I thought I might be shooting the sunset. However, those plans changed.

Apparently, that beach is very, very popular for surfing. There were tons of guys out on the water, so I basically just sat there for two hours and made surfing pictures.

Figuring out settings was a constant battle. At first, the sun was at full bast as backlighting the surfers. I needed to stop the action, but still get a decent depth of field and get detail in the dark wet suits. I also needed to keep an aperture of at least f/8 to get rid of aberrations in the lens.  I shot at 1/500, f/8 and ISO400 for that lighting.

Then, set sun dipped below some clouds and epic light rays started. As that progressed, the lighting got more and more dramatic, but also darker and darker. The contrast between the light rays and the water/surfers got more and more. I decided that I need to preserve as much detail as possible in the light rays, since it's easier to get detail back in the shadows than highlights. At least for digital.

I shot at the same settings, since I was including the sky in the exposure more. The shadows and highlights both lost a bit of detail, but that's all I could do in the conditions. The surfers were moving too fast to use bracketing, maybe if I used a tripod and preset the framing it could work. In the future I might try that, but this method worked well enough.

For framing, I tried to get the sky in the exposure as much as possible. Next was obviously getting the surfers in there. This was kind of a hit and miss, since I did not know where they would go or the waves would take them. Basically, I tried to use looking space (put more room in the frame in the direction that the subject is facing or looking), but in the end it was just chance and bit of skill.

With the shot I got, the colors weren't really working for me. The sky was amazing, but water, no no. Didn't work for me. However, I loved it in b/w. For the rest of the editing, I lightened up the spot where the surfer was a bit. Then I raised the clarity a bit to get even more drama in, especially in the sky. That's about it though, mainly it was brightening up the water where the surfers were.

See you tomorrow!

Forest Light

My family and I went for a walk today in the Avatar Grove. It's an old growth section of forest near Port Renfrew. Apparently, it's home to Canada's Gnarliest Tree (which is up for debate still).

When we started walking, it was pouring rain and very cloudy. I doubted that there'd be any good pictures to be had in the wet and flat lighting. There's not many situations were that flat light is good for photos...

But luckily, the sun came out! It wall still "raining" since drops were still falling from the trees. Even better, I was at a point in the trail were there was a little stream right next to me. I started shooting right away, trying to get the light rays that were streaming through the trees.

However, with the bright sun and the dark forest there was a lot of contrast in the scene. I didn't shoot directly into the sun, but it was pretty close. That's the direction the light rays were, so that's the way I needed to generally shoot.

To try to capture the whole tonal range of the scene, I bracketed by +-1 EV. From the last couple times trying to blend exposures, doing more than that is really  hard to blend in Ps. Even with luminosity masks, it's difficult and I haven't mastered the whole process yet.

ButI figures doing the bracketing would give me a better chance at making an accurate image, so I went with it.

With the stream, I wanted a long exposure to get some good water blending going on. My base exposure was f/11 at ISO100 and 1.6s. I based this one getting a "correct" exposure. To double check this, I looked at my histogram for the darker and brighter exposure to make sure I was getting the exposure information I wanted. For the brighter one, I wanted most of the data in the middle and upper parts of the histogram. This would mean I was getting the shadows as the midtones, and thus getting more information about the darker parts of the scene. In the darker exposure, I wanted most of the info to me on the left or lower parts so that I was getting more information into the highlights. When I composited this all in Ps, I would squish all the information into the one photo, and so there would be information everywhere in the exposure.

First thing I did in Ps was make luminosity masks for the darker layer. My plan was to add the shadow details to the darker exposure. I selected the dark areas of the dark image, and then painted them in very slowly with the mid exposure. I used a soft brush at a 10% flow to really be soft about it.  However, there was too much roll over into the highlights, and weird halos were being made everywhere. To fix this, I selected the highlights and painted them back into the darker layer. This worked really well, and the tonal range of the scene came together! I'll probably do some videos about this process more, and explain it a bit better.

Next, made a levels layer that brightened up the shadows a bit, and then a green photo filter to get the richness of the forest back. Both of these I used luminosity masks to apply only to the midtones and shadows. The filter I applied a bit to the highlights, but not too much. This was about the extent of the whole photo editing. Like I said, I'll do a video or two about it when I get back to good internet. Uploading something is out of the question right now...haha

See you tomorrow!

Ferry Cam

For Christmas, I got a Lens Baby Spark. It's a specialty lens, designed to be incredibly soft and have weird focusing effects. It's a cheap lens, with cheap construction, but that's kind of the point of it. You have a manual move the front of the lens to focus, it even tilts and all that so you can do very interesting focus effects with it. It's really really soft on the sides, with a lot of vignetting. Not all pictures work really well with it, but some look amazing.

Today, my family went to Canada. We're staying on the west shore of Vancouver Island for the next couple days, hopefully seeing some awesome beaches and weather here. However, today was mostly just travel. The Spark is an awesome travel lens. Just set the camera to Av mode and about ISO800 and shoot away. There's no auto features on the lens, not even an adjustable aperture.

We ate in some Canadian equivalent of Olive Garden or something for lunch, and they had the coolest lamps. For pictures I mean... The shades had a really cool marble patten on them, with thick bands of black moving in waves around them. I had to use live view and hold the camera way up to get the shot I wanted. The shade was small, so I wanted to shoot strait on and get the bands as a 2D shape. All about form and texture on this one.

As I said, I shot in Av mode at ISO800. I think the Spark is set to f/8, and the shutter was 1/400 for this one. I could have shot at a lower ISO, but whatever.

Editing was simple. Convert to b/w, up the whites, lower the highlights. This brought more detail into the highlights, but also increased the contrast up. I also touched the clarity up just a little bit. Not much. That's all.

See you tomorrow!

The End is Near

Of the year I mean...not the world or anything. Seemed like a fitting title though, since this post is about burning things!

Christmas Eve was last night, and my family has a tradition of opening presents from the family that night, then doing Santa presents in the morning. Victor has been a close friend for some time now, and so of course he got quite a few presents under the tree too. One of which happened to be a bag of steel wool. My parents know we like to use it for pictures, and that we are constantly running out.

That bag turned out to be the present of the  night for us.

After presents, we went down to Maclin's and watched Ninja Turtles. Speaking of which, I think that one might come close to the sin count of the most recent transformers. The "everything wrong with _____" Youtube channel is fantastic, and I can't wait to see what they do with this movie. Let's just  say it isn't the best made movie ever...

As we were watching, Victor was hanging long strands of steel wool from Maclin's bed, and then lighting them on fire. If you've never done that, you really really need to. It's epic. In light of this awesome epicness, after the movie was over we went into the shop and started burning the rest of the bag into the wee hours of the morning.

So many different ideas were tried, but the one I liked the most was just taking simple pictures of the burning wool. We tried for quite a while to get the right pictures, but with a macro lens it was incredibly difficult.

I'll put it into perspective. Imagine you're looking through binoculars at a sparrow. That sparrow is flying at about 60mph and randomly changing directions. There's also a lightning storm so you eyes have to keep adjusting to keep track of the bird. On top of this, the focus on the binoculars is terrible, so you have to keep readjusting it to keep the bird sharp. AND the binoculars are as big as your face and you can't hold them up, so they are on a tripod that you control by moving your body.

That's was it was like. No wonder no pictures worth keeping were had. There are a few semi decent ones, but most were bleh. I had to control the camera by pinching the tripod handle between my arm and body, then hit the shutter with one hand and focus on the other. With the macro lens, the sparks in the wool travel really freaking fast when looking through the lens, so it's really hard to track.

After an hour or so of that nonsense, (which was still awesome to watch) we wised up a bit. Instead of making a big pile of wool, we flattened it out and made it as 2D as possible. This made focusing much easier, because I only had to focus once between the burning started! Everything about the camera as pre-set, exposure, framing, focus, etc. Everything got set up, then the burning started and I used a remote shutter.

This set up allowed two things. Firstly, it eliminated a lot of variables that could ruin the photo. If it didn't turn out, it was the sparks being in the wrong spot or something like that. Secondly, since all the photos of a burn session were framed the same, they could be composited in Ps!

I shot at f/22 (the sparks are really bright) ISO100, and 1s. This longer exposure gave the necessary trails to capture the sparks. As the metal heats and cools it changes colors, which you can capture in a longer exposure. Not too long, then it blurs together, but just enough and you can get some awesome effects.

In Ps, I took the most promising looking series, and composted them together with the lighten blend mode. This only let the bright areas of all the layers combined show through. In other words, in any particular spot on the photo, only one layer that is the brightest there shows through. Pretty great way to composite light trails. However, just doing that doesn't always look good, so I went back in a made some layer masks over over exposed parts or other such pieces that I didn't like.

Nothing done in Lr, this is pretty much right out of the camera. Enjoy!

See you tomorrow!

Too Busy Exploring

Victor and I went out to South Beach tonight for the sunset. There were a few clouds on the horizon, so I thought it might be an okay sunset. Usually, the best sunsets are with low cloud cover. The sun reflects up onto the clouds, and color goes evvverrryywherrreeeee.

Unfortunately, the sunset was one of those mediocre ones. Very yellow and the clouds obscured the sun too early for the good colors. The water didn't get very much color either, so it was kind of meh.

However, Victor and I were busy exploring the beach. The rocks down there are just amazing. The tide was really high, and with a slight onshore wind the waves were pretty good sized. There were tons of log bridges between different rock out cropping, and we quite enjoyed playing on those while the waves crashed underneath us.

When I actually did get around to shooting, the couple scenes I tried weren't all that great in the colors or lighting. With the sun down, the water was pretty flat, and the exposures had to be fairly long. Long exposures aren't bad for water though, I bracketed them starting at f/22, ISO100 and .8s. The other two were at 1/5s and 3.2s, I bracketed at + or -2 stops.

Editing was a little tricky, I used a combination or luminosity masks and layer masks to blend the exposures. The the sky, I first made a luminosity mask of the bright areas of the sky (this included the clouds) and then painted in the darker exposure. This replace the blown out sky with a darker, richer one. However, the blending wasn't too great. I went back and created a looser mask, and then painted that one in again over the first. This gave a softer blend. I think shooting at +-2EV was a little extreme, so blending the exposures was difficult. In the end, the sky doesn't look half bad, but it's not quite what I hoped.

Next came the water, I had my middle exposure combined with the darker sky so far. I added in the lighter exposure of the water with a black layer mask, then painted in (with a very soft brush) the areas I wanted the water to show up. This was mainly the rocks and around them. I did not paint out into the more open water, because this area was very over exposed and not very natural to blend with the sky. It took quite a few attempts to get the position right of the mask.

Next, I made two clipped adjustment masks for the sky. Clipping masks only affect the layer under them, which was the sky layer. I added more saturation, and darkened it a little bit. Nothing fancy.

I the set my black and white points using a threshold adjustment. This is a pretty simple concept, just ensuring there is a full range of contrast in the photo. I set the curves adjustment to luminosity, so that it wouldn't effect the colors.

However then I duplicated it and applied the color changes to the sky and some of the open water. Finally, I added a curves to lighten up the rocks a little bit.

In Lr, I added lens correction and sharpening. Nothing I haven't written about before.

See you tomorrow!

Water Gives you Wings

Drink water. Also, puddles are fun and I wish I could fly.

Living in the north west, it rains quite a bit. On San Juan, it's not as bad as some places like Seattle, but there's still quite a lot of moisture. This week has been one of the wettest in  a while. It rained pretty much the whole day, and so the puddles were, well...how should I phrase this..


SIZE: EPIC

Basically, they were a small pond size. Not that deep, but enough to really have some volume in them. More importantly, more than enough to really create some epic water splashes. Victor, Maclin and I went down to the secret puddle location, and made some photos happen.

I took the ol' p.bike, which I haven't ridden in almost a year now. It needs a good rebuild anyway, so I figured it'd be fine to give it a nice bath....

The lighting set up was pretty simple really, just two strobes on either side set to a high power. The strobes side/back lit the water, and really made it stand out. The background and foreground was left black, with only the reflection in the water. Not the most flattering light for portraits, but for action shots it's one of my favorites. Really brings out drama in things.

I shot at f/8 to get a decent depth of field since I wasn't quite sure where the picture would be taken. I was moving pretty fast on the bike, so the focus could fall in and out pretty quickly. In fact, the final photo isn't actually sharp, but it's really close.

I also shot at ISO500, to help the strobes out little bit. They were pretty far away from me, and with the higher aperture they didn't have a lot of power.

Victor was the one who pushed the shutter, so it was up to him to decide when. I've shot with him a lot, so he could time a photo like this pretty well.

Editing started by just doing basic contrast and exposure correction. The exposure needed to go up a little bit, actually a lot. The LCD really does not tell the truth...Next, I switched to b/w, and then I was done.

I also cropped things down a little bit, but to tighten it up. Not too much, but cropping can make a world of difference.

See you tomorrow!

Light the Night

Last night was the darkest day of the year. Not only was the night the longest, as it was the solstice, but it was also a new moon (or pretty close). The light in the sky should have been pretty close to nothing.

But of course....humans have to go and screw that up with light pollution. Grrrrrrrrrr.

Victor and I went to a solstice party last night, which lasted well into the night and a little into the morning. There was delicious cookies, live music, and most importantly Halo 4. Legendary really isn't that hard any more.....Victor and I almost spent more time killing each other than the enemy...or maybe those are the same thing?

I digress...After the party, we were walking to the car and I happened to look at the sky. It was cloudy and ugly earlier, so I assumed it still would be. But what do you know it had cleared up! The stars were shining bright, and the light pollution as lovely on the horizon. (NOPE. BAD LIGHT POLLUTION)

We rushed back home, and then proceeded to sit at the crossroads for a few minutes figuring out where to go. Victor thought it would be good to go down to the light house at the south end, and I was wondering about the north end. In the end, we decided to go south, which was a good choice.

We arrived, and after a short hike ended up at the light house. The tiny, rolling hills around it were amazing, so I had to incorporate them into a photo somehow. We did a little light painting and whatnot at that location, then moved on. Here's what we got from that.

The next spot was just on the other side of the light house, right up against the cliff. We were looking up at the light house, with the cliffs and the stars in the background. I'm going to do a video for this one, since there's a lot to go over and it's easier to talk than write it all.

Camera settings: 30s, f3.5 and ISO1600. I shot a very high ISO (at least higher than I normally do) just to see if it actually works for making the sky more exposed. It really helped, so I'm going to continue that trend.

Here's the final image. I love it, just bummed the milky way wasn't in it. I'll have to look into that a bit more, maybe this time of year it's not visible that time of night? Who knows...

Here's the last one of the day, a light painting on the rocks by the water. The water is painted with my Maglite, and there are two exposures of the sky to create the vertical panorama. Enjoy!

See you tomorrow!

Many Yum Yums

Emma and her friend, Julia, made these fantastic little cookies today. They are some sort of ginger snap with a kiss on top. Delicious when warm, cooled, and frozen. Yes, I have tried them in all stages of heat. It was fun when they were hot because the kiss melted and could be spread all over the cookie.

A little while back, Victor got me this crazy big white globe thing for lighting. It's almost a foot across think, basically just a big plastic light fixture kind of thing. It can make pretty cool lighting as it has a soft but also hard light effect. Light comes from everywhere on it.

We put the cookies on a lazy susan so that the wood grain would sort of blend in with the cookies nicely. I really like how the diagonal grain goes against the composition, things that are straight and level don't always work in photos. Sometimes you have to go, well, against the grain. haha so punny. But seriously, change things up, you never know what you might get, and it might be really awesome. Some of the best pictures are ones that happened just because someone decided to see what "such and such" would look like. They're experiments gone horribly right.

We placed the globe thing, and strobe, right behind the cookies. So the cookies were between me and the light. Sort of, sort of not because I decided to shoot straight down. I love this kind of shooting, it really has some sort of geometrical appeal to me. I arrange the cookies in a circle thing, and started test shots.

At first, it was way dark. The fixture ate up a lot of light. I settled on f/8, ISO100, and I think about 1/8 power on the strobe. The light created was soft, but obviously directional. I wraps around the cookies really nicely, but still leaves all the textures and detail in tact. I think it's one of the best lighting conditions we've come up with. The one thing I don't like the kisses blowing out a little bit in the highlights. Only one has actually lost information, but the others are really close. If I tone them down in Lr, they just get ugly and uck.

What I did do though, is lower the whites down to try to get some details back. Not the highlights, just the whites. I also boosted the clarity just a bit to bring out more texture, but this made me also raise the shadows a bit to compensate for darkening.

Sharpening was fairly advanced (for Lr). I first did a little noise reduction, then set my sharpening to a point where I could just barely start to see it doing something. If it's obviously sharpened, you've gone to far. Next, I adjusted my radios to be quite small, and my detail to be subdued as well. If you turn those up a lot, you get way over sharpened for most things. The masking was the important part though. I adjusted that so that only the details would get sharpened, not the smooth tones in the kiss and whatnot. They don't need to be sharp so why sharpen them?

See you tomorrow!

It was a dark and stormy night

It was a very stormy day today, very very windy and rainy. Not that cold luckily, but still very wet and miserable. It's wasn't possible to stay dry if you went outside.

Victor and I were busy most of the day, but he came over late in the afternoon, and we decided it would be a good idea to go down to the beach. With the weather, the waves would be pretty good, as well as the drift wood. The tide was very high, so the logs were getting bashed left and right up on the beach.

As soon as I opened the door of the car, the interior was inundated with wind and rain. No way was the camera going outside without some kind of protection. Luckily, I had some gallon plastic bags in my bag for just such an occasion. Normally, I would cut a hole for the lens, but in this case I didn't want to. With just rain, it wouldn't be that bad. But with salt spray coming off the water, no way was I  letting that get all over my lens. So I simply just put the bag over the whole camera. :)

However, as you'd expect, the bag made the image quite soft. No sharpness to be seen. However, it made an interesting effect, sort of a super blur that made everything soft and creamy. I also love the water drops that were on the bag.

For exposure, I wanted to shoot at f/8 in an attempt to at least have the lens focus correctly. At f/3.5 the depth of field isn't that big, so the image would get really blurry. With f/8 though, I had to shoot at 30s and ISO640. It was really late in the evening, and it was getting very dark.

The first shots I did were from a little farther back, getting more of the log field as well as the water and rocks. These were pretty good, but when I got closer to the water, I knew the picture I wanted was not from far back. The camera came down closer to the water, and the resulting picture was much better. I do with I had moved a little farther left though, to get dinner island father away from the rocks. It's a bit of a squished photo right now.

With editing, I did brighten things up by about a stop and also increased the contrast. It was a very flat scene, and still is in the edited photo, but I thought I might add a little to it. Didn't increase the clarity or anything, I like it soft.

See you tomorrow!

Beyond Vision

Earlier this night, I decided to not use this image for the blog. It's not that bad, but there is a lot of information being lost threw editing and what not, and I thought it could be better. However, after I went out and did some more shooting, I took another look and decided that it might actually make a good blog post.

I won't say much about infrared photography, because I really don't know that much. What I do know is that filters in front of your sensor filter out infrared light and only let visible light pass through. In order to shoot infrared, you can have those filters removed and replaced, or you can put a filter on your lens that blocks visible light and lets infrared light in. The latter method is what I used today, with some very interesting results.

Cameras are sensitive only up to about 1500nm wave lengths, so they are by no means thermal imagers. It's a much different look, and I really have no way of explaining it because I don't know much about it. Objects reflect infrared light differently than visible light, so results are very odd.

Tonight, I shot a beach with a sunset, and wow it was not what I expected. The water turned into a velvet mist, which you'd expect from a long exposure, but it stops there. The colors were, well, not colors actually, but everything was a shade of red, and the sky was yellow. No idea why....

With the filter, I had to shoot at 30s, f/8, and ISO100 to get a good exposure. It's a really dense filter.

The sky was a little blown out, but some how with the infrared it wasn't that bad. The color was the big problem. To fix this, I used Adobes DNG profile editor to make a custom color profile for that image. In it, I adjusted my white balance to how I wanted it, and also the hue/saturation of each color. However, those latter adjustments didn't do what you'd expect. They actually adjusted the brightness of the different areas based on the colors the camera thinks it saw.

Once I had my color profile made, I went back into Lr and further adjusted the white balance since it still wasn't quite right. I let Lr do that, I just picked a fairly neutral rock and let Lr do the balancing. Not too bad. To finish it off, I did a gradient adjustment to the sky to darken it a bit since it was overexposed. Also, I did a lens correction to get rid of massive barrel aberration.

See you tomorrow!

Light Beam

After a few too many hours playing Halo tonight, Victor and I went to take a picture of the epic light I have. It's a Survivor LED brand light, and it's just ridiculously bright. It was really rainy/lost of moisture in the air tonight, so the light beam from the flash light was pretty epic.

We wanted to do a bit of a product shot for it, I had the idea of using the light beam to light up the Survivor LED logo floating in the sky. Victor would be in the lower right with the flash light, pointing  it at a diagonal to the upper left. The light beam would hit the logo, and "illuminate it."

The setting were similar to what I'd use for a star picture. 30s, f/3.5, and ISO1600. It's really dark out, and the beam isn't that right, so the camera needs to capture as much light as possible. There's a lot of noise, but you have to do what you have to do.

In Lr, I brightened things up quite a bit, since they were very dark even with that long exposure. I did a local adjustment over Victor, to try to get him to stand out a bit more from the background. Then, since the noise was just getting too much, I converted to b/w. Color wasn't working.

In Ps, I put in the logo that I found on line. The first thing to do is position it. I put it quite large, right on the tree line. Next, I made a new layer with a clipping mask so that it would only effect the layer below it, which would be the logo. On this layer, I painted white where the beam hit ht logo.That's kind of the highlights. I used a big, soft blush with a low flow, so that I could really slowly build it up.

Next, I went into layer styles and did a bevel and emboss on the logo. This gave it more highlights and shadows, like there was actually light hitting it. Not perfect, since it's all from the same angle, and to be right the highlights would shift depending how far out they were from where the light hit.

Finally, I masked out the tree line by using luminosity masks. I selected the darks, then used a mask to paint in those areas black on the logo, so it kind of looks like the logo is behind the trees. To finish it off, I added some noise to the logo to make it blend better.

See you tomorrow!

Moar Rarr Quad

Went out to the farm today with Victor to play with the quad. Deb is so kind to let Victor play with that rather large (and very noisy) toy.

They've actually started riding in a track out there, so we decided to do some drifting pictures of it. It's super slick, so the drifts are pretty consistent and easy to set up. We picked a corner that had a pretty long line, and had lots of grass that could be thrown by quad.

We used three strobes for the set up. I knew that I was going to be shooting at about 45 to the corner, near the exit. This would hopefully give the best view of the drift, but not put myself into the path of the beast. We tried a few runs with the strobes to backlit everything, but having them right behind actually was too much. There were lens flares like crazy, and things got really blown out.

The strobes got moved off to either side of the frame, one on the exit, and two on the entrance. The two were a 580 at 1/2 anddddd mini nuke! So there was a heck of a lot of power over there. This did the heavy lifting on the backlighting of the grass and the quad. The light on the left/exit was propped up by a gas can and was zoomed only to light the front of Victor. Mostly, this just separated him from black, and gave a little bit of insight into the shadows.

I shot at f/5.6, ISO400, and 1/100s. The shutter I wanted to drag just a bit to get the bright headlight, and the rest were to get enough power out of the strobes. Little lights aren't quite enough to light a quad going this fast. I really need studio lights to get a fast enough cycle to freeze everything. The strobes did a good job, but there's still some motion blur going on.


To frame/ compose this, I followed Victor threw the corner, and kept him in the left hand side of the frame. When he was in the right spot in the corner, shutter was pressed.

To start off editing, I went into Ps and brightened up the head light with a curves layer. I just brightened the whites, then only painted over the area of the head lamp. This gave a really cool glow effect. Back in Lr, I converted to b/w because I really didn't like the colors of the scene. With time, that could be changed, but tonight is not enough of that. Maybe tomorrow. I also upped the clarity just a little bit. More pop. All done!

See you tomorrow!

Much Be Home

Arrived back home at last! Took pretty much every mode of transportation I could to get home. Van to train to plane to van to boat to car.  Much not fun, but the ferry had some amazing views of the olympics. The weather was pretty wild over there, and the lighting was awesome. There were low clouds in front of the mountains, and then very big, fluffy, angry clouds above them.

I threw on the telephoto lens (kidding, I actually was very careful), and took a meter reading. As my setting were, 1/200, f/8 and ISO100, it was perfect exposure. About a third of a stop underexposed, but that was only because of the bright clouds throwing off the exposure.

I tried doing a panorama, but with the telephoto lens I didn't think it would work at all. On a moving boat, with a long lens....just no. But...when I got it into Ps, it worked better than most panos I do on a tripod! So weird!

My first adjustment was the color. I used the curves adjustment to add a little blur to the shadows, and then add some red to the highlights. This gave a richer feel to the photo. I also lowered the green a bit to get rid of an ugly overtone. Next, I set my white and black points by using the threshold adjustment layer. I've explained how to do that before I think..

Finally, I added a clarity curve layer. For this, I darkened the midtown shadows, but then adjusted the blacks not to be effected. Essentially, this made the midtown blacks darker, while not loosing details. It also raised the highlights a bit.

In Lr, Victor and I agreed that the photo was a little to purple/red ish, so I adjusted the orange channel to be more yellow. This took out the tangerine over tone, and made it much more realistic. Wonderful. I also added a selective clarity adjustment over the mountains.

See you tomorrow!

Hawk Eye

Today's my last day in CO, and I decided just to go walk for a bit and take some pictures before I left. Last time it was 2 years before I got back again.

As I was walking down the path, I spied a really cool looking hawk. It was just hanging out on a branch up in the trees, doing hawk things. The only reason I really saw it because it was so white against the dark branches.

From where I was, there were a lot of branches and twigs in the way, way too many to take any pictures. However, I walked just 20ft farther, and presto, perfect framing. The branches made sort of a picture frame around the hawk. There are a few good things about winter I suppose, the bare branches being one. They're really great for composing, just full of geometry. Sometimes it really pays just to walk the 20ft more to get the right framing. You can have mediocre pictures if you take them just from any old place, but you can have great ones if you put just a little extra effort into finding the right place.

I shot using the sunny 16 rule, so f/16 ISO100 and 1/100. This gives the proper exposure in sunny conditions, it's been used for many, many years.

In Lr though, I did a few little adjustments. I converted to b/w, and I lowered the blue channel to darken the sky. The sky is blue, so darkening the blue channel, well, darkens the sky. Same effect as using a red filter. Colored filters brighten their own color, and darken their compliment. So a green filter would lighten green things, and darken red/ warm tones. Depending on the filter, it might also darken blues and yellows too.

I did a little tiny bit of contrast adjustment to the tone curve, brightening the highlights and darkening the shadows just a bit. Not much though, as I didn't want to over blow the white feathers of the hawk.

Birds are such amazing animals. That's all I have to say.

See you tomorrow!

Snow!

After the last couple day's of temperatures in the 40s and 50s, it's snowing in Boulder today! Actually pretty decent snow too, nice big fluffy flakes that stick and don't just melt immediately.

I wanted to do something with the falling snow, and I thought it might be cool to take some pictures of snow covered grass at a really wide open aperture. This might give some really cool snow bokeh effects with the shallow depth of field. I played around with it a bit, but didn't come up with anything I really liked.

They aren't bad really, but I wanted to do something a little more abstract and less photographic. But what?

Shallow depth of field is one way to separate the background from the subject, but how else could I do it....what about using motion blur? With bikes and sports it's a pretty commonly used technique to create a sense of motion or speed. I thought it might work with snow too.

I slowed the shutter down to 1/13 and raised the aperture to f/11. This isn't even fast enough to shoot handheld with a 50mm, and so purposely moving the camera really made some soft photos. Which I loved.

My technique was to start up high, and follow the snow as it fell. When the framing I wanted was about to come together, I hit the shutter. The results were awesome. The snow was actually very in focus, but had some really cool blur to some parts too. The background was almost unintelligible, but still enough to make out the general gist of it. It really made the photo about the atmosphere of the time, not the content. Right along the lines of the Pictorialism, which I really enjoy. Sometimes the sharpness of photography gets in the way of what you want to capture.

Editing, I set my black and whites points first, then adjusted the clarity slider until I got the levels I wanted. Too much clarity and the photo becomes too sharp, but too little and the snow falling is lost. Then I adjusted my highlights and shadows; I made the snow very white, and brought a lot of detail back into the blurred shadows. I guess detail isn't the right word, but I brightened them up a bit.

Finally, I adjusted my tone curve ever so slightly to brighten the whites a hair. I wanted more control of what specific area of the curve I wanted to adjust, and the whites slider doesn't give that control.

After I exported, I looked at the different calibration presets there were, and I actually ended up changing the photo from standard to landscape. It further brightened the whites a bit. Exported again and then I was done. It's not uncommon for me to do this four or five times with photos, there's always little changes to be made.

See you tomorrow! 

Acorn...?

Don't really know what it is, but it's cool! Kind of like a nutty flower.

I'm at my aunt and uncles house this weekend, and tonight I found this weird little trinket in a bowl of shells. I'm not really sure what it is, but I thought it'd be beautiful to photograph.

My first strategy was to raise up the thing and use the soft box to light it. I had on the macro filter again too. However, when I tried this, the light was very directional and unattractive. I felt like the light needed to wrap around this little more.

I tried using the ring light next, but the distance was too close and it proved ineffective. Grrr, now what?

A bare strobe was the next logical step, so I just tried that. Normally, I don't use bare strobes because they send such a hard light. However, since the distance was so small, they effectively turned into soft boxes! Compared the thing, the strobes were huge, so they actually cast fairly soft light.

I put the thing on a wood desk to try to match textures a bit, and put a strobe on either side of it. At lowest power and f/22, things were still a little bit bright, so I pulled out the wide angle diffusers built into the strobes to calm them down a bit. This worked perfectly! There's also a built in bounce card, which helped back light the thing a little bit and make it stand out against the background. Take a look.

Most of the edits were done with two adjustment masks. One mask softened and darkened the area around the thing, to pull focus into the center of the image. I heavily feathered this mask to make the transition zone fairly large. This meant that I had to really make sure it wasn't darkening the thing itself, as it's easy to with such soft masks.The other mask lightened the shadow areas a little bit, as they were a bit dark. I also converted to b/w, I'm just loving doing that lately. Finally, I brightened up the very tip of the thing just a hair. It was falling into shadow and I didn't like that.

Enjoy!

See you tomorrow!

Money Leaf

I spent most, well pretty much all, of today re-learning how to ski! My uncle and I went up to Winter Park resort and rented for the day. At last count we did something like 10 or so runs today, and I'm probably going to have to get myself a pair of skies in the next few weeks....skiing is awesome. So much better than boarding, at least in my opinion.

It was only after we'd gotten back, showered and eaten that I remember that I hadn't done a photo yet today.

At first, I tried taking some photos of the fire place. The flames were looking pretty cool, but it wasn't working out very well, so I scrapped that. It was more of a warm up anyway.

Next to the fire is a money plant, I guess it's called. But that's not important. What is important is the beautiful vein structure of the leaves. They're very pronounced and prominent, perfect for taking pictures :)

With leaves, I like to back light them. It really helps bring out the veins, since they are more dense than the leaf around and they show up darker. What's awesome about the money plant is that since the veins are to large, there is actually highlighting going on that really, really brings out the details.

To shoot, I started at f/2, ISO100, and the power of the strobe at 1/128. Annnnnnd the image was pure white. It tried again with three stops down, and it was still white. So then I just stopped all the way down and what do you know, perfect exposure! I did shoot with a 4x macro filter, just to get a bit closer to the leaf. At f/22, only the central light rays were admitted to the lens, so aberration and distortion were put to somewhat of minimum. f/16 might have been better for the lens alone, but with the filter I think this gave better results.

The first thing I did in editing was convert to b/w. Then I used that Lr HDR technique, upping the shadows all the way and lowing the highlights. Then setting the white and black points with the sliders while holding option. This gave the most detail possible in the photo, while still getting a full range of tones.

See you tomorrow!

Mad Heron

I left Bozeman this morning, actually about 15 hours ago. I had planned to take my picture for today of the sunrise on the plane, but that didn't exactly turn out. The sunrise was amazing, but I was in the isle seat, and I was asleep. I only briefly awoke to see the most amazing pink sunrise, pretty sure I thought it was a dream actually.

Now I'm in Boulder, CO, staying at my aunts house for the next few days. The first thing I got to do when I arrived was go for a bike ride! Pretty happy about that! There are some walking/bike trails basically right from where they live, so I just hopped on those and started riding. After a little bit, I arrived at a small pond. The trail went around the pond, and when I got to the far side of it I saw a picture I had to take.

There was a single heron or some fishing bird standing in the shallow water. The sun was coming from behind it, and the water was just lit up golden all around. I didn't have my camera on me at the time, so I rode back to the house as fast as I could, and then rode back out hoping the bird would still be there.

And it was!

I shot that bird for about a half an hour or so, all through the changing light of sunset and into blue hour a bit. My favorite shot was taken just as the sun was dipping below the horizon, so I'll explain that one for the blog.

For a photo like this, you have three options for exposure. You can expose for the water, and make a silhouette of the bird. You can exposure for the bird and then blow out the water. You can bracket and combine the two exposures to make a HDR photo where everything is exposed correctly.  While HDR might be cool, I chose to just keep it simple and do a silhouette of the bird.

Metering off the water wasn't that tricky, I did over expose by about 1/3 stop, just to keep the water nice and bright. Normally, water with reflections of the sky is a bit lighter than middle grey, so just using what your camera tells you will actually underexpose the water.

I settled on f/5.6, ISO100, and 1/200. There wasn't a lot of light to work with at this point, so I shot wide open to try to keep a high enough shutter speed. I could have pushed the ISO a bit more, but I felt like 1/200 was enough to freeze the slow moving bird.

Composing this, I wanted until the bird was moving, then tried to catch it while the foot was just above the water. This gave a more dynamic pose, especially with all the ripples in the water.

Editing was a little tricky. I wanted the water to be like liquid silver, or in other words very smooth and silky.

Okay, lot to talk about here.

The original image was well exposed, but it was rather flat and colorless. To fix this, I brightened things up to make the whites really pop out. Contrast and clarity also helped with this. The idea was to gave a lot of contrast to the scene. However, this crushed the shadows too much, so I pulled more detail back into them.

But now there was too much detail in the silhouette, so I used an adjustment brush to darken that up a bit and return it to a almost black silhouette. The whites and blacks sliders used with the option key to set the black and whites points were very helpful. It really allowed be to push the photo to the farthest points of contrast with out loosing detail or information.

Now to deal with color. Up the vibrance, which helped a lot. I also warmed up the image substantially to give it more of that golden hour look.

I also went in and adjust the oranges to be more red. Again, this gives the photo a more golden look and feel.

So here's a before...

And after...

Quite a change, eh? I feel that the photo is more true to what I was seeing with my eyes. Cameras compress contrast and colors, which kinda sucks for scenes like this. It's up to editing to really bring back those qualities of a photo, and make it look as the photographer saw the image.

See you tomorrow!

Moon Rise

First photo today was taken from the M trail looking out over Bozeman. It was just with my iPhone, and even edited in Snapseed it was pretty spotty. I like it, but not for the blog.

The next attempt was with my last three chocolates. I resisted eating them just for a picture, that actually didn't turn out that bad. I used the macro lens and just a tungsten lamp. Not going into detail, but it was minimal editing, just a little cooling around the outside of the tree. 

But it still wasn't up to snuff. As my last night in Bozeman for the blog, the photo had to be a little something special. 

I happened to glance outside, and what did I see but stars! Andddddd of course one I drove all the out to the west side of the valley it was cloudy. 

But I couldn't leave empty handed, so I drove out to the next little view spot I have. And boy was that a good idea. I happened to arrive just at moon rise, and what a moon rise it was. The valley was so very dark, and the moon so very bright even though it was partially covered by clouds. 

In other words, I had to choose between getting the mood exposed and the ground or clouds around. Maybe, with bracketing I could get the clouds, but that was about it. 

To determine exposure, I just quickly burned though a couple a different shutter speeds. Eventually, I settled on 1/6, ISO100, and f/5.6 for a fairly decent moon exposure. Time was very quickly running out, so I couldn't be exact. 

The moon was already above the horizon, so I only had time to fire off one bracketed sequence. The moon was just too high up, and the clouds were starting to really obscure it. Better luck next time, right? 

In Ps, I had these three exposures. Now how to blend them? I wanted the correct moon exposure, so there would be detail in it. I also wanted the clouds around it that were so amazing in the overexposed one. How to get both?

At first, I tried using luminosity masks to do the heavy lifting. That kinda worked, but I was left with a black halo around the moon. The overexposed moon had more light spill into the clouds, so it actually appeared larger. The masks wouldn't line up that way. 

So maybe then I could mask out the overexposed moon, and do an overlay on the correct moon. With the screen blending mode, the clouds would appear on the black background of the correct moon. But with the overexposed moon bigger, I had to enlarge the correct moon to be even bigger.

This strategy actually worked really well, and the clouds blended nicely with the moon. I just made a layer mask of the exposed moon, and feathered it on the edges to blend with the moon. 

I'll be doing more moon rise shots in the future I think, just all about timing and placement. And being ready...

See you tomorrow!

Eye Me

I had the urge to play with strobes tonight. A while ago, actually a long time ago, I saw a photo by David Hobby with some really interesting lighting to it. He used a couple soft boxes, a grid, and a couple gobos on the light mods.

But when I tried to find that post tonight, I couldn't, which was very sad. I didn't remember quite how the whole thing was set up, so I just had to move on to something else.

Another thing I've wanted to try that David Hobby has done is using feathered light from an umbrella or other large light source directly above the subject. It can have some really awesome, beautiful lighting effect. The shadows are very soft and subtle, with right tones in a full range of contrast. It's very symmetrical lighting, which is usually unnatural and provides an ethereal feel.

But I didn't like the results I was getting with that, so I scrapped it.

Then I started playing with the ring flash a little bit and though, "why not do something with the ring light reflection that happens in eyes?"

There's a lot you could do with that, but I immediately jumped to doing a macro shot of the eye. I've done my fair share of them in the past, but I don't think I've ever done one with a ring light as the main light source.

With the 10x macro adapter on there, I was set to go. My aperture was stopped down to f/16 to get the max depth of field, but not too stopped down that I'd drain my strobes batter and/or get refraction from the aperture blades which would soften the image. What's really cool about shooting with a crop sensor is that you get more depth of field than with a full frame. I want to say it's one stop, but I could be wrong about that, so I'll get back to you....

Focusing is always the challenge with the macro adapter. It's not the sharpest tool in the backpack, so you have to be in the center of the frame with enough light for the camera to focus. I did this by bouncing my Maglite off the ring flash and illuminating my face for the camera. Then it was just a matter of moving fractions of an inch until the camera locked focus.

Now for the fun of post processing. I did pretty much everything with elliptical adjustment masks. Around the out of the eye, I darkened things, upped the contrast, and softened it. I wanted to draw the attention to the eye, not the boring skin around it. By darkening it and softening it, you provide hints to the view to look away for something brighter and sharper.

Which was the eye. To it, I applied brightening, lots of clarity, lots of contrast, and a fair amount of sharpening. This really, really makes the eye pop out at you. Totally unrealistic, but oh so lovely.

Sometimes, it's nice to just have a simple, realistic, powerful photo. A lot of very good photographers take images for their content, not the aesthetic qualities. Yes, the photos look lovely, and are technically very correct, but they're not about the technical side of things. That's great, but there needs to be times when you just go crazy with a photo. Photography doesn't just have to be about powerful images with deep meaning about society and the world. Sometimes, a photo can just be crazy for the sake of being crazy.

That being said, I do not condone the HDR craze of land scape that's going around. If it's done well to bring detail back or make it a little bit more romanticized (like many paintings did in I think the Hudson period? or something like that? I could be horribly wrong with that name), but just pushing the HDR slider is rather shock and awe sometimes. And not in a good way.


But then again, I was doing that 6 months ago, so maybe it's jus the beauty in the eye of the beholder.

See you tomorrow!

Smokey the Cup

Sometimes the most random connections get made in my head. Tonight it was a tin cup and smoke bombs. Two completely unrelated objects, but in my head they go perfectly together. Why not take a picture of smoke coming out of the cup? The smoke bombs are colored, so that would be even better!

Here's a picture of the set up I made. The strobe back lit the cup and smoke, and they were at the lowest power so that they wouldn't over expose everything. I even shot at f/6.8 to darken them down a bit, they were really close to the cup, so there was little light lost due to the inverse square law. As light disperses, it losses intensity over a given area. The closer the light, the brighter it appears.

After I got the camera set up and the focus set, I started playing around with the smoke. At first, I shot at 1/200s to get rid of any ambient light around. The results with the smoke are pretty cool, but I felt like something was missing.

When you light the smoke bombs, it sparks like crazy for a few seconds, then starts the show. I wanted to try to get the sparks caught, and then maybe composite them back into some smoke shots. I was on my last bomb, which luckily had the longest fuse, and so the most sparks. I slowed by shutter down to 1/20s, which in theory should give some cool little light trails. The fuse was lit, and I hurried to start popping exposures.

I got really lucky, and there was one exposure with sparks and smoke in it!

The editing I did in Lr was mostly related to contrast corrections. I added a little bit of clarity to give more definition in the smoke. However, that crushed the blacks too much, so I went into the tone curve and brightened the dark shadows a bit. I also raised the highlights up, as they were a little flat in the smoke.

I also added an adjustment brush around the base of the cup to darken the wood. It was a bit too bright, and it was taking away from the rest of the scene.

See you tomorrow!

Snowy Sunset

My sister and I went up to Hyalite this evening and hiked to the falls up there. Don't know how to spell the name, so I'm not going to attempt it.

In the mountains the sun sets really really early. We were in shadow by about 4pm. But it was pretty warm out, so it wasn't terrible to be outside. The falls were really cool, part of them were frozen, and some were flowing. I didn't realize it at first, but we were standing on the frozen river under the falls! Pretty cool.

I got a photo of the falls just before the last of the light faded, but the last of the light wasn't that great. Next time I'll get up there sooner and get something with more light.

On our way back, I saw the setting sun hitting the clouds above the mountains, with the frozen lake in the foreground. I quickly pulled off the road and took some pictures. I bracketed them, so that I would get the sky and the shadows in the trees. One exposure can't capture everything, so multiple ones at different densities are needed.


I shot at f/11, ISO100 and 1/6s. The important adjustments here were the aperture for sharpness, and the low ISO to get low noise. The shutter speed followed, I just used what ever would give a correct exposure.


I also shot with a polarizer, to darken the sky. I wish I had a red filter, that would have really darkened the sky. A colored filter brightens it's color, and darkens its compliment. So with a blue sky, it would be darkened.

In editing, I first darkened the sky in the dark exposure just to get as much detail out of it as possible. Next, I opened the picture in Ps and created a bunch of luminosity mask selections. The first one I chose was a selection of the highlights, which I then applied to the dark layer. This brought the sky and other over exposed areas back into detail. I had to touch up the areas close to the mountains, to add a bit of glow to the mountain tops.

Next, I selected the shadow areas, and then applied them to a curved layer that brightened them up a little bit. Not too much, but enough to not let them fall into black.

Finally, I made another selection of the highlights, and used it brighten up the snow a little bit. The snow was a little dark for my taste.

I tried to make the photo as realistic to life as I could. I think it's pretty close, maybe a little bit more contrasty. To have it exactly life like though would be rather uninteresting sometimes, so you have to add a little flare.

I finished up in Lr with sharpening and noise reduction. As with yesterday's photo, I adjusted the masking to only include the trees and clouds, since I didn't want the blue sky to have detail. I guess it would be grey sky though, since it's a black and white photo.

See you tomorrow!

Walking Train Set

Enjoy the video!

And of course the picture.




See you tomorrow!

Wait...another??

Tonights photo looks only familiar...it's nearly the same as another photo I did not too long ago. For some reason, I've been acquiring old Canon film cameras. The last photo was a Canon XT-1 or something like that, I don't remember. It used light painting to illuminate the camera in a variety of ways, then composited it all together later.

Today, I found an old Canon TX. Don't know anything about it, but it has a sticky mirror, so I assume that's why it was thrown out. It has no lens, it's just the body, but I thought that might be interesting for a picture! Especially with light painting from the back of the camera to hit the mirror!

First things first, I had to set up the background. Step 1: Aquire black cloth. Step 2: Tape to wall.

Next, set camera. The way I'm light painting doesn't take too long, 5 seconds is usually the shutter I use. f/8 gave me fairly good depth of field, while still being bright enough for my iPhone's LED to light with.

I wanted to highlight the mirror so I focused on that. Normally, I could focus on the logo, and I do with it was more in focus, but the mirror is more important.

There are 6 lighting painting layers in the final composite. Four of them are just me lighting the camera from different angles. First, I'll did a top down. Then, I did a one where I got more of the front lit. Next, I had one from the bottom. Finally, I did one where I made a bunch of light trails behind the camera, and back lit everything.

For the last two layers, I lit the inside of the camera from the front, and by way of the view finder in the back. With the front light layer, I only used the part of it that lit the interior of the camera. Since the interior is recessed into the body, I had to light pretty intensely on the rest of the camera, resulting in over exposure. I didn't want the rest of the body that bright, so I made a layer mask to get rid of it.

To capture the inside light by way of the view finder, I just put the LED right up the view finder. Pretty simple, but with cool results! Light travels both ways in a camera.

The more I look at the picture, so more I wish I had a tilt shift lens to adjust my plane of focus. That way, the whole camera would be crisp. Darn, maybe the future.

I sort of all ready described how I edited. In Ps, I set all the layers to lighten, which makes only the brightest areas of all the layers be shown in the final composite. In other words, if there are three layers of 155, 187, and 230 brightnesses, only the 230 layer will be shown in that spot. This makes awesome results when compositing light trails and such.

For layers that I didn't want to keep the whole part of, I just used layer masks to select the parts I wanted. Simple.

Nothing in Lr, this is pretty much out of the camera! More or less...

See you tomorrow!

Don't Even

It's that time of year again...for the Christmas cards! My house decided to do a house card this year, so we went out a bought ugly sweaters for it. For $11 I got a horrible turtle neck and vest, can't beat that. I often wonder why I live with the people I do...

But anyway! We all got dressed up as ridiculously as possible, and I started setting up lighting.

The first thing I tried was a three light set set. There were two strobes on either side of the group, and a ring light in front of the lens. The idea behind this was to light the whole room and white sheet with the two side lights, and then fill in the people with the ring light.

There were two problems with this. First off, the side lights kept making really terrible shadows on us. The room was really small, so there wasn't really much we could have done about that, and still have had the background all lit up.

So then we did something awesome. We took the white backdrop, hung it to the ceiling, and used it as a gigantic soft box. There were two strobes behind the backdrop, both a fairly high power. That backdrop diffuser became the key light, and the ring light filled in the rest.

Rings lights have magical properties, as you can really tell in this photo. Skin is super soft, and just the very subtle shadowing from the key lights creates some awesome lighting. It's not awesome for just regular portraits, I think it's a bit to....odd. The shadows halos the ring light make are just too much to handle on the mustard yellow walls. Why is that even a good color to paint walls??

But in the spirit of the ugly sweater photo, it works beautifully. Really weird lighting, terrible background photo, and even worse attire.

Editing this, I had to up the exposure quite a bit. Didn't look at the histogram enough, as usual. But no matter. Then I set my black and white points by holding option on the white and black sliders. Other than that, there wasn't any adjustments I did. The photo needed to be a terrible as possible.

Enjoy.

See you tomorrow!