Super Odd Experiment

So today is a short post. Big day tomorrow so I thought I'd try something short and sweet for today.

This is not a photo composite. This is obviously enhanced in post, but the geometry is out of the camera.

The set up for this is super simple. I took my big reflector, which is translucent white, and put it in between myself and the camera. Behind me, I put a bare strobe. The image you see is the shadow cast on the white reflector.

This was inspired by old techniques of tracing profiles of people projected in much the same fashion as I described above. The difference was that candle light was used instead of a strobe. It's also the same principle as shadow puppet shows. The point is, it's a super old technique that still applies today.

I digress, back to the photo at hand. I shot at f2.2, 1/200, and ISO100. Same reasons as always. Except for that I didn't actually need any depth of field because the image was projected on one plane.

Once I got it into Lr, I raised the contrast and clarity a bunch, and also converted the image to grayscale. Other than that I did nothing.

As promised, this is a short post. Any questions, feel free to comment. See you tomorrow.

Multiple Sams

Before I even begin, this photo was directly inspired by Gwyneth Glissmann. She did a photo exactly like this last year, and ever since I saw it, I wanted to try to figure out the technique she used.
Here is her original photo.

It's a very simple photo when you look at it closely. Just original stills with blurred copies next to them. It's such a, dare I say basic, technique, but it work marvelously. And when I say basic, I mean basic to a photographer that knows their way around Ps like Gwynth does. It's a really cool idea with awesome results.

Here's how I made my version.

First I got all my photos that I woulds stitch together. I took them using a 560 with a 1/8 grid pointed down on me. I could have used a bare strobe, but I just really like the look of a grid, and I couldn't copy Gwyneth with everything.

Settings: f2.2, 1/80, ISO100. The 560 was at 1/64 power.

When I got all the photos into Lr, I selected my three favorites. I chose 3 because 7 was too much, Gwyneth used 5, and 1 would be lame. Even numbers don't have as much visual weight or balance that odd numbers do.

I raised the clarity and contrast, and that was it. I used them basically out of camera.

In Ps, I just lined them all up on a canvas 250% as wide as one of the frames. I merged them all, duplicated it, and applied motion blur to that new layer. Finally, I put that blurred layer under the crisp photos which I then proceeded to set to lighten.

All done. Here's what it looks like.

Even thought it's the same technique, it has a very different feel. Comparing the two, I actually prefer the five frames in Gwyneth's than the three in mine. The extra negative space at the bottom of her's works really well too. And obviously, she had a better model than me. I am wondering why one of her blurs is on the left side of the figure instead of the right like all the others.

Anyway, I accomplished what I set out to do and I'm happy with the results. See you tomorrow and thank you Gwyneth for the idea!

Night Photography

Contrary to every photo I've taken up to this point, this one took exactly 5 minutes to shoot and 5 minutes to edit.

Crazy right?

I expected to be shooting for a lot longer. I went out to Peat's Hill, a park near campus, and didn't really know what I wanted to shoot. I thought maybe stars, but there were clouds so I ruled that out. Then I remembered this little bench that over looks the northeast side of town and the mountain. I set up the tripod, and started shooting. I initial test shot was way over exposed, my second a little better, and my third was a bit underexposed. It was at that point that I'd just done a bracketed group of shots, and you know what that means...HDR!

Since I was on a trip pod and using a remote, I didn't have any camera movement between frames. So even though they were 30 sec exposers, the camera held still.

When I got into Lr, I used Photomatix Pro to composite the frames into a an HDR. I did a little tweaking back in Lr on clarity and noise reduction, then sent it and my underexposed frame into Ps. I set the underexposed layer to screen, then overlayed it on the HDR. I painted out everything except for myself and the lights around my head from that top layer. The goal of this was to strengthen myself as the subject of the photo.

Note's on night photography.
1. USE A TRIPOD. unless you like incredibly blurry photos, use one.
2. OR use strobes to freeze your subject. This only works with shorter shutter speeds of say...6 seconds or less. any more and the subject fades unless the background is black.
3. Use a low aperture, high(er) ISO and long shutter speeds. but you knew all that, right?
4. Experiment with painting with light. It's incredibly hard to mess up, so just go crazy!
5. Use a remote shutter. It helps, trust me.
6. Know where your gear is so you don't step on it.
7. Get a head lamp.
8. Cold decreases battery life, but makes low noise. I can push 3200 in the cold and take useable photos where 1600 is about the max in the heat.
9. Use a flash light on you subject to focus in Livemode. Auto focus obviously doesn't work.
10. Don't worry about walking in front of the camera, you won't reflect enough light to show up unless you stay still for more than 1/30 of the exposer time.

Anyway, here's the photo for tonight!

If you isn't already guess, the lights around my head are from my iPhone. I used it to illuminate myself and the bench. If you look close, you can see my right arm is raised and holding the light. The reason my arm is faint is because it's moving around to get the light around to illuminate everything. I prefer to use a Maglite as it's way more powerful, but iPhones work.

Camera setting were.... 30 seconds. ISO100, f5.6. The town was so bright I didn't have to bump the ISO at all. There for, I got really low noise and a crisper image. The long exposer does introduce a lot of noise on its own, but far, far less than if I had to go to ISO1600, per se.

That's all for tonight! See you tomorrow.

Clam Shell Lighting

What is clam shell lighting? Sounds kind of...fishy.

Pardon my lame pun. I'm in a hurry here.

Clam shell lighting is a technique where you use two umbrellas to like a subject, and you position the umbrellas like a clam shell. The shell opens toward the subject. The advantage to this is that you can have very very even lighting on the subject and control the strength of shadows on the face by changing the exposer levels on the strobes in the umbrellas.

For my set up, I used two 560s at 1/128th power for the lower umbrella, and 1/64 for the upper.

Camera setting were f1.4, 1/200, and ISO100. Wanted shallow depth of field for a soft image and no ambient light leaks.

Here's the results.

In Lr, I upped enhanced the eyes with my normal technique, and brought down the clarity across the board. This lightened things and made it look really soft. Other than that this is what the lighting looks like out of the camera. 

This is a really short post, more tomorrow. See you then. 

What Time is it?

I had to get a watch the other week for my EMT class. We have to have one to take pulses and respiratory rates and what not. I didn't want to buy anything fancy, so I just went to Target and figured I'd pick up a cheap one. As it turned out, I did pick up a cheap one, but one I actually liked. It's called the Forester, which is of course a marketing ploy, but it's very earthy and very simple. It's slim and light, not giant and bulky like a lot of watches these days. 

Since I got it, I've wanted to do a photo with it. I've had it for a couple of weeks, but just haven't gotten around to it yet. Until today. 

My initial attempt at lighting it failed miserably. I thought that I could light up two pieces of white computer paper on either side of the watch and that would act like a mini photo studio. Wrong. Just made ugly light and lit everything very very evenly and boring. Like just shooting the available light from a ceiling fixture. Not that great. 

Then I remembered how I shot my 35mm camera last week. With the gridded 560 on one side and the soft box on the other. I set that up again, and it worked like a charm. I had to do a little tweaking, but it's pretty similar. Here's a pic for ya...

As you may see, there are some differences that the set up for the camera. The soft box is a lot closer, for one. I wanted it to be this close in order for it to really wrap light around the watch. Being so big compared to the watch, the light would come from a wide variety of angles, so it would completely light the face and fill in some of the ugly shadows left by the other light. Speaking of the other light, I had this one set down instead of acting like a spot light. Mainly this is to get come highlighting on the side of the watch instead of using it as a spot light. 

If you look at the side of the watches, there's some really cool specular highlights in the plastic. None in the glass because the angle of incidence and reflection did not intercept with the camera.

Camera setting for this were, f5, ISO100, and 1/80. The aperture was at f5 for two reasons why you'd stop down: depth of field, and to make it darker. With the flashes this close, even at minimum power they are just too much. 

In Lr, I raised the clarity, and then to compensate for that I bumped the shadows and blacks a bit. I also raised the saturation overall, and raised it a lot in the watch face itself to bring out some of that glow in the dark green. To finish it off, I added a bit of a vignette to draw focus to the watch. 

I find it very interesting thinking about the concept of capturing this specific moment in time. You can see exactly when I took this photo. The date and time down to the second. Looking back on this at the end of the year will be down memory lane for sure. It's the same for every photo really, capturing that single moment in time. It will never exist again by every law of physics, yet you can hold it in your hands or on a screen and recall it again and again. Is that actually recreating the past in the same way as a memory does, or is it completely different? And since the shutter speed is not actually instantaneous, are you capturing a single moment, or and infinite number of moments? One of my professors lectured that photography, and film as well, can not actually capture motion or time. They capture single moments and nothing else. I beg to differ. Like I said, the shutter speed dictates how long light is let to the sensor, therefor it dictates how much time is recorded. You are not capturing a single moment, but a length of time. This is very obvious when you have too slow a shutter speed to capture moving subjects. You can see where they have been, and where they went. You can see the motion. However, we then have to ask, what is motion? Is it physical moment, or the path an object takes in space? Depending on how we define motion affects whether or not cameras capture movement. And not even how we define the word "motion," it's how we define the concept of motion. Through verbal trickery one could prove one or both theories false, but one can not twist the very essence and concept of part of the physical nature of the universe to their will. 

End random rant...

See you tomorrow. 

Zen college student

Sam is so focused on studying the rules and regulations of the dorm that he actually levitates.

Just kidding, I hung him by wires from the ceiling.

Also kidding. I used my jedi powers.

a.k.a Photoshop...

This is a two part photo. The first photo is of Sam sitting on a table. This is the most common way to do levitation photos. You have you subject on some raised platform and then mask that out later.

To get this, I used two lights. One was a 560 up and to the left. It was gridded with a 1/8th grid, and set to 1/64 power. This light is the main light, and makes the spotlight effect on him. Technically though, the key light in this is the soft box just off to the left. This one filled in the shadows and made Sam recognizable. It also spilled light on the wall behind which made it easier to mask Sam out later. The combination of a hard light (gridded 560) and the soft light (soft box) does wonders on his jacker and shoes. Really brings out the texture and colors of it. 

The next picture I took was just of the background. This included the spot of light on the ground and also the black of the background. I wanted the background to be completely black with only the spot of light on the ground. 

So there's what that looks like. Pretty simple.

Now to composite them. Very simple for this actually. All I had to do was to select Sam out from the first picture, and make that selection a layer mask. The selection was a little messy as it was quick, so I went back in and cleaned it up a bit with a brush. 

At this point it look pretty good. I raised the whites, clarity, and vibrance a bit to give the coat and whatnot more pop. But it still was missing something. It looked too...photoshopped. Like I'd just taken him and stuck him on another picture. The edges where too prefect, the sale too exactly. There wasn't that sense of blur or blending like you get in real life.

To fix this, I duplicated the layer of Sam, then put a massive blur on it. This did two things. It made all the colors blend together, and more importantly it expanded the edges. Essentially I'd just made a glow around Sam. Though this isn't photorealistic at all, it added at little bit of something that was missing to me.

Pretty simple photo in all. Bit of Ps work but not too much on the whole. 

oh and camera setting were the usual. f2.2, ISO100, 1/200. Nothing new. 

See you tomorrow. 

Stuck in a Blizzard

Todays post is a combination of lighting, as well as Photoshop, tips.

I'm just going to jump right into it. I'll show you the finished product and go through it set by step. 

Before I did anything, I had to get a picture of me with all that gear on. Just taking a picture with normal light wouldn't fit right with the background. There had to be simulation of the lighting you would find in a blizzard or on a windy, sunny, cold day. I went with the latter, and decided to make it super sunny out. Maybe all that snow flying around could be from high winds or something, cause if it was snowing then there would be super flat lighting. 

Anyway, how to recreate the sun and the sun on snow. We know that sun makes hard shadows, but snow acts a reflector and fills shadows in. So how do you make that lighting with strobes? The way I did it was to put a bare strobe up and above my right shoulder and a umbrella down and to my left. The strobe, a 560, up high as the same as the sun. Hard light and very intense. The umbrella, also a 560, was the bounced back light off of the snow. Together they recreate the lighting concisions of a sunny day out in snowy Montana. Not perfect, but close. To finish it off,  I added the mini light the background to nuke everything and make a nice rim light. This was in part to make the background easy to cut out later, but also get some good highlights around me. 

Camera settings were f2.2, ISO100, and 1/200. Bare 560 at 1/64, umbrella at 1/128, and mini light at full nuke settings as always. 

I'm not going to be able to explain everything that I did in Ps, but I'll try to cover all the problems/solutions/techniques I use to blend. 

First thing I was cut myself off from the background. Since it was all white, I could simply select the white and hit delete. Easy as cake, or is it pie? Piece of pie, err cake? Always forget the saying... ANYWHO

Next was to add the background in. I found one online that was pretty close to what I needed. For this you don't need something detailed. Just a snowy background with general shapes to give some depth and steadiness to the image. Something to root the picture in space. I added my selected picture in behind me, and adjusted the levels of it to really blow it out. Like I just said, it's not too important. 

Now to get rid of the reflection in my goggles. There was a pesky reflection of my umbrella in them, so I decided to just repaint a new lens. I started with white, then added a gradient, orange tint, and massively raised the contrast on that. I repeated this again to get more of that shiny, reflective quality lenses have. Then I added some shadows in around the edges of the lens to give it depth. Finally, I took my eyes from another picture, and overlaid them to the painted lens. This gave the lens more black and depth, and it also made it blend more with the image. A reflective lens by it's self looks really fake, but if you can see through it, it makes it a little better. 

It needs to be snowing, right? Making snow is almost exactly like making rain from my last Ps adventure. Add a layer of noise, add some blur (more for the snow), add some motion blur, and then play with the levels to make it look like snow. Adding noise makes wayyyy too much "snow," and so you have to raise the contrast a lot to cut out all the unneeded flakes. I repeated this whole process three times, each time making the flakes a different size and density to add some depth to it. 

In a nutshell, that's how I made this. Obviously there was a lot more involved, but sadly I do not have the time to write everything out, nor would that be that helpful as it's hard to follow steps in writing with no visual aid. Maybe I'll try to get some screen recordings going next time...ideas ideas....

See you tomorrow.

Books

I like to read. Tonight, I decided to take a photo of a book. Over Christmas break I spent as much time reading as I did taking photos. 

Taking this photo was a bit challenging. I really should have looked up the best way to light a reflective surface like a book jacket, but I wanted to figure it out myself. 

The book jacket is very reflective. Very very reflective. I couldn't use a small light source because I would get hard, ugly shadows for one, and there would be small, intense highlights. So a big light source it is. Which makes big specular highlights. As in the entire book. This has the same effect as putting a layer of white over the book in Ps and turning the opacity to 50%. It washes out all the colors and destroyed the contrast. 

I had to figure out how to get rid of that silly highlight. What I found worked the best was to have a bare 560 shooting across the book and up at a big reflector. The reflector bounced light back at the book at an angle that wouldn't be seen in the camera. In other words, it still lit the book, but only by the texture of the book reflecting light and not by the actual reflector. If that made any sense. It's the same principle as tilting your phone in the sun so that you don't get a reflection of the sky. The angle of incidence and reflection does not intersect with the lens position. 

Despite getting the specular highlight out of the way as much as possible, it was still there to some degree.  Which mean some work in Lr.

First thing I did was actually to raise the highlights and whites. Seems the wrong thing to do, but it ensured adequate contrast on that part of the tonal range. 

Quick note, the goal here is to make the book jacket look like it does in Ps when it was first designed, not as it does in real life. We all know that things look better on the screen then they do in physical form, and the point of this is to make the book look appealing to buy. 

Continuing with Lr adjustments, I added a gradient adjustment to each side of the image to brighten up the white background just a bit and make the book stand out more. 

I then went a painted over the black parts on the cover to make sure they were really black and not a shade of grey. 

Lastly, I adjusted the colors on the book (red) to be more orange, as this is the real cover of the book. In the original photo it looked more red than it should be. 

The camera setting were f4, 1/200, and ISO200. The 560 was set to 1/64+ .3. 

Aperture was at f4 so that I would get a little bit more sharpness than at a lower aperture, shutter was that high to kill ambient light, and the ISO was there so that I could use a lower power setting on the 560. The stopped down aperture,  about one stop down from 2.2, killed one stop of light from the 560, so I had to raise the ISO one stop to compensate. Remember, shutter doesn't nothing to light from a strobe unless it's over the sync speed. 

Now that's you're done reading this, go read a book. 

See you tomorrow. 

Retouching

The light on this speaker always catches my eye. It light by reflection off of some wood closet door, so there's a warm, soft feel to it. Plus just lovely highlights.

I decided that today will be a walk through of how I approach a photo like this. I know that I want to increase the contrast, crop it, and try to bring gout some of those supple greens and blues in the highlights.

First things first, cropping. This photo to very obviously frames and shot poorly. It's slated and there's lose bits of stuff on the edges. I want to very tight, straight composition. Using just the crop tool in Lr, I did this.

 Much better, it's tight and self contained very nicely. But, the "DUAL PORTS" lettering is cut in half. That has to go.

 Using the heal brush, I painted out those letters. It was much easier than I expected, usually I have to do a bunch of clean up with the stamp tool but this was perfect. Even got the tones right.

Next step is to add an adjustment layer that will bring out the shadows in the center speaker, while still keeping the highlights and blacks. To do this without affecting the rest of the image, you apply a layer mask around just the center speaker. That way, the levels adjustment only affects that one area.

On to Ps and dodging and burning. If you don't know what that is, it means to lighten certain areas (dodging) and to darken certain areas (burning). I did this across the whole image, first dodging the highlights, then going back and burning the shadows. This creates a hard light effect, which I think really suits the metallic nature of the speaker. First you have to make a new layer and fill it with 50% grey. Then change this layer to overlay blend mode, which will make it "invisible." Overlay essentially make the layer below the layer set to overlay darker where there is dark in the overlay layer, and light where there is light in the overlay layer. Therefor, if we dodge and burn this layer, we can work non destructively on our original image. Plus we can layer multiple layers in case we aren't sure a certain effect will work. I use 10% exposure on both dodge and burn brushes so I don't apply something too quickly. I stopped after one round, then toggled the layer on and off to check how the adjustment affected the image.

After another round of going into more detail around the bolts and tiny highlights. It's a very supple change technically but it does a lot visually.

So here's where major stuff happened. I brought the image back into Lr, and did a few things. First, I did a split tone. The shadows got blue and the highlights got orange. Next, I used the eye dropper for white balance, and selected a tone out of the top of that strong highlight off to the left. This made the photo a lot more "metallic" and made the colors in the highlights pop more. To add to this, I raised the vibrance a bit.

Final step is to reduce noise. You can see in the image above this last one, there is a lot of green artifacts in the center speaker. This is no bueno. Using the built in noise reduction in Lr, I cleaned all that up and sharpened it a bit.

There obviously a lot more you could do to this photo, and to any photo in general. There's no right way to edit and there's no correct look for each photo. Another photographer might have added lens flares and lights leaks everywhere, and other might have made it a monochromatic, high contrast negative image (which would be sick IMO). But for today, I was just going for enhancement of the image while still keeping it semi-realistic. Maybe I'll do another edit of it later, but for now this is the way I wanted it.

See you tomorrow.

Snow Flurry With Madison

One thing to note, Blogger messed this photo up. To view the photo accurately, look at it here.

It finally snowed in Bozeman today. After almost a month of warm temperatures and basically all the snow turning to mush, there's fresh snow!

I had to shot in it of course. Snow is such a lovely reflector, and when that's combined with a cloudy day you get the softest, most beautiful light in the natural world.

Shooting in snow poses one big problem. Exposure. The reading your camera takes off the snow will be way off. This is because snow is white, and the camera doesn't know this. When taking a meter reading, the camera tries to makes the average value in the scene to be medium grey. So if all that is in the frame is snow...well you can see the problem.

When any kind of priority or automatic mode, you're going to come out with very dark pictures. The snow will be a grey and bleh. You're subject will be dark and deathly looking. We don't want that.

To correct this, there are two methods. The first is too shoot with exposure compensation. This tells your camera to over expose the scene an amount determined by you. Usually you can get away with this in a pinch but I wouldn't bet on it. The easiest and most reliable way to shoot in snow is just go manual. With DSLR's today, you can check your exposure as many times you want until you have it exactly right. Why fight the little mind of the camera when you could just use your own?

For today, it was a cloudy day and snowing pretty hard. So despite the greyness of the sky, light was reflecting everywhere and it was actually pretty bright. I took an initial reading off the meter in my camera, and then fiddled with the setting from there. The camera usually gets you pretty close to the right exposure.

I like to shoot at wide apertures, and today I chose f2.2. Lower than that can it's hard to focus with a moving subject, and any higher it just have too much background.

At ISO100, I ended up using a shutter speed of 1/400. This was exposed for the subjects face, not the background.

One thing to note, Blogger messed this photo up. To view the photo accurately, look at it here. The eye's aren't actually black..I promise. 

In Lr I did quite a bit. Mainly I adjusted clarity and saturation in the hair. And of course the eyes. I over do the eyes for most people, but it's my photo so why make it if you don't like it? 

I softened her skin and got rid of some of the shadows. I also made her lips more colorful. All of these adjustments are really basic. 

So there you have it. A photo taken with all natural light, and one that I actually retouched to improve skin quality, lips, etc. I don't usually do that much, but since today was already different, why not? 

See you tomorrow. 

Looking at the Past

This is my 35mm camera I picked up last semester in preparation for all the analog shooting I'd be doing for class. I got a good deal on it and it has all bells and whistles. It's a perfect camera except for one thing....it doesn't work in the cold. So that basically renders it useless in Montana where the average temperature at the end of November was around -10.

It's been sitting on my floor all winter as I am now using my dad's old Nikon EM, which is fabulous by the way.

It's really a beautiful camera though. The lines, the material, even the lens just looks amazing. So why take of photo of it!

My first approach to this was to use a single light, gridded, shining down on the camera from above. For some reason I just love grids right now, something about that spotlight effect.

Anywho, just the grid didn't work out so well. I only illuminated on side of the camera, and everything fell into really ugly shadow. It looked like something taken with an on camera flash. Bleh.

So I added in some fill light with a soft box off to the right. This light illuminated the right side of the camera and then filled in the dense shadows on the left. With a little more tweaking I came up with this.

I'm really pleased with how this turned out.  This is the untouched, in camera photo that I took. There's zero adjustments or tweaking to this. 100% what you would see in real life if the strobes were consistent lights.

You can see where the gridded strobe (a 560 at 1/64) is the key light and where the 560 (at 1/128) in the soft box takes over that role. It's actually right over the lens that the two lights switch roles.

So why use a soft box as the other light source and not just a bare light or an umbrella? Well, using a bare light would be the same problem as using the grid. It's a hard light source and it would just look like crap. The nice specular highlight on the camera is coming from the big lit area of the soft box. There's wouldn't be any of that with a bare light. Or with a umbrella. Well technically that's a lie, there would be specular highlights for both, but they would be of different quality. The bare light would be small and punch, while the umbrellas would be HUGE, maybe so huge you wouldn't be able to see the difference between the highlight and transition area. The soft box strikes a nice balance between the two, it has a strong highlight, but not too strong.

Another reason not to use an umbrella is that it would ruin that spotlight effect created by the grid. So it'd defeat the purpose of using a grid in the first place.

On to Lr adjustments now. As you can see, the photo looks pretty good as it is. But it's still lacking that punch. It's a bit flat, and colorless. It's very soft and dull really.

The first adjustment I added was to brighten the shadow, and darken the blacks. This effectively go more detail into the shadows while still maintaining the richness of the blacks. I also upped the clarity, which made the highlights and black more intense and richer. It adds that pop.

On to color. First things first, raise the vibrance. Those colors in the lens are really cool and I wanted to highlight them.

Then to split toning. I toned the shadows a warm, orange color, and tinted the highlights blue. These are two complimentary (I think?) colors, so they naturally look good together. Good may be the wrong word, their conflict inflicts interest subconsciously and conscious in the viewer. It's another way to make the photo pop out.

Finally, I added a little vignette.

Camera setting were: 1/60, f5(for depth of field), and ISO100. I've already mentioned the strobes power levels but they were 1/64 for the gridded and 1/128 for the soft box.

There you have it. See you tomorrow.

Another Photoshop Thing

As you can see, this is not one of my usual posts.

This started off as a normal photo. It was going to be me sitting in a pool of light with the umbrella, but then I had another idea and went for it.

This is a compilation of four photos and some filters. Firstly, there's the photo of myself with the umbrella. Pretty straight forward, strobe aimed down at me and that's it. Then there's the ground I'm on, the mountains, and the night sky. They are all separate photos stitched together.

To combine the mountains and the ground, I made a layer mask and made a gradient from white to black from the mountains to about the middle of the ground. if you look closely you can tell where the foreground pictures melds into the background picture with the mountain. To add the sky in, I selected the sky that came from the mountains, deleted it, and then added in one of my own pictures. Nothing fancy at all.

Now to add me to it. The first hurtle was the scale. I still think I'm a little small for where I am, but I'm in a time crunch so oh well. Once I put myself in place I had to paint in a shadow behind me. I did this by burning the ground layer with darkened it like a shadow would. I also burned and dodge myself in order to make a harder light effect to go with the land scape.

Speaking of lighting, I added a curves layer that raised the contrast a lot, and also added a cooling filter to make it look like night. (ish) the green/yellow don't work right. But again, it's late.

So next was the rain. Step 1. create noise. step 2. apply motion blur. step 3. adjust curves to add A LOT more contrast and make it look more like rain. step 4. fix the perspective so it's not coming straight down.

The final touch I did was to duplicate everything, merge it all, then change that layer to hard light blending mode. I make a circular gradient layer mask to make a vignette effect.

This was a really quick and dirty composite, mainly for me to relearn a lot of photo shop stuff I knew from last year. It's been a while since I've composited things. Expect some more post like this in the future as I get back into it more. That, or some heavily remastered photos.

Either way, I'll see you tomorrow with something brand new.

Aura

The first photo I did for tonight I really didn't like, so I decided to make a little photo shop piece. I did use photos composited to create this, so it is't all fake.

So here it is. Nothing too fantastic. It's pretty simple as far as it's parts go. There me sitting (one photo I took), the cliff (pulled from google), the auto (painted) and the stars.

To get the photo of me sitting, I took a photo of me sitting at the edge of a table. I selected myself in Ps and then painted back in the selection to make me a silhouette. I used the same technique for the cliff.

The stars are a picture I took last summer, set to screen and put over a gradient of blue to red.

The aura was the tricky part. I used an old brush preset that generated clouds to make some clouds, then applied a motion blur filter, spherize, and wave filter. These gave it the stretch out, wavy, atmospheric look.

This is really just a quick post because I have a ton of reading to get caught up on. I'll do something more in depth tomorrow I hope. See you then.

Raining Light

I've seen this technique done a few times in the past. It's kind of a cool use of an umbrella. Finally I've got around to doing it.

Set up is really simple, half it is what you see in the photo. What you don't see in the picture is the snooted strobe just off to the left. It's shooting light up into the umbrella. It's a super simple set up.

The strobe (a 560 at 1/4) is snooted so that a minimal of hard light hits Madison. I wanted the light to be a soft of possible, so all the light would have to come from the umbrella. Light from the strobe is from such a small light source, it casts hard shadows and doesn't look great.

But the umbrella casts beautiful light. Especially being so close to her. She is literally get wrapped up in beautiful, soft, glowing light. You can see how the light around her falls off so gradually.

There is some lighting on here arm and on the camera from the strobe. But that's okay. The camera is shielding her face from the hard light, so while the hard light enhances the camera and its hard angles, her faces is lit by the soft light of the umbrella.

Camera settings are 1/200, 2.2, ISO 100. 50mm on a 7D. No significant comments. 

In Lr I painted over her with a brush that upped the clarity to bring of the highlights and textures more, as well as a brush that upped the saturation. I did not paint over her face, but instead raised the highlights on her cheek bones. That's all I did. This is straight out of the camera for the most part. 

Let's talk about light for a second. Soft light and hard light. When to use one opposed to the other? The norm is to use soft light to make things look soft, romantic, beautiful, ect. It gets rid of sharp angles by filling in shadows. It also makes things look smoother because it fills in shadows that would give away the small inconsistencies in a texture. This is why almost all photo shoots use soft light for models. It makes then look like they have better skin and what not.  

As far as hard light goes, use it to make things look sharp, defined, or textured. It's used to cast nice shadows because, as the name implies, it casts hard, sharp shadows. 

How you use light is really depended on the photo you are taking and how you want to portray something. I personally like soft light for almost everything. The times I use hard light is when I want to cast shadows, show a harshness in a subject, imitate the sun, or get a nice texture. As you play with light, you'll get a feel for what quality of light to use for different situations. And don't forget its either or. You can mix two light qualities quite easily and effectively. Use hard light to get good highlights and use a soft light as a fill to lighten up the shadows, for example. There are infinite combinations of ways to use light.

That's it for now, see you tomorrow.

Super Creepy Weird Idea

Today's photo is...different. I really didn't know what I wanted to shoot, so I was just messing around with lights and came up with something a bit off.

I've been wanting to do a top lit photo for a while. I've always been attracted to little pools of light places. It's kinda like a moth to a street light. 

I got this thing called a speed grid a few weeks ago. Basically, it's a honeycomb that you shoot a strobe through. The science behind it is super simple actually, but would take longer than I have to explain in full. In essence, a speed grid constricts the light, much like a snoot, but instead of leaving a hard edge it makes a really nice gradient to shadow. 

I think I've talked about this before.

I wanted to use a grid as an overhead spot light, so to speak. It would shine down on me, so I'd be the only thing illuminated in darkness. Surprisingly, it worked about perfectly on the first try. It was almost too easy. The chair was lit beautifully and you could make out my form but nothing of my face or features. Perfect creeper lighting. 

Which got me thinking. How could I make this super creepy with the one light I had left? (mini light doesn't count cause that thing is a Nuke)

I came up with this. I would illuminate just my face with a snooted strobe. Just the strobe would be too bright, even at minimum power, so I'd have to find someway to tone it down. Why not use a dark purple gel? I'm trying to make this creepy so why not color my face purple? And again, it worked almost perfectly on the first try. I had to bring the strobe closer to me to make it a bit more constrained and bright.

End results looks as follows

 It's kinda a weird photo, I'll admit. But this was an exercise in lighting, not trying to make myself look good. 

Is it just me or does it look like I have a floating chair?

As I mentioned before, there are two strobes for this. One above me with a 1/8 grid and one just to my right and at head height. The second one is snooted and gelled purple. Both are at 1/128 power. Wait, that's a like. The gridded 560 is at 1/64/ I'm amazed at how powerful those 560s are. Minimum power and they are too bright most of the time.

In Lr I really didn't do anything. I upped the clarity in my hair and raised the highlights just a bit. Other than that, this is what it actually looked like in the real world. 

Camera settings are: f2.2 (for minimal use of power on the strobes, 1/80 (for ambient light killing powers) ISO100 (for low noise) 

50mm on a 7D...blah blah its my usual set up.

On thing I haven't talked about is why I use ISO100 and not 200 or 400. I could be using a higher ISO and then stop down the aperture and still have the same exposer, but I don't. Even on the 7D, a semi-pro model, there is noise that becomes very apparent in darker areas. If you were to view this at 100%, you would see A LOT of noise in my shirt and shorts. and I was only at ISO100. Granted, this is before any noise reduction, but still. I try to never shoot at high ISOs unless its absolutely necessary and/or it's very bright out. Noise isn't as apparent in light areas. Or when it's cold out. A cold sensor and camera will produce less noise than a hot one. Heat is of course just more energy, and this energy introduces more noise when the computer in the camera reads the sensor data. So rule of thumb, shoot low ISO and in the cold to get the best results. Unless you have say a 5DmkIII. Then you can shoot all day long at 3200 have people thinking you're shooting at 100. 

If only I had $3500.... 

Well I gotta get back to studying common respiratory illnesses and how to treat them. See you tomorrow.

Reflection Portrait

You might be wondering why I've title this post "Reflection Portrait." No, this isn't a portrait reflection my self image back at the camera, dazzling all that look upon it. Yuck.

This is a portrait lit by reflection. The key light for this was a reflection. I've played around with this stuff before for macro shots, and it's turned out really well. Big reflection on a big (surface area wise) surface gives really nice, soft light. I use it all the time for portraits using natural light, I've even bounced strobes off of reflectors as light sources. I even mimicked the sun with a strobe and then mimicked the snow with a reflector.

Side note: Why didn't I just just the actual sun and the actual snow? Well, because I wanted more pop in my sun and the snow didn't throw the right, or enough, light back. Plus we were in the shade...

Anyway, today I wanted to use this technique again, but make it super simple. No mimicking suns or using multiple walls and other lights as rim lights this time. Just one strobe and one reflector. and maybe a snoot...

If you didn't know, a snoot is a light restrictor. It's a tube (sometimes) that goes on the end of the strobe that basically turns it into a spot light. It's useful if you want to light only a tiny area from a distance.

I'll show you the end result first and then you can see the set up. Try to figure out the set up from the first photo...

and here's the basic set up

So obviously the background is different, and I'm looking in a different direction, but essentially the set up is the same. You can sorta see the strobe in the lower left corner. What you see there is the connection between the snoot and the strobe. The snoot is shooting the light up at me but mostly at the white mat board in my hand. The light is then reflected back at me. The warm glow on my face is caused by spill from the snoot. The snoot is made from card board, which is a warm tone, so it warms the light, hence the warm glow on my face. The light reflected off the white mat board is turned...you guessed it...white. Theoretically it's still tinted warm, but it's unnoticeable.

Super simple set up, awesome results.

For the camera settings, f2.2, ISO100, 1/200. 50mm lens on 7D. Was going for a shallow depth of field and the ability to run super low power settings on the strobe. 1/200 to get rid of ambient light as best I could.

In Lr, I did my normal routine. Enhance the eyes with saturation, clarity, and highlight boost. Boost all the highlights and shadows a bit too for this one. I boosted the clarity in my hair for some golden glow. Clarity lightens highlights by the way. I think that's about all I did. The photo ended up being pretty specially flat sadly, so I wouldn't call it a masterpiece. This was about experimentation for the most part anyway. It would be good for laying in Photoshop though....

On to a bit of theory. Reflection is, I think, one of the best ways to light something. For one, if you use the environment you're in, you get the natural tones so it looks more realistic to the viewer and you don't point and say, look! That was made in a studio. Lately I've been wanting to do more with natural light. I haven't for a long time, and using strobes to recreate certain natural lights got me thinking. If this light already exists in nature, why do we even care to recreate it if it takes more work? The point I'm trying to get at is there has to be a balance. Rarely is there a photo taken with just natural light or just artificial light that looks perfect, so to speak. You don't get the drama with natural light as easily as if you create the light yourself, but creating light adds too much drama and looses the beauty that natural light has. There's exceptions to this of course, there's absolutely no absolutes in photography. As a general rule of thumb though, the best photos I've seen combine natural light with artificial light. The basis is formed by natural light, and artificial lights are added to supplement and create that dramatic or romantic (not the kiss kiss kind of romantic, the other kind) feel that photographers see in there mind. This artificial light can exist in reality, or in post production in photoshop. So up and comer photographers, take note, be diverse. Don't go one direction and think its the only way. Don't be scared to try new things and create the world you see.

So enough of the rant, see you tomorrow.

Another Eye

Sticking with the gray scale theme from yesterday, I went with a quick macro eye shot for today. This was mainly an experiment as to how well a soft box works up close on something as dynamic as a face.

Here's what it looked like...

Beautiful lighting as it turns out. The soft box was held about 5 inches from my face, so the light source is quite large relative to the subject. See how beautifully the transition areas are between the shadows and true value of the face. You can't even tell where the shadow ends and the true values begin! In addition to being pretty darn sharp, the specular highlight on the eye is really unique. I've never seen a highlight like that that actually shows the texture of the surface of the eye. The eye apparently isn't as smooth as I thought it was, you can see tiny bumps and inconsistencies on the surface.

I barely edited this one. I converted it to gray scale using a green filter. Essentially, this means that tones close to green get brighter, and the compliments of green get darker. Using this filter lightened the greens in my eye while toning most everything else down a bit.

I did a bit of iris enhancement since its such a macro shot. Sharpening and clarity were pretty much the extent of that work.

Other than the conversion and spot adjustment, I didn't do anything to this. It's pretty much straight out of the camera.

Speaking of the camera, I shot at 1/60, f13, and ISO200. Reason for the shutter speed was to grab of bit of ambient light to provide a base exposer and a little more smoothness as a fill. I used f13 to get nice depth of field on the eye while still keeping other parts of the face a little soft. Don't was the attention wandering too much. ISO200 because my batteries in the strobe are almost dead so I have to shoot at minimal power. i.e 1/64 power on the 560.

Lets talk about focus. At this macro distance, it's insanely hard to focus the camera on yourself. Auto focus basically stops working (don't know why, maybe light issues or an old lens. I'm using my old 18-55), so you have to manual focus and then play a guessing game at how far away the camera should be to your face. For this photo, I just started with the camera close to my face and slowly moved it back while hamming the shutter. A bit of spray and pray, but it gets the job done. The recycle time on the 560 was very short because technically it can fire 64 times before depleting the capacitor. At least that's my understanding. I'll have to look into that as the fraction might go back to analog photography when strobe power settings were based off apertures they were to be used with. I don't know if that system has changed over the years.

All for now, see you tomorrow. Hint, some portraits of someone other than me are hopefully coming soon....

Totally Different

I intended to do another long, drawn out, portrait photo today. With a long explanation on lighting or something.

but it didn't turn out that way.

I took pictures of a potted plant.

I haven't done a photo like this in a really long time. I've done macros recently, but those where uber sharp, subject specific photos. This is something completely different. 

As I was setting up for a portrait, I had to move around some furniture, and that's when I saw a little potted plant just sitting there. There aren't a lot of plants in my dorm, so this was a special plant. Miracle it is still alive.

So anyway, I just pulled the umbrella over and slapped a 10x macro filter on. At 1/128 power, the 560 in the umbrella was the perfect exposer. The macro filter made for a really soft and distorted effect, which I thought not only looked cool, but embodied the organic nature of the plant. 

I was shooting at f1.4, 1/125, and ISO100.  f1.4 gives the super soft focus because 1. it already has super shallow depth of field and 2. the macro filter basically eats focus sharpness alive. 

Here's the final result. 

It's not the best photo in the world in any sense. It's a bit dark, there's no whites, and it's really noisy and soft. But that's exactly how I wanted it. Lately, as with my "Imperfection" post, I've been fascinated with the imperfect and just down right wrong things. Many people tend to over look the ugly and ordinary, instead of stopping and taking a closer look. 

This photo is my expression of taking something that people normally don't even notice, much less take a closer look. It's a plant stuck in a artificial environment filled with unruly college boys and yet it's still alive and thriving. It's not that attractive of a plant either, just a little nubby thing in a plastic pot you'd buy for 5 cents at Home Depot. 

Taking all this into account, the soft focus, horrible noise, and lack of rich contrast serve to capture the plant as I see it. 

Short post today, gotta a lot of reading and emails to answer...so see you tomorrow. 

Two Face

This post is about color and how it can affect a photo.

So we all know that films that have dark subject matter tend to have cool, subdued, dark colors. Many of you probably realize that this color pallet sets the mood for the film and influences how you feel. As an audience, cool colors and supposed to make us feel sad or desperate or depressed, while warm, vivid colors are associated with happiness, love, or positivity.

This relationship with color is exactly the same with photography. Photographers choose color pallets that suit the tone or expression of the photo they envision.

Tonight I didn't have much time to shoot, so I did a quick set up similar to some old portrait stuff I've done, and turned it into a example of how color tells stories. As you look at the first photo, you can clearly see the expression is constant across the face. Pay attention to the next two photos and see how that changed supply.

It's a small difference, but upon first glance, the "face" on the right appears to be more sinister, more angry, and have more emotion in general. But it's not. It's the same expression across the whole face.

This change in perception is due mainly to the color pallet, and how light falls on my face. The light source on the left is a large, white umbrella. On the other side, it's a comparatively small soft box that has been gelled blue. One cool effect tho has is that there are now two sets on highlights on the right side of the face. One from the umbrella, and one from the soft box. They blend together and make a very unique feel. It's also a harder light on the right side, with more pronounced shadows and highlights due to the smaller light source.

So think about that, and the implications it has on cinema and photography. Supple changes, even different lighting on different characters or part of a scene can have  a profound influence.

Techy part...

You know what the set up was. Umbrella on the left has a 560 at 1/32 power. It's at about 45 degrees in front of me and about 35 degrees up. The soft box is on axis with me horizontally and about 40 degrees down. It's pointed 40 degree to the back of me at the wall behind. it's set to 1/128 power.

I was shooting with a 50mm at 1/250, f2, at ISO100. I just light the shallow depth of field for this. The eye is still sharp but the shirt and background are wayyyy blurry.

On to work in Ps and Lr. This was a quick and dirt edit. In Lr I enhanced the eyes (clarity, saturation, brightness all up), bumped the clarity and shadows up a bit as well as the highlights. I exported to Ps and proceeded to do a quick dodge and burn session. I burned the shadows a bit (darkened them) and dodged the highlights (lightened them). This creates a hard light effect or more dramatic lighting. I did this to the face, eyes, and a bit to the shirt.

Next step. Duplicate layers and merge. Duplicate that layer. Set to color dodge. Mask around the face but leave the hard light effects is makes on the shirt, hair and background. Then duplicate the base layer again and set to overlay. Mask the face again to create a vignette around everything. I could have spent more time but technically it's tomorrow already so I've gotta post this.

Anywho, that's it for now. Comment if you have question about any step I took along the way to this photo. See you tomorrow...errr today.

Imperfection

I really didn't know what I was going to shoot today. I had a few half ideas but they fizzled out pretty fast. I finally settled on doing some kind of self portrait, as I haven't done one of those for a while.

As to what kind of self portrait I was going to do...no idea.

The photo began to take shape as I started to set up lights. The first light I put up was a 560 with a 1/8 grid on it. This just restricted the beam a lot so it would just fall on my face and nothing else. This is what just the 560 gridded looks likes.

I took a few shots with this set up, but I really wasn't feeling it. I then put a 560 with a soft box down in the right corner as a fill light. This fill was super supple and I actually didn't end up using it for the final photo. It was just part of the journey there.

With the two lights up, I decided to add the mini light I have (Canon 260ex II I think it is) as a rim and background light. Boy did I get more than I expected out of that thing. 

With only one setting on it for power, nuclear full, the thing put out some serious power compared to the 560s, which were at minimum power. Adding the mini light gave me this look...

Backing up a bit...I was shooting at f1.8 and that's why I was using such little power on the 560s. I just didn't need much to show up in the camera. So when I added the mini light which is always at full power, it was astronomically bright. Here's a pic of the set up.

 As you can see, the mini light is incredibly bright. Even though its pointed at the wall behind me and not at a key or even fill, it bounces off the walls and ceiling, becoming a strong fill light as well as adding to the key. Plus, in the shallow depth of field that f1.8 provides, the overexposed background melds beautifully into my shirt, face, and hair. Granted its a maybe a bit overdone, but I'm getting to that next.

The reason I titled this post "Imperfection," is that nothing in the final photo is done "correctly." Normally, a grid this small isn't used as a key light when doing portraits. It creates harsh shadows and hard highlights, which are usually not preferred. I wanted to experiment around a bit though. I'm still not sure if I really like it as much as if I used a soft box up close, but it's definitely a unique look.

Using the mini light in the way I did was a complete accident. Yes, people use lights bounced off walls and ceilings all the time, but for one its a purposeful thing. I was just seeing what would happen. I thought it would light the wall and maybe add some rim light, but I had no idea how powerful it would actually be. I do like how that turned out, but it probably is a bit too strong.

Next problem. The aperture was wayyyy to low. Using this open of an aperture definitely gives a very super shallow depth of field, which can look cool, but it makes it really hard to focus. You can tell that my eyes are not in focus even though the side of my nose is. It also lets a lot of light in, which is why the mini flash is so overpowering. If I had stopped down to maybe f8, I could just raise the power in the 560 to compensate and keep that light on the same level while the smaller aperture would let less light from the 260 in. It would also give more depth of field and make it easier to focus. That being said, if it wasn't a self portrait, it wouldn't be that hard to focus.

Camera settings: 1/200, f1.8, ISO 100. 50mm on 7D.

In Lr, I enhanced the eyes the bit with a bump in clarity and shadows, and also increased the contrast around the eye and hair. I also added a vignette. The wasn't as much darks as I liked so the vignette helped.

That's it for today, off to EMT class. See you tomorrow.

Shoes and a Thermos

So I missed yesterday. Bummer. Double post today.

Lately I've been liking to do product shot, I guess would be what you call it. It is challenging to light something in a way that makes it appealing. I don't have the studio or equipment to do it properly, but I do the best I can with the lounge next to my room.

The first photo today is of my climbing shoes. I wanted to bring out the details of the materials used to make the shoes, so this meant harder light to bring out textures. There is a bare 560 just to the left of the shoes pointed up and slightly towards the wall you see on the left. This bounced the light off the ceiling and the wall to have more wrap around the shoes. However, it isn't that soft because the wall and ceiling are not that big. You can still see some very defined shadows and highlights. Especially on the shoe in the background. The second 560 was set up in a soft box on camera right. This is the key light for the foreground shoe and the fill light for the background shoe. You can see the hard shadow this light makes and also where the other 560 starts to take over as a till and then a key light. Both lights make cool hot spots on the walls behind. I believe the bare 560 was at 1/1 and the other at 1/16.

The camera settings are: 1/250, f5.6, ISO100. 50mm lens on a 7D.

The thing I would change about the lighting is to warm up the 560 in the soft box with a gel. You can see how the 560 bouncing get a warm tone from the walls, where the other 560 is pure white and looks a bit off.

In Lr I raised the clarity on the shoes to bring out more texture as well as brighten the shadows a bit. On the background I also raised the clarity around the walls and hot spots to add some pop. The ground right in front of the shoe I darkened because it was kind of distracting.

Next...

Back to the thermos, the dreaded thermos. The reflections on this thing are just so intense I can't even deal. It's quite a challenge to get that right. This time I had a different approach. 

The mat board is now the set for this, backed up against a while wall. One 560 with a soft box is off to the left at maybe 1/8 power. This was to make a little kicker highlight in the side of the thermos as well as make sure the ground was bright and white. The main light for this was my 56" reflector with the reflector part taken off. It turns into a big diffuser that I shot a 560 through. This turned the 2" area of the 560 into about a 4' circle. The area of light is much bigger so you don't get as hard highlights and more all around illumination on the thermos. I had to aim everything perfectly so the highlight would be right over the logo so you could read it. 

No much was done to this in post. Messed with the logo a bit to make it most consistent as far a lettering luminosity goes, made a white vignette around everything to draw attention in, and darkened the little bottom section of the thermos because it was reflecting the white mat board and turning pink. 

Camera setting were the same as the photo of the shoe. 

I think that's about it for today, see you tomorrow. 

Macro

Since breaking out the old macro filters yesterday, I decided I'd play around with them a little more.

And since I happened to be eating pistachios, why not take some macros of that?

As with yesterday, I wanted to have very deep depth of field, so I had to use a very small aperture. f22 in case you're wondering. Since aperture is one of the two exposer settings that effects how bright or dim a strobe looks, wouldn't f22 essentially render a strobe useless? So little light gets in with f22 that even the sun can look dim sometimes. How would a strobe compete with that?

The answer is distance. There's a very complicated law out there that would take forever to explain in detail (not that I even could), but in essence it states that the closer a light source is, the brighter it is. Makes sense right? Since a little flashlight at a tree a mile away and it's not going to illuminate much, but get right up to the same tree and it's like day light.

Even though I was so stopped down at f22, if I had the strobe positioned only a few inches from subject, then it would be much brighter. So much brighter in fact, that I only had to use 1/16 power...in a soft box that robs about 2 stops of light! Physics is pretty cool, right?!

In case you think this sound familiar, its the same principle I used for my shot yesterday.

Here's the photo from today...

and here's a different angle...

and to demonstrate how stopped down f22 is, this is shot into a lamp turned all the way up. Same settings as what I used for the other shots. You can see how little light actually gets to the sensor.

The set up for the first two shots was almost identical to yesterdays shot. A 560 in a soft box right over the nut at 1/16 as I mentioned before. Camera setting as the same too: 1/125, f22, ISO160. The one difference was that other 560 was aimed at the nut from about 7 inches behind and to the right to create a rim light and give more depth. This 560 was lying on the same surface as the nut to get the light from a low an angle as possible for maximum depth and texture enhancement.

In Lr I created a strong vignette on each photo to darken the wood and bring attention to the nut. I also toned the highlights down a bit on the shells, and boosted the clarity  A LOT. Cheap trick but oh well. I like the look of it. I had to brighten the shadows and blacks a bit to compensate for the raise in clarity. I'd like to know what that slider actually does....always screws up exposer.

Well that's all for now. See you tomorrow.