Dat View

Today, Victor and I drove from Seattle down to Provo, Utah. I drove the whole way, so I didn't have any opportunities to take photos from the car, but we did stop at this super cool view point.

No idea where it was so don't ask. :)

We saw the turnout for the view half way up this mountain pass, and on a whim decided to pull over, stretch out and take a look. Turned out to be a really good idea. The view was amazing, even though the light was terrible and super flat. I still needed to get a picture though, so I grabbed my camera and set things up.

We you're trying to make things look more dramatic, especially the sky, it can help to use a polarizer. They filter the light so you don't get as much haze and the clouds will look a lot better with one on. I threw mine on my 18-135mm lens. It did create a bit of vignette so I had to zoom to 29mm to get edge to edge brightness. When shooting a pano, you have to made sure you have edge to edge brightness or you're going to get a bad composite.

I've started using a tripod more and more to shoot panoramic shots and HDRs. Hand holding really just doesn't cut it, even with the awesome IS that lenses come with today. To shoot with a tripod for a pano, just lock the tilt and open the pan adjust. This ensures that you're panning on a level plane and don't have to worry that your images won't mesh in Ps later.

Speaking of editing, I did a little bit of different approach. I took my raw files and processed them before I made a pano. I converted to b/w, turned expo up, upped contrast, lowered highlights, raised shadows, lowered whites, upped blacks a bit, and I think that's it.... Then I made my pano in Ps and exported it to Photomatix where I applied the Enhanced filter. This gave it a more dramatic look that I liked.

In Lr, I made a vignette (fairly strong one), and then brightened the landscape in the middle of the image. Then I added more clarity and contrast to the clouds to enhance them.

And all done!

See you tomorrow!

Trails for Days

Last night was supposedly a meteor shower, so I attempted to catch some of them. Victor and I were packing for the trip, so I just left my camera hooked up to an introvelometer outside for a couple hours.

The introvelometer was set to a 48 second exposure, and it just kept taking pictures over and over until I told it not to. It went for about 2 and a half hours, so maybe a couple hundred pictures? Something like that. IDK

I was at f2.8 and ISO250. Because need light but don't want noise. Stars are just bright I guess.

Editing this went soooo fast. I just exported all the files to jpeg, put them in Starstax and then clicked process. Bam.. instant star trails. So easy. Then in Lr, I added some blues to the shadows and dropped the reds. Then I brightened the star trails and turned up the saturation so you could see the colors in the stars. And that's it. All done.

See you tomorrow!

Food Food Yum Yums

More yum yums from Emma. This time they are energy balls...aka delicious bit sized things of awesomeness.

Sadly, they are for my mom so I only got one :(

I set up the photo fairly similar to the other food pictures. One strobe in the back with a soft box, and one strobe up front. However, this time the front strobe was pointed straight up to turn the whole box into a giant soft box.

These two images show the difference that the strobes make. With and with out, you can see how much light the strobes add and how that light improves the scene. The soft light in the back serves as a back light similar to a large window or something of the sorts.

When shooting the food, I approached like I was shooting something on a bigger scale. Maybe a landscape or something. Not everything needed to be in the frame, and so started framing things tighter. The arrangements we had of the balls worked lovely with shooting from directly above, similar to aerial photography. I really liked the flattened looked that shooting from above gave.

In editing, I mainly just added a vignette. Really that's all. A touch of shadow lifting, but that's it! If you light it right, it saves you so much trouble in the long run.

Here's my favorite from the shoot. Shot almost directly down.

See you tomorrow!

Milk

Surface tension is freaking cool. There's this awesome experiment where you put food coloring in milk and then put soap in it, and craziness happens. The colors swirl around everywhere and it looks awesomeeeeeeeee.

Lighting this was hard. And I don't think we really got it right, but we just put two strobes to cross light the milk. We had put the milk in a glass bowl, so the light could pass through the clear glass and light up the milk. It worked pretty well, but I think it could have been better somehow.

I shot at ISO100, 135mm (to focus close enough), 1/200, and f8 because strobes are brightttttt.

The first thing I did when editing was to crop out the bowl. It just looks bad and needs to go away. Next, I went about improving the color in the image by upping the highlights, shadows, vibrance and saturation. This brought out the subtle colors while still retaining the awesome whiteness of the milk. To complete the look, I added a vignette which made the colors around the edges really rich and intense. I did decrease the luminosity of course, but that's okay.

That's about it for this one, quick photo.

See you tomorrow!

Magical Doorway

I was going to do a post from a boat call I went on today, but then I saw my awesome cool door way and changed my plans. The door was cracked open just enough to let some light out, and it just awesome.

I grabbed my camera and remote trigger, then headed out into the black abyss that is the hallway. To frame and focus I used live view. In dark conditions, if you can light just the area you need to focus on, then lock the focus, that's all you need. I almost never use Live View to shoot, but it's perfect for a lot of other uses.

My exposure settings were 30s, f7.1 and ISO100. I could have used a higher ISO and lower aperture to have a shorter shutter speed, but I wanted the depth of field and low noise that those two settings provide.

The problem I kept running into was that my body was blocking the light and making it boring. I dealt with this in two ways. Firstly, I turned my arm so that only my had was visible to the camera. Then, in Ps I made a gigantic light leak to make the crack completely white.

To do this, I made a selection and filled it with white, then made a white glow and blurred it. This gave it a great glow feel to it.

Back in Lr, I added a vignette and upped the contrast a bit.

See you tomorrow!

Yummy

My sister made a yummy Greek food item tonight that I forgot the name of and/or can't spell and I'm too lazy to look it up and this is a giant run on sentence and my dad's an english teacher why can't I grammar?

Moving on....

So the Greek food that was made by my sister was really good. I normally don't like Mediterranean food that much for some reason (except for Italian), but I liked what ever she made. It was in Pita break and we added salad and this really good sauce. You can find out more about the food at her blog, Emma's Baking Addiction. Google it, fool!

Now to photography...

Basically the same set up I used for the last food picture. There was a strobe in the back and a strobe in the front, with two consistent light sources to add a bit to the shadows. The strobe in the back was pretty high to add some back light to the food. I put a soft box on the strobe in the front to give the food some nice, soft light. The  closer a light source is, the brighter it is and also the bigger it is. I had the soft box really close, so I saved on power and made everything superrrrrr soft.

As for how we positioned the food, we pretty much just used what we had. Which was a white tray. I wish we had some other props or backgrounds that would add something extra to the image. Give a Greek feel, or something like that. But what we had worked and that's that.

It's more attractive to the viewer if you have an odd number of objects in the frame. Even if that means having two and a half objects, it makes the image feel more balanced and also draws the viewers attention more. Adding things like the salad in the background and a fork just add to that "food appeal" that we are brainwashed with by ads. At least that's the idea!

I really didn't edit these much. I shot at 1/60, ISO100, and f8 with power settings at 1/16 and 1/32. This gave me an awesome exposure right off the bat, so the only things I did in Lr were coloring the oranges a little more yellow, some cropping, and the lens corrections. They are pretty much straight out of the camera. It really pays to get it right when you take the picture, they will just look better overall and will save you soooo much work.

Doesn't look great on Blogger, as usual go to Fb.

See you tomorrow!

Don't Touch the Butt

All of you that got that reference are awesome sauce....as for the rest, you better catch up on Pixar...

Any who! I was cleaning a boat today for a friend with Victor, and he spotted this sweet boat on the boat. It had this amazing wood deck that was just this giant V shaped thing. Photography is basically the manipulation of geometry in a lot of ways, and some of the strongest pictures in history are based on geometry. There for, this boat looked freaking sweet and needed picture taking.

I used up the rest of my phone's batteries taking and editing pictures of it. hehe

I'm a big fan of almost symmetry, or asymmetry in photographs. My gate project for MSU was partly based on that; making and image that appeared symmetrical but was really not once you looked at it. It's true in the natural world, and even though part of art is to create what does not exist, I find it an interesting concept to explore in photography.

Boat's are pretty symmetrical for stability, and so I shot straight down the bow and centered the mast. This made the really cool V shape that made the picture so cool. Other than that, I just tried to include as many diagonal lines from the rigging and railings that I could.

In editing, I raised the shadows, ambience, and contrast first. I also converted it to black and white. Removing color helps to exemplify the shapes and geometry of a photo, which is was this image was all about. It was a pretty simple photo to edit, I just toyed around with the settings in Snapseed until I got something I liked.

That's what's awesome about editing, you can just play around and make the image look so different.

See you tomorrow!

Sparky

Fire is freaking awesome. Lighters make fire. There for pictures of lighters.

Sparks are really hard to time. It's basically just pot shots every time.   The only  method that I found effective was to take the picture when you sparked the lighter and hope that the timing was right.

The settings I used were ISO1000, f8, and 1/640. This froze what was happening pretty well as well as providing an adequate depth of field. I wish I could have shot at an even more stopped down aperture, but there just wasn't enough light for that.

I used a 50mm lens with a macro filter on it to get closer in. I focused by moving the camera backward and forward to change my plane of focus. This method is much more effective that trying to turn the focus ring, as you can quickly tell what's sharp and whats not. If you need to recompose it's a breeze too, much quicker than recomposing and then focusing. Basically it just cuts out a step and a lot of hassle.

Editing was pretty quick. Raise the shadows, add some blues, raise the clarity, lower the highlights, and raise the shadows. The purpose of all this was to bring out the definition of what was going on and compressing the tonal range.

See you tomorrow!

Riding on the Orcas

Went over to Orcas again today to shoot some photos with Colin! We spend like four hours or something shooting on pline, and I think we got some really cool shots. The light didn't really cooperate for us. It started off very flat and grey but then suddenly turned super sunny and contrasty. But it worked out and we got some cool stuff! and no body crashed and died....another plus.

I was thinking about writing up a big explanation about one of the riding shots we did; they were challenging to get and hard to edit. But I'm finding myself drawn to a spur of the moment shot to took just as Colin was about to drop in.

We were shooting this corner...

 








We probably shot this thing like 8 or 9 times, just trying to find a good angle. These are the ones that turned out, but I have like a gazillion more of other angles.

From the first angle we tried, I could see where Colin was starting from farther up the trail. He was half way hidden by trees and whatnot, but it looked kind of cool so I just pointed my camera up there and took a picture. And it turned out awesome. Something I just really like about the composition. If he had been ripping that section of trail, I think it'd be an awesome action shot too.

Shot at ISO1000 (it was darkish), f5.6 and 1/200.

For editing, it got tricky. I raised the expo, then lowered the highlights and white and upped the crap out of the shadows. This effectively did two things....made a shit ton heck of a lot of noise and compressed the tonal range. I ran a lot of noise reduction later and then some sharpening and that helped a lot. I also lowered the blacks. Doing this seems counter productive (and maybe it is) but it helps bring back the contrast that compressing the tonal range makes go away.


Tone curve...you get screen shots.

 


Basically, further compressing the tonal range and adding some shadows back. Yes, it's undoing an adjustment I already did but shhh!!!! Don't tell.

You also get a screen shot of my b/w
conversion.

I then added yellow to the highlights and blue to the shadows. Give it a little toning.

Finally, a vignette and we're done!

Here's the rest of the photos from today. See you tomorrow!

Night Bicycle Riding

On a whim we went out to the DNR tonight to do some night shots of bike riding! At the end of last summer Victor and I tried this, but we kinda failed and it didn't work out so well. But tonight we prevailed with the help of Maclin and Cody! aka voice activated light stands...

So I suppose I'll just walk through my process of setting up and shooting.

1. Get the gear you need out. In this case, I planned to use strobes to light up everything and freeze Victor as he was going down the trail. I would have my shutter open the whole time to get a nice light trail of his head lamp down the trail. This plan demanded two things, that I have strobes of course, and that they be fired at a different time than when I opened the shutter. Considering this, I pulled out my trigger that I can fire with the test button on the trigger. I set one strobe to manual with the receiver, and the other to slave so that it would "see" the first strobe pop and fire at the same time. 

2. Compose and focus. I used Live View for this, and just used my Maglite to get enough light to the camera. Pretty simple.

3. Gel the strobes and place them. I chose a orange gel for the strobe Cody would hold in the upper right to backlight Victor. Maclin got two gels (one to cover the top and one to cover the bottom) of orange and green, and he would be just to the left of the frame providing most of the key light. 

4. Test. Just have Victor go a few times and do your best to pop the strobes at the right time. Luckily, when they did fire, I got the right time so we only had to do it a few times! Yay!

Editing.

Shadows up. Blacks up. Highlights down. Whites down. Clarity up. 

Tone curve. Red shadows down, green mids down, blue shadows up.  

This made a flattened yet very punchy look with lots of great color in it. The shadows are cool which meshes nicely with the orange light from Cody's strobe. 

Then add some sharpening and noise reduction. Also a bit of vignette.

See you tomorrow! More biking pictures!

Yummmyyyyy

My sister made ice cream sandwiches today. and they are delicious.

She loves to bake, so in the summer she has a baking blog called Emma's Baking Addiction. She posts her recipes and what not as well as fun anecdotes that go along with whatever she made.

And of course I get the honor to photograph the baked goods in exchange for some of them :) omm nom nom.

For the sandwiches today, I wanted them to look summery but also cool at the same time. To give it both these features, I chose to have a really strong back and top light that would mimic the bright sun.  We set up a little plate inside Emma's mat box thing (basically a bit white box) and put the sandwiches in it. She has some cool lamps that we used for some soft fill light, then I used two strobes for the main lights. I set up one strobe in the back at 1/32 power to blast light around everywhere. Then I had one strobe in the front right at a low power to just add some texture and light the front. I think the combination of the four lights makes some really nice soft light, as well as some awesome reflections on the plate. A giant plate with no edges would be fantastic. I may have to get one of those...

The problem with the light set up was that is sapped the contrast and warmth from the sandwiches. They just didn't look...good. Luckily, it's an easy fix in Lr.

I lowered the blacks and shadows to get that end of the tonal range back, and then warmed up the white bal temp. This helped a lot as it gave the sandwiches more of a sunset look. But it wasn't quite there yet. I then went into the color panel and upped the saturation of the long end of the visible light spectrum, and lowered it on the short end. Short story I made the warm colors warmer and the cool colors go away. Worked like a charm. No more purple coco chips, because who wants purple coco chips?

So as far as composition goes, I like to have some objects cut off by the frame. If everything is nicely inside the image, it feel it tends to make it boring. It just feels to staged to me. This goes back to the idea of the snap shot. Photography really got it's recognition as a fine art when street photography and portable camera's began to have their influence. Photographers went away from the painting format of having everything nicely in the frame and started purposely cut parts of the image off. Street photographers were the pioneers of this style, but of course their were the few masters who had caught on to this earlier in other disciplines of photography. But as a style of framing, it really took off as the snap shot became well known.

Short explanation but little photo history for you.

Focus is also a great method of drawing the viewers attention where you want it. The out of focus cookie just adds balance to the image, if there were two cookies in focus it'd be boring. You wouldn't know what to look at. But with a fraction of a out of focus cookie, it just adds a lead or path that directs your eye to the sharp cookie. Cookie sandwich that is.

Anyway, time to end. See you tomorrow.

In the Quarries

I got off work a little early today, and so Victor, Maclin and I went out to the quarries for a few hours and swam. It was still really cold, and so we eventually went and got wet suits, but for a little while the sun was out it was okay. It seems that every year the quarries get a little bit colder, maybe it's just me though. I hope it's a hot summer. 

I brought my Gopro along today with the hopes of taking some under water photos. It's an older model and it doesn't take the best pictures, especially in semi murky water. I really want an underwater housing for my 7D....

Anyway, while I still was braving the water, I swam around near Maclin and tried to get some cool shots of him below the water line. Gopros are water proof, so I could get it pretty far down and not worry. Unfortunately, there is a lot of lag between when you take the picture and when it's actually recorded, so it was really a game of chance as to if I got the photos I wanted. 

Luckily, I got one that was pretty close! 

It's not bad, but it's not all that great either. The composition is good, but the tones and contrast isn't awesome. It's not that dramatic either. 

So first things first, get some light rays in there. I made a curves layer that brightened the whole image, then made a black layer mask and hid everything. Next, I painted in some white spots of different sizes on the layer mask and applied a big radial blur to them with the center in the upper right where the light source is. This made the big light rays that's you'd expect in water like this. I did this a few times with white spots, and a few times with black spots to break up the rays a bit. 

Then I brought the blacks down with a curves adjustment as well as adding some blue to the shadows and pumping up the greens. The whole image was a bit too warm and overwhelmingly green to begin with. Finally, I sharpened the image with a high pass filter. 

Looks much better than the original, right? More contrast and drama to it. It's summer to it had to looks like summer! 

See you tomorrow!

It's a Toaster

I went for a run tonight. and then I was hungry. and so I made an egg sandwich. which required toast. and it was dark in the kitchen. and the toaster looked really cool. so I took a picture of it.

That's pretty much how I came up with tonights photo. It's not the best photo ever, but it pretty accurately captures the moment. A glowing toaster in the dark. I wish the focus would have been better, but it was super dark so I was shooting at f1.4 and the toast popped up right after I took the picture. The backs in focus though so that's good.

I shot at ISO1600 (so a heck of a lot of amplification) and 1/50. Pretty slow shutter, wide open aperture, and massive ISO. Sometimes you just have to compromise to get the shot. Depends on the situation, but it can be worth getting an OK shot rather than getting no shot at all.

I went for the washed out kind of look. The true blacks are pretty much all gone, and the dark areas are toned pretty blue. I raised the clarity and shadows to get more details in, and that's about it. Quick edit for tonight.

Wow blogger makes the picture look horrible :/ check it out on facebook

See you tomorrow!

Post from a Phone

Posting from my phone tonight. Just because. Even the picture for today is taken and edited on my phone. It's just a phone day I guess.

My friend Maclin got a new dog recently, we'll him mom did. And it's an epic mini dog. All tiger stripped and super hyper. Today we went down there for a bit and played with it for a while. Victor tied the leash to his shoe, and the puppy dragged him around so he had to hop on one foot before he got mini dog under control again. Then it attacked him and he had to battle it away from licking him to death. Naturally I had to take a few pictures. Action shots on the iPhone. Not any real good technique to action shots on a phone other than just taking a bunch and hoping you get it. Auto focus is slow so you have to be prepared.

I edited the picture in Snapseed. I raised the shadows, ambience, warmth and structure. I then added a  center blur and tilt shift thing. This blurred the edges and also created a vignette thing. Pretty cool.

Finally, I added the retrolux filter just a bit to add some light leaks and  whatnot. And that's about it!

See you tomorrow!

Epic Maclin in the Forest

So there's this epic stream in the forest. It's pretty much the coolest thing I've ever seen. Starts with this mini waterfall between two cedars (with pools in the roots a foot deep), then winds its way down the gully between and under logs, roots, and more trees. There's ferns everywhere and giant skunk cabbage. There was one tree we used to cross the stream that I actually slid down like a slide. We explored up the steam just with head lamps and flashlights, which just made everything even more epic. I think it's one place I'll be visiting frequently this summer.

Originally, we'd planned to do more fire painting, but it was a little to dry out so we scrapped that idea and just did regular light painting.

Victor and I both had powerful flashlights, and so pretty much just ran around with different gels to get cool lighting effects. I composited everything later in Ps with simple layer masks and one warming filter. It took us a while to light paint, but it was just so epic out there we didn't want to stop.

I've talked a lot of light painting and compositing lately, and tonight was no different from the last couple ones I've posted. Just shoot on bulb, shine a light around and see how it looks. It's really a trial and error process, but you can get some awesome results. When compositing, I just used layer masks to put everything together. Big soft bush and a low opacity and just paint stuff in until it looks good.

See you tomorrow!

Orcas!

Victor and I went over to Orcas today to ride. There were a ton of people there and it was pretty unorganized, but we managed to get a few good runs in.

I brought a lot of my camera gear, but didn't use any of it until the very last run. We had time to stop at one jump. The light was fading and we had to run to catch a ferry boat. But we got two or three good shots. It's amazing how quickly you can pull something together with people that actually know what their doing.

Colin found a cool angle for the jump, and so I just stood up there and directed Colin and Victor with lighting placement and what not until we got it dialed, then Colin could just run up the hill and hit it a few times. No need to take a test shot, run and adjust, then run back and take another test shot. Three people helped a lot.

The lighting was pretty simple. We had one strobe down low at 1/8 power to add some under to bike, and then a strobe back to his right to mimic the setting sun. This strobe was at 1/4 power and gelled a bit orange to give that warm glow. I was shooting at 85mm, and I cropped the images a lot.

When cropping, you can have your framing however you want. It's a second chance, really. For this image, I tightened up a lot and made it so Colin was jumping from the lower right to the upper left of the frame. This made a path for the eye to follow.

With editing, I brought up the exposure, shadows and blacks a bit so the image wasn't so dark as looked more natural. I added a vignette and also a elliptical adjustment mask that gave a more orange glow to Colin in the air.

It's supposed to look like a golden ray is breaking through the trees and hitting him. I think it works for the most part, considering how fast we set everything up.

See you tomorrow!

Back at it

There's a really cool photograph by someone I don't remember the name of who did a series where he photographed movies. As in the whole movie in one exposure. Of course this turns  the screen completely white as is the nature with photography, but it was a very interesting concept. Plus, the movie provided the lighting for the rest of the frame.

As you probably already guessed, I did the same kind of photo tonight. There's not much to explain with it, the lighting came from the monitor and I just shot at f22 for "a while." I think it was about 756 seconds or something like that.  So a long time.

For editing, I raised the shadows and black point using the tone curve, and raised the clarity a bit. Lastly, I added a bit of a vignette.

Not much else, it was a simple photo.

Oh, and this basically represents half of the summer for me. Lots of photos to edit.

See you tomorrow!

More Nights With Fire!

The power was out last night after I got home from shooting, so I couldn't do post. But I'm doing one right now and then another one later tonight! I've got more photos to edit than ever, so I'm going to busy for the next few days.

Last night was a scheduled power outage, so my friends and I went into town to do some light painting, because when else do you get a chance to light paint in a totally dark town?

Only we weren't really light painting....we were fire painting! The results from Wednesday night were so cool, we got more steel wool and brought that along with us.

Since it was a planned power outage, there were tons of police and utility vehicles roaming the streets doing work and making sure the town wasn't ransacked. Surprisingly, the utility people didn't even stop to watch the fire going everywhere, and the police actually gave us the thumbs up and took a break to watch us! I think it was mainly to make sure we didn't light the gas station on fire...but still! We got to throw fire all around Friday Harbor!

It was super cold, even with the fire. I think we spent about three or so hours outside in the freezing wind. At one point, we went into this little alley way. The picture we set up in there turned out really well, but since it was an enclosed space, the sparks flew everywhere and it was like a war zone. Everyone was dodging them and Brandon got a hole burned in his sock. :) Entertainment.

Learning from the first time we did this, I shot at f7.1 and ISO100 last night. This dropped the light coming in and being written by maybe 2 or 3 stops and made a world of difference. The centers of the  spinning fire weren't completely overblown, but the spark trails were still very visible. I also used a 10mm lens to capture everything on the street.

In post, I composited about half the images I have in this post. The ones I did composite, I used a combination of layer masks and blending modes. Linear dodge, screen, and lighten are the best modes for compositing this light trails, as they only add the bright areas of the images. I could have used luminosity masks, but that takes a little longer and it think it'd have the same results. I might experiment with that after I write this though...

Once I'd composited them the Ps, I just adjusted the color a bit in Lr to be more red, and upped the shadows a bit. These are pretty much true to life images. Maybe some clarity adjustments were applied too.

See you tomorrow!

Playing with wool

This is going to be a short post because I want to sleep.

Tonight I went out to the quarries with Victor, Maclin and Cody and did some light painting with fire! I've seen this done a bunch before but never done it myself. It was really just a big experiment to see how and if it'd work, and it turned out awesome!

We put some steel wool in a whisk, yes a cooking whisk, tied it to a cable and swung it around in circles. The steel wool burned and as bits melted off they got flung out and so it made a huge spark making/throwing machine.  Cody took it out to the middle of the quarries and swung it out over the water. It was probably very cold and he was a trooper to do that as well as get melting bits of metal fly around him. We got some awesome pictures from it!

My favorite from tonight was one I actually am not going to composite with other photos. It's a single image light painting, which is something I haven't done in a long time. I just like compositing things so this is different. But fun!

I shot at ISO250, f4.5 and 12 seconds to get this one. The exposure times were however long it took for Cody to swing the whisk and how long the wool inside kept burning. Sometimes that was 20+ seconds, and sometimes it was 5. I probably should have used a little more stopped down aperture to reduce the over exposure in the center of the image, but it's okay. Next time :)

To edit this, I added blue to the shadows on the tone curve, added red to the highlights, and upped the blacks on the tone curve. I applied some split toning with those colors as well, and added a vignette with the lens correction. And that's it.

See you tomorrow!

Pin Pin Apparel

Pretty much all I did today was test and shoot photos for Leah from Pin Pin Apparel. Pin Pin is a local clothing company that has some awesome designs!

 I went out with Victor to Lime Kiln and tested lighting set ups and locations for about two hours. We found these awesome spots by a lake that we thought were really cool. The lighting took a while, but we eventually came up with some designs that we thought would work really well. And the locations were awesome.

And so naturally, when we met up with Leah and the models, Vanessa and Fiona, we didn't use any of the locations Victor and I originally scouted! But that's just what happens every time so I wasn't too surprised.  Either the lighting set up or locations you scout will have to be thrown out as soon as you start shooting, so just get used to thinking on your feet and making it look like you know what you're doing!

Luckily for us, Leah took the directorial role for the day and took care of picking most of the locations and posing the models. She pretty much stood next to me as I was shooting and we she made most of the decisions on what the model needed to tweak and if the background was working. I was left to concentrate on making sure the lighting was spot on and correct as this was the only time we would have shoot. Thanks Leah for taking that director role! Made life a lot easier!

Speaking of posing and models, I really don't know what the big deal is with models supposedly being hard to work with. Maybe we got lucky or something but Vanessa and Fiona we incredibly easy to work with and just awesome models in general! Both looked great right off the bat with every clothing change and it was really just a process of tweaking lighting and posing to get it just right. They both could do pretty much exactly what we were trying to tell them to do with out much explanation, and we never had to wait for them to find a good pose or take a break. Every time I put the camera to my face they were ready to go and I never had to wait at all. It was also chilly out where we were and we shot for about 5 hours and nobody once complained about anything. At all. I think that's a first. So thank you Vanessa and Fiona for being great to work with and awesome models in general!

So now for the tech talk....

Lighting. For tonight picture, I used two strobes. One was on a stand and shooting through a white umbrella to make nice, soft light. This was the key light. The fill light was a strobe bounced off of my big reflector on it's gold side. This filled the shadow in with a nice, warm light. It was a bit of a challenge getting the reflector to stay balanced on my tripod, but we eventually tied it on with a inner tube I had in my car.

This image really came together in the editing. Here's the raw picture right from the camera.

Pretty good. Almost could work right out of the camera. But could be better. In Lr I played with the tone curve, dropping the shadow reds, raised the greens a bit, and raised the blues in the shadows a bit. I also cropped the image. Upped the exposure and contrast, as well as adding some blues to the shadows. 

 In Ps, added two light leaks downloaded from the web, set them to screen and lower opacity. A quick curves to darken the shadows a bit, then a texture overlay to darken the lower left and add some, well, texture. Then I finally went in and sharpened, then smoothed her face with the paint mixer brush and removed from blemishes. Didn't need or do much.

I'm going fast because one of my HD fried and I need to go recover the data hopefully.

Here's the final image.

See you tomorrow!

Flower Man

Back on the island! Finally. I was considering doing a landscape thing or a picture of my house or something, but that's not reallyyyy what it means to be home.

So instead I had Victor go jump into flowers. :)

He attacked them when we first got to my house, and I thought it would be perfect. Normally, when you smell flowers, you are very gentle and tender and everything. So jumping into them at full speed and basically eating them would be quite a startling image. Or at least that's the hope.

To set this up, I used two gelled strobes. The front light was on an umbrella and gelled a light orange. The second or backlight was gelled light purple and was bare. The goal of this set up was to have a nice, warm tone with soft light in the front and and hard rim light.

I shot with a 70-300mm lens at 140mm and f5.6, so the strobes were set at pretty high power. Can't remember exactly but it something like 1/2 and 1/32. I had to back up and stand on some steps to get the right angle. If I shot from my height I would get the weird distortion and not see his face because I would be looking up. By getting at his angle, I get the action head on.

Timing this took some effect. I actually ended up holding the camera upside down from the way I usually do so that I could have both eyes open. This takes some practice to use both your eyes to time a photo when one eye is looking through a lens. I would be able to generally frame the image, lock focus, then watch Victor run up with one eye. When he started showing up in the frame, I started to take the picture. The natural lag that you have will result in the picture being taken much later than you thought you took it. I got pretty lucky with this shot, I haven't done this type of photo in a while so I was kinda rusty on my timing skills.

To edit this, I did much the same thing as yesterday's picture. I adjusted the tone curved to make the blacks a dark shade of grey, darken the shadows, and raise the highlights. I raised the reds in the lighter tones, and added blues to the darker tones. Green was added to just the highlights.

Next, I warmed the image and toned it a bit purple. I raised the exposure, highlights and shadows, as well as the vibrance. I took an adjustment brush and raised the clarity and saturation of the plants and flowers around Victor. I also darkened his jacked and added a vignette to the image.

Finally, I added a bit of blue to the shadows of the image to give it more color.

Overall, I gave the picture a toned, washed out look. Not quite vintage but along that styles lines.

See you tomorrow!

Walk in the Forest Grove

Another day in Forest Grove since my car is broken and can't be fixed until tomorrow morning. Means more time visiting my twin though, so it's not all day. Oregon isn't that bad, and this area is super photogenic!

After lunch today, my sister and I went for a hike/walk out on this weirdly straight path. It was possibly the longest, straightest path I have possibly ever walked on. There was literally 1.5 miles of path that didn't curve at all. Very odd. But pretty though. The trees formed this nice archway over the path and was very picturesque.

I shot this on a telephoto lens at 140mm, which on a 1.6 crop is 210mm. So very telephoto. That's about a 3x or 4x magnification or something?

Anywho, I wanted to get everything is focus, so I shot at f11. This is much higher than I usually shoot, I tend to shoot really open. But today that was different. I wanted sharpness for dayyysss.

Since I was shooting at f11 and ISO100, my shutter speed needed to be at 1/13th. That's much to slow for handheld, especially at 140mm. Even when it's on a tripod, the vibration created from the mirror flipping up blurs the image a bit. To counter this, I have a custom mode that has mirror lock up as a preset that I used. Mirror lock up means that the mirror flips up with the first shutter press, then the second press actually takes the photo. I used a shutter release to further steady the camera and get as sharp an image as possible.

Editing this image has taken me about 4 hours. I worked in short bursts while watching tutorials to get ideas of how to edit the image. I've combined tutorials for a bunch of different Ps techniques, but the image came out to look like it has been processed to have the vintage effect on it. The blacks aren't quite black and there's a strong blue tint to them. The highlights have a tint to them as well, and the over all tonal range of the photo has been compressed. There is also heavy vignetting and blurring around the edges.

I started to edit the image in Lr. I made a lot of adjustments on the tone curve that basically darkened the exposure and highlights, while lightening the blacks and leaving the shadows completely alone. I also raised the red highlights and lowered the red shadows. This removed red from the shadows and added it to the highlights. I added green across the board and removed blue. Finally, I raised the clarity a bit and that was the extent of Lr adjustments.

Now to Ps where the fun began. I first added a curves layer to brighten the shadows a bit and bring blow out the highlights just a bit. Next, I added a gradient map adjustment layer with a radial gradient on the layer mask that only applied it to the center of the image. This darkened the shadows and increased the mid tone contrast in those areas. After taking care of the tones, I made a stamp visible layer, set it to overlay, then applied a lens blur to it to make a nice glow effect. I then made a layer mask and just applied it to the trees and ground. This made those areas more dramatic and surreal. Next was a high pass sharpening layer followed by a levels adjustment to raise the shadows a bit. Finally, I blurred the edges of the photo.

It still didn't look quite right though. Something was off. I added another gradient map to the lower part of the image to darken the pavement. I then made a stamp visible layer, set it to overlay and adjusted the blend if adjust so that it only affected the highlights of the layers below. Finally, I added a very complex levels adjustment layer. For this I added reds to the mid tones, added green to the highlights, and added a bunch of blue to the shadows and mid tones. This layer was what gave the image that vintage, color toned look.

I'm happy with the photo, but I feel like it's missing something. Just can't put my finger on it. Maybe I just took it at the wrong time of day. Huh...

See you tomorrow! Hopefully from the island!

Finals

I'm done with school for this year...but my sister's not. muhahah. I took a photo tonight that captures what finals is to students. At least, that was the intention.

Finals means studying a lot, right? My sister and her friends apparently sit in the hall and study a lot, and they were doing that tonight. I brought out my photo gear and set up a little photo.

I wanted to make it looks like they were in this deep, dark, depressing hole of a hallway just studying for ever and ever. It had to be dark and the only light to be shinning down on them.

I took a strobe, put it on my tripod since I didn't have my light stand, then stuck it back in the hallway a bit behind them. The strobe had a really short rectangular cardboard snoot on it to focus the light just on them. I still got some spill on the walls, but not that much.

I shot at 1/125 at f6.5 to cut out most of the ambient light. I had to put the strobe to 1/4 power to compensate for the stopped down aperture and since I was backlighting things.

In Lr, I first cropped the image so that it would be nice and constrained. It had to feel tight or something like that, so the crop had to be tight.

I then converted it to b/w, raised the highlights a bit, and also the contrast up a bit. But the image was too busy, so I took an adjustment brush and darkened everything around them so it was just a super dark hallway with some lights and people. No more walls really. Finally, I brightened the lights with an adjustment brush.

Happy finals!

See you tomorrow.

Forest Grove

I'm in Forest Grove, OR at the moment visiting my twin who goes to Pacific University there. I arrived early afternoon today, and we've just hung around all day eating food and meeting her friends.

I took some pictures of flowers earlier today, but I think I'm going to wait and edit those when I get back to the island. Or maybe later tonight. We'll see how tired I am....

Tonight post if from a lake we visited this evening. It was about 20 minutes out of town, and we got there just as the sunset was ending. However, I soon discovered that the lights of Portland and Forest Grove combined make a nice orange low in the sky which looks exactly like a sunset! Only it's from the wrong direction but who could tell?

So I set up my fake sunset shot with a tree and it's reflection in the water in the foreground, and the beautiful "sunset" in the back ground. I shot at f10, ISO200, and 46 seconds. I used an introvelometer to control my camera. For how cheap you can get those things now, there's no reason why you shouldn't have one. Basically, it lets you control the exposure time for the camera, how many shots you take in a row, holds it open in blub mode, etc. Used for timelapse or uber long exposure photography.

Tonights photo was originally set up on a 50mm lens (on a 1.6 crop camera like the 7D that's like 86mm or something like that?), but I decided that was too telephoto and switched to my 18-135mm. I had it at full wide (18mm), and shot landscape.

The original image looked like this right out of the camera.

No too bad, but pretty flat and uninteresting. The crops kinda weird and the sky isn't that dramatic.
The first thing I did was crop it to a square and pump up the exposure about a stop and a half.

That resulted in overexposure in the sky though, so I brought down the highlights and whites a ton. I also raised the shadows and blacks. Basically, I compressed the tonal range in Lr and made an HDR. Finally, I raised the clarity and the contrast a lot to bring it back from being super flat.

When I get back home a settled in, I'm going to try some luminosity mask editing on this to see what I can come up with.

That's about it though, it turned out to be a pretty quick and easy shot to do, but still came out looking really cool!

See you tomorrow!

On the Road

I left Bozeman today. It took me a whole day of packing and scrubbing a floor that would not seem to get clean. And battling Bozeman traffic (????), steaming cars, high speed night driving with sketchy semi trucks threatening to topple on me. And lots and lots of The Hobbit on audiobook :)

So all in all a pretty good day. And now I'm lounging in a hotel room in Spokane, editing photos and listening to music.

Who said traveling sucks and is boring?

In the traveling spirit, what better photo to take than one in a hotel room with a iPhone and editing on the iPhone to be completely over processed but still awesome!

In my room, I have possibly the weirdest, coolest, and most out of place curtains known to man. They look vaguely middle eastern or something, and yet they are in Spokane...

Anywho, when you look at the lamp straight on, perpendicular to the curtains, it makes a really cool depth plane things. Art is normally staged in depth, ie forground, middleground, background. I've noticed that I tend to over simplify my photos sometimes to just two or three planes. For the photo tonight, the lamp is on one plane, and the curtains form the second. It's a very compressed and constrained, as well as almost be symmetrical. I think this brings out the tension but also relaxation travel has. All you do is sit in a metal box all day....that happens to be moving along at 75+ MPH.

I used my iPhone, like I said, to take this one. I used a square crop, partially to emulate the "instagram" look and stick with the travel theme, but also because I like square crop.

Editing is Snapseed is pretty easy and straight forward. But you can just as easily complete over edit a photo in it with it's super power filters. I did my initial adjustments like exposure up, ambience up, structure up, sat up, contrast up.

Then I moved to the HDR something-er-other filter and applied just a hair of it to flatten out the tonal range just a bit. I still don't know about that decision, but I went with it so I have to stick with it.

Finally, I added a randomized retrolux filter and got this! Enjoy.

See you tomorrow!