Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Dancing With Flour - Part 2

Annddddd another month goes by before I get around to writing the next part of the flour series. I'll attempt to remember where I left off and start to fill in some gaps that might have been left by the last post.

If you missed that one, you can read it here.

I mostly covered the basics of all the shoots, so these next two posts will be specifics about each shoot that I changed or modified to fit my needs. Each shoot presented it's own challenges, and I'll try to talk about everything. Sometimes might be insignificant enough to glance over, but I'll at lest mention all that I can.

First things first, let's talk about location. The first shoot we did outside, in the cold....and that kinda sucked. Michelle was really cold, and I think we ran the risk of a pulled muscle or injury from trying the jumps and whatnot we wanted. The cold was actually better for the gear as electronics function better at a lower temperature (to a point of course), but that's a minimal advantage compared to the human element. Human ice cubes are not the goal...

Background check to give some context.

About a month and a half ago, I met another photo student, Kaitlyn, who also happens to be a gymnast/dancer. I was matting one of the photos from the first flour shoot, and Kaitlyn happened to be printing self portraits of herself dancing. We started talking, found the common interest, and about 30 seconds later decided a flour shoot needed to happen soon.

A week later, it was 7pm and we decided that night was the night. Being back in Bozeman for the next shoot, I decided that doing flour pictures outside was just a no go. There's not a lot of spaces in Bozeman that are large enough, and public, for a project like this. Luckily, one of those spaces is on MSU campus; Romney Gym. (Little did we know you have to reserve it :D, story for the next post)

For clothing, Kaitlyn and I were torn between black and white. I knew the pictures were going to be b/w eventually, so we didn't have to worry about colors if we wanted lighter tones for clothing. After some debate, we decided on going lighter colors. Kaitlyn had some bright green spandex shorts and a sports bra that, in grey scale, were very close to her skin tone. I also knew since the green would stand out so much to the camera (will discuss this later), I could tweak the exact shade later so we went with the green attire.

Earlier in the week, I'd gotten tarps and flour in preparation, so we headed over to the gym and started  to set up.

When we got into the space, there were two things I needed to decided immediately. First, were the ambient lights a problem, and what's my background going to look like?

I thought the lights were bright enough that they would start to creep into the photos, so from there we were limited to one side of the gym that had an overhang and was darker. With these photos, I wanted there to be no information besides Kaitlyn and the flour, so background info from ambient light is a no no. I'll talk about this more when I discuss camera settings.

Luckily, that side of the gym with the overhang also had a dark wood wall, and I thought that would work as a background. With the lights pointed and modified in the right way, the wall should fall to black. That was more of less true, but I'll talk about that a little later.

Tarps, lovely tarps. The one problem with being inside, besides the lighting and background, is that clean up has be pretty complete. We can't exactly borrow a space and then leave it a mess, now can we? This time around, I'd gotten TWO tarps to total of 400 sq/ft of tarp!  That should be enough, right? NOPE, not even close.... But we didn't know that until it was far too late. None the less, we taped down everything really well and hoped for the best. The thing that really did us in wasn't the throwing of flour, it was me running back and forth to the camera! My feet got caked with flour, and made a nice white path... when we eventually got kicked out by the janitor (not for the flour, but for time issues on an unreserved space), I did feel bad that he had to clean it up...

Two lessons learned from the tarps and janitor: Get more tarps, reserve the gym! When I did the first flour shoot, Victor was there to help assist with the throwing of flour. This time around, it was just me, so I used a remote trigger and threw the flour myself. This worked well, except for the tracking of flour back and forth to the camera.

On to shooting. The first thing I always do with a shoot like this is figure out my shutter speed to balance with the ambient light. Similar to Ansel Adams pre-visualization method, I think about what I want the final image to be, then build the picture to accomplish this. I knew that I wanted everything apart from Kaitlyn and the flour to be as close to black as possible, so I jumped to my highest sync speed right off the bat. This let the lest amount of light in as possible, and gave me the darkest background. My ISO was set to 100 as my standard to start, and aperture to f/8. These two settings give me the best image quality, and I try to use them as often as I can.

However, due to the low power output of my strobes, I needed to gain about two stops of light to get a proper exposure. Technically, I could use max (1/1) power and get enough light, but the t.1 time of my lights is too slow to really stop the motion. At full power, the strobes are an effective 1/400 or so shutter speed, and I need about 1/1000 at the very very least. As far as I know, when you half the power on a strobe, it also cuts the time in half, so I could probably get away with 1/2 power and still have enough stopping power. The very fine details would probably be a little blurred, but I can live with that.

If you don't remember, when you're using only strobes to light an image, your shutter speed is irrelevant, as long as it's longer than the sync speed. There's a lot of info out there, so if you're still interested I encourage you to do a google search of sync speeds. For a couple posts about strobes, go here or here.

In review, I have my settings at 1/200, f/8, ISO100, and strobes at 1/1. I want more stopping power though, so I turned the strobes down to 1/2. Since I have two strobes, this actually cuts two stops of light, instead of just one. 1/2*1/2=1/4 which is 2 stopes. So I raised my ISO to 200 and opened the aperture to f/6.3. This is only 1.6 stopes, but I really didn't want to go all the way to f/5.6 for sharpness and depth of field issues, and I can make up that 1/3 stop in post very very easily.

My lighting set up was identical to the first set up (check the link at the top of the post to see that), but once I got the settings dialed in I ran into some background colors. We had set up too close to the wall, and light was falling on it and illuminating it :/ no good.

We could have done multiple things to fix this, but the one we settled on was gobos. I'll talk about another way we fixed this problem in the next shoot. But gobos for now. Gobo is short for go between, its basically put in between the light and whatever you don't want to light. We didn't want light to fall on the wall, so two gloves got taped to the side of the strobes prevented light from going in that direction. This helped quite a bit, as only light reflected off the gym made it back to the wall. We also turned the lights so they pointed more toward the camera, so even less light was directed towards the wall.

Now that the settings were set, on to actual picture taking!

Not too much to say about this process, as it was very similar to the the previous shoot. There were a couple little changed I made though. The biggest one was that I threw flour into the frame and remotely triggered the camera. This allowed more flour in the frame, adding to the drama and element of motion. My old remote trigger actually died that night, but I luckily have two flash transceivers (Yongnuo RF 603 II) that can pair to function as a remote. Worked perfectly, with no misfires and sync issues.

For the pictures with a lot of flour, many of them are composites of a couple different shots. Even if we didn't get the pose we wanted for particular image, I rarely threw the flour in the same place twice. This way, I would have a lot of frames with flour everywhere, and I could add that flour into the final frame with the good pose. The background is pretty much black, so all that was required were layer masks to blend.

That's about all I have to say about shooting that I didn't say last time. With digital you have especially unlimited storage, so just fire away until you get the shot you want! Be sure to very carefully check each shot you think is good to make sure it's actually what you want. I can't tell you how many times I've called it good and only later discovered the image was soft, or flat, or framed wrong, or some little detail that completely ruins it. It's easy to do, and really ruins all your work in a hurry. If you put in the effect to set everything up, take the extra couple minutes to make sure it's not all going to waste because you were lazy.

Last thing I'm going to talk about is editing. I'll skip the basics, as I covered it in the last post. Two new issues presented themselves for this shoot, and that's what I'll discuss.

First, the background. That pesky thing....it was brown, ugly, and very meh. Surprisingly, it was actually a fairly easy fix. Since all the images were going to b/w, that took care of the color cast. The was still a bit off, but with the global adjustments done to the image for contrast, the blacks pretty much got to where I wanted them. To touch up a few spots I used the adjustment brush to raise clarity. This darkened the shadows (to crush the blacks) but also raised the highlights so that I wouldn't be loosing the flour in those areas.

The second topic is color to b/w conversion. Kaitlyn was wearing the bright green spandex, which appeared no where else in the frame. When you convert to b/w from a color image, you can adjust each colors luminosity to get the look you desire. I brightened the greens, which brightened the spandex and made it appear as if she had on bright white clothing. I felt this worked a lot better with the photo, serving to brighten up the darkish feel and really add some contrast as well.

That's all for this post! I'll try to get the next one written up soon so it's not another month before you see it!

Here's a couple of my favorite photos from the shoot, the rest can be found here.