Controlling Light

I've talked about how to balance ambient light with strobes quite a bit before. How ambient light is controlled by shutter speed and aperture where are strobes are only controlled by aperture. But I've never actually show you how that actually works. Today, I thought it would be great to do a little demo of how camera controls affect exposure.

First off, we'll play with shutter speed. The camera is set to 1/250 at f2.2 and ISO100. The lighting set up isn't important here, other than I am using two strobes here to light the chair. Almost all ambient light is being cut out by the high shutter speed, even though there's a very open aperture. This is the sync speed of the strobe with the camera. This means it takes 1/250 of a second for the strobe to fully discharge, so the camera can't be open less that 1/250 of a second or the full power of the strobe would be cut short. Technically, there are different sync speed for different power levels, but for this lets just call it 1/250 cause that's what it is for the 560 at full power.

Here's at 1/250. Almost goes to black in the background where the strobes don't reach.

 1/125. One stop brighter. There's some detail coming in now.

1/60. Another stop brighter.

 1/30. One more stop up. This could be a "good" exposer for a portrait, for example. The background would be there but not intrusive. The subject is still lit mostly by the strobes, but the shadows aren't quite as dark as if we where at 1/250. This is all very subjective, and varies on the situation. I'd use this exposer at say, a wedding or senior portrait in the woods. I don't want the background to over power the sitter, just add to the feel of the photo.

1/15. Now it looks as it would to the eye. It's properly exposed for the strobe and the ambient light. Makes for a rather boring photo, doesn't it? No drama to it at all.

1/8. Starting to have some blown out highlights here.

1/4. Now where two full stops over exposed. Not useable without heavy processing in post.

1/2. Really over exposed. Highlights have no detail and the mid tones are starting to go.

1 second. Completely over exposed. Not useable at all. Maybe, maybe with heavy processing but there's just no detail in the highlights. If you could make it work, it'd still look terrible compared to a properly exposed photo.










This was all shot at exactly the same aperture and ISO. There's no change in any camera setting except for the shutter speed. I slowed the shutter in one stop increments. As you can see, there is massive control to be had with just one camera setting. You can independently expose the background from your artificially lit subject. Most of the time you use this to underexpose the background, and make your subject pop more.

On to adjusting aperture. This is a quick demo to show how you can control your strobe by the aperture. I turned the lights off so there would be no interference from ambient light. Tomorrow I'll do something to show how you can adjust all your setting simultaneously to control the light.

 Here is an over exposed photo. The highlights are too much and the mid tones are too bright. This is at f1.4

Stopping down to f2, the photo now becomes properly exposed. The tonal range is correct, and theres detail everywhere we want.

Going to 2.8, we're starting to underexpose things. The shadows are crushed, and there's very little detail in the midtones.

f3.5, two stopes underexposed. This would be a very noisy image to bring back. It's easier to bring back overexposure than underexposure.

 f4, unusable. Even the mid tones are gone.

f5.6, barely even any highlights left.















That was a quick little demo to show how you can control your strobes without actually adjusting power levels. If you're strobe is too bright, stop down. You'll have to also lower your shutter speed to keep the same exposure of the ambient light, but we'll talk more about that tomorrow.

I hope you can begin to see the significance of this. With this, you can take complete control of your photo. Theoretically, if you had a powerful enough strobe to overpower the sun (which there are), and infinitely short sync speed (think leaf shutter), you could make any lighting condition you wanted just by adjusting your camera settings. This is why I love shooting with strobes, there's just no limit to what you can do with them. You literally can make you're own lighting conditions that could never, ever exist in the natural world. If you're really good, you can trick people into thinking that the lighting is real, and that you had no hand in it. Thats the sign of a true master. cough* cough* Gregory Heisler.

Anywho, see you tomorrow.

Compositing Colors

I figured since I as on the topic of biking from yesterday with my helmet, I might as well shoot my bike. The one I have in Montana right now is my P.1. This isn't a biking blog so I'll spare you the details about it. What I was concerned with is the color scheme of it. It's black and with purple accents.

I wanted to have the lighting reflect the colors of the bike. So there had to be purple. I set up cross lighting for it, one 560 on either end of the bike shooting almost straight across it. This gives very strong texture and contrast. I also had on of the 560 gelled purple so there would be purple highlights on the reflective paint. I shot during the day, so there was natural light coming in through the windows providing the base exposer.

When shooting during the day, you first meter for the natural light, then underexpose that and bring in artificial lights to bring back what you want lit properly. This is somewhat of a quick and dirty way of lighting, but it definitely does the job well most of the time. It's what I used for this shoot. I shot at 1/125, f2, and ISO100. This gave a underexposed naturally lit scene, which I then added the two 560s into at 1/32 and 1/64 power. The purple gel was at 1/64 because I didn't want to overpower other colors too much.

This was the initial result.

 Not very interesting, right? Kind flat and boring really. It's just sort of...a bike. The purple helps, but not enough. So I though maybe a grayscale version would be better?

I converted it to grayscale, added some clarity and brightened the bike (not the background), and put a vignette down.

Much better. With out the distracting colors, the form of the bike is much more apparent. The details in the shadows and highlights just pop, and the textures are supple but apparent. But there's still something missing.

What happens if I add in the color photo on top of this?

This happens. I happen to think it's a very lovely effect. I dropped both version into photoshop, then set the color version to "hue." This dropped the exposure range and tonal changes that layer make to the grayscale version, but left the colors. I dropped the fill down to around 60% just to make the colors more supple and not overdone. To top it off, I added in a lens flare because why not? Sometimes that random, completely unnecessary addition just works. There's no reason for a lens flare, but so what?

And on that bombshell, see you tomorrow.

And no, I haven't been watching unnecessary amounts of Top Gear.

My Helmet

I went snowboarding for the first time today. I managed to get a board and bindings for $15, and boots for $35. Pretty good deal I think. I already had my downhill helmet for biking, but I was instructed that it would impair my vision. So instead, I rented a helmet. Turns out, the only difference in field of view is that on my helmet you can't see straight down. Side to side is the same because the goggles are farther out than the helmet. So tomorrow I'm trying my helmet instead of paying for one.

I think you can guess what I shot for today...my helmet.

It's not the cleanest photo out there, but neither is my helmet. It's still caked with mud from the last runs I did with it last summer. I wanted to capture both the helmet, but also the use I've gotten out of it. The mud, stickers, and scratches are just as important as the helmet itself. The white isn't all the way white, and the black isn't pure and fluid like it was when it was new. It's dirt strained and scripted. Exactly the way a helmet should be. 

The set up for this was as follows. One 560 up to camera right pointed down at the wall behind the helmet. This was to put a bit of light on the helmet but also use the wall behind as a reflector. To touch up the shadows a bit that were cast by the hard light of the bare 560, I used my Orbis ring flash adaptor shooting up from camera right. This filled in inside the helmet and under the visor. It also added a bit of specular highlight along the chin piece or whatever it's called. 

Back in Lr, I selectively raised the clarity on bit of the helmet with high contrast. Over the big areas of tone the clarity adj. doesn't do much except make it look terrible. I also raised the blacks and shadows quite a bit to get more detail in the helmet. Lastly I raised the saturation to bring out the pad and stickers.

One other thing I did was correct for lens chromatic aberrations. Aberrations are essential out linings of color around details. They are usually shades of purple or green, although they can be any color. If your photo just looks a little weird, almost like it has too much noise, it might be chromatic aberrations. Taking them out really does a lot to the photo. It gets rid of that low quality look. There's a simple check box and sliders in Lr to do this, so there's no reason not to.

The camera setting were the usual. Not even going to list them. 

See you tomorrow.

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.