Balancing Night and Strobes

I've talked about this method of lighting a little bit before. It's the same concepts as what I talked about at the beginning of the week regarding balancing strobes and ambient. Most of that was in day time or lit conditions, not at night in darkness.

Today's photo isn't quite as far as I push this type of lighting, but I think it'll get the point across.

I took this one in a totally dark room overlooking a parking lot. The parking lot was easy enough to expose at 1/4 of a second, but thats no where near short enough for most portraits. Most people move too much and you just get a blurring picture.

So you use a strobe, of course. I used a 560 on a 26" umbrella up to camera right to light myself. It's a quick and easy solution, but does have wonderful results. I'd love to try experimenting with cross lighting more in the future though..

When you're taking these kind of portraits, there's a lot of latitude to work with. If you use a longer shutter speed, you can make some really cool blur effect around your subject. The subject gets frozen by the strobe, but since it's a long exposer, you get another, blurry subject "behind" the frozen one. I've seen people do really cool stuff with this using lights or even multiple flash pops to make "ghosts."

For tonight, I just kept it simple. Nothing fancy, just a straight up portrait. I think there's some beauty in a very simple portrait like this. The longer expose blurs the edges a bit, and the umbrella casts really soft, wrapping light.

The very blurred background is pretty cool too...

So in Lr, I upped the exposer, highlights, clarity, shadows, and blacks. Soooo basically everything. When I bump clarity I usually bump the shadows and blacks too because the clarity adjustment tends to crush them. I raised the vibrance a bit as well.

I shot this at 1/4, f1.4, and ISO100. I wanted the really open aperture to blur the background, and it also gave a great depth of field on my face. Really shallow, but it works. Unfortunately, using an aperture this big meant I couldn't use very long of a shutter, only 1/4 second. With a dimmer background, I would have loved to push the shutter to 1 or even 2 seconds. I think there'd be some really cool blurring and ghosting going on with that.

Well that's it for tonight, I'll experiment with this more in the future. See you tomorrow.

Cookies!

Guess what arrived in the mail today? Nope, not mail. Cookies. Real, live, monster cookies. They're gone now, but I had to document them as they are such a rare phenomena. It's not too often you have a chance to observe the native monster cookie in it's natural habitat.

Kidding, that's all photoshop, the cookies don't actually appear in rainbow clouds...obviously...okay no more lame jokes.

On to actual photography, here's my actual photos for today. I could decided on just one, I got into shooting them so you get two photos for today!

This turned into a experiment with shape and portions of a whole. Obviously, I couldn't just sit there and take pictures, I had to interact with my subjects like any good photographer. So my subjects slowly, mysteriously, began to disappear before my eyes. I started with three cookies, and when I was done there was only one! I have no idea what happened, maybe they got scared and hid in my stomach....

So as for lighting, I had a 560 in soft box about 5 inches overhead, and a snooted 560 just off to camera left.

The soft box added some really pretty light. It wrapped light everywhere, and made an amazing shadow. Super, super soft transition zone. But with just the soft box, the cookies didn't really have much depth. They were just kinda...there.

So I added in the snooted light as a cross light to give some texture on the cookie. The light was set very low, almost on the level of the cookie, so the highlights and shadows were sharp.

I didn't really need the snoot, the light was so close and I didn't have to worry about light contamination on the white mat board. I already had the snoot on though, so I just left it on. Did give the light a little bit of warmth to it as the snoot is made from card board.

In general, when you shoot food, you want to depict it as naturally as possible. You don't want to change colors and contrast too much, a little is find of course, but too much and the food will look fake. I like to do a mixture of hard and soft light for food. Give it some good texture, but also soften it just a little bit. The shadows are very important in food photography, they give the feel to what the food is. A hard shadow might convey intensity, or strength in flavor. A soft shadow is nice when the food is a treat or a "relaxing" food. If there's such a thing...

For cookies, I wanted the texture, but I also wanted a soft shadow. Cookies are amazing and hard shadows would just make them look rushed, or hard and brittle. I like gooey, soft cookies, and so I used soft light. Plus, it makes it look like they are floating a bit above the ground, almost as if they are magical (which of course they are).

I've done some food photography before, for my sisters blog. It's Emma's Baking Addition. There's some great recipes for treats on there, so check it out. I hope she continues it this summer...I get paid for my photography services with the treats sooooo.....

Anyway, what did I do to the cookies in Lr?

Not much. I find that I don't do much post anymore. I try to live by K.I.S.S. Keep it simple stupid. The more you do, unless you're good, the faker it looks. For these photos, I raised the highlights and vibrance a bit, and that's it. Obviously lens correction as well, but no other significant edits. The key to a good photo is in the lighting while you are shooting, no in Ps. You can't fix bad lighting later. It's just bad. But you can enhance good lighting very very easily and make it look even better. Do the extra in the beginning and save your self in the long run.

Camera setting were, f5, 1/80, and ISO100. I used a higher aperture than normal because the strobes are so bright up close.

For the background, I just put the cookies right on a piece of white mat board. Simple and quick solution. The stuff costs 50 cents, so it's one of the cheapest ways to improve your photography. You can use it as backdrops, reflectors, gobos...there's a long list.

All for tonight, go get yourself some cookies. See you tomorrow.

Light Painting

Light pairing is one of my most favorite things about photography. There's just so much you can do with it, and it looks awesome! 

So tonight I obviously decided to do some light painting. I used my room as a subject. My roommate moved out a bit ago, so I have a whole dorm room to myself now, which is pretty awesome. As you can see, I've made the two twin beds into one king bed, and made a small cave underneath. There's so much more room now. 

I digress, this is photography not interior design. So how does one make a light painting like this?

Not in one exposure. I believe this is about 8 or 9 exposures composited together in Ps. Before I get to Ps, lets talk about how to actually do the painting in the first place.

To paint effectively with light, you need a bright flashlight or light source. You can do it with dim lights of course, and that's great if you just need to add a bit here and there, but for the effect you see above, you need something with power. I use a LED Maglite with 200 lumens, but anything over 100 or 150 should work fine. To color the light, I use the gels from my flashes. They're wide enough to fit over the bulb, and they obviously very colorful. If you don't know, a gel is just colored plastic, and any colored, transparent plastic will do. 

Once you have your light ready, you have to decide how long of a shutter you want. A longer shutter, say 30s, will give you the most time to light things, but it will also have the most ambient light influence. This means your colors won't be a bright or intense as if you used a shutter of say 8s. It's a trade off that you have to decide for yourself based on the situation. I usually do a few exposures at different shutter speeds and levels of brightness just so that I have the background untouched by artificial light. This way, I can have complete control over the intensity of the colors later is post processing. 

I didn't do that for this photo though. I didn't do it because I wanted to just go for it and see what it would turn out like. The fun about light painting is that it's all guess work. You get good at judging, but you never ever know exactly how its going to look. You have to chimp and check your work after every exposure if you want to get exactly what you're after. 

The setting I used for tonight were 8s, f2.2 and ISO100. My light is very bright, so I didn't need that high of an ISO to pick them up. Shutter speed doesn't really affect how bright the light you paint is. It's the same concepts from using a strobe. The shutter does almost nothing, it's the aperture and ISO that will effect how the colors are in relation to the rest of the image. Yes, the shutter does affect the brightness of the ambient, but the light you paint with is too erratic and changes so fast the shutter doesn't care about it. You are only exposing a part of the frame for part of the time the shutter is open, so it doesn't matter if the shutter is open for 5s or 30s if you're only painting for 1s. The color will get washed out more at 30s, but that's only because the ambient will burn in. For the most intense colors, use shorter exposure times, and if you want more ambient, take a photo of just ambient light to blend in later in Ps.

Speaking of Ps, how do you blend all those photos together? You can't mask around ever light because transitions are much to wide and you'd get hard lines everywhere that'd look oh so fake (although, that's something to play with in the future). The answer is blending modes. You do have to mask out the areas that you don't want from each frame, but you just use a big, soft brush. All the layers are set to "screen," which lets all the highlights and bright areas of the layers come together into one image. From that, you can adjust the brightness or fill of each layer independently, even duplicating a layer if you want a more intense effect. Playing with other blend modes can be very cool too. Color dodge and color burn change the image a lot. 

Once you're done in Ps, just export it straight out, or go back to Lr and add whatever you want. Clarity, tonal adjustments, whatever you want. 

Light painting is all about guessing and just doing random stuff until you come up with something cool. It's one of the more abstract, and dare I say creative, sides to photography. I encourage you to go play with it, I guaranty you'll have fun with it. Don't be afraid to try crazy things, you might come up with something cool.

See you tomorrow. 

Lighting Part 2

Continuing on from yesterday...

I talked about how you can control the exposure of the ambient light and the strobe independently of each other. Shutter speed affects only the ambient, so you can set the brightness of the background or parts of the photo not lit by the strobe exactly how you want it.

Adjusting aperture affects both the ambient light and the strobe light. I don't think  I explained why this was however. An aperture is a diaphragm that gets bigger or smaller depending on what f-stop you want. f2 is larger than f16, and therefor it lets in more light. The aperture is not selective as to what light is lets to the sensor. All light must go through it to the sensor. So when you stop down (close the aperture down to a smaller size, but higher number), you restrict both the light from the strobe and the ambient. This can be used to darken the whole image, or to control the strobe output if you compensate with the shutter speed.

Here's an example of how you can play with balancing the exposure with your camera of your scene of strobe used in conjunction with ambient light, without touching the power levels on the strobe.

These two photos were taken under the same lighting, but with vastly different results. 

Aside from the obviously change of a normal lens to a fisheye, what else do you notice?

You're right! The second photo is different in that background is blurred, but the foreground is not! How is that possible you ask? Strobes and shutter dragging. 

The first photo was taken with a high shutter speed. This froze everything, background and subject. The strobes further stopped the motion, as they have essential a shutter speed of at least 1/250 of a second. 

In the second photo, I slower the shutter speed to around 1/2 of a second. But this overexposed the crap out of everything. So I had to stop down the aperture to compensate. Say maybe from f2 to f8? Don't remember exactly. Not the point here though. Continuing, after I got my exposer for the ambient light right, I was left with a very blurry image. Why? Because my strobe had a power output set for my wide open aperture, not my stopped down, light restricting one. To solve this, I did two things. I put on a wide angle and moved everything, lights and camera, closer to the subject. This way, the lights would be brighter without adjusting anything else. But not bright enough. So I raised the power setting up as must as I had stopped down my aperture, and then took it back down just a hair because I had moved closer. This yielded the correct exposer and motion freezing of my subject, but let the background blur because the strobes weren't lighting that area. 

To recap, I wanted to have a blurred background, so I lowered the shutter. To compensate, I stopped down. To compensate for that, I turned up the strobes. 

It's all a balancing act, everything you adjust had an effect on the image, and there's usually a readjustment of some other setting to compensate for the original adjustment. The key to photography is to slow down and think. You have a very powerful tool to capture the world exactly how you see it. Don't squander that opportunity by being sloppy.

Spelling doesn't count^

See you tomorrow. 

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.