Shutter Drag

While debating over what I wanted to eat for dinner, an idea popped into my mind for a photo. I've experimented around with this before, but never really done anything serious.

Shutter drag means that you have your shutter open for longer than the "correct" amount of time. This allows you to blur motion or other parts of your scene. It's used a lot in sport photography while panning with a subject to create a illusion of speed and motion. What I wanted to do with it tonight was just make a really odd image that would make people think a bit to figure it out.

I knew I wanted to use a fisheye to expand space, but I wasn't sure how I was going to use shutter drag. I played around with moving the camera in various ways in relation to myself, this got me a lot of different blur/frozen subject combinations. I eventually went with holding the camera directly above my head and spinning around. I would remain fairly stationary in relation to the camera, but the background would get really blurred. I used a shutter speed of 1 second with an aperture of f5.6. This gave a nice long time to blur while still not over exposing the image.

I tried this a few times, and it's basically impossible to keep the camera exactly in the same spot overhead. My face just wasn't staying sharp enough, so I added in a flash to freeze my face. At first I used a soft box, but that lit up and froze the rest of the room too which was not to my liking. I switched to a 1/8 grid to focus the light only on my face. At 1/128 power, this gave me just enough freeze to make my face fairly sharp, while not making it look completely unnaturally lit. I had a lamp on in the corner of the room, so that cast a nice warm tone and provided both fill and a rim light for me.

In Lr, I just applied the Cross Process 2 filter and was done with it. There's not much to do with a photo like this unless you want to put a lot of work into it.

So lets talk about shutter speeds a bit more. First off, every shutter speed, no matter how fast it is, is going to have some motion blur. Whether or not you can see that motion blur to the point where it's distracting is what dictates if you've "frozen" the action or not. Sometimes, the motion blur will be smaller than a pixel, so technically it's nonexistent. But remember that no matter how short a shutter you're using, its still an amount of time for the world around the camera to move. So while you may freeze a sitting person at 1/500 of a second no problem, catching a F.1 car in profile at 200mph is going to have a heck of a lot of motion blur. Freezing action is completely subjective to a couple of factors. How fast is your subject moving in relation to you? What light source is lighting your subject, is it a strobe or a continuous light? What is your shutter speed? With these three questions, you can pretty much calculate how fast of a shutter you need to get the amount of blur you want.

For example, if I'm shooting in daylight and a F.1 car going 200 mph coming right towards me I can probably get away with using 1/500  of a second to freeze the car. Even though the car is moving really fast, since it's coming right toward me it's not moving that fast in relation to me. If it was moving in profile to me, that is perpendicularly, then I'd need 1/1000 or even 1/2000 of a second to catch it. However, if the car was being lit by a strobe that had a t.1 time of 1/1000 of a second (not likely) then I could use any shutter speed I want because the car is being frozen by the light and not the camera.

So applying all this to the picture for today, I knew that if I held the camera above my head and spun with it, I would barely be moving in relation to the camera. That way, I could use a shutter of 1 second to blur the background, which would be moving really fast in relation to the camera. To further freeze my face,  used light from a strobe. A strobe only illuminates the subject for a very short time, so you are basically making a shutter out of light. Since it is more powerful than the ambient exposure of my face, my artificially light face will take precedence in the image and will be seen over the ambient exposure.

That's all for today, see you tomorrow.

SKINS

SKINS is a clothing company. They primarily make compression undergarments for athletes. I used to have a partial sponsorship from them, so in continues yesterdays theme, I decided to a mock ad for them.

Considering I have about two hours to shoot, edit, and write these posts, the photos are in no way perfect. In a perfect world, I'd spend a lot more time getting wrinkles out and reshaping the clothing in Ps so it looked perfect. But for tonight I left the general shape alone and messed with the color, lighting, and actually putting the ad together.

To start off, I had to obviously get some pictures of the tights. I could have just laid them down and taken the pictures that way, but that would have looked horrible. So I had a model wear them! Correct shape and I wouldn't have to re position them for every shot.

I lit the scene with two umbrellas cross lighting the model. They were at higher powers than normal, both at 1/32 power. This was because the tights are black, so I had to use more light to bring out the texture and muscle tones forming the tight.

My first thought was to do only one view of the tight to make the ad, but I ended up with three views I really liked, so the ad turned into a three view ad! I did the fairly traditional front view, 45 degree, and profile. I had a back view, but I didn't really like it so it went away.

In Ps, I masked out the tights and put them on a white background. This was pretty quick and easy so not much to tell. Used the quick selection tool because I had to be quick. Pardon the lame joke....

The problem I did encounter was that the masks from the auto-seletion tool I was using didn't quick mask out enough around the tights, so I added a white glow around the tights to blend them with the background.

I then grabbed a logo on line and popped it in. I had to recolor the gold of the logo because it didn't match the tights. Eye dropper tool and paint bucket tool.

Finally, I added a levels adjustment to make everything a little brighter, and I was done! Here it is.

Since I didn't mention it before, I shot at ISO100, f2.2, and 1/200 of a second. I would have shot at a higher aperture to get more depth of field...but...I'm lazy and didn't feel like changing it because that would require compensation with ISO or flash power which would mean either more work in post and a lesser quality image or I'd drain my flashes really fast. Batteries are expensive, one charge of one of my flashes is like 10 bucks! I gotta get some external packs for them..

See you tomorrow!

My Sleeping Bag

For Christmas, I got this awesome new sleeping bag from Sierra Designs. It's some new kind of down that is hydrophobic so it doesn't get all soggy and mushy when it gets wet. At least not as much as regular down. So I decided to make a little ad for it today. It does actually work great and I can't wait to use it again soon!

To start, I had to get a picture of the bag. I set up a white cloth on the ground (so it'd be easier to mask later) and laid the bag on it. I lit the scene with an umbrella at each end, in line with the bag. I wanted fairly soft light while still having some texture to the bag. The umbrellas were about waist height and set to 1/4 power.

Camera setting were 1/200 (no ambient allowed), f3.5 (widest aperture on my 18-135 lens), ISO100.

First thing I did was mask out the bag in Ps. I experimented around with blue colored backgrounds, but I settled on white. It just looked cleaner.

I needed water to be splashing around the bag...I'd love to do this in real life, but then I'd get everything wet and so that wouldn't be too great. So instead I settled for internet water! Pretty lame and unrealistic but what can you do at midnight in a dorm room? For the time I had it worked out pretty well. I managed to find a .png file that had it's transparency still with it, so I didn't have to deal with taking out the white background that's usually with splash pictures. Like I said though, the water still looked a bit fake because the droplets were kinda messed up from taking out the white background. Look at the picture and you'll see what I mean.

Once I had my water, I warped it a bit so it curved around the bag. I had to actually clone a few bits so that the original edges weren't shown. The bottom left side of the water didn't actually exist in the picture as it was the edge of the frame. Easy fix.

I had my water and bag, but they didn't match. The water was too light blue where the bag was a darker blue. To fix this, I added a color overlay in blending modes that darkened the blues of the water.

To finish it up, I grabbed a couple of logos off Google and popped them in. I did have to re-color one of the logos because it was grey instead of the green I wanted. I just added a color overlay in blending modes of the green I wanted so solve that.

Here's the final result. Time from start to completion: 1.5 hours. Shoot time: 10 minutes. Edit time: 1 hour 10 minutes. Time eating yogurt: 10 minutes.

That's all for today! See you tomorrow!

Plants!

Today I visited the greenhouse on campus. I've never been in it before, and it was awesome! My friend, Cara, is a plant person, so she was the one that got me in there. We pretty much just hung out for an hour, ate sandwiches, and took awesome pictures of random plants.

It was very nice to be somewhere warm since it was very cold out.

I couldn't decided on just one photo, so I decided today will be a mini series day! See all the photos! These are my favorites.

This one is actually one of the first photos I took. It barely edited at all in post. I shot the backside of a leaf as sun was shinning through it. It's very beautiful.

These two were taken moments apart.  Cara was holding this little plant up into a beam of light, and I just snapped a few quick photos. In Lr, I added graduated filters on the sides to get the rich blues. I did a bit of spot adjustments to make sure the highlights in the leaves weren't overblown.



This was another shot of a leave that sun was shining through. I applied the Cross Process 2 filter to it, which added some blues to the shadows and messed with the hues of the greens a bit.

Another leaf one. This one's almost out of camera, just some fine tuning of the contrast.

I love this one. It's a fern with a shadow of a fern on it. Fernception. I applied the Cross Process 2 filter to it and that's it. The highlights near the top are a bit overblown, but that's okay.

The last one. This was just a really cool little tear in a leaf. I love the contrast between the orange of the dead tissue and the rich green of the living tissue.

As far as camera exposures, they were simply metered off whatever I was shooting. I used my 70-300 lens, so I had to use a very high shutter speed to avoid motion blur. This took out a lot of light, so I had to then use a wide open aperture and a relatively high ISO, at least higher than I usually like. All of the photos were taken with natural light. It's amazing how wonderful it can look. When you can use natural light instead of artificial light, do it. It's easier and generally looks a lot better. It's incredibly hard to match the softness of a cloudy day shooting in the snow or the patterns of light thrown by a beautiful window. You can do it, but sometimes it's not worth the effort. It's better to supplement the natural light that's already there.

All for today, see you tomorrow!

Couldn't decide photo

Back to light painting tonight! I though't I'd combine some light painting with me jumping and see how it turned out. This was really a fooling around photo and I had no idea if it would work or not.

To start out, I set a shutter speed of 4 seconds and started painting with different colored lights. I just put my flash gels over my Maglite to get colored light. I think I painted with five different colors before I called it good and started to try to get the jump.

To light the jump, I had my two 560s cross lighting me. They were set to mid range power as I was using an aperture of f3.5. Since I had a long exposer already set up, I trigged the 560s using my back up set of triggers. Since I only have one receiver, I put one of my 560s on S1, which means it will fire when it "sees" another strobe fire.

Timing action isn't terribly difficult when you can see it happening. You do have to trigger the shutter a tiny bit before you think you do, and even then it's somewhat hit or miss. When you're trigger the shutter and doing the action it gets much harder. Trying to think about the right pose and when to hit the little button is somewhat of a challenge. I ended up taking about 15 pictures before I got one I like.

Bringing all the photos into Ps, I created masks around the parts of the light painting I liked, then set those layers to screen. I masked out myself from the jumping picture and set it to overlay. This blended everything together and made it look semi realistic.

Back in Lr, I did a couple of different edits on the image, and I couldn't decided which one I liked!

The first two are more "realistic," while the last two are much more surrealistic. As I'm not sure what my original vision was, I have no idea which one I like the most.

I'm not going to go over the setting for each one, but they were mainly achieved by messing with the contrast, saturation, and tone curve. A bit of split toning was used too.

That's all for tonight, see you tomorrow!

Little Light

Grids are pretty cool little things. They are a light mod that constricts the light beam like a snoot, while still having the beautiful fall off of a big light mod.

This is going to be a really short post because I have to get up for work in 4 hours...sleep in needed.

Here's what a grid looks likes when a strobe is fired through it.

It's hard to tell, but on the edges of the strobe head you can see the fall off of light in the holes. As you get further away from the light, the holes get less and less light. This translates to the very soft fall off of light that a gridded light source has. The edges of the light source actually have less light emitting. Unlike a bit light mod that has softness because its own light fills in the shadows in makes (including the edges of the light patten) a gridded light just has less light on the edges. It's pretty ingenious.

To shoot this, I had to use f22 and a .9 ND filter. The strobe was at minimum power, but pointed right at the lens it was still really bright. For those of you who don't know, ND means neutral density. Those filters block light to the camera.

All for tonight, see you tomorrow.

Another Photoshop thing

Yet again, I had no idea what I wanted to shoot today. I guess there's only so much you can do late at night in a dorm room. Tried to do some photos earlier in the day, but they didn't turn out. So I resorted to using Photoshop, which I honestly hate to do.

The idea behind this was to do kinda a good and evil theme. I've done it before, so I figured I could knock it out and get something up for today.

I hung a ripped up sheet of cloth on my wall, then used a gelled strobe to light it. I got on picture of myself just standing there, and then one with my helmet attempting to look evil...pretty cheesy I know.

I got them into Ps and blended them together so they'd look like one image. I adjusted some levels to make it more contrasty lighting, then I made the fire effect. I have some brush presets that are things of smoke, so I just used those and layered them to create "fire." Pretty OK if you ask me. I used layer makes to get the fire "in" the helmet and "behind" me.

In Lr, I applied the Cross Process 3 preset and was done. Pretty quick and easy.

Not my best work.

Anyway, that's it for today. See you tomorrow.