Sweet Tooth, detail
The pic above is one of many moderately successful photos that I made very recently. The entire concept really came together pretty well, mostly courtesy of my wife. See, the original thought was to embed the tooth in a cupcake. Click to continue »
Snakehead Cowry, side profile
By taking just a few flashes with me on trips, I can create DIY studio shoots wherever I may be. Take the image to the right, for example: you’re seeing a snakehead cowry. We found this shell (about 3 inches long), washed up on mile 69 beach, just south of Hapuna beach. A gift from moana, one could say. Its owner had long since been eaten, this being just a memory of a life that was.
Now, the sea-lover in me wanted it in the deeps. What a perfect home for a young hermit crab! But the photographer in me wanted to see it up close, under the lens. So to the condo it went, for a short while. Click to continue »
Hindsight, 20/20 – as always. A few notes for myself (for next time), and to answer a few questions of readers:
When you look back at the photo, you’ll see that the shadows to the left are nice and soft. This is good, but I don’t think it fits this particular subject. We’re not looking for a soft look – not for some hippie with a beard. A little roughness is just fine. Should have gone with, or at least tried, a bare bulb.
Anyone want to get me a California bounce reflector? I use cheap, and often rigged-on-the-spot reflectors. I should use something better & would love a good-quality reflector. Why? In this case, the eyes kept coming out dark. Too dark, in many. Fixable, but should be better out of the camera.
Bonus: with a good reflector, I probably wouldn’t have needed the flash to camera left at all.
Yes, everyone that you’ll ever talk to will say “don’t use the display to gauge picture quality.” It’s bad – it’s chimping. Well guess what: I didn’t call this blog “photo-chimp” for nothing. People do it, and I do it. If you’re going to do it, check the histograms. I did, so these came out fine. However, by looking on the display, I thought they were much brighter. Some images, including the posted one here, needed as much as a +1.5ev adjustment in ACR, just to get skin tones right.
It’s minor, but could have been mitigated in camera. A pre-emptive responst to the question: why didn’t the histogram tell you it was off? Because of the dark background. This is a very low-key photo, and the histogram only tells me that there is detail in the photo itself.
Three lights on Pop
The picture to the right was taken with three lights. Technically four flashes, but only three produced the light in this particular portrait. The fourth worked as the master controller for the other three.
Our goal was to show the beard – a near-year’s worth of growth, which is about to be chopped off. We wanted to show the full size and fuzziness (this is a lot for this guy), so that later photos can accurately show the contrast. There were several poses that we ran through, all of which did pretty well. This was my favorite, I think – it shows that the hair in the back grew (pony tail, yeah!), as well as the beard effect.
So, how it was done: we started by running through the house. We needed a background that would be visually interesting if we chose to light it. It also had to be in a room large enough so that we could use light to isolate details if need be.
In the end, we chose the main living room. It’s large, has dark walls, and a natural-stone fireplace (barely visible in this background). Unfortunately, a few shots in & we realized that the mantle cuts right through an adult’s head from virtually any angle. So, darken it we shall! Take the rear light, turn it around & give the subject rimlight. This was at 1/32nd power. Click to continue »
Just another image from the wedding, for another perspective of the overall impression.
Full cake, strobed
Strobed cake
Go ahead, take a gander at the pic to the right. Click it, look at it up close. This is one of my favorite (recent) pics – taken just last week on the fly. Since posting it on Flickr, I’ve had a few people asking about the details. Perhaps better said: they wanted to know how I did it.
First off, this is a single-strobe shot. The background was brighter than the foreground, so that’s my primary area of exposure concern. This means taking a reading on one of the brighter areas with a spot meter. In my case, the in-camera one – no prob.
Now, dial it down a little, to bring in the saturation of the colors. End result: before I’ve taken the shot, I’ve already set the camera in manual at 1/100th, f/ 9.
This makes the foreground far to dark. So quick, set the on-camera flash to commander mode, yank of the large flash, set it to sync mode, and hand it to someone nearby (thanks, Josh!). Set that to 50mm (limit the spread of the light), and have him hold it up near the ceiling.
At this point we have a remote flash, the background exposed properly, and a nearby diffuser to blast light off of (the ceiling). Set the external flash to iTTL, with “0″ compensation across.
We’re set, now let’s go: give it the first test shot. As expected, it was too dark. This is mostly due to the light color of the cake and the bright background. Dialed it up to +.7ev on the flash and took try #2. Dead on – we’re good. All shots from that point on were like that.
Flash is barely three feet to camera left for this. Remember that this is while people are milling about and setting up wedding decorations. It’s a great effect in little time.
Red strobed flowers
Taking a picture with strobes can be somewhat challenging with the setup that you have to the right. What we have here are two primary colors, red and blue, with slightly different tones that need to come out well saturated. I’m doing this indoors, so I don’t want the light to be quite as harsh as I did last time, so I’ll use a softbox. How am I going to set this up so that the background recedes and the flowers are well saturated?
A few things. First, I need to keep the lighting on the flowers delicate. They’re already pretty bright, so they don’t need a lot of light. Too much, and the colors bleach out. I also need them to be brighter than the background – the background is actually a mid-to-light blue color (my daughter’s lunchbox, in fact).
So I start by exposing f/stop wise where I think I’ll need it for the light. f/11 or so. Then I adjust shutter speed while exposing for the background, aiming to hit -1EV for that guy. Flash with softbox is perched to camera left, set on manual (14 mm spread) at 1/32nd power. Blinds it out on the petals. Move it down in third stops until it stops bleaching out: 1/64 even is the flash. Try slightly smaller and larger f/stops, find f/11 is still the best.
That’s all there was to this. These petals are from the www.moosestooth.net parking lot (my daughter snagged them). I did the full setup, shooting and teardown in 20 minutes – her bath.
Flowers, all strobed up
We have some flowers – african violets, I think? In knowledgeable hands, they bloom almost continually. In our hands, we’re lucky if it’s once a year, in the summer. They’re blooming right now.
To the right, you’ll see a macro shot of these blooms. While it can be expensive to get all of the right pieces of equipment, it’s pretty simple to run if you do. In my case, I have Nikon gear, which means that I have a few flashes, and Nikon’s excellent iTTL flash technology.
So how did I get the dead-black dropoff with the lighting on the petals? That, after the jump:
Well, not so impressive in Anchorage – not on an overcast day. Still, there’s a semi-decent impression:
Flowers, strobist-style
The strangeness of the image is due to using flash to overpower the ambient light. More on the tech side tomorrow. Some resurrection of light in photoshop, too…
Holiday Ornaments on the tree. Lighting from bounced flash.
I don’t want to go too crazy about linking to David Zizer‘s blog (oh, why not. It’s excellent!), but he posted a semi-followup to his criticism of the photographer I mentioned in this post.
From a newer post:
Anyone who has attended my Digital WakeUp Call tour knows that I’m am not a big fan of on-camera flash particularly when the flash is pointed straight ahead. I’m not going into specific reasons why – I do that during my program. Just know that direct flash on the subject is about the least flattering light you can put on your subject.
Yes, I do have a quick fix – just turn your on-camera flash about 90 degrees to the left or right side, bounce it off a wall and, presto – beautiful light.
I’ll definately second this. There are many things to keep in mind, but the portrait lighting is incredible. This year at Christmakkuh (family term), I specificall did on-axis bounced flash the entire time. In keeping with my beliefs of keeping other peoples’ lives private, I won’t post any of the pictures with my subjects. However, look at the photo attached to this post.
That’s a strobist-inspired photo. F/9, 1/60th, on-axis flash bounced to camera right.