day 31 - burning the sun

so at the moment i own 3 1/2 flashes. i have 3 sb-28s, and one colorsplash flash (which i consider to be half a flash, since it seems to be about half as powerful as the '28s). so i had the brilliant idea to rig all three sb-28s together and create a monster. this is it:



sexy, isn't she?

then i figured, with that amount of light going off, i could almost compete with the sun. so i dragged the beast out into the backyard, exposed my camera for the sky, stood in front of the triple headed monster, and pulled the trigger.

it was kinda scary, i'm not going to lie.

but it worked. which is cool. this is something i didn't think my equipment was capable of.... i'm planning on buying some kind of a super-powerful light, either an alienbee or a white lightning monobloc to do exactly this sort of thing. to take a day when the sky is clear and light blue, and darken the sky down to almost a late afternoon kind of a feel, and still have proper exposure on my subject.

my camera's sync speed is 1/200th of a second. that's the highest speed it can go and still catch the flash going off. if i make a faster exposure than that (say 1/320th) the shutter opens and closes before the flash can light up my subject. so that's my shutter speed ceiling.

as far as aperture goes, this one is at f/25. that's a lot smaller of a hole than i'm usually at. that's why absolutely everything in the frame is sharp. the depth of field is huge at this aperture. i usually like my background out of focus, but at this aperture, that's not an option.

day 30 - big softy

i really don't use my big softbox nearly enough. and i had never used it with my new 10" boom arm. so i figured that's what i'd do.

i also wanted to try shooting from a low vantage point and lighting my legs separately from my face. so i set up two 42" umbrellas, reflective side bouncing light down from about waist height, and then set up my softbox to light my upper body.

using the lower vantage point has the effect of stretching me out, i look like i'm ten feet tall up there. focus wasn't that great, since it was locked onto a tripod i could never tell where it was autofocusing. next time i'll set a lightstand where my face will be, focus on that and then leave it in manual so it won't change. solve that problem.

but yeah. it's good light, and i should use my big softbox more often.

setup shot:

day 29 - neo-noir

today's idea was sort of a take on film noir, where they would often light around objects and people, so that the person has a lot of shadows wrapped around them. it's a very mysterious look.

the problem with the noir feel is a lot of the time you can't see the face of the subject.... so to make sure that didn't happen here i set up a flash through a grid spot aimed right at my lovely assistant's face. all the other light was provide by two sb-28s into reflective umbrellas on other side and slightly behind alisia. this gave her a really soft wrap of light around her shoulders and hair, and left everything else mysterious.

i really like the highlights on her forearms and hands. i think that was really successful.

i had a hard time with the light falloff on the wall behind her, though. our living room isn't all that big, and it's tough to get the lights far enough away from the wall to not make obvious light edges. anyways. i think this is a good technique, and i'll have to explore it again further in the future. if i took some time with this image and did some dodging and burning, it would be really fantastic.

setup shot:

day 28 - halo

there's a drawing of a famous architect (whose name i can't remember) where it's a straightforward portrait, but then just behind and above the architect's head the artist drew a big circle, a circle like you'd see in blueprints or a technical drawing, just sitting there behind the architect like a halo.

i've always liked this idea. taking an element from the subject's life and using it in the same way artists in the renaissance would paint halos behind all the important figures in their (mostly religously funded) paintings.

so i was thinking about this...... looking at my beauty dish, thinking about this.......... looking at my beauty dish.....

and so i did it.

it was actually a lot harder to do than i thought it would be. in my head, it was "set up the dish behind, set up a reflector in front, maybe an uplight, done". and....nope. i had to keep adding and moving things, adjusting power levels up and down.... this is one of the most complicated portraits i've done. but i really like the outcome.

in terms of post, i adjusted levels and colors in lightroom, and opened it up in photoshop to do a bit of healing.... my skin wasn't made for light like this. i didn't do a vignette because i like that faded highlight in the upper right corner too much.

here's the final setup shot -- i almost prefer the way i look here to the "finished shot".

day 27 - wood on wood

today started out very differently, i wanted to do my georgia o'keefe distorted sense of scale idea, but it wasn't working out well. i think i need more softboxes and a smooth background of some kind. so some other day, g o'k.

while trying to work through things, i shot this wood statue on our wooden floor, and quite liked it. so then my goal became trying to get the best gradient falloff on the floor behind the statue i could. i wound up positioning a 42" umbrella behind the statue, mostly to illuminate the floor. then i had my sb-3 softbox camera left at low power to throw a bit of reflection onto this side of the figure (it's kinda shiny). shot over and over to get the most floor in the shot i could, and called it done.

tweaked the color in lightroom, added a bit of vignette, and there it is.

strobist info:
nikon d60 iso 100, f5.6 1/200th of a second
sb 28 through a 42" white umbrella @ 1/16th power for the floor
sb 28 through a sb3 camera left @ 1/16th power for reflections

day 26 - soft above soft below

another exploration into the greatness that is my new 10' boom arm light stand. for this shot i set up a 42" umbrella just above my head, sb-28 through it at 1/8th power. then a reflector pretty much on my lap, angled to guide light softly back up towards my face.

did a bit of color tweaking in lightroom (our light brown walls tend to go a strange hue sometimes) dropped a vignette in there, and that's it. this type of light wasn't dreamed up with me in mind. it mostly just serves to draw attention to the forehead area..... but i still like the shot. i think the lighting is solid, and it has almost an old-timey hollywood feel.

setup shot:

day 25 - dramatic feather

i'm really quite tired of looking at myself, so i thought i'd start out today taking a picture of this feather thing. it's actually a pen that belongs to alisia.

i wanted to do another dramatic lighting type setup here, so i put the feather pen in a justin clamp on a light stand, put the camera on a tripod, and set up a sb-28 through a sb-3 softbox camera right. i feathered the light (hah!) so that it was pointed more at the background than at the feather itself.

i liked the results, but wanted to experiment with color contrast, so i got out my old colorsplash flash (the flash that got me into flash photography in the first place) attached an optical slave trigger, and placed it about 5 feet away behind the feather on a bookshelf camera left. i played with the colorsplash settings (it has three different gels built into it, red, blue and yellow) and decided the blue gel had the most pleasing effect.

did nothing in lightroom other than a levels adjust. no vignette, no color shift, nothing. done and done.

setup shot:

day 24 - back quarter light

this is like an extreme rim light shot. two flashes, each one behind a shoulder, pointed at my face. that left a big shadow on my eye-nose-mouth area, which i solved with a flash low camera left into a big piece of white posterboard reflected up into my face.

i'm not usually a fan of the oversharpened look, but i thought it was appropriate for this shot since it has such a hard edge. to get it, i cranked up the "clarity" slider in lightroom, and did a quick b/w conversion. adjusted my levels, and that's it. job well done.

all the flashes are at 1/4 power. more info in the metadata.

setup shot:

day 23 - new stuff

so there isn't really any concept or goal with today.... i got some new equipment in the mail yesterday and wanted to try it out. what did i get? glad you asked:

1 new 10' light stand with a boom arm! so excited about this one.
1 60" optical white umbrella.
1 new justin clamp.
1 new optical slave trigger.
1 package of roscoe color correcting gels.

yep, a pretty good haul right there. so i figured i'd get to know my new stuff today, see what i can come up with. one thing that has always bothered me has been my inability to position the flash directly over my head without having a light stand in the picture. so that's exactly what i did right off the bat. i set up a flash right over my head with a green and blue gel on it pointing straight down, and then the new 60" shootthrough camera right with a cut of cto on it to warm things up. i was hoping to get some killer color contrast, have a greenish blueish hat and shoulders and everything else warm and correct, but it didn't quite work out that way. instead it just looks like i'm standing under a fluorescent light. but anyways. after yesterday's bout of desaturation, color is a welcome addition.

setup shot:



i love that beautiful boom arm.

day 22 - gradient control, part 2

so, last time i did this i was trying to acheive some hot light on dark action with two gradients. it didn't work out so well. all i got was a big light blob of flash on the wall. in my post i said i'd try it again, this time with a subject standing there. and now, the prophecy has come true.

so the goal was to have a light to dark gradient on the wall, with the lightest part directly behind me. to pull that off i set up a sb-28 camera left, with a gridspot pointing directly where i wanted the lightest part to be. so far so good.

then, i wanted myself to be lit from the opposite direction, so that the shadow side of me would be right on top of the brightest part of the wall. so a 42" shootthrough umbrella camera right worked as a nice soft light source for me.

i like the resulting image. it has a pleasant sort of a push-pull to it.

strobist info:
nikon d60 on tripod, iso 100 1/160th of a second, f3.5
sb-28 camera left w' gridspot @1/16th power aimed at background
sb-28 camera right w' 42" umbrella @1/8th power

day 21 - coffee table light

so, that's our coffee table right there. i was wondering if a softbox type modifier was necessary to do a tim simmons style photo. i was thinking, well, you have multiple light sources, wouldn't they more or less overlap and create artificial softness without needing a softbox / umbrella / modifier?

so i set this one up. i used a justin clamp to attach a flash to the edge of our coffee table, put the camera on a tripod, and then took 12 exposures, moving the flash for each one. then i merged all the layers in photoshop, and here's the final image.

the verdict? yep, you need a modifier. i mean, it looks cool, but it has a really hard light feel to it. there's a really quick falloff on the rug, and hard edged shadows on the table legs.... the whole thing is a bit contrasty, and there's not the smooth dynamic range i was hoping for.

i think my disappointment comes from the fact i was hoping for a more "ethereal" look to the light, and all this hardness just doesn't have it going on. most of what makes this technique interesting is that you can't tell where the light is coming from, and a softer light makes it even harder to say where the light could be.

so yeah. lesson learned. ethereal light requires softness.

strobist info:
nikon d60 iso 100, 1/15th of a second, f6.3 x 12 exposures
sb-28 at 1/16th power on a justin clamp x 12 exposures
merged in photoshop using "lighten" setting on each layer.

day 20 - one light does the work of three, part 2

so the idea for today is the same as the idea for yesterday, only smaller. one flash does the work of three..... it's harder smaller. plus this buddha statue has a lot more specularity than my face does...... looks a lot different even though the same techniques are being applied.

setup image:

From tim's 365 (this is my year)

as you can see, one light with a grid on it, a piece of white paper as soft fill, and the inside of a tin box as a mirror-ish reflector. looking at the picture in hindsight, i wish i had placed the tin box behind the statue, to provide rimlight or some kind of edging element. but i didn't do that, so no edge today. maybe tomorrow.

strobist info:
nikon d60 iso 100 1/125th second @ f3.8
sb-28 with a gridspot at 1/4 power.