day 57 - many light tree

today alisia and i went for a walk in a "sculpture park" near our apartment. during the walk i saw this big willow tree that i thought would make a good subject for a tim simmons style picture. so after dark we went back there and took a few pictures.

this picture is made of a lot of exposures from the same camera location. each time you take a picture, you move your light source (i'm using a 40" softbox). one problem you have to think through is focusing. you don't want each picture to have a different focus, otherwise it'll look..... odd when you stack them all together. my solution was to bring a small flashlight, and have alisia shine it on herself while i zoomed in on her and let the camera autofocus. then i switched to manual focus and zoomed back out.

another problem to think about ahead of time is how things are going to stack up..... i'm doing this in photoshop with layers all set to "lighten". that means if an area of my current layer is darker than what's below it in the stack, it's going to show the other layers through.

so if your subject is wearing black, or dark colors.... that's not going to work so well. here i had a problem with alisia's jeans being too dark. i wound up cutting out a jeans shaped patch from one layer and making it opaque in order to not have grass showing through her lower legs.

a third problem to think about is movement in your picture. if anything moves between shots, then you're going to have at best a weird doubling effect, and at worst a quadrupling or more. if you look at this picture closely, you can see that most of the leaves were moving in the breeze. so there's a lot of doubling going on. if it bothered me i could get in there in photoshop and mask out every other leaf.... but i'm not going to get that crazy.

there are other things to consider with this type of shot, but i've revealed too many of my moves already. i think it looks cool, and that's really all that matters.

day 56 - tight light

today i replaced the bolt i was using the attach my beauty dish to my light stand. before i was just slapping a nut on the end of the "brass monkey" and hoping it didn't fall off (not a lot of extra thread to get my nut onto....) but today i went and replaced that situation with one that is much better.

so, now that i've done that (finally) i can turn my beauty dish sideways without worrying that gravity would kick the monkey's ass.

so i did a setup to take advantage of my new horizontal dish ability. i figured i'd set up the dish so that it's making these deep dark shadows under my hat and eyesockets and nose and chin, then set up a lumiquest sb-3 on the floor at my feet to throw some light up into those caverns. and while i'm at it, why not a color contrast too?

so there's a cut and a half of cto gel on the beauty dish, nothing on the sb-3 flash. then when i balance for all that orange, the daylight balanced uplight goes a bit blueish. looks good.

one thing i don't like about this picture is the top of my hat going so bright.... if i wanted to make it right, i would create a virtual copy of the image in lightroom, adjust the exposure / brightness so that the hat looks perfect (and everything else is too dark) then stack and mask in photoshop, so i get a final picture with perfectly lit face and perfectly lit hat.

but i'm not doing crazy photoshop manipulations here. i'm trying to get better at lighting, not better at photoshop.

setup shot:

day 55 - converging shadows

for this one i wanted to have a light source behind me so that each of my legs is casting a shadow towards the camera. but at the same time i didn't want to be a silhouette. so my answer was light behind me, gridded to prevent crazy reflections from all the walls and ceiling around me, and then a high camera right beauty dish illuminating more or less only my head and torso.

the final image has some problems.... you can see the light stand holding up my shadow light source, and you can even see the shadow of the shadow light source on the wall behind me. i had to move almost every piece of furniture in the living room to get to this point, so it's not too frustrating to me. just a few little things that i would change if it were possible.

of course, with photoshop anything is possible.

setup shot:

day 54 - traced with light

this one is about making that "traced light" look. where light is being bent around the form, and creating this really thin rim effect..... it's not quite like a rimlight. it's actually photons curving around the form (wave / particles doing what they do) to make a quick appearance in ways that no particle should be able to.

so that's what we're doing here. that explosion of light just off my shoulder.... i have no idea what that is. looks cool, though. looks like a puff of dust. maybe my chin is extremely dusty, and i moved and shook some dust out just before the picture was taken. i dunno. anyways. the key to this traced effect is to have the distant flash pretty far away.... i think in this shot it's about 16 feet behind me. i had to grid it so it doesn't light up the entire room. i think if it was maybe 20 feet back i'd get a traced effect on the back of my neck too. maybe. there it is. bye!

setup shot:

day 53 - take this show on the road

i've come up with a new rule, that anytime i can't think of a new way to do a photoshoot in the apartment, i have to get in the car and go out somewhere to shoot. so that's what i did. this shot was taken under the L at about 1:40am. i chose this spot because the wall was dirty, and there was that sodium vapour-ish light up there that i thought would give a hint of nice color contrast.

so yeah. there's a 42" white umbrella high camera right, with an sb-28 at maybe 1/4 power through it. the camera's at 1/80th of a second, and f3.5

so yeah. i like this shot. i would like it better if the camera had focused on me, instead of the wall, and if my toes weren't being cut off. but that's part of the camera on a tripod game, it seems.

day 52 - beauty dish portrait

nothing crazy here today. just a typical shot. i just felt like using my beauty dish, so i set it up, put a white reflector opposite it, and fired away. i think it came out nicely. i actually also set up a bit of rimlight with my colorsplash flash far camera left, but in this particular shot it didn't go off. but you can see it (and it's effect) in the setup shot.

it is interesting to me how much bounce my white shirt is putting up onto my neck. that was unexpected. i so rarely wear white shirts, i wasn't expecting so much light to bounce around. i should've expected it, though.

at that photography seminar i went to, ziser talked about how if you have a "first dance" wedding type situation, and you position your light/assistant at the correct angle, the white of the groom's tuxedo shirt will bounce some light up into the bride's face, and make a very sophisticated lighting pattern.

something to think about.

this shot reminds me of school picture day, but i think that's part of it's charm.

setup shot:

day 51 - shadow wall

working that fake ring flash last time made me spend some time thinking about shadows. it got me mostly considering how i'm usually trying to minimize them or make them more manageable, but really they have great potential for use as graphic elements. i think i need to use them more consciously, instead of just looking at a picture and saying "oh, that shadow is terrible, change it....". wouldn't it be sweet to have a picture where the subject is incredibly boring, but the shadows are interesting?

i think the most interesting shadow in this picture is the one under my hat that makes me look like i have a widow's peak.

setup shot:

day 50 - fake ring flash

a ring flash is a type of flash that is shaped like a doughnut. the idea is that you stick the lens of your camera through the doughnut hole, and then the doughnut circle will illuminate your subject, thereby avoiding any directional light, since the light source is a circle around the lens itself.

fashion photographers love ring flashes. mostly because they produce an image where the model is (usually) super bright in the picture, and sometimes has a "shadow halo" effect going on around him/her. it's been a trendy look for awhile now.

and of course, i want a ring flash. i want everything, really. every piece of gear ever made. but, ring flashes are very expensive. recently orbis has come out with a ring flash adapter that lets you use your speedlight strobe as a sort of a ringflash, but even that is pricey. so i'm stuck, with no ringflash.

then today i had an epiphany.... the ringflash look can be accomplished by just putting the camera in front of a big circular reflector dish. something like the do it yourself beauty dish i made six months ago out of a wooden salad bowl, a convex mirror and some spray paint.  i would have to put the camera on a tripod, but i've been doing that anyways for this 365 project already.

so yeah, it's not something i can easily bust out for a photoshoot, since the camera's locked down to one place, but it's definitely a good move to have in the playbook. and i'm willing to bet that close to the same look could be achieved using umbrellas (either silver or white shoot-through).

how cool would it be to set something like this up in a "photobooth" type thing at a wedding? definitely some unique images for the album.

setup shot:


bonus shot:

day 49 - fake outside

allright, no lies. that's my tv. i've heard of photographers that buy ridiculously expensive video projectors, and use them to project backgrounds onto white walls, then have subjects stand in front of say.... a beach scene, and then they take a picture. light it correctly, and who's to say that your subject wasn't at the beach? nevermind that you and your subject are in nebraska or wherever.

so anyways. thought i'd give it a try, see how hard it is. i don't have a projector, but i do have a big ass tv hooked up to my computer. so i grabbed a lake shot from the interwebs, made it full screen, set my camera to burn it in, then set up a few lights for myself, and here we are. a passable image of me at a lake in the fall. if only there were lakes near where i live, i would just go there. but unfortunately......

yeah. so anyways the tough part seems to be mimicking the light in your background. that and keeping the flash from reflecting off the screen. my screen isn't that big, however. so i'm limited to basically a head and neck picture.

i don't really see the point of using this technique to just throw in a background, however. i can get better results by actually going there than i can with this fakery. what is interesting though, would be to use this as an abstract background generator. like come up with crazy graphic patterns and then shoot people in front of the screen.

or --- even better, my tv is 40 inches. that's about the size of a medium-bigish softbox. why not use the tv as a light source? i could color it whatever color i want, put precise hotspots at different places, maybe have it shining a striped pattern, so that someone standing next to it will have a light-dark repetition on their skin. i could be onto something here.... the dawn of the age of the fifteen hundred dollar light modifier.

might be a bit heavy for a light stand, though.

setup shot:
 
iso 100, 1/13th of a second, aperture 5.6

day 48 - stairs

i was looking at the stairs in our apartment, and it occurred to me that they would make a really strong graphic element in a photo. so i moved our tv, and a bookshelf, set up an umbrella high camera left with a 42" white shoot through @ 1/2 power (all that power to cover the 7 feet or so it was away from me)..... then i set a light on a stand behind me, pointed at the wall behind my back for a high key contrast thing. pulled the trigger a couple of times, and there it is.

if this was a serious portrait, i'd get my photoshop on now and remove that lightstand from between my legs. but my goal here is interesting light setups, not practicing photoshop.

setup shot:

day 47 - ziser poses

yesterday i drove for two hours to go to a photography seminar by david ziser. he's a wedding photographer from cleveland, ohio. his seminar was pretty solid, the first half was all photography technique, and the second half all marketing. i was more interested in his marketing style than his photography, but i enjoyed everything, he really was pimping things on every level possible, which is a positive attribute, in my opinion.

anyways. one of his talking points was that most of the flood of photographers to the recent market don't know the classical portrait poses, and that these poses are classics for the single reason that they work.

so i figured i'd practice my classics a bit here. up there you have a full-face, a three quarters view, and a profile. i threw the raw pictures into a couple of pieces of software ziser recommended highly last night, first nik effects silver, and then lumapix's fotofusion for the book picture-in-a-picture feel. 

it was difficult to nail the poses since i was taking my own pictures, but i think i got pretty close. maybe the three quarters view is a little off. i used one sb-28 into an umbrella high camera left. set up a loop light pattern for the first two, and just a 90 degree off for the profile.

day 46 - super color

joe mcnally does this thing from time to time where he'll gel the hell out of his strobes, and set up some kind of crazy situation where half the light will be this super saturated red, and the other half will be a rich dark blue, and in between there's usually someone standing there that is (mostly) color balanced correctly.

and this is something that interests me a lot. i mean, it's difficult to make a flash look like it's a dark color. you're filtering the color of light coming out of a speedlight, so it's not like you can add more to make it richer. if you turn up the flash power, it gets more washed out instead of more saturated.but if you turn the flash power down, now there's less light to bounce around the room and color things.

so it's a bit counter-intuitive. but i eventually worked it to this point, which is decent enough for what i'm trying to do. i plan on exploring this more in the future.... it's mind blowing to me to think that you can walk into a space with just a couple of flashes and some thin colored plastic gels, and create this super-colorful environment for your subject. i think next time i'm going to try double and triple stacking the gels on the flash heads.

setup shot:

day 45 - tv paranoia

i was thinking that i should do more concept - oriented stuff with my photography. try and get myself to think about the mood-creating effect of this type of light, or of that type of photo.

so with that in mind, i thought i'd come up with a concept and try and execute it using photography. the first concept i came up with was "tv paranoia". so that's what i tried to execute. unfortunately, i'm a terrible actor. this picture could be used as a cable tv ad, or a stock image about the switch to digital tv broadcasting.

so yeah. not enough paranoia. but the image itself came out well. i hid a strobe on the other side of the tv, with a cto (correct to orange) gel on it, as a sort of separation / rimlight on myself. i set up a silver reflective umbrella behind me, with a strobe at 1/16th power and a ctb (correct to blue) gel on it. i had to put up my reflector between the silver umbrella and the wall beyond me in order to keep light from spilling onto it.

one other problem was that the tv wanted to reflect the blue flash as a highlight. so i had to move my flash further to the side than i wanted, just to get rid of the highlight. and it turns out on this shot, my most expressive and terrific acting job ever, the camera focused on the tv set, instead of on me.

speaking of the camera, i had it set for a 1/8th of a second exposure. that's just to burn the tv in, and prevent those tv lines from showing up. so on top of acting i also had to hold very still for 1/8th of a second. it's tough, let me tell you.

setup shot:


concept sketch:
 

oh the atlas idea is coming, just you wait.....

day 44 - head shot setup

this is a really solid setup for doing head shots. a lot of light for the subject, not alot for the background. it's just one strobe, high camera right into a shoot through umbrella, with two reflectors, one horizontal and one vertical forming basically half of a box for the light to bounce off of.

so you're getting a quick and clean uplight and opposite side light, each one slightly less intense than the main light. it makes for a really soft-ish light that still has some directionality.

you can't really use this for anything more than a head and shoulders shot, though. as the setup shot shows, there's a lot of equipment in the way of the rest of the figure.

setup shot:

day 43 - wall of reflection

the idea here is that i wanted to set up a flash w' reflectors on either side, so that any light not hitting the subject will get reflected back that way again. sort of use my reflectors as a parabola, and focus the light toward the subject similar to the way a flashlight does.

it worked out pretty well. i decided to go for a really close crop, whitened up my eyes a bit in photoshop, and there it is. there's also a rimlight camera right for accent, but you should know that by now.

setup shot: