day 81 - floor background

so, i was bemoaning the fact that our walls here aren't all that interesting. they're just some neutral warm tone.... probably some color named "egg shell cream" or something annoying like that. and i was thinking to myself i should go to home depot and buy a big section of wooden flooring to prop against the wall and use as a backdrop. something like the floor we have in our townhouse.

then i took the next logical step, and turned everything on it's side.

i think it worked out well.

setup shot:

day 80 - bit of the old hard and soft

yeah, i'm really running out of blog post titles up there.

anyways. for this one i thought i'd work the premise alluded to in the last post... namely, hard light plus reflector equals magic. so i used the same hard light from day 79 (conveniently still set up in the living room) and set up a reflector in a convenient spot (silver side this time, for a change of pace), took a few shots, and there it is.

i think my favorite thing about this one is that my ear throws a shadow that looks like really thin but dark sideburns. like i took a marker and drew them on for no reason.

and who's to say i didn't?

thing of setup interest in this shot: i was getting too much light on my background. usually i'll just move the lights away from the background..... problem solved. this time however i went with the gobo approach. i grabbed a thick piece of paper and a rubberband, and stuck it to the side of the flash so that it blocks light from hitting my wall back there. it also created that cool light control gradient thing you can see better in the setup shot.

enjoy!

setup shot:

day 79 - hard and soft

this one is a mix of hard and soft light. i grabbed this basic setup from strobist, i wanted to try it out and see how well it works, and i really like the results. i think hobby's really onto something here. usually when i want to do a hard/soft thing i just set up a cross light situation. hard light on one side, soft on the other. let the battle play out across the subject's face. to acheive something more like this my first instinct is to grab a reflector and use it to bounce back some light from the main light source. but you have more control over it this way. and i'm definitely a fan of control.

setup shot:

day 78 - feathered sihouette

i think i look a bit like lenin in this picture.

anyways. the idea here was to flip what i usually do backwards. usually i'll try and make the background dark, and throw a lot of light on my subject. for this shot i decided i wanted to basically create a silhouette -- light background, no light on the subject, and then feather in a bit of light on the subject.

it would have worked, too. but i had my background strobe zoomed in (to make a nice tight circle) without realizing that would make the brightness of said circle a bit too hot. so if you look at the picture, the edges of my face are being "eaten away" by the light pouring past and curving around. i had thought it through in order to prevent that, but then i went and turned up the zoom to 11, and blew my numbers.

that's it. i need to find a better way to hide my light stands.

setup shot:

day 77 - on axis fill

i don't usually use on-camera flash. mostly because 90% of the time it looks terrible. you get that ugly shadow behind people, and there's no shaping quality to the light..... what's that quote? something like "using on camera flash is like turning your camera into a photocopier". i don't know who said it, but i'd say it's more or less true.

that said, the strobist has some setups that involve using an on-camera flash as a on-axis fill. meaning it's not the main light source, it's just a bit of extra light coming in to push some detail into shadow areas.

it's not how i usually work, but i figured i'd give it a try. and it works out allright. it's basically lighting for the shadows, setting up your ambient level and then accenting with off camera flashes the areas that are important. i did still get that ugly shadow in my picture.... shooting inside with a wall five feet behind me, there's not much getting around that. but using the on-camera fill did put a bit of light up under my hat, which is a place that usually is a pit of shadows and darkness.

so yeah, not a bad technique. not sure it'll be part of my everytime arsenal, but it's useful, that's for sure.

oh - and you can't see it in the setup shot, but i have a colorsplash flash on the couch to lighten up the background a bit. i couldn't get it into the frame for the setup shot.

setup shot:

day 76 - dish halo

had this idea to turn my beauty dish horizontal and use it as a sort of hat / coming from all directions light source. so i did that. it looked good, very directional light coming with a fairly quick falloff coming from above my head. wanted something better. set up a reflector camera left, and another flash at 1/64th behind me to provide shoulder highlights and reflector bounce on my face. that worked out even better.

i like it. even the part where my forehead is getting blown out. it's a good look for me.

setup shot:

day 75 - up close

this is a variation on my fake ring flash setup. this time i had the beauty dish slightly higher than the camera, with the result that there's less shadow above objects in the picture now. it's not a crazy re-think on the concept, but it's an interesting tweak. makes it look much less like a ring flash, more like a police photo or something. so it's good that i know how to do that.

setup shot:

day 74 - electric turban

so for this one i wanted to set up a longer exposure to burn in the x-mas lights, and i wanted a lot of color contrast, so i set up a flash with three blue gels and an sb-3 softbox. i plugged the lights in on the table and shot a lot of test shots trying to figure out the right white balance / shutter speed to get a good tension between the yellow lights and my blue flash. it took a while, but i finally got something i liked, so i wrapped the lights around my head, took a couple of shots, and here's this one.

i think when it came down to it, the flash was @ 1/4 power, my iso was 100, white balance was set on some weird setting i'd never used before, shutter speed was 1/5th of a second. 

setup shot:

day 73 - oiled wax paper II

this is basically another attempt at day 66's "oiled wax paper" shot. while writing that one up, i wondered what it would look like with water droplets on the wax paper. well, this is the result.

i played around a bit more with this one than i usually do. hit it up with some split toning in lightroom, after doing a custom b/w conversion in lightroom. lightroom has a really great approach to b/w conversions, basically it turns the image grayscale, but you still have sliders to adjust the brightness levels of all the different colors.

so if you have say a guy with a red shirt in your picture, and you want that shirt darker, slide the red slider darker. the shirt (and everything else that's red) gets darker. you play around with the sliders after making a grayscale conversion, and you can get some really cool results. in this image i found that the magenta slider basically controlled the texture in the upper right corner of the image, so i was able to very precisely adjust it's value. other sliders controlled other elements.

when i was done with the grayscale conversion, i hit it with the split toning. all i did was make the shadows blue and the highlights green. thought it looked good, so i called it a day.

setup shot:

day 72 - the usual style

seems like i've been doing so much lately that's more experimental for me, or more of me trying to deconstruct what someone else has done, i felt like i should get a bit more back to the simple style, and do something that's not incredibly unusual or way outside of my comfort zone.

my goal with this project is still to break new ground, and find new ways of doing things, but it's also to sift through all that new knowledge and see what parts of it can actually be deployed in pursuit of great photography. it's not enough to just figure out new ways to do things, you also have to figure out how to get results doing things in new ways.

so this is a sort of return to the baseline day. a simplish shot. it's just a flash into an umbrella, with the flash head turned so a lot of light goes raw over to a reflector for a bit of fill. add a camera with two red gels throwing a bit of light up into the top right of the photo, and it's done.

b/w conversion in photoshop, and that's it.

setup shot:

day 71 - morning (no)sunlight

got all excited and ready for the morning sunrise today, had my golden reflector all ready to go and everything, just waiting for the moment when the first sun's rays hit the front yard, and...... didn't happen. clouds to the east = no first morning sunlight. but instead of giving up, i decided to just fake it.

so i used an sb-28 to simulate the sun coming up over my shoulder, and bounced it off the golden reflector for some early morning warmth. it didn't come out too bad.... the part of my face getting direct flash is blown out a bit, but i don't really mind that. and the golden reflector color shift made the clouds at the top of the picture go an interesting shade.

so yeah, i'm feeling it. i might just be really tired of all the lighting in a studio stuff i've been doing lately. it's not the most amazing shot, but it's a nice change of pace.

setup shot:

day 70 - gellin' again

i was unhappy with how day 69 went.... so i went back to the well and gave it another shot. i decided i was going to figure out each color one at a time, and just lock each one down completely before moving on to the next element.

so i put a dark blue gel on a flash and pointed it at the wall. took a picture..... too light. stacked another dark blue on top of the first. nice, rich dark blue at 1/16th power.

grabbed a dark red gel, put it on another flash with a gridspot...... too light. stacked another dark red on there. now it's coming along.

grabbed my one remaining flash, justin clamped it to a reflector and used that as a bounced light source. crouched in front of the camera and took the picture. contrast and color adjustments in lightroom, and here it is. more successful this time.

i think if i'm going to go full out with this type of thing - joe mcnally style - i'm going to have to order up some more gels and maybe a couple more flashes too. it would definitely make things easier.

setup shot:

day 69 - gel crazed

today i wanted to make up a super colorful background using gels. create like a weird pattern of colored light on the background, but still keep the subject in the correct color range.

so i made this:


it's a box that my justin clamp came in. it's long and about the right size. so i cut a hole in both ends, and stuck a flash in one end, and a bunch of gels onto the other end. at first i tried to get some kind of color pattern going, maybe a warm to cool color transition, but in the end i was just taping on more gels any way i could.

the toughest part was balancing the amount of light for the background with the amount of light on the subject..... turn up the softbox too much, and it starts to blow the background white. too little and the subject is just a silhouette. i wanted more color in the background, but there was a intensity of color i wasn't able to achieve. i wound up using my colorsplash flash low camera left to push some blues up into the background.

i think i still need to work on this type of color-gel management. i pushed up the colors in lightroom a bit for the final image, but i'm still not all that happy with it.

setup shot:

day 68 - single light with a bit of glow

the idea today was to set up a strobe directly behind me, so that it does that rimlight thing, and then have two reflectors catching whatever spills past me and bouncing it back to illuminate my face. just for fun i made one reflector white and one gold, in order to (hopefully) add some interesting color contrast.

liked what i saw, wanted more. so i set up a gridded gelled flash on the couch behind me to create sort of a behind-glow on the wall. i used a green gel in a moment of "why the hell not?" and it actually kinda sorta worked. i can't decide if i like the couch shadow or not.... didn't notice it on the back of the camera, so didn't have a chance to experiment with it.

setup shot:

day 67 - feathered uplight

for some reason the idea of standing just barely in the flash path, with most of the light going up past my face and then coming back down from a reflector seemed really solid. right now the concept of feathering light so that just the very edge of it hits your subject is very intriguing to me.

one benefit to this technique is that  you get an artificially quick falloff onto your subject.... in this picture my chest is lit, but my shoulders aren't. had i lit this picture without feathering the light, both my chest and shoulders would be receiving nearly the same amount of light. so this is a good way to establish a mysterious kind of vibe for your subject.

that's it. simple shot, using the elements in unexpected ways. there's no vignette on this one.... i wouldn't want to destroy the cool light gradients happening up on the ceiling with one. so the falloff on my right arm is completely natural. that's all in-camera right there.

the blueish tint on the back ceiling was present in the original, but i did make it a little more present using the "graduated filter" tool in lightroom.

setup shot:

day 66 - oiled wax paper

this morning for some reason i had this strange flashback memory to history class in the third grade or something like that, where the teacher said that early american settlers couldn't afford glass for their windows, so they would oil wax paper and use that instead. and for some reason this sounded like a great idea for a picture setup.

it didn't come out like i thought it would..... the oiled wax paper lets light through, but it isn't transparent enough to see much of anything that's further than six inches away on the other side.it does have a nice texture, though. and it diffuses things very nicely.

i would be interested to see what adding droplets of water to the oiled paper would result in..... i think the droplets would act like little magnifying glasses, and maybe add some interesting light / dark areas to the texture.

just to be clear, there is no photoshop on this image. just a touch of lightroom to adjust contrast / values, and a bit of a vignette. everything is real.

setup shot (oversharpened for no reason):

day 65 - glowing wall

for this shot i wanted to use an entire wall as my light source. the only wall in the living room that is mostly empty is the one behind the couch that usually serves as my background. so i set up two sb-28s to bounce off of it, and a green sheet hung from the ceiling to serve as my background.

sb-28s aren't the most powerful flashes out there. even using two at full power, i wasn't getting a lot of light on myself, so i set up a reflector to (hopefully) throw a few more photons my way. it worked somewhat, there's still not as much light as i'd like on myself.

i didn't want the background to be illuminated by the same light source as i was.... since i'm standing just a few inches in front of it, i knew i couldn't make it go out of focus like i usually try to, so i put a flash behind it, to hopefully illuminate it a bit that way. it did wind up giving the sheet an interesting texture, but didn't really illuminate it very much.

i desaturated the green of the sheet a bit in lightroom, a slight vignette, and that's it. not the greatest, but good to know that if i'm going to use a wall as my primary light source, i'm going to need more power (or stand a lot closer to it).

setup shot:

day 64 - blinds lines

yeah, so i wanted to do that fashion-y shot where there's all these horizontal lines (usually from miniblinds) being projected onto the model. we don't have the little mini-blinds in our place though, we got the big ones. so that's what i used.

i set up a gridded flash outside the window, about 5 feet away from the glass at 1/2 power. then i set up a white reflector just behind my left shoulder to catch any light that makes it by me and bounce it back up for some weak fill. fired a few shots, and this is the one i liked.

one thing that helped me compose the shadow stripes was to make sure that i can see the flash head outside through the blinds.... that way i know my eyes will be illuminated, and i won't end up with a big black stripe blindfold lookin thing in the picture.

i think if i do this one again i'll have another source of illumination inside, either to fade out the lines in selective areas, or for rim / separation light.

strobist info:
nikon d60, iso 100, 1/160 @ f5.6
one sb-28 outside @ 1/2 power into a gridspot
one reflector camera right a couple inches from my left shoulder.

day 63 - the floor skip

this weeks' episode features aiming a strobe at the floor, so that light bounces up off the hard wood and creates a naturally warmed uplight. our floors are kinda dark, so i had to turn the strobe up to full power, and zoom it to 85mm so that it didn't spill a lot of light directly onto the subject.

this composition is interesting to me how it has dark areas within light areas within dark areas.... just the dark/light layers of my face, beard, neck, shirt, sweatshirt, couch..... there's a lot of dark on light on dark going on. maybe that's why i like this shot.

setup shot:

day 62 - golden reflector

just a quick one strobe shot. using a reflector i can make the raw light spilling past me into a big soft source and use it to gently illuminate my face. this way the photo has both hard and soft light..... i think that's a dynamic that is becoming more and more important to me. 

i'm using a gold reflector disc here so that the reflected light is warmed up compared to the hard light.... adds a subtle bit of color contrast to the contrast between hard and soft.

setup shot:

day 61 - mirror universe

for this shot i wanted to have two images of my face in the shot, one showing the lit up side, and one of the shadow side of my face. my first thought was straight on light from the sb-3, but that was too directional, and not soft enough. so then i aimed the sb-3 up at the ceiling for more softness. i think overall that worked out well. as a last touch i clamped another sb-28 to a banister railing board at the top of the stairs, gridded it and used it for some rim / separation light.

i think it came out well. it's a sophisticated look, with a lot of light falloff and light areas next to dark areas. and it's good to know that my glowering abilities haven't diminished with age.

setup shot:

day 60 - pimpin the inverse sq law

allright. so, the inverse square law states (if i might paraphrase poorly here) that light falls off logarithmically from it's source. you can see this if you look at a light bulb right next to a wall.... it goes from being very bright, to being medium bright very quickly, then slowly rolls down to not very bright over a much longer distance.

observe this graphic, stolen from wikipedia:



explained a lot, didn't it?

so, who cares? how can this be used and abused? usually you're going to use this by positioning people in the "long slow falloff from medium bright to not very bright" zone, because the light there is very even for a very long time. so even if you have ten people, spread out over twenty feet, they'll all get the same (more or less) amount of light, and no one will be way way brighter than anyone else.

but what if you want a subject that is lit brightly, but very little light on the background?

that was my idea. in this picture i wanted to take advantage of the quick falloff that occurs very very close to the lightbulb. in order to do that i had to make that quick falloff reach a little further, since i at least want to be slightly visible in the picture.

so, of course, counter-intuitively: if you want the background wall to be dark, you have to turn up the power of your strobes.

which i did. then i closed the aperture of my camera down to f22, and took some shots. adjusted the subject to light distance a bit (at this level of closeness, it's easy to blow out the subject's highlights..... that exponential curve can do some damage), took some more shots, and finally got this one.

now, there's easier ways to do this. it's really easy to put a "gobo" (a go-between) between your strobe and the background, guaranteeing that less light will hit the background. but i wanted to challenge myself and do this with nothing between the strobes and the background. light still got back there, lots and lots of it, but by the time it got there is was (comparatively) weak. that ten feet separating me from the wall resulted in light hitting it that was way way darker that the amount of light on the subject.

it is kinda cool, using this sort of extreme falloff curve.... the light on the subject has a bit of a different feel to it. it falls off faster, defines the shapes differently..... it almost reminds me of when you put something on top of a photocopier and use that to make a crude image that way. makes me want to shoot something very curvy with this setup. be interesting for a pregnancy shoot.

i pushed up the "fill light" in lightroom for this pensive setup shot:

day 59 - make it rain

saw this shot from zack arias' onelight workshop (which i tried to get tickets to, but they sold out too fast) .... and i thought i'd give the sprinkle rain a try, see how it goes.

so i talked alisia into it, and here's the result. things to remember:

1. it gets cold in september in chicago at night. alisia not so happy about that.
2. if the model is standing in the middle of the water, all you'll get is droplets in the picture.
3. try to keep your equipment (especially camera lens) dry.

so yeah. things i learned. the setup here is basic. i've got a softbox camera left at 1/4 power, and a lone sb-28 into a grid high camera right and behind alisia. so it's basically a light for the model and a light for the rain droplets.

i like this shot. maybe next summer i'll try a few more like it. late.

day 58 - paint with ipod light

saw this technique on the strobist a while back, and always wanted to try it, but never got around to it until today. it's a pretty easy one, you set your camera up on a tripod, turn off all the lights, open the shutter for 30 seconds or more, wave a ipod touch / phone around with the screen all lit up (courtesy of the free "flashlight" app) and paint the light in where you want it. you have to make sure your model holds still, and that's about it. one mysterious, strangely lit picture coming right up.

in this shot i was trying to avoid letting the raw ipod light shine back at the camera, but in a few i played with that idea, and it looks kinda cool. there's a big swirl of light just floating there. would be fun to explore further, maybe even do something like ziser did here.