day 181 - alisia ethereal

so yeah, playing with a bit of lens flare and that shoot-a-bunch-of-light-into-the-lens look. here i wanted to do the whole thing with just one flash. so i setup an sb-28 @ 1/4 in front of the lens, and positioned my trigrip with a silver/gold cover on it above and just behind the camera. that way some light goes into the lens direct, and some goes up and bounces back down in a soft manner from the trigrip.

it worked out well. i got alisia to step in front of the camera, and took a bunch of pictures. i think it's a slightly different feel, dark room flash into lens vs. high key room flash into lens. i spent some time playing with the position of the flash in relation to the lens, just to see what different lens flares i can get that way. it's pretty predictable in a way. that big purple thing is always directly above the flash in the picture, and the orange thing is always on the other side of the center of the lens. so if you put the flash in the center bottom of the picture, the orange, purple, and white areas will all line up in the center of the frame. 

interesting.

setup shot:

day 180 - bright lights dark corners

i wanted to explore the whole super-bright-lights-small aperture thing again, so i set it up again. this time i've got a flash maybe six feet behind me, gelled with a 1/2 cto pointing at the wall..... it's interesting how fast that gradient falls off back there. i mean, it's throwing a ton of light, but it's like it's not going anywhere at all.

camera info:
Model: NIKON D60
ISO: 100
Exposure: 1/125 sec
Aperture: 22.0
Focal Length: 18mm

setup shot:

day 179 - trigrip hotspot

for this one i wanted to work with placing a flash behind my 32" trigrip diffuser, and zooming the flash all the way so that it creates a real strong hotspot type effect on the trigrip. then for fun color contrast i set up another flash behind me, pointed at the back wall with a green gel on it. in lightroom i adjusted the white balance until it looked okay, and that's it right there.

setup shot:

day 178 - strobed

i've got this old strobe light that i've had around for at least a decade now. hardly ever use it, but i was thinking today it might be a decent light source for a multiple exposure faked using one long exposure type thing. so i set it up, and set up my camera to keep the shutter open for a half second, and this is what i got:

day 177 - photo copier

so i had this great idea that i would use alisia's scanner as a light source. i had a scanner years ago that had seriously the brightest bulb ever. you could put eggs on the glass, press scan, and when it's done you've got breakfast.

so that was my great idea. so i got out alisia's scanner, set it up, pressed scan, and it only has this weak little led style glow thing going on. seriously. how does it even scan with that?

so i was stumped. there's no way to use that weak little light as a light source. i might as well try and light using an indiglo wristwatch or something.

so i decided to use the glass and the white back of the scanner as a bounce device. set up a gridded hard light source, point it at the glass and let it turn into a softer bounce thing. i had to work with it a bit, i was getting some strange glass / mirror reflections across my face, but eventually the angles made sense, and i got the shot i wanted.

it's not bad for just one hard light.

info:
Model: NIKON D60
ISO: 100
Exposure: 1/160 sec
Aperture: 1.8
Focal Length: 35mm

setup shot:

day 176 - aftermath

last night alisia and i went downtown to attend a night photoshoot event thrown by melissa diep. it was maybe twenty five, thirty photographers and four models just taking crazy pictures near some kind of an industrial shipping facility. it was interesting seeing other photographers work. so many different ways of doing what we do. and it seemed like everyone was really cool, the whole thing was fantastic.

anyways. i was the one guy with the giant 60" umbrella, i did a bit of hard/soft lighting, alisia would hand hold a hard flash, and i would set up the umbrella shoot-through style opposite her. got some good pictures, and here's a few of them.

you can see other people's pictures here. there's some really great ones, i especially like albert yau's tilt-shift pieces. those were solid.

day 175 - fake softlighter

a softlighter is a type of umbrella device that looks like a silver umbrella making sweet love to a white umbrella. it basically has all the light focusing abilities of a silver reflective (a pseudo-parabolic shape to direct light a certain way) and the softening abilities of a white shoot-through umbrella. i've never used a softlighter, but i've always been curious about what kind of results it would give.

anyways. today i figured i'd do something similar to a softlighter. so i set up my 60" white umbrella, and clamped a 42" silver onto the stand directly opposite it. i put the flash head on there facing into the silver, and took a few pictures.

it's not exactly like a softlighter..... the gap between silver and white let light leak out, and it isn't very adjustable..... i can't angle it all over the place like i could a single umbrella..... but it did give me a large light source with a lot of directional quality to the light coming out the front. it does seem to have a flattering feel to the light, and that is definitely a plus. i'll probably explore this technique a bit more later, maybe try stretching some translucent fabric over the front of a silver umbrella or something. see how that goes.

setup shot:

day 174 - two squares

yeah, so i've got this mirror on the wall, and it's always throwing these reflections from my flashes across the room, so i'll be taking pictures, and the first five or so always have this square of light being projected into them or something. so i have to cover the mirror, and i usually just grab whatever scarf alisia left downstairs to do it.

so for this, i figured i'd stand next to said mirror and scarf, and use it sort of as a graphic compositional element. since i'm in the corner, it's tough to get an umbrella or my big softbox up in there as a light source, so i just went hard with it from a flash clamped to the stairs camera left. then i propped my 32" trigrip up at my feet with a flash behind it for uplight/fill/whatever, and fired away.

i didn't think it would look that great, so i didn't take a setup shot. but i kinda like this. the light is harder than my face can handle, but i dig the odd shadows being thrown by the scarf, and the too-strong uplighting gives it a bit of a different feel. so that's it. quick, wasn't it?

day 173 - blow out

the idea here was slightly different. i'm shooting with my wide open 1.8 aperture, so any little bit of flash is going to be crazy strong. so i'm really strongly feathering the light in front of me, i've got a softbox pointed more or less at the space two feet in front of my face, and a 32" trigrip bouncing some of that back up from camera left. then there's another sb-28 behind me cranked way up for some rim light, and a translucent ear for some reason.

it's not really coming together, though. all the elements are present, just not perfectly balanced. and the pose is a little weird. but whatever. i'm out.

setup shot:

day 172 - i'll have the usual

yeah, so this is really becoming like the standard thing i do. even though i keep finding slightly different ways to do it, this is what it winds up being. so the slight modification here is that there's a flash behind me pointed at me, with a leaned over 32" trigrip throwing some of that light back onto the background. mindblowing, i know.

i'm becoming conflicted about this. on the one hand, i like the level of light control i'm achieving these days. i'm completely off of my usual photoshop addiction (it's going to be odd, actually retouching for real again when i get my next paying job), and i'm getting really great wrapping light and high drama pictures. but they're all starting to look samey. i'm not sure what to do about that. different locations? more experimental light arrangements? i dunno. maybe i need to look for inspiration from a new set of heroes. maybe not. maybe i should have a gyro for dinner. mmm..... gyro.

setup shot:

day 171 - heavy light

i wanted to go for another crank everything up to eleven and let the light falloff get really steep shot, so i did. this time i set up my big softbox camera right with an sb-28 at full power, and adjusted my camera's aperture to make everything okay. one lone sb-28 rear camera left at 1/2 power for rim, and i propped up my 32" trigrip low camera left for a bit of bounce and smoothing on the right side of my face.

it's cool how dark the room behind me got, and how quickly my arm gets absorbed into the darkness. it's interesting to me how many different settings you can come up with that will all result in "proper exposure".... big aperture dim flash fast shutter, small aperture bright flash fast shutter, big aperture dim flash long shutter...... each one will give you a very different result, it's interesting exploring each possibility to see which one has qualities you like or don't like.

camera settings for this result:
Model: NIKON D60
ISO: 100
Exposure: 1/200 sec
Aperture: 16.0
Focal Length: 18mm

i didn't take a setup shot, so i dummied this up really quick to show how things work:

day 170 - crossed

so this is just a bit of backlighting on camera right, with a bit of light from above on camera left. i liked the gradient on the wall, so i called it done pretty quick.

setup shot:

day 169 - big light

this is what i noticed the other day when i was working my diy vignette..... when you set up a flash to pour a lot of light directly into the lens, it creates this bleached out ethereal feeling look to the picture. and since the flash isn't putting any light (or not much, at least) back onto the subject, the subject's values all stay mostly the same and can be treated just like always.

it's a cool effect.... i think i've seen it in fashion type shots before. i always assumed it was some kind of post production move, but apparently not.

anyways. so, for this one i've got an sb-28 and my colorsplash flash about six inches away from the lens, one on either side of it, pointed straight in. the angle is set up to avoid lens flare, and just put a lot of light into the camera. then i've got a softbox and a trigrip bounce illuminating the subject from camera right. i wanted something strongly directional, since i figured it would be really bleached out, i wanted some semblance of a darker tone in there somewhere.

setup shot:

day 168 - got purp

yeah, my color scheme was all over the place on this one. red shirt, tan hat, cto gel on one flash, it was a mess. i decided the only solution was to go greyscale and bring it back up with a bit of shadow tinting. so that's what i did. and it's the return of the goofy smile, always nice to see that.

setup shot:

day 167 - diy vignette

i remembered today seeing a how-to video on photography from the '80s (dean collins ftw), and in it dean demonstrated how to make a vignette. this was back before photoshop and easy post retouching type stuff.... so he was actually cutting a piece of paper and putting it just in front of the lens of the camera, so that it would be out of focus and provide a bit of a gradient to white (or black, depending on the color of the paper).

so i gave it a shot. made this:


i cut it out unevenly on purpose.... i wasn't trying to duplicate what i can do in photoshop or lightroom, i wanted to do something that looked different, not the same.

interesting things learned:

1. i had to light the vignette paper with it's own flash.
2. make sure you're not focusing on the vignette.
3. success has a lot to do with tweaking the exposure, levels in lightroom.

i learned something else too, but i don't want to talk about it yet.  i think i'm going to explore it more in the future, and maybe do a post on it down the road.

setup shot:

day 166 - window light

figured i'd start today off with a little natural window light. so this is in our kitchen. i shot this at f1.8, 1/80th of a second, all the light was coming in through that window. i dropped this picture into photoshop and did my fake tilt-shift move on it, used a gradient so that only my face is in focus, and everything else is gone blurry.

it's not bad for a no-light setup. i tried a few shots of me smiling, but i just look odd when i smile. so i scrapped 'em.

oh, and side note.... alisia pointed out to me today that yesterday was day 165..... so only 200 days left. coming up on the halfway mark quickly. it's very exciting.

day 165 - front yard

saw that the dusk was fading fast, and wanted to catch it really quicklike, so i grabbed my trigrip reflector on a stick, and had alisia stand in front of our house, and grabbed this picture. had to time it just right so i didn't get cars driving by in the background, but it came out pretty well, i think.

setup shot:

day 164 - blue

wanted to do a simple blue background shot, the only real modified approach here is that i used my 32" white trigrip reflector as a bounce with it's own flash clamped to the handle. it worked out really well.... made me get on ebay to buy a couple more used flashes so i can do this more often.

setup shot: