Wednesday, December 29, 2010

post growth


i'm always working on taking pictures. i figure that great lighting is the key to great pictures. so, mastering lighting is the most important thing i can do. however, every now and then i realize that lighting isn't everything.

for example, this picture. i took this picture a year ago. i processed it, decided it wasn't very good, and left it to sit on my hard drive, forgotten. then the other day i was going through my old pictures and i came across it. so i reprocessed it, and decided it was decent. so here i am posting it.

what's interesting to me isn't how i thought it was crap, and now i think it's good. the interesting part of the story is that how i go about doing my post-processing has changed dramatically in the last year. i used to emphasize dark, ominous shadows and heavy handed contrast. now i emphasize a wider tonal range and crispness.

i think the best thing about my day-to-day practice regimen is that i have to go from start to finish, all the way through the process. set up lights, take pictures, edit pictures, run post processing, photoshop where necessary, export, post..... by practicing the entire workflow, i slowly, gradually improve step by imperceptible step. until a year later i can rework an image from something crap into something decent.

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

2010 is almost over.....

in the last year, i took 25,700 pictures. i like to think that if you show up and do the work, the results will come. so while i'm pleased that my shutter count is up there, i wish it were much higher. but i'll get there.

Thursday, December 9, 2010

headshot


this is a professional headshot i did for Dr. Paulina Caban ND. it's the typical headshot setup, beauty dish high camera right, reflector under the chin, i put a large-ish octa-type light behind her, to make it super easy to get a clean white background. i'm pleased with how it came out. it's a good moment, good viewer interaction, and a hard-to-mess-up lighting setup. done and done.

Monday, November 29, 2010

back in the lab


split lighting. man, i have never really cared for it. but i figured i should probably explore it anyways, just to make sure i'm not missing something amazing that everyone else has figured out years ago. 

anyways. so this is my interpretation of it. i've got a big soft fill floated out in front of me to throw a lot of wrapping light onto the dark side of my face, and then a gridded snooted 3 degree flash basically doing an accent light on the left side of my face. add a light for the background, and a light into a reflector on the floor for a bit of up bouncing light, and there it is.

one thing i do like is how the accent/split light is defining shape and texture across my face and clothing. i could definitely see using this technique to define someone's musculature and edge out every muscle group, while at the same time not letting the shadow areas go to black.

so that's something to keep in mind.

setup shot:

Friday, November 19, 2010

hdr photoshop


this is a picture i did for a local business. i quite like how it came out. i feel like this is a step in a more commercial direction for my work. i just bumped up the amount of ram on my mac, so now i can do more intensive photoshop things, and not get the spinning beach ball of death every two minutes. plus it seems like my vision is moving beyond the "purist structure" of only using lightroom, and only tweaking the image so far. now i'm more interested in what mood and concept i can create, how many ideas i can pack into a single image, and still make it captivating and visually interesting. it's an interesting new dimension i can explore. i'm looking forward to it.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

hacking hipstamatic


so, i found a post by isayx3 that talked about how to apply effects from the iphone app "hipstamatic" to your photos in photoshop. it's fun, and pretty easy to do. basically hipstamatic has some gradient blob images that it overlays on your iphone pictures to make a "light leak" effect. kinda like when the back of your old 35mm film camera didn't close up tight enough, and light got in and contaminated the film.

of course, with the hipstamatic app, you can't control it much. you press the button, and maybe you get a cool image, maybe you don't. pull apart the app, drop the gradients into photoshop, and suddenly there's a lot more options. you can choose your blend modes, you can play with opacity, with position, mask bits out, rotate the blobs around.... there's a lot of options.

it's a fun effect. it has a retro feel, since modern (usually digital) cameras don't have a back door that can accidentally let light in. or film to be contaminated in the first place. so it makes the picture feel like it's of an older generation. like it had been taken with film, on a beat up old 35mm camera.

it's interesting how aesthetic choices like putting a gradient blob on a picture can evoke certain responses in viewers. as photographic prints age, the whites yellow, and the blacks take on a blue tint.  when you dig a picture up out of a forgotten drawer or ancient chest, it's going to look that way. and with photoshop and modern digital images, you can manipulate pictures taken recently to look like they've been forgotten and aged for a couple of decades. you can push that button in a viewer's head, just by shifting the colors around a bit.

of course, digital images don't fade and color shift like that. which means twenty, thirty years from now pictures taken these days won't have yellowed whites and blue shadows. they'll look exactly like they do now. maybe by then photography technology will have progressed to the point that our current pictures will have a certain "look" to them, a certain charming simplicity, just because they're not in holographic 3-d, or whatever breakthroughs in technology will occur in the next two or three decades.

seems like the past often looks quaint. i just wonder what it is about the pictures we take today will look simple and "retro" in hindsight.

Saturday, November 6, 2010

new hdr composites



a few new pictures..... the backgrounds here are hdr shots, 5 exposures blended to give that wide range of tones, and then the foreground subjects were shot on grey paper, and composited on top later.

i want to begin to focus more on composite type images... there's a lot that can be done with these types of techniques. and it's much easier to shoot someone in the studio than it is to get them out at some random location.

what do you think?

Thursday, October 21, 2010

my new diffusion screen


a couple of months ago i ordered a bunch of ripstop nylon online.  i found a seamstress here in eugene that knew what she was doing, and i had her stitch it up into a 7' by 5' panel, with pvc pipes as a frame. now i basically have a super large panel i can put between a light source and my subject, and bounce super soft light at them.

the best thing about this setup, in my opinion, is that if youre bouncing light through the panel, there's still a lot of hard light going past the edge of the panel. so you have this raw undiluted light that you can use to light a background, or bounce back with a mirror or reflector or just let wash around the room and provide a bit of ambiance.

i'm not doing any of those things here. in this picture i'm using my diffusion panel as a super large uplight fill. i've got two sb-28s pounding light up from beneath it, almost enough to compete with my ab-800 powering down from above with a hard-ish beauty dish.

so yeah, loving the diffusion panel. so many uses. it's like the world's largest softbox, without the sides. you can't go wrong with it.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

faces of eugene - 001


i've started a personal project -- a series of "dignified portraits" where i'm approaching people i don't know and asking to make their portrait. so many people don't have access to getting a professional portrait made, i wanted to give people that might not be able to have a portrait made a chance to get a professional portrait. this is the first picture of the series.... taken at river road and the beltline.

Monday, October 11, 2010

down-town


i went downtown today to scout out some photo locations. ran into a friend of mine, who quickly became my test subject. didn't bring a flash with me, just my camera and the unusually-bright-for-eugene sunlight. i found a few good places to shoot in the future.... it was good to get a bit outside of my comfort zone, shoot without a flash and a studio. makes things feel new. makes things feel fresh. 

Monday, October 4, 2010

first from new studio

it's been a while.

since my last post, we've moved across country, and now we live back in eugene, oregon again. it's good to be back. we've moved into a place with a big garage, which i've promptly taken over and turned into something of a studio. gone are the days of low ceilings and rearranging furniture. now i can shoot wider, and put lights higher than ever before. these are exciting days to be alive.

anyways. for this shot, i wanted to get some strong color gels on things, and pop out the subject with a gridded white flash. it's all hard light, which made for some interesting shadows on the background. it was a good experiment. something to try next time i'm in front of an interesting or crazy looking wall.

it's good to be back.

setup shot:

Friday, August 20, 2010

baha'i temple


the only baha'i temple in north america, and i live maybe two miles from it......


i dragged a tripod along, and tried a few hdr shots of it.... it was a nice cloudy day, so i tried to bring the clouds out without making it look too fake..... hdr has that grungy quality that it brings to everything, it didn't really flatter the building, it more just made it look like it was set in one of the lord of the rings movies..... but there it is. i might go back and try reprocessing a few of the hdrs, see if a decent mask and cut layering job will bring the tonal range without the grunge..... so, maybe more to come?

Thursday, August 5, 2010

self satisfied


i've been getting bored with desaturated things here lately, so i decided to pursue doing a really strong background color gradient for a change. i have a roll of white seamless paper in my living room, but i usually only use it as a 3/4 backdrop, since pulling it out can be such a pain.

the biggest problem i encountered on this shot was getting enough distance between myself and the background to maintain separate lighting situations. i didn't want key light to spill from the front to the back, or blue background light to spill from the back to the front. the key to keeping things separate is distance, or if you don't have distance, you can gobo it.

luckily our living room is just long enough to do the job. i decided i wanted the key light gridded.... so that i'm sortof half silhouette and half properly exposed. i used a reflector to fill a bit on the dark side of my face, and let everything under my arms go to black. the blue background lights were set to fill with the center just slightly hotter than the sides, and i set up a gridded flash flying in the middle to make the clean center glow.

all in all, it came out allright. i would like the glow to be a bit tighter, and maybe the blue not quite so saturated, but then again, i did this so i would have some color up on the blog again, so maybe not......

i guess i'm ready to start shooting cheesy glamour stuff now.

setup shot:

Monday, August 2, 2010

also in the arsenal



so, i've been trying to shoot more and talk less lately. trying to get to know some of my less-often used modifiers, and trying to reverse engineer a few things i've seen people do here and there online. so in the spirit of all of that, here's a bunch of pictures i've taken here lately, with setup shots and nothing else. enjoy.


Thursday, July 22, 2010

retouchified


i've been working on mastering the amy dresser technique of retouching.... this is my first real attempt at using it. it's pretty different than my usual technique. i can see how using it aggressively could result in some really fake looking images.... but i usually lean toward the less-retouched, more textured results, so i think i should be allright.

this shot was taken with a 42" shoot-through umbrella providing light for alisia's face. the background is the front of my medium sized alien bee softbox. i just set it up and kept taking test shots, increasing the power each time until the background was snapping to white. it didn't take long.

anyways. i'm pretty happy with the results here. alisia looks great, and the snap-to-white background is quick and easy to do. done and done.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

flared


i saw zack arias do a similar shot a while back, and i wanted to play with this lens flare idea... so i set up two lights shooting straight into the camera. at first i thought a reflector would be enough to fill the middle, but that proved too unwieldy, so i brought in the big gun, my 40" softbox. from there it was easy to power up and down until i had just the right amount of fill.

setup shot:

Monday, July 19, 2010

hot lights


i got the idea recently to do a setup with a mix of flash and continuous lights, each illuminating a different part of the subject. that way the cont light creates a blurry action feel, and the flash creates a sharp, detailed component. i don't have any studio hot lights though, so i had to grab a desk lamp and the base of a lava lamp to provide the continuous part.

these setups are just fun. you never know what you're going to get, there's an interesting color twist to it, and the more motion you put into it the better the shot comes out. i think the next time i do this setup i'll get someone with long hair, or some kind of swinging element to incorporate into the shot.


camera info:
on a tripod, at f 2.8, iso 100, 1/3rd of a second.


bonus super action shot:












setup shot: