day 95 - on white

so i thought i'd work on my white seamless kungfu, even though i still haven't gotten around to ordering any white seamless. so this is me in front of my wall. i'm not completely happy with it, but it's a start. having a low-ish ceiling and off-white walls didn't help me much. i think this is going to be one of those things i have to practice on.

setup shot:

day 94 - reflecto

so i wanted a picture of me wearing sunglasses, and reflected in the sunglasses is some crazy scene. a skyline, or mountain range or something. the easy way to do this is take a picture of the sunglasses, and then mask out the lenses, drop in your reflection image in photoshop, and call it a day.

i didn't do that. instead i set up my tv to show a skyline, set up two flashes to illuminate me, and fired away. some problems encountered were:

1. i had to keep the shutter open longer than usual (1 second) in order to burn in the tv image.
2. the window blinds were letting in too much light from outside. had to cover them up.
3. long shutter exposure = have to sit very very still.
4. the light from the tv was illuminating the whole room.... had to burn it down in ps.
5. reflection in glasses still not as big as i would've wanted.

that's about it. used the silver reflective umbrella to control light leaks into the rest of the room, and the lumiquest sb-3 to create a hardish-soft light source camera right.

setup shot:

day 93 - getting the band back together

honestly, this was way more trouble than i thought it would be. it probably took me a half hour to set up the lighting, and an hour in photoshop to get in there and mask everything out so it looks seamless.

that said, it looks pretty good, i think. definitely makes you do a bit of a double take. i'm actually in there four times.... there's another me sleeping next to tako, but singing me is blocking the view of sleeping me.

i know this is just opening the door for a lot of "why are you always playing with yourself, tim?" type innuendo, but i don't care.

i wanted to try this because i have a band photoshoot coming up in a month or so, and i wanted to see if this was a good idea.... shoot everyone separately, then collage together a piece that has the best picture of each of them individually.

it's a good idea, and i think it would definitely yield superior results to just get everyone together and try to catch a moment where they all look good...... but i wouldn't want to do it like this, where everyone's close to each other. it'd be a much easier photoshop job if there was more room in between the different members of the band.

that's it.

setup shot:

day 92 - water glass

i really struggled with this one. usually i shoot with the largest possible aperture.... for my standard lens it's somewhere around f3.5 this gives me a nice shortish depth of field, so i can separate myself from the background and draw the viewer's attention right to me (the eye abhors a lack of focus, and will go straight to the part of the picture that is in focus). so i set up this glass of water shot the way i always do. and no matter what i did, i could not get it to get me in focus. i tried manually focusing on a tripod standin, i tried shining a light on my face for the autofocus, i tried everything. couldn't get an in focus shot to save my life.

so i gave up on it for awhile. thought about it a bit, then came back and tried again with a much smaller aperture. took it down to f11 to stretch out the depth of field a bit, and that did the trick.

one other thing you have to do when you close up the aperture is turn up the power on all the flashes you're using. after shooting 30 frames or so i think my batteries are about dead. oh well. a couple of hours on the charger and they'll be good as new.

setup shot:

day 91 - these sinning hands

yeah, the blog post title is an iron & wine reference. so sue me.

anyways. after yesterday i wanted more of that sweet sweet 50 mm loving, so i set up a light and my camera and took some pictures of my hands. i started out with a flash high camera right at 1/64th with the sb-3.... but it was way too bright at this aperture (f1.8).... how crazy is that? the flash is too bright at it's lowest setting from like three feet away. so i decided to bounce the flash off the ceiling for a super large light source and some distance to lessen the light a bit.

i think it came out decent. always unhappy with my lack of autofocus, but i do what i can.

setup shot:

day 90 - outside with the 50mm

yeah, i was outside watching the dog play in the yard as evening approached, and i decided to grab my camera and 50 millimeter lens and fire up some wide open aperture / short depth of field stuff. so i did. it was a lot of fun.

i don't use my 50mm all that much, because on my low-end dslr it only works as a manual focus, so i almost always wind up frustrated with pictures that are close to being in focus, but not quite there. my solution to the focus issue here is to take pictures of things where it looks like i was intending to have most of it out of focus. it usually works pretty well.

so yeah. this is all stuff in the backyard. no flash, no light modifiers, just me and my camera as evening encroached. i think it looks pretty good.

day 89 - high key

i cropped this one a bit differently than i usually do. most of the time i'm a 4x6 man, but for this shot there were some odd elements i couldn't eliminate and stay in a 4x6. it was nice that tako decided to pose for this one.

for this one i was determined not to have the same problem i did last time i did a high-key portrait. namely i had too much light going into the background, and it was eating away at the edges of the subject. so for this one i set up one sb-28 for the background, and started it out at 1/64th, then jumped it up one stop at a time until it looked right in the back of the camera. it's still a bit short of true white-with-no-detail, but i like where it's at right now.

setup shot: