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: