day 49 - fake outside

allright, no lies. that's my tv. i've heard of photographers that buy ridiculously expensive video projectors, and use them to project backgrounds onto white walls, then have subjects stand in front of say.... a beach scene, and then they take a picture. light it correctly, and who's to say that your subject wasn't at the beach? nevermind that you and your subject are in nebraska or wherever.

so anyways. thought i'd give it a try, see how hard it is. i don't have a projector, but i do have a big ass tv hooked up to my computer. so i grabbed a lake shot from the interwebs, made it full screen, set my camera to burn it in, then set up a few lights for myself, and here we are. a passable image of me at a lake in the fall. if only there were lakes near where i live, i would just go there. but unfortunately......

yeah. so anyways the tough part seems to be mimicking the light in your background. that and keeping the flash from reflecting off the screen. my screen isn't that big, however. so i'm limited to basically a head and neck picture.

i don't really see the point of using this technique to just throw in a background, however. i can get better results by actually going there than i can with this fakery. what is interesting though, would be to use this as an abstract background generator. like come up with crazy graphic patterns and then shoot people in front of the screen.

or --- even better, my tv is 40 inches. that's about the size of a medium-bigish softbox. why not use the tv as a light source? i could color it whatever color i want, put precise hotspots at different places, maybe have it shining a striped pattern, so that someone standing next to it will have a light-dark repetition on their skin. i could be onto something here.... the dawn of the age of the fifteen hundred dollar light modifier.

might be a bit heavy for a light stand, though.

setup shot:
 
iso 100, 1/13th of a second, aperture 5.6

day 48 - stairs

i was looking at the stairs in our apartment, and it occurred to me that they would make a really strong graphic element in a photo. so i moved our tv, and a bookshelf, set up an umbrella high camera left with a 42" white shoot through @ 1/2 power (all that power to cover the 7 feet or so it was away from me)..... then i set a light on a stand behind me, pointed at the wall behind my back for a high key contrast thing. pulled the trigger a couple of times, and there it is.

if this was a serious portrait, i'd get my photoshop on now and remove that lightstand from between my legs. but my goal here is interesting light setups, not practicing photoshop.

setup shot:

day 47 - ziser poses

yesterday i drove for two hours to go to a photography seminar by david ziser. he's a wedding photographer from cleveland, ohio. his seminar was pretty solid, the first half was all photography technique, and the second half all marketing. i was more interested in his marketing style than his photography, but i enjoyed everything, he really was pimping things on every level possible, which is a positive attribute, in my opinion.

anyways. one of his talking points was that most of the flood of photographers to the recent market don't know the classical portrait poses, and that these poses are classics for the single reason that they work.

so i figured i'd practice my classics a bit here. up there you have a full-face, a three quarters view, and a profile. i threw the raw pictures into a couple of pieces of software ziser recommended highly last night, first nik effects silver, and then lumapix's fotofusion for the book picture-in-a-picture feel. 

it was difficult to nail the poses since i was taking my own pictures, but i think i got pretty close. maybe the three quarters view is a little off. i used one sb-28 into an umbrella high camera left. set up a loop light pattern for the first two, and just a 90 degree off for the profile.

day 46 - super color

joe mcnally does this thing from time to time where he'll gel the hell out of his strobes, and set up some kind of crazy situation where half the light will be this super saturated red, and the other half will be a rich dark blue, and in between there's usually someone standing there that is (mostly) color balanced correctly.

and this is something that interests me a lot. i mean, it's difficult to make a flash look like it's a dark color. you're filtering the color of light coming out of a speedlight, so it's not like you can add more to make it richer. if you turn up the flash power, it gets more washed out instead of more saturated.but if you turn the flash power down, now there's less light to bounce around the room and color things.

so it's a bit counter-intuitive. but i eventually worked it to this point, which is decent enough for what i'm trying to do. i plan on exploring this more in the future.... it's mind blowing to me to think that you can walk into a space with just a couple of flashes and some thin colored plastic gels, and create this super-colorful environment for your subject. i think next time i'm going to try double and triple stacking the gels on the flash heads.

setup shot:

day 45 - tv paranoia

i was thinking that i should do more concept - oriented stuff with my photography. try and get myself to think about the mood-creating effect of this type of light, or of that type of photo.

so with that in mind, i thought i'd come up with a concept and try and execute it using photography. the first concept i came up with was "tv paranoia". so that's what i tried to execute. unfortunately, i'm a terrible actor. this picture could be used as a cable tv ad, or a stock image about the switch to digital tv broadcasting.

so yeah. not enough paranoia. but the image itself came out well. i hid a strobe on the other side of the tv, with a cto (correct to orange) gel on it, as a sort of separation / rimlight on myself. i set up a silver reflective umbrella behind me, with a strobe at 1/16th power and a ctb (correct to blue) gel on it. i had to put up my reflector between the silver umbrella and the wall beyond me in order to keep light from spilling onto it.

one other problem was that the tv wanted to reflect the blue flash as a highlight. so i had to move my flash further to the side than i wanted, just to get rid of the highlight. and it turns out on this shot, my most expressive and terrific acting job ever, the camera focused on the tv set, instead of on me.

speaking of the camera, i had it set for a 1/8th of a second exposure. that's just to burn the tv in, and prevent those tv lines from showing up. so on top of acting i also had to hold very still for 1/8th of a second. it's tough, let me tell you.

setup shot:


concept sketch:
 

oh the atlas idea is coming, just you wait.....

day 44 - head shot setup

this is a really solid setup for doing head shots. a lot of light for the subject, not alot for the background. it's just one strobe, high camera right into a shoot through umbrella, with two reflectors, one horizontal and one vertical forming basically half of a box for the light to bounce off of.

so you're getting a quick and clean uplight and opposite side light, each one slightly less intense than the main light. it makes for a really soft-ish light that still has some directionality.

you can't really use this for anything more than a head and shoulders shot, though. as the setup shot shows, there's a lot of equipment in the way of the rest of the figure.

setup shot:

day 43 - wall of reflection

the idea here is that i wanted to set up a flash w' reflectors on either side, so that any light not hitting the subject will get reflected back that way again. sort of use my reflectors as a parabola, and focus the light toward the subject similar to the way a flashlight does.

it worked out pretty well. i decided to go for a really close crop, whitened up my eyes a bit in photoshop, and there it is. there's also a rimlight camera right for accent, but you should know that by now.

setup shot: