FlashFrog

Explosion inside

noreply@blogger.com (zetson) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:34:00 +0000

I shot this picture about a week ago, and didn't bother do write about it since the setup was pretty simple.Still, I've recieved a lot of questions about how I shot it, so here we go.

Idea and setup

Earlier this day I was at work. My colleague asked me to throw a bottle of water to her. I noticed how the water looked, as if it exploded. I thought it would be interesting to freeze that motion. On my way home I bought a cardboard with gold coating which I wanted to use as background for this shot. I was fed up with colorful backdrops, including black or white ones.

I placed the golden cardboard up against the wall and a SB-600 flash on the left side. I put a pillow on the floor in front of the backdrop. I drank up a bottle of vodka and fell asleep. When I woke up the next day, I removed the lables from the bottle and cleaned it with nail polish remover, since it was covered with label glue. I filled the bottle with water almost to the top.

Oops, sorry for including my new Epson 1400 A3+ printer in this setup description...

Exposure

Exposure was pure luck. Ended up with these settings:

Flash: SB-600, 1/8 power, 24mm zoom

Exposure: 1/250@f/8, ISO 200

Camera: Nikon D300

Lens: Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D

Shooting and post processing

I mounted the camera to the tripod and pointed it at the background. I connected the remote shutter cable and held the bottle in front of the camera, allowing it to auto focus on the bottle by pressing the shutter halfway down. I threw the bottle up in the air while giving it a little spin and pressed the shutter. I did shoot only one picture for each throw. I repeated this action about ten times, but I ended up using the first test shot.

This is the RAW file:

Look how unbelievably straight the bottle is.

In Photoshop I cleaned up the background and increased the contrast in levels. Finished with crop and sharpening.

The result:

Splashism

noreply@blogger.com (zetson) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 11:36:00 +0000

There are two types of photographers: Those who have shot water drops and those who will.

Idea

Two days ago I saw an episode of Time Warp on Discovery Channel, a program were they slow things down. They are using a high-speed HD movie camera to capture movement with a frame rate of 10,000 frames per second. It's a amazing! Well, in the mentioned episode they shot water drops and I got a few ideas. Here's my shot at it.

Setup

First of all I needed something to pour water in, and it had to be black. I found a deep tray in the oven and put it on the kitchen bench. I also needed a white reflector. In lack of a stiff white cardboard, I glued a white sheet of paper on one of my wife's paintings (on the the reverse side) and set it aslant behind the bench, using a string for support. Next to the tray I placed a Nikon SB-600 flash unit.

I originally inteded to buy a pipette/eye dropper of some sort to make the water drops but luckily I read a tip which would make the shooting process much more efficient. It involved filling a plastic bag with a little bit of water and hanging it above the tray. Then I just had to puncture it with a small needle. This would release a smooth stream of water drops, falling with equal intervals and, more importantly, they would hit the water surface on the same spot - every time.

I mounted the camera with a Tamron 90mm f/2.8 macro on the tripod and connected a remote shutter cable to avoid camera shake. When I pointed the camera against the water, I had to make sure that the field of view stayed inside the reflection of the white paper. A Nikon SB-800 flash was used as a commander for the SB-600 slave flash.

This is how the setup looked initially:

Focusing

The setup was finished, it was almost time to shoot. I was amazed how quickly this was done. It's wasn't very painstaking. But before I could shoot gorgeous water drops I had to lock the focus. Since timing is just as important as exposure (or may be more important) I didn't have time to focus on the water drops each time I took a picture. Most likely, the camera wouldn't be able to focus at all. To configure the focus, I punctured the plastic bag with a needle. The water drops came out about one second apart. I placed a contrasty object (pen with letters) right where the drops hit the surface and focused automatically. Then I switched to manual and the focus would be close to perfect most of the time.

Exposure

The next I had to do was find proper manual settings for the camera and the flash. Highest sync speed for the shutter was mandatory (1/250 sec) and I definitely wanted a narrow aperture to achieve as much depth of field as possible without risking diffraction. Since I was planning to use color filters on the flash, it would be necessary to adjust the output depending on the transparancy of the filter.

Flash: 1/8 power (1/4 for dark filters), 24mm zoom

Exposure: 1/250 sec, f/11, ISO 200

Lens: Tamron 90mm f/2.8 macro

Camera: Nikon D300

Shooting

With a red color filter on the flash, I was ready for the fun part, and believe me: It was a lot of fun. It felt like I had endless attempts to get a good shot. If one drop shot was bad, I just had to wait another second for the next drop to hit the surface. I didn't have to think about how and where the drops were released, which made the shooting process a relaxing piece of work. I could instead concentrate more on the lighting. The first shots looked pretty cool, and thought it would be appropriate to add another flash to get additional colors in the shot.

Straight out of the camera (SOOC). Red back lighting.

I set up a lightstand on camera left with another SB-600 slave flash and pointed it at the background. Same output as the other slave flash. I used different combinations of color filters on the flash heads. Some combinations looked better than others. I definitely fell in love with the blue-red combo and blue-orange. By setting up another flash, I changed the properties of the backlighting to a color mix/gradient, while at the same time lighting up the drops with a different color.

SOOC-raw file. Dual color lighting: Red on the background blue camera left

I did also put the camera closer to the action, but that resulted in an extremely narrow depth of field which rendered the preset focus useless. Still I got some lucky "sharp in the land of the soft" shots.

SOOC-raw file. The closest I could get with the Tamron macro lens. This picture shows the water drop as it bounces off the surface.

Post-processing

Since the colors are so vibrant and shapes are contrasty, very little processing was needed. I only increased the vibrance and contrast just a tad in Adobe Camera Raw. I also removed some tiny dust spots and lens flares. Here are some of the results I'm most satisfied with, in terms of sharpness, colors, lighting and shapes.

Epilogue

Those of you who are familiar with the Tamron 90mm f/2.8 macro lens know that the lens extends quite a bit when shooting close-up shots. During the focusing prcoess prior to the closest shots, I had to move the lens very close to the water. What do you think happened when the autofocus motor stared pushing the front lens element outward?

This is only a reenactment. No camera lens became wet during the taking of this picture. Only prior to.

Summer Baby

noreply@blogger.com (zetson) — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 18:18:00 +0000

It's been so long since the last time I wrote a setup article. Our baby is over four months, so I guess I don't have any excuses any more. But there won't be any setup shots this time. During the shooting of this picture I actually forgot to take picture of how it was shot. I will remember that the next time - I promise.

Idea and setup

The weather has been exceptionally nice this summer, or at least this weekend. July started with an average of 6 degrees Celsius, but in the last few days the temperature has been around 23 degrees. Today, the sky was blue, and our boy wore a cute hat. I wanted to shoot a portrait of him against that very sky.

The sun was pretty high, so I definitely wanted fill light. I hooked my Nikon SB-800 external flash to the camera using a coiled cord (Nikon SC-29). I told my wife to grab him under his arms and lift him up while I stood below behind and shot the photos, while holding the flash in my left hand.

Exposure

Since children and wives seldom are patient when it comes to photography, I had to find the exposure prior to the shooing. I wanted the sky as blue as possible, and to achieve that without a polarizer filter, I thought underexposing the sky would do it. I turned the knobs on the camera to manual, and set the shutter to the fastest flash sync speed (1/250 sec). I pointed the camera to the sky and found that f16 was a suitable aperture. Any aperture wider than that would overexpose the sky, so I was balancing on the edge. Due to diffraction I didn't want to use a narrower aperture. ISO was set to the lowest value; 200.

To find a proper exposure for the face, I set the camera to spot metering and set the flash output to TTL (automatic flash exposure). Even if the camera is set to manual, the flash was still dependent on light readings from the camera. By setting the metering on the face, the flash would know exactly how much light to emit.

Shooting

I quickly found out that something had to be changed. The test shots looked dull, the sky was almost white and the quality of the light was nothing like I had imagined. Here are some examples:

The first one is overexposed since I accidentally bumped the thumb wheel, so the exposure was increased with one stop, but the other two don't look any better. The fact that it suddenly started to become cloudy didn't help much. Yes, the boy was cute, but that won't pay the rent. It was time to soften up the light.

There was still a small blue spot on the sky, so I ran inside the house and found a translucent 43 inch umbrella. I hooked it to the flash with the umbrella bracket. I had never held the flash and umbrella in my hand like that.

It was quite heavy working like this. The camera with lens and battery grip weighs about 1.5 kilograms and the flash with umbrella, cord and bracket about the half, but it was windy, so the umbrella got quite heavy. But I found a big advantage doing it like this. I could follow every movement and be prepared for unusual poses. And that happens when shooting infants.

Anyway, I used the same exposure as with the bare flash head, and I feel the result was much more pleasing:

Since I had to shoot against another spot on the sky, the sky was probably darker, even if it didn't look like that during the shooting. That's why the sky looked so much better on the latter photo. And the quality of the light looks better due to the soft light. In Photoshop I increased the contrast with a slight S-shaped curve and and darkened the edges a little with a vignette.

Epilogue

Do you see the warm glow on the right side of the face? I didn't see that until I looked at the photo on the computer. I wondered a little why that fortunate accident had happened, since the umbrella was located on camera left. I went outside to take a look at the surroundings, and I discovered this yellowish wall, which is the fence connected to our porch:

We stood at this wall during the shooting. It was on my right side. The sun was on my left. The sunlight was probaly reflected on this wall, and gave my son this glow on his face.

The reson for the silence

noreply@blogger.com (zetson) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 20:04:00 +0000

I'm so glad to see a lot of subscribers to my blog! I have so many ideas I want to share with you, but I don't have much time for experimental flash photography these days. On March 7th my wife and I was blessed with a beautiful baby boy and he takes all my time I have.

When I get over the shock that I'm actually someone's dad and things are stabilizing around here, I will start to shoot and write again. I just hope it won't take too much time. If Vincent Laforet can, I can too:)

In the meantime, here's the reason why I feel like the luckiest person alive:

Great news: Part deux

noreply@blogger.com (zetson) — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 22:28:00 +0000

Today another article I wrote was featured on a website called DIYPhotography.net. I think it's been an honor to contribute to this site, since it introduced me to creative flash photography about a year ago. Prior to that I had know idea that you could use multiple flashes, or even bounce them. DIYPhotography.net really gave me the inspiration to start experimenting with light.

The article on DIYPhotography.net is about how I took this "film noir" shot. It was more difficult than it looks. Click here to read the article.

If you can't beat them, join them

noreply@blogger.com (zetson) — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 20:36:00 +0000

This picture is not my idea, but since I saw it the first time, I could not understand how it was shot. Unfortunately I don't remember where I saw it.

While watching TV today, I got a revelation. This post is all about how I shot it.

Setup

First of all, I needed a simple picture of an umbrella. A Google search gave me that. I printed it and glued it to a piece of cardboard. With a sharp knife, I cut out the cardboard in an umbrella shape, and glued it to a piece of white paper. My wife has a lot of scrapbook equipment, so this task wasn't to difficult.

This paper would be the diffuser for this shot, with the umbrella working like a kind of inverted gobo.

I headed over to the kitchen, and set up the camera on a tripod near the kitchen bench. To leave the DoF as large as possible, I wanted to shoot vertically, or at least as much as the tripod would allow. The slave flash, a SB-600, was mounted on a microphone stand so that it would light the bench directly from above. With a teaspoon I made small water drops on the bench where the camera pointed.

The other side:

Exposure

SB-600: 24mm zoom at 1/16 power

Exposure: 1/250 sec @ f/8, ISO 200

Lens: Nikkor 35mm f/2D AF

Camera: Nikon D300

Shooting

I held the paper with the umbrella over the water drops so low as possible, without entering the camera's field of view. I wanted as much of the white paper surface to reflect in the water drops, and since they are curved on top, it required me to hold the paper as close as possible to avoid to many dark areas on the drops.

With the remote shutter cable I fired a couple of shots.

Post-processing

This is the original raw-file:

I quickly realized, after seeing it on the computer, that the umbrella spots appeared too weak. In the raw converter (Adobe Camera Raw) I increased the clarity and constrast, but no luck. I hoped that Photoshop CS4 would help me.

I added a curves adjustment layer and started messing with the curve. I wasn't too happy with the results, until I discovered the little hand symbol in curves box. With this hand selected, I could click and drag any area on the picture, which would make the color tone of that area darker or lighter. By clicking one of the umbrellas, I ended up with this curve (the hand symbol is visible on the upper right hand corner):

I'm by no means an expert in curves, so I doubt I would find a similar curve only by playing with the anchor points. I have been raised to believe that the curve should appear as a nice S, but there are exceptions, especially when my flash settings are way off...

I finished the post-processing with a crop and sharpening.

The result:

Zetson's Valentine Wine (tm)

noreply@blogger.com (zetson) — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:42:00 +0000

I'm not going to lie. This shot wasn't planned to be a Valentine's Day photo. All I wanted to do was to shoot a bottle again. Luckily, the first bottle I found was shaped like a heart. It's has been laying around here for years, and today was the first time I actually noticed this shape.

Setup

I did try out several ways to light the bottle with umbrellas. I put one umbrella on each side with a green background, but I didn't think it looked good at all. It may be because of the background, but also the ribs in the umbrellas. They just show too good. I really wanted pair of softboxes! The highlights didn't work with me either. The bottle has a lot of curves in the glass, throwing reflections all over the place. Here are two examples on how ugly these photos looked:

Then I started thinking about lighting the bottle from below, removing the need for umbrellas. I took out a glass plate from one of the kitchen cabinets (that was pretty scary, having Friday 13th in mind...) and put it on top of a cardboard box. I had covered the inside of this box with black cloth to minmize the reflections. In the bottom I put a SB-600 with red color gel and a home-made snoot.

By bouncing the commander flash in the ceiling I could trigger the SB-600 in the box.

As a background I just reversed the green background, and voila, a white background I could do whatever I wanted with. I placed another SB-600 in front of this white paper, also with a red color gel.

Exposure

Backround flash: 1/128 power, 85mm zoom

Box flash: 1/8 power, 24mm zoom

Camera: 1/250 sec @ f/8, ISO 200

Lens: Tamron 90mm f/2.8 macro

Camera: Nikon D300

Shooting

I was completely surprised to see the heart-shape inside the bottle. I knew that the bottle was a big heart, but I didn't expect to get a nice heart inside it. After some trial and error, I found a camera angle that made the inside-heart look most heart-alike. (Has this sentence ever been written before?) Changing the angle and/or camera height just a little would ruin the heart, so I'm glad I found it!

This was the best shot, IMO (the raw file):

I imported the file to Photoshop and increased the contrast a little with curves and removed some of the dust spots and reflections in the glass. Finished with a crop and sharpening.

The result:

Happy Valentine's Day!

Point of no return

noreply@blogger.com (zetson) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 22:18:00 +0000

"High ISO" was the title of the assignment at dps this week.

I wanted to shoot a subject where high ISO was actually needed, rather than just shooting something randomly at high ISO. Action photography is a field where high ISO is crucial. It's a low-light situation where addidontal lighting is difficult/impossible and the scene consist of moving subjects that you want to freeze. In the lack of local football matches this week, I decided to shoot an igniting match instead (pun intended). I have done that earlier, but wanted to shoot it differently this time.

Setup

I placed a non-flameable plate on the kitchen table. On top of this one, two pieces of styrofoam. I put a match in each of the styrofoam stumps so that the matches pointed at each other. I recently discovered that when the matches are placed like this, the flame is controllable to a certain degree (less luck is needed). This way the flame goes more to the sides and upwards rather than all directions at once, which was the case in my last match picture.

The camera was placed as close as possible to avoid unnecessary cropping in post-processing.

Exposure

Since the assignment said "High ISO" I had no other choice than setting the ISO to next to maximum, which is 1600 on the Nikon D300. Based on the the settings in the previous match picture, I ended up with the following exposure:

Exposure: 1/8000 sec @ f/10, ISO1600

Lens: Tamron 90mm f/2.8 macro

Camera: Nikon D300

Shooting and post-processing

I used the cable remote for the shooting. The camera was set to burst mode. I focused manually on the middle of the two matches so that most of the flame would be in focus and to avoid focus delay during the shooting. With the cable remote ready, I lit a third match and moved it slowly upwards below the two matches. The moment before they were ignited I pressed the shutter and kept it down until the flame was normal. I repeated this for about two hours, resulting in 350 useless RAW-files. Things are happening so fast during the ignition of a match, that even 6 fps on the D300 are way too slow to catch all the action. But finally, a pleasing picture appeared on the LCD-screen. This picture was quite different than all the other attempts.

The SOOC RAW-file:

The match itself is quite blurry. That was because I focuses in the middle of the matches. Shooting this close to the subject will give an extremely narrow depth of field, even at f/10. But I thought that the main subject is the flame, and not the match itself, so I approved this photo for further processing.

In Photoshop I used the selective coloring tool to give reds a pinkish hue, while making the yellows a little cooler. Then I converted the picture to LAB mode and boosted the colors using this tutorial on dps.

The result:

Zetsonata Op.9 No.2

noreply@blogger.com (zetson) — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 15:23:00 +0000

(Warning: The post you are about to read contains no in-depth descriptions.)

I have just recieved my new stage piano; a Yamaha P85. I'm very satisfied with it. The problem is that I don't know how to play it. Still, I wanted to shoot a picture were it looked like I mastered this instrument.

Setup

The flash attached to the umbrella was not used. The umbrella was only worked as a reflector to create some fill light on my head and hands.

Exposure settings

Main flash: SB-600, 1/4 power, 50mm zoom

Lens: Nikkor 35mm f/2D

Exposure: 1/250 @ f/8 ISO 200

Camera: Nikon D300

Post-processing

I wanted to make a BW picture, so I imported the RAW file to Photoshop and used the Black and white filter. Increased the contrast with levels. I also had to paint some of the kitchen details with black since the black background cloth wasn't big enough.

Result

Nearly Christmas

noreply@blogger.com (zetson) — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 19:27:00 +0000

After I recieved a request for a setup description of my homless photo, I decided to write one. I took a couple of setup shots right after I was finished with the photo, but didn't have time to post a blog entry.

I got this idea when because of the "Christmas Decorations" assignment on dps. I tried to shoot something out of the box, not just a picture of decorations. I wanted story telling too. One day, after I was finished at my job at the airport, I noticed that one of the hangars would be a great way to shoot "on-location" portraits in the winter months. I have also thought about shooting a photo story about homeless people, and somehow I managed to mix these two ideas with the Christmas Decoration assignment.

The setup

Before driving to the hanger, I had to bring some props in addition to the camera gear. So I wrote a list over things that would make the viewer instantly recognize the situation (Christmas and homless) in the photo. This is the list:

Clothing:

- blue nylon jacket

- sweater with hood

- worn-out shoes

- worn-out jeans

- cap

Props:

- empty plastic bottles

- cardboard

- pillow

- plastic bags

- cardboard box

- loads of Chritmas decoration

- crutch

- quilt cover

- paper cups

- "Merry Christmas" card

The only thing I thought was missing was a shopping cart.

I was supposed to bring all this stuff in addition to the photo gear to the hangar, while the wind was blowing up to 60 knots. I had to walk about 50 meter between the hangar and the car, so I didn't look forward to this task. I was very close to giving up, but I thought my idea was too good to let go, so I was determined to continue.

After arriving at the hanger with all the gear safely inside, I got a very pleasant surprise. On one of the shelves I found a shopping cart look-alike. I think it was a trolley that the cleaning staff use, but it looked more than OK for the project.

I started to arrange the setup in one of the corners. It was a very elaborate job to get that look I had in mind. With the Christmas decorations it almost felt like I was decorating a tree. After about 30 minutes of fine tuning, I got this:

(After I shot the picture above, I added the bag, bucket and the cardboard box. I also found an old vacuum cleaner with some appropriate colors which I placed by the wall.)

The light setup was pretty simple. Inspired by Dave Hill and Jill Greenberg I wanted to shoot a kind of subtle "artistic" photo, so I planned to use bare strobes. However, after some test shots, I realized I had to use an reflective umbrella to light up the trolley, since I got too many harsh shadows from that strobe. (It was too evident that it was an arranged picture). This is how the final setup looked like:

I attached the camera to the tripod and started adjusting the exposure.

Exposure

There were a lot of grey tones in the scene, so was just adjusting the flash power equally on both strobes until I got a clean histogram with a peak on the middle. The light in the hangar was pretty warm and ugly, so I used minimum sync speed for the shutter to block it out, while using a narrow aperture to get most of the things in focus.

Final exposure settings:

Bare strobe: SB-600, 1/8 power at 24 mm

Umbrella: SB-600, 1/4 power at 24 mm

Exposure: 1/250 sec @ f/8, ISO 200

Lens: Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D AF

Camera: Nikon D300

Flash sync: Optical with SB-800

Shooting and processing

I tried a lot of different poses for this shot. I was uncertain how to behave. I tried laying down while sleeping, sitting with my head hung down, and looking at the trolley. It was a lot of walking back and forth. I had to trigger the 20 sec timer for each shot, so I got a great leg exercise out of it. Finally I found that the looking tired and unhappy at the camera was the best. I looked dead in the other poses.

This is the best shot, unedited RAW file:

In Adobe Camera Raw I increased the clarityto about 50, the vibrance to about 20 and corrected the white balance. Luckily, the exposure was spot on.

In Photoshop I did this:

1. Duplicated the background layer and changed the blending mode to Soft light.

2. Added a high-pass filter (radius 44) on the Soft light layer and reduced the opacity to 70%. This created the slightly artistic look.

3. Used Surface blur on the Soft light layer to even out the surfaces while preserving the edges.

4. Lowered the master saturation a little while increasing the reds to make the decorations stand out.

5. Cropping, vignette and sharpening.

This is the result:

Surprise from above

noreply@blogger.com (zetson) — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 01:26:00 +0000

Inspired by winning the "Christmas Decoration" assignment on dps, I wanted to try a selfportrait including fairy dust, a Photoshop techinque I learned earlier this day.

The setup

I hung a green cloth on the wardrobe and placed a SB-600 on lightstand in front of it, about 40 cm from the door. This was background lighting.

The camera was mounted on a tripod. Right next to the camera I placed another lightstand with a snooted SB-600 on top, pointing down at were my face would be.

Exposure

Since the background flash was pretty close to the surface, I entered the lowest flash output on this one. For the main flash I held up a white sheet of paper and checked that the highlights didn't blow out on the histogram on the camera and adjusted the main flash accordingly.

I also used a narrow aperture to get as much of my face in focus. I shot with the timer on the camera, so I had to lock the focus prior to shooting by focusing and the lock it.

Final exposure settings:

Background flash: 1/128 power, 24 mm zoom

Main flash: 1/8, 85mm zoom

Exposure: 1/250 sec @ f/11, ISO 200

Lens: Nikkor 25mm f/2D AF

Camera: Nikon D300

Flash sync: Optical triggering from the camera

Shooting and processing

Finding the right facial expression and the positioning of the hands was the hardest part. After 30 or so shots I got a pleasing shot. This is the RAW file - straight from the cameram with no editing:

In Adobe Camera Raw I increased the clarity slider to about 50, adjusted the white balance a little before I sent it to Photoshop, where I did the following:

1. Added surface blur to entire image to soften the skin while preserving the edges.

2. Dodged the highlights and burned the shadows, both on the skin.

3. Duplicated the layer and added a high-pass filter on the new layer. Changed the blending mode to Soft Light and reduced the opacity a little.

4. Selected the greens with the Color Range tool and blurred it almost maximum to even out the wrinkles on the green cloth.

5. Covering some of the green background with black to make it more uniform.

6. Created the fairy dust using this Photoshop tutorial. (I'm sure I could have done it better than what I did in my photo, but my sketching capabilities are at level 0...)

7. Cropping, flattening and sharpening.

The result:

John Brainard: Yes, I finally managed to put together a new blog entry before Monday, LOL.

Theory of Relaxitivity

noreply@blogger.com (zetson) — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:15:00 +0000

This week's dPS assignment whispered gently "relax".

Getting the idea

For weeks now I've wanted to shoot something which I could cross-process, but so far my subjects have not looked good in offset colors. When I read about the assignment, I got the idea instantly; a dreamy, cross-processed high-key selfportrait of me listening to music. Would it work this time?

The setup

It was time to move my gear out of the computer room to the living room. The spot which I chose for shooting was right in front of the TV set so I had to be quick. My wife wasn't willing to listen to the radio the rest of the evening.

During the clearing of our closet yesterday I found a large white wooden plate. This was perfect for the shot. I placed it on the arm rest on the couch and placed a carboard box underneath on the other side. I mounted a translucent umbrella on a light stand with a SB-600 flash and another SB-600 (backlight) behind the plate (It's hidden behind the camera on the setup shot below):

Here's the backlight flash, pointing upwards along the wall.

I put on a blue color gel. The shot I had in mind would have a slight colored background, so I picked the blue randomly. It turned out to work just fine.

The camera was mounted to a tripod. I originally inteded to shot it myself with the remote, but finding the right head position was EXTREMELY difficult even with a mirror so I had to ask my wife to take the pictures. I took on a headset and layed my head on the plate, right above the couch's arm rest. I also had to place another umbrella under my chin for fill light. Please overlook my feminine pose in the shot below:

Exposure

Finding the exposure was easy in this shot. Similar to my Leaf Diet shot I had to deal with almost white surfaces. Using the histogram on the camera I could increase the main flash's output until the curve ended up right below the over-exposure mark. (You can find an in-depth explanation on this in the Leaf Diet shot above). The output on the back light flash was reduced with one stop lower than the main flash. I also wanted to block out all ambient light, so I chose the max. flash sync speed on the camera:

Final settings:

Main light: 1/8 power at 24mm zoom

Back light: 1/16 power at 24 mm zoom

Exposure: 1/250 sec, f/5.6 and ISO 200

Lens: Nikkor 35mm f/2 AF

Camera: Nikon D300

Shooting and processing

I told my wife that I wanted my head to point directly on the camera and she instructed me accordingly. As mentioned I held the umbrella with one hand, and streched the headset cord with the other. After about 30 shots we got a shot we were pleased with. This is the SOOTC RAW file:

Since the exposure was figured out, I only had to adjust the whitebalance in Adobe Camera Raw.

In Photoshop I adjusted the curve slightly in each RGB channel according to this cross-processing tutorial on the dPS forum. I also had to increase the contrast in Curves, making a slight S-shape, but still leaving it a little faded. I also added a light vignette and cropped it a little.

The result:

Aftermath

The head pose that looked the best was very unpleasant since I had to force my sholder into the arm rest and hold my neck in an awkward position, with both hands occupied. It also felt kind of strange, because it felt like I was looking down on the floor, away from the camera. Of course, the autofocus wouldn't work everytime because my face was too dark and the AF illuminator wouldn't light up. I had to keep my head still in an uncomfortable position for "long" periods of time to get the shots. So, even if the picture depicts "relaxing", the circumstances was not relaxing at all. It actually wore me out, giving me a nasty headache... This is another example that pictures don't always tell the truth.

Another "fun" fact: While I was processing the photo, I noticed that my wife was wandering back and forth, looking for something. I didn't bother asking since I was so occupied. After the editing was finished I walked back to the living room to take the setup photos. After sometime I just had to ask my wife what she was looking for. It turned out to be her wallet.

I had to plead guilty at once. In order to get the wooden plate horizontal, I had to build up a support of a cardboard box, some books and a.... wallet.

Warhol's Light Bulbs

noreply@blogger.com (zetson) — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 22:08:00 +0000

I didn't plan to shoot light bulbs so that they looked like an Andy Warhol creation, but when you don't have a plan for your work, you just got to accept whatever result.

Getting the idea

I thought the Still-life set on my Flickr stream needed a little punch in terms of colors. I have a couple of cloth backgrounds with different colors and wanted to use them. Of course I needed a foreground object as well and the first thing I found was a light bulb. Fair enough.

The setup

I placed the 40 watts light bulb in the midde of the room and hung a cloth background about 1 meter behind it. I pointed a SB-600 at the background, placing it as close to the light bulb as possible to avoid shadows on the background caused by the uneven background cloth (no, I didn't do any ironing this time either). I mounted the camera as close I could get on a tripod and connected a remote control.

Exposure

The problem was that the light bulb was too bright. At minimum x-sync speed shutter at 1/250 and f/45 I got a pleasing shot of the inside of the light bulb, but I didn't get any background color. The SB-600 was just not powerful enough.

But after connecting a IKEA dimmer things changed to the better. Using the lowest setting on the dimmer I could open up the aperture a lot, making the flash useful again. I reduced the flash power to 1/8.

This is the edited version of the photo.

I thought it was an OK shot, but not as colorful as I wanted it to be. So I moved the camera to get the whole bulb within the frame and rotated it to portrait orientation. Since it wasn't as important to get the whole tungsten thread in focus I could open up the aperture even more and reduce the flash power again.

Final settings:

Light bulb: Minimum power, according to IKEA

Flash: 1/128 power at 24mm zoom

Exposure: 1/250 @ f/4, ISO 200

Lens: Tamron 90mm f/2.8 macro

Camera: Nikon D300

Shooting and processing

I shot one shot of the light bulb with a different background for each. It was during this I started thinking about Andy Worhol's work (collage of the same object in different colors). I did a reshoot, making sure that the camera didn't move. As mentioned I used a remote control for extra protection.

With four images of the same light bulb with different colors I imported them to Adobe Camera Raw and increased the exposure by 0.7 stop. The only editing I did in Photoshop was cropping, cutting and pasting (and a whole lot of cloning to remove the speculars from the commander flash on the camera, but that's another story).

The result:

The coloring could easily been done in Photoshop too, but it was kind of fun to this the hard way, like Warhol:)

Somebody, light a match!

noreply@blogger.com (zetson) — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 00:43:00 +0000

Since Christmas is just around the corner, I thought I'd do something a little bit different. I wanted to shoot a lighting match in its most dramatic stage. I thought I had to use at least one strobe initally since I was uncertain how bright the flame would be. But no.

The setup

I understood that in order to focus properly on the match, I had to attach it to something. I found a small clamp and fastened it to a heavy object that would withstand the pressure while the match was lit. It actually took some time before I realized the logic behind this "heavy object":

Yes, it was a fire extinguisher! That made this whole situation much more comforting. Only problem would be that the extinguisher caught fire first, making it unusable, but I didn't have time to worry about that. I was here to shoot pictures.

I sat the camera on a tripod and attached my new remote control. This was pretty much it.

Exposure

I often get tunnel vision when I find something interesting. That happened during this shooting. During the shooting of the first match, I was so caught up in looking at the result on the LCD-screen that I completely forgot that the match was still on fire! By the time I found that out, the match had melted the plastic coating on the clamp... Luckily, I had several of those:)

Until now I haven't put the D300 to the extremes. This time I finally did. By trial and error I found that I could go as far as the fastest shutter speed possible! That also meant increasing the ISO to the max and using a pretty wide aperture. Still most of the sparks would be appear with motion blur. During the test shooting I had to narrow the aperture a little because of the extremely shallow DOF, but the exposure seemed fine.

Final settings:

Strobe: A 1 inch match firing at full power

Camera: 1/8000 sec @ f/6.3, ISO 3200

Lens: Tamron 90mm f/2.8 macro

Camera: Nikon D300

Shooting and post-processing

I focused on the match manually, swiped the match with the matchbox and pressed the remote shutter in burst mode (about 6 fps on the D300). Changing the match everytime was a bit tedious because the handle on the fire extinguisher was curved, making it difficult to fasten the clamp.

After 112 shots and seven matches I found a kind of interesting shot. This is the untouched RAW file:

In Adobe Camera Raw I only reduced the noise, which was definitely needed at ISO 3200, even on a D300. In Photoshop I cloned out the flares on the right side of the flame. I also adjusted the levels just a little bit and burned the head of the match (as if it wasn't burned enought in the first place...). I ended the post-processing with a square crop and rotation.

The result:

Red socket

noreply@blogger.com (zetson) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 23:14:00 +0000

I hadn't shot anything during the past two weeks and I was desperate. I had to find something to light up with my strobes.

Getting the idea

I searched the tool shed and I found a rail of deep sockets. Nothing special about that, but one of the sockets had a red cap and I still don't know why. Either way, I thought it looked as a nice focal point and I wanted to do a high-contrast tool shot.

Setup

I wanted a "grungy" background so I placed the sockets on top of a small toolbox which had a rusty surface. Soft lighting was out of the questions so I snooted a SB-600 and pointed it at the rim of the sockets. I realized that this would create a black area on the other side of the sockets, so I did the same thing on the opposite side.

I wanted to use the Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 macro lens which has a minimum focusing distance of 1 meter. I had to climb a ladder to get high enough.

Exposure

The Sigma lens is quite soft at 200mm so I had to turn it down to 170mm which is the longest focal length that this lens stays sharp. Focusing at the minimum distance at this focal length gives a very narrow depth of field, so I chose f/8 to stay safe.

Both strobes: 1/64 power, 24mm zoom (SB-600)

Exposure: 1/125 sec @ f/8 ISO 200

Lens: Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 macro @ 170mm

Camera: Nikon D300

Shooting and processing

Even though I used an aperture of f/8 the slightest movement brought everything out of focus. Using the tripod was unpractical so I took quite a few shots just to be sure that at least one stayed perfectly sharp (or at least as sharp as the Sigma gets....). I also had to re-arrange the sockets a couple of times for a more "tidy" look. From about 15 shots, this was the best (SOOC RAW version):

Once again it was a little bit underexposed, but instead of adjusting the exposure which can lead to increased noise, I increased the brightness in Adobe Camera Raw, and it looked better. In Photoshop I duplicated the background layer, desaturated the new layer and changed blending mode to Overlay. Reduced the opacity to 70%. This gave me a high-contrast look. The red cap faded a little so I brought it back with Selective Color. Adjusted the Level gliders and added a vignette. Finally I cropped it, which was really needed. A square crop is the only way to go with this kind of shape, IMO.

The result:

Low-key selfportrait

noreply@blogger.com (zetson) — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 12:24:00 +0000

I just wanted to write a description of my latest selfportrait, from which I learned a few things. The latest dPS assignment was "Headshot" and I thought about photos of actors/actresses, trying to say something about their personality. When I shot this photo I was kind of moody because it was late at night and very tired. Thus I wanted a dark (and hopefully) dramatic low-key portrait.

Focusing and kicker

When shooting a low-key photo I feel it's important to separate the subject from the background, but not too much, since I at the same time want it to blend with the darkness. So I decided to use a kicker/backlight instead of lighting up the background.

I started by hanging a black piece of fabric on the wardrobe closet. On the photo below you see a pair of scissors on the floor. This marks the position where I would stand. Previously I had placed a light stand on this point and locked the focus on the light stand on the position where my eyes would be. Since I would be using a pretty large aperture, I had some leeway regarding depth of field, and as long as I positioned myself overhead the scissors, the focusing wouldn't represent any problems.

The photo above shows the snooted kicker flash (Nikon SB-600) mounted as high as I could. I made sure that when I stood on the scissors I could see the enitre flash head through the snoot. This would provide lighting for the back of my head.

Main light

On the opposite side of the kicker I set up a light stand with a 45" reflective umbrella with a SB-600. Originally I wanted to try cross-lighting, by sending the the main light parallel with the focal plane, but the first test shot looked so bad. I got a large shadow covering almost 30% of my face, making the portrait a little too low-key'ish. Therefore moved the main light against the camera, so that the umbrella pointed about 20 degrees offset from the imaginary focal plane... Sorry for this complicated description. Thank you, Microsoft Word, who made this illustration possible:

Since I'm looking at the camera, this placement of the umbrella, in addition to emphasizing the shape of the face, also creates catchlights at an approx. two o'clock position.

Exposure

As mentioned, I wanted to use a medium-large aperture to get all of me in focus. I also wanted to use the maximum sync shutter speed to block ambient light. Each flash's ouput was determined by trial and error.

Kicker: 1/128 power, 85mm zoom

Main light: 1/16 power, 24 mm zoom

Exposure: 1/250 sec @ f/8, ISO 200

Lens: Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D AF

Camera: Nikon D300

Shooting and processing

I tried a couple of different poses using a 10 sec timer on the camera. I didn't have a plan in particular, I just kept on shooting until I got a picture with some kind of "drama" in it. After about 10 shots I got this one (untouched RAW file):

After I imported it to Adobe Camera Raw I realized it was under-exposed. It didn't look that way on the LCD-screen on the camera. I had to bump up the exposure to about 1 stop, but luckily no noise was detected.

In Photoshop I increased the contrast in Levels and converted it to black and white with B&W Filter. Cropped it a little. I felt that it needed a little more treatment, so I did something I've never done before: Duotone. I converted it to greyscale mode and then Duotone. I chose a light blue color in addition to black. I probably could have done the same using a color layer or Gradient Maps. Here's the result:

Conclusion:

I should have gotten the right exposure in-camera. I was probably fooled by the dark areas, leaving me to believe that my face was correctly exposed. The next time I'm shooting a low-key portrait I'll use my greycard and histogram again.

Great news!

noreply@blogger.com (zetson) — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:45:00 +0000

One of my articles are featured on the dPS blog! You can read it here. It's describes the setup for this photo, called Leaf Diet:

Color Peaks

noreply@blogger.com (zetson) — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 08:43:00 +0000

This was a photoshoot had been looking forward to for a long time. Experimenting with water and colors was the reason I bought my strobes to begin with. To justify this expensive purchase to my wife, I really had to nail this shot.

The idea

As the time went by, I forgot about this idea. Partially because I didn't know how to do it and because I have been caught up in shooting bubbles and leaves. Yesterday, while I was at the grocery shop I discovered a rack of confectioner's coloring. Red, blue, green, yellow... Perfect! And they were cheap too. I bought one bottle of each, thinking that should be enough. Little did I know...

The setup

I filled a rectangular vase with water and placed it on the kitchen bench. On the wall behind it I taped a white sheet of paper as background. I put a SB-600 on the left side of the vase, pointing it on the paper. Mounted the camera on a tripod as close I could get (about 1 meter), with the 70-200mm f/2.8 macro lens attached. Filled the vase half full with water.

I wanted to drop three colors in the water at the same time so I had to arrange the color bottles in a rack with tape.

Focusing

I had to find a way to lock the focus inside the vase. I planned to use a narrow aperture, but getting so close with a long focal length doesn't give much playroom in the depth of field (DOF). So focusing on the vase itself wouldn't work. I took two drinking straws and made a T out of them. I hung this T on the vase, which gave me a focus point in the middle of the vase. I auto-focused on the vertical straw and switched to manual focus. This way, I didn't have to care about focusing while the colors unfolded their beauty.

Exposure

As mentioned, I wanted a narrow aperture to get as much as possible in focus, since I couldn't foresee the movement of the colors. I needed a relatively high shutter speed to freeze the motion. My plan was to shoot in burst mode, which means 6 frames per second on the D300. In order for this to work I had to use the smallest flash output usable for the camera settings, which would ensure fast charging times and at the same time getting a completely white background. Prior to this photoshoot I thought over-exposing the background would work well, since I've done that several times before. I discovered quickly that I could do that in this shot since the colors are exposed by that very same light. Over-exposing the background would also over-expose the colors, resulting in blown-out colors. Using the histogram on the camera I quickly found some appropriate settings with a low flash output:

Speedlight: 1/64 power at 24mm zoom

Exposure: 1/160 sec, f/10, ISO 200

Lens: Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 macro

Camera: Nikon D300

Shooting

I held the color containers on the edge of the vase while pressing my other finger on the shutter and poured the liquid in the water. This was much harder than expected. The movement of the colors was pretty random and most importantly, because of the nozzle on the bottle and density it was pretty diffucult to pour the color fluid out of all three containers at exactly the same time, which the following montage clearly shows (these shots were shot before I zoomed in closer on the vase)

I wanted three more or less identical flow of colors and this lead to a lot of work. Every time I had shot a series of photos, I had to empty the vase for contaminated water, wipe it completely dry, fill it with excacly the same amount of water and lock the focus with the drinking straws. I shot about 10 series, so I spent about two hours at the kitchen bench, doing mostly this:

The reason I had to quit was that two of the bottles got empty and the grocery store had closed.

Post-processing

After I had uploaded the photos (1,8 GB of RAW files) I found one - 1 - shot that looked pretty interesting. This is the straight-out-of-camera RAW file, obviously turned upside down:

If you look closely on the white background there is a gradient going from white on the right side to almost 50% grey on the left side. I had no idea why this had happened, since I was exposing the entire visible background. Looking at the vase answered my question: the vase was rectanguar, but the glass itself had a slight planoconvex shape seen from above (I know, I have never heard that word before either, but thanks to wikipedia, I know now). The picture below shows an exaggerated illustration of the vase.

Have you seen this shape before? Do you know what a lens is? Exactly, the vase was a lens. I suspect that was the reason why I got the gradient background. I also got some chromatic aberration which I haven't seen on the Sigma lens before. The planoconvex shape on the vase was also a good reason for not focusing on the vase itself, but on the drinking straw.

Enough ranting, moving on: I didn't do any adjustments in Camera Raw except for WB. I imported it to Photoshop and used the Curve tool to fix the background which I wanted to be completely white. I sat the white point on the darkest area on the background, which made the colors look blown-out. Then I adjusted the red, yellow and blue sliders in Selective Colors to bring back the colors again. Adjusted the contrast and crop a little. Sadly, I had to do some cloning to the left of the blues because of the reflections in the glass.

When this article was written, I didn't have the JPG file of the final image. Only the PSD file which I couldn't convert due to strict policy rules on the computer at work. Thankfully, two members on the dPS forum were more than happy to help me to convert this PSD file to JPG so that I could upload it to Flickr. I promised to credit them in this blog:

JimnyClickit and Fletch,

JimnyClickit started helping me at first with a head start, but Fletch quickly took the lead since JC was using a dial-up connection with about one hour download time on the 13 MB PSD file, while Fletch used a whopping 3 minutes:) Anyways, thank you both!

The final image

Color Peaks

Conclusion

Well, I got to finally take pictures of colors in water, but I'm not sure I'm very pleased with this attempt. I was hoping I could get a "cleaner" looking photo. Instead I got a grungy look that almost looks like painting on a piece of paper. I will definitely try this again, may be experimenting with only one color. But in the end, it was funny to have tried it, and some lessons are learned. Getting a vase that's not a lens, trying different ways to light the subject and other backgrounds.

Wet leaf

noreply@blogger.com (zetson) — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 21:26:00 +0000

"Leaves" was the assignment theme this week at dPS. Generally, I don't like shooting flowers, but rules are to be broken. It's autumn, but up here most of the leaves are already rotten by now, so I had to find a subject inside. I wanted go for a minimalistic approach and trying do do something different (as usual...). Obviously, I wanted to use my strobes.

Getting the idea

While watching TV I noticed that the leaf of an orchid on the TV set was sort of bending downwards while looking straight at it. It looked pretty cool, so I decided to shoot it that way.

Trial and error

I took it to the kitchen table and wiped of the dust with a damp cloth. I placed a white sheet of paper to hide the distracting branches while at the same time creating a background. I mounted a snooted SB-600 overhead and took a photo with a 35mm lens at f/2.8:

The exposure and WB was pretty bad in this first shot, but regardless it looked extremely boring, so removed the paper instantly. Another problem was the ugly glare on the leaf.

I took a black T-shirt and wrapped it around the plant for a low-key approach. I also mounted a translucent umbrella overhead to diffuse the light while changing to a 70-200mm lens to compress the field of view to get a more vertical look on the leaf.

The umbrella didn't work any better. The glare got worse. I recalled the thirsty rose setup and placed the snooted flash on camera left to see if the light would enhance the texture and shape of the leaf.

I thought it got much better. But the background was too bright, so I placed a cardboard box between the flash and the leaf to block the light on the background.

This is one of the advantages with working with strobes instead of natural light. You can shoot at high shutter speeds forcing the camera to only record nothing but flash light. At the same time this light is so concentrated that the edge of the cardboard box is enough to achieved a completely black background without any processing.

I got my strobe light as I wanted. To make it a little more interesting I sprayed some water on the leaf and took a couple of shots to determine the exposure. I wanted a pretty narrow DoF.

Exposure settings

Strobe: 1/8 power, 24 mm zoom

Exposure: 1/125th sec @ f/5.6, ISO 200

Lens: Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 macro @ 160mm

Camera: Nikon D300

I took six shoots with different crops and ended up with this photo (processed RAW file):

Post-processing in Photoshop

I know that it's advisable trying to get the final crop in-camera, but sometimes you just got to change your plans when looking at the photo on the monitor. I thought too much of the leaf was visble so I cropped about 30% of the lower part. I enhanced the green color with Selective Color and increased the contrast on the green channel in Curves. Used levels to brighten it up a little.

The result

Conclusion

I regrett using a quite narrow aperture. I think it would look better with the entire leaf in focus. I did a test shot with one f-stop higher , but it looks like I had focused on the background, causing the subject to be blurry. I should also have experienced with cross-lighting (lighting from both sides) but that sounds like something to test in another post.

The bubble resurrection

noreply@blogger.com (zetson) — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 22:31:00 +0000

I've been literally living in a bubble the last week. All I can think about it getting a bubble shot that I'm at least satisfied with. This is the third blog entry about me shooting a bubble, almost like the You suck at Photoshop series. I think the videos are hilarious, and I love how the main character is slowly loosing his mind. Just like me with the bubbles.

In my previous post I promised I would never shoot another bubble shot again. But that was yesterday. Today I felt I was in a better mood and I didn't have to worry about smoking or thinking about the bubble assignment at dPS, which had closed by the time of shooting. I had carte blanche and no time pressure. I wanted to do a silhouette shot of the soap bubbles. I hadn't succeeded with this in an earlier photo shoot, but I suspected it had to do with the background being a little to dark and poor lighting.

This time I wasn't going to shoot it at home, which lead to a fantastic discovery. In a locker room I found a 100cm x 70cm cardboard with an intense green color. Ordinary people apparently regard this as "trash", since it was ready for the waste bin. Photographers however, see a background! I brought it the "studio" and hung it on the wall with tape. I also put a Speedlight SB-600 on a tripod and put it in front of the cardboard.

In the photo above you can see how I have twisted the flash head so that it points on the background but still the optical trigger sensor is pointing at the camera.

I sat the camera in portrait orientation on a tripod and locked the focus by focusing on a floorlamp that I had placed about 50 cm in front of the camera lens. Then I sat the lamp so that that it wasn't in the field of view. By doing this I could see where the point of focus was, by dragging an imaginary line from the lamp parallel with the camera's focus plane. On the photo below you can see the floorlamp on the left side, the camera tripod and the backlight strobe.

The setup was finished. I did a couple of test shots to adjust the exposure. I wanted a pretty fast shutter to freeze the bubbles and a medium aperture to have a little bit of playroom in the DOF. These are the settings I ended up with:

Backlight strobe: 1/64 power, 24mm zoom

Camera exposure: 1/125 @ f/5.6 ISO 200

Lens: Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D AF

Camera: Nikon D300

Instead of using that time consuming interval timer shot mode on the D300, I thought a five second self-timer would be sufficient since I wasn't going to be in the photo, but instead stand next to the camera while blowing the bubbles.

I brought up my new bottle of soap bubbles and stood right next to the camera on the right side. I pressed the shutter button and prepared myself for the blowing. I wanted most of the bubbles to be in the imaginary zone created by the floor lamp when the camera took the picture. That was easier than I thought. When two seconds remained I started blowing a calm and steady flow of small bubbles. For most of the shots, there were hardly any bubbles in the frame. I shot about ten shots in total and the photo below is the one I'm most happy with. This is the straight-out-of-the-camera version (RAW) turned back to landscape orientation:

I realized I had to crop it a little to remove the black area in the lower right corner. In Photoshop I didn't do much. I only duplicated the layer and added a gaussian blur by 6 px and changed the layer's opacity to 12%. That gave me a little more greens without destroying the gradients. Using the saturation slider caused just that.

The result is called:

Amobeas going into the light

Finally I'm happy with a bubble shot! I think the main problem in the previous bubble shots was that I was too caught up in shooting it as a selfportrait. A selfportrait is hard enough to do exactly the way you want, and doing activities in addition makes it very challenging.

But tonight I can go to bed and just let my dreams take away my bubble thoughts. Tomorrow will be a new day, and I can start thinking about other photo projects that do not include soapy water filled with air....

Bubbles - my Nemesis

noreply@blogger.com (zetson) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 23:00:00 +0000

Sometimes you just got to realize the facts. You'll not always reach your goal, even how many times or how good you try. My attempt on shooting a simple bubble is an example on just that.

My previous bubble shot was a so-so shot, I think. I'm pleased with the lighting, but the shot itself was a little boring, even though I felt that I caught the bubble in the right moment. So, while I was waiting for my wife to get back home this evening, I wanted to kick it up a notch by blowing smoke into a same-looking bubble. "That's gonna be a killer shot!", I thought.

The reason I had to shoot it while my wife was out, was because she can't stand cigarette smoke. Therefore I had some time pressure, since I had to be finished within one hour. Also, I hadn't smoked in eight years, so I was a little anxious on how I would react. I was determined to only fill my mouth with smoke; without any exeption would I inhale.

I set up the lighting almost the same way I as did in the last bubble shot. Three second intervals, reflective umbrella on camera left, same lens and settings. The only difference was the backlighting. I reduced the power by two stops to get a low-key effect to emphasize the fantastic smoke bubble I was about to create....

I lit up a cigarette out on the porch, ran inside with smoke in my mouth, started the camera, assumed the position, counting the seconds for perfect timing and started blowing. These are the problems I ran into:

I had to keep my breath for about 30-40 seconds after I "inhaled". It doesn't sound like much, but doing the things above at the same time in addition to the time pressure was a big challenge for me.
It felt like the smoke was sort of pushing down my throat, which almost made me vomit every time. Remember, it was eight years since last time, and I was not used to this at all anymore.
It looked like the hot smoke made the bubble break up much faster than without making it almost impossible to fill a bubble in the same size as the last bubble shot.
Performing a nice and calm expiration of the smoke was very hard, since I was both out of breath, almost vomiting and trying to blow at just the right time.
While blowing, a lot of smoke did not enter the bubble, but insted wrapping around both my face and bubble which literally contaminated the photos.
The interval timer menu always turned off by the time I came running from the porch. I had to 15 keyclicks on the camera to start the timer with the smoke in my mouth.
I only got one shot for each smoke expiration (That caused me to do a lot of running and lighting up a total of six cigarettes)

All these challenges came in addition to the pose and positioning, which alone was hard enough in the last bubble shot. So I just dropped the idea of getting the correct crop in camera and continued.

Here's a screen dump from Bridge, showing all the photos that were taken until my wife got back home:

Of all these 90 shots, I got ONE shot where the bubble actually shows filled with smoke. The straight-out-of-the-camara RAW file:

Problem is that it looks like I'm blowing into a condom... How charming is that? And look at that awful background. I wanted a red backdrop and that lousy brown-red blanket was the best I could find. My hand is so distracting behind that condom bubble that it takes the attention away from the bubble.

This meant only one thing: "TO THE PHOTOSHOP MOBILE!"

I played with a lot of effects in Photoshop: a lot of different crops, duotone, Orton, gaussian blur with overlay blending, BW conversion and grungy hard-contrast look. I ended up with a mix between the BW conversion and the hard-contrast look which is pretty much the same as the Contre-Jour Amour shot. It's even the same composition. Very imaginative, no?:)

The final version:

The image is too dark, I think, but leaving it any brighter made it look dull. And the bubble looks even more like a condom. I guess the image has a certain feel to it, but that messed-up bubble ruins it for me.

This shot was a disaster, and I'm just fed up shooting bubbles for now. During previous photo shoots I've discovered that if you just shoot and never quit you'll get that perfect shot in the end. Unfortunately, that end never came. I really should have had an assistant that could operate the camera, eliminating a major challenge. Anyway, it's going to be a long time until I'm shooting bubbles again.

They are my Nemesis.

Creation of a bubble

noreply@blogger.com (zetson) — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 08:20:00 +0000

The only time I really experiment with different strobe setups and themes is during an assignment shoot. This weeks assignment at dPS was "Bubbles". As we speak, I've posted my previous Marble Drops shot for this assignment since the drops look very much like bubbles, but I felt that it's the definition of laziness, so I tried to make a new shot.

Ok, so the theme was "bubbles". The first thing I did was to buy a soap bubble dispenser at the local toy store. I ended up with a Hello Kitty model:

The store clerk asked if he should wrap it in gift paper, but I said: "No, it's for me". First time he's seen a 30 year old man buying soap bubbles for himself?:)

I wanted a fresh background for the bubbles, so I hung a blue fabric bought from Ikea over my microphone stand. (This mic stand is probably one of my most helpful props during these strope shots. I've used it almost everytime, holding umbrellas, flashes, fabric and of course a microphone...)

I wanted a strobe to light up the backround so I set up a bare flash pointing at the fabric from a about 45 degrees from the right side (camera right). And while I did that, I discovered something that I've never thought about before:

I use CLS for triggering the external flashes. That means that the flashes are controlled with optical signals from the commanded flash on the camera. About a millisecond before the shutter is opening, the commander flash sends out a trigger signal that is received by every flash in the setup. They have a little "window" on one side where the signal is recieved. In this picture it's located on the lower left side of the flash:

One problem I have come over during previous photo shoots is that the flash's window is pointing away from the camera, so that it does not detect the commander's signal, causing it to not fire at all. In situations like this I've instead used the radio controlled Cactus triggers, loosing the ability to control each flash's output from the camera.

I have also known that the flash head can be rotated 180 degrees in the horizonal plane. I feel so stupid... I have NEVER realized that this could be used to make the little "window" turn against the camera! In the photo above, the flash is rotated. I think it will be much easier to set up the strobes just the way I want from now on:)

Moving on... With the flash pointing on the background a put up a reflective umbrella on camera left, pointing parallel with the focal plane.

I originally planned to use my wife as model on this photo shoot, but she didn't feel too well, so I had to use myself insted. This made the shot very tricky. I don't have remote control and using a self-timer would be hopeless. Trying to catch the perfect bubble shot with a self-timer in a self-portrait would take ages! So I had to figure out another way of doing it.

I must admit that the Nikon D300 has a lot of functions that I haven't studied yet, but while searching trough the menus I found a function called "Interval timer shooting". That sounded too good to be true! At first it looked a little complicated, but it's pretty logical. I wanted to shoot several shots with a 3 second interval (to avoid flash misfire). Here's how that's done on the D300:

From the Shooting Menu (the camera symbol), choose INTERVAL TIMER SHOOTING:

To start shooting right away, choose NOW and press the the RIGHT arrow:

Enter the time between each shot, in this case 3 seconds and press the arrow:

This screen made me a little confused, but here you enter how many intervals the camera should run AND how many shots to be taken for each interval. I wanted a total of 9 intervals (and only one shot for each interval. Then press the arrow:

If you want to just save these settings, press NO. When you press YES the camera starts shooting automatically. You don't have to use the shutter button at all:

Now I could finally take several pictures of myself without a remote. Now I just had to figure how to fit myself in the frame. One thing I should mention is that nowdays I'm trying to get the crop I want in-camera instead of doing that in PP. The reason is that I want to use the full resolution that my CMOS sensor can provide. I planning to shoot stock photos later and it seems that bigger is better.

I took out another light stand and placed the top of it at the height and distance from the camera that I wanted my mouth to be at during the shoot. I autofocused on this and turned the knob to MANUAL FOCUS. This way the camera won't focus for every interval, making it easier to time the bubble blowing.

Now that I've found the Y-axis an Z-axis for the position of my mouth, I put another stand next to the camera, indicating the X-axis for my mouth. I could now walk in front of the camera and just make sure that my mouth is positioned in the intersection between those two stands. There's nothing wrong about utilizing triangulation in a photo shoot:) In the photo below you see the first stand is placed in front of umbrella stand and the other stand is to the right of the camera:

Finally I could start making bubbles! I thought.... I hadn't adjusted the exposure at all. I was so caught up in the setup that I completely forgot that...

I wanted a wide aperture to blur the backround so that only me and the bubble would be in focus. I didn't want any motion blur in the bubbles so I chose the maxiumum sync speed. These are the final settings:

Background flash: 1/64th power @24mm zoom

Umbrella flash: 1/16th power @24mm zoom

Exposure: 1/250 @ f4 ISO 400

Lens: Nikkor 50mm f1.8D AF

Now I could start shooting, and shooting I did! I got so many poor shots in the beginning. I realized that I haven't blown soap bubbles in years and figuring the right amount of "pressure" took about 30 pictures.

Here's the photo I ended up with, showing the bubble the moment before it lets go. This is the RAW file with exposure adjusted in Camera Raw:

Observant readers have probably noticed that I didn't iron the background fabric prior to shooting. It's not a slip, just laziness. I was hoping that I could blur out the background with a wide aperture to smooth the wrinkles. But as wise people say: "A wide aperture is no substitute for ironing". This caused some unnecessary work in Photoshop. I had to isolate the background and Gaussian blur it like there was no tomorrow. Still there are some wrinkles left, appearing like darker areas on the fabric. But anyway, lesson learned! Other PP I did:

Smoothing the skin by selecting highlights and blur them a little
Removed some dark spots on my skin
Increasing the blues a little
Added vignette
Sharpening

So this is what the result looks like:

Creation of a bubble

I don't think it's worth using in the bubbles assignment, but if I'm not getting a better shot withing Tuesday, I'll probably use this or the marbles shot.

What I could have done differently:

Used another model to get it just perfect. I could have experienced more with different angles and persectives and the model would maybe have a smoother skin:)
I should have shaved... Those stubbles doesn't look too good!
As mentioned I should have ironed the background to avoid too much PP work.

Marble Drops

noreply@blogger.com (zetson) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 21:47:00 +0000

This week's assignment on dPS was "Texture". I have been shooting a lot of photos with texture lately. These mostly involves wooden surfaces. But this time I wanted to do something different.

A friend of my told me about a shot he had seen some years ago, with water drops on a glass plate. Under this plate some pencils were spread out in a star shape. I thought that sounded really cool and wanted to do something similar.

I didn't have a glass plate but after some searching in our kitchen drawers I found a large bowl with a flat base. I thought that the pencils had to be outside the depth of field so I put this bowl on top of some DVD covers so that I got some space between the bowl and pencils.

I didn't have all the pencil colors so the color wheel wasn't complete, but to drive to the store to buy more pencils would be insane...

I thought I was on a roll. The setup was almost too easy. Of course I bumped into a big problem: the water drops. I didn't have any equipment to make water drops. A pipette would be perfect, but we didn't have any. I searched every corner of the house to find something, but no. The closest thing I found was a soap dispenser in the trash. I had to wash it for 30 minutes just to get all the soap out of it. Still that wasn't enough. But I was impatient so I thought I just had to deal with it.

I filled it with water and tried to make small water drops. It was an awful tool to work with. It wasn't completely watertight so it poured water everywhere. That's not a good thing when you want to control the flow of water.

Caution: Nudity in the photo below:

I didn't count the time, but two episodes of King of Queens ran in the background before I finally got a pleasing arrangement of water drops. Easy math:) A tip: It was easier to use cold water than hot water. The water seemed less liquid in a cold state so that they didn't mix very easy.

OK, now with everything set up it was time for the fun part: The lighting. I didn't have any plan for that, but I wanted to try soft lighting first. I mounted an umbrella close to the pencils and did a manual test shot.

Suprisingly it looked good and I hadn't done any adjustments to the camera nor the flash... I was afraid that the top of the umbrella would ruin the whole scene but no glare was visible:) Still I wanted to tweak the settings and ended up with the following:

Flash: 1/16 power @ 24mm zoom
Camera: 1/250 @ f/4 ISO 200
Lens: Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D AF

Finding the right aperture was tricky. I wanted as much of the drops in focus but still I wanted the pencils to be as blurry as possible. f/4 was a good compromise.

I did a couple of shots with different angles and heights and ended up with this shot ("straight out of the camera" RAW file)

After adding some blacks in Adobe Camera Raw I imported it to Photoshop and did the following:

Increased the brightness a bit in Levels
Increased the contrast in Curves
Added a vignette with the Lens distortion tool

The result:

Marble Drops

What I could have done differently:

Bought a pipette. I would have had much more control of the water drops and the shape so that they would have been more or less circular and uniform. I think the "pencil star" would be more visible in each drop that way.
Increased the height between the pencils and the glass bowl so that the pencil would become more blurry.

A very thirsty rose

noreply@blogger.com (zetson) — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 21:06:00 +0000

Today I wanted to use my strobes again. I had planned to take them outside for some on-location shooting, but my model wasn't available so I'd try a still-life shot (again).

First I tried to shoot some water shots (things falling in a bowl of water, water drops etc) but I didn't have a large enough glass containter for the shots I had in mind. Then I took out some colored glass-vases and lit them from above, from the side and below, but the results weren't pleasing. (Maybe one of them got a little interesting, but I'll describe it in another post).

I was about to call it the day, when I discovered a bouquet of dry roses hanging on the wall. I don't like to shoot flower shots if they don't have a story, but I thought I could make one with a dry rose. Hoping that my wife wouldn't get mad, I out one rose from the bouquet. Last time I took a rose from her, she wasn't too happy...

As I mentioned, I didn't have any plan for how to shoot this rose, but reglardless I needed something to put it on. I took out the glass plate I used in the raisin shot and wiped it clean. This is very important. Dust and fingerprints does not look good during a strobe attack, so keep it nice and clean. The black cloth was used for background.

I put the rose on the plate and mounted an umbrella with SB-600 on camera left and a bare strobe on camera right for fill. Here are some straight-out-of-the-camera (SOOC) examples:

So what did I learn by taking these three shots?

Soft light is not suited for a dry rose. I thought it looked too boring and needed a little punch. So I decided to snoot both strobes to create some strong shadows.
The rose just laying there was pretty boring, so I removed it leaves. Still a little boring. A bowl of water was standing right next to me (after the water shot attempts in the beginning) and I thought that a dry rose might want to drink water? Finally I had the story I was looking for!

I removed the umrella, put the flash on the floor (to create longer shadows) and made a new Taco Dinner cardboard snoot for the camera left strobe which lights up the rose. This is the final setup:

The reason why the flash to the right is upside down is because the light sensor for remote triggering is closest to the camera. I was too tired to experiment with manual flash output and relied only on TTL...

After some test shooting, I came up with these settings:

Right strobe: SB-600 85mm zoom, TTL -0.7

Left strobe : SB-600 85mm zoom, TTL 0.0

Lens: Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 102mm

Exposure: 1/250 @ f/5, ISO 200

Finding the right angle and crop was so hard. I was extremely tired, my wrist was hurting and was pretty much fed up with photography due to all the failed attempts earlier this evening. I had never aborted a strobe photo shoot without a result and I certaintly did not want this to be the first. After about 50 shots, I got a shot that I was pleased with.

The SOOC version:

This was done in Photoshop:

Added a vignette
Desaturated the reds a little
Levels adjustment
Removed some of the shadows on the rose (don't tell anyone, OK?)

The result

After I was done shooting, I had ask my wife why the 3 roses was hung on the wall. She said that they were the roses she gave me on our wedding day...(ops!) When she asked why I wondered about that, I had to tell that we had 2 beautiful roses left...

The next post will be titled "Why photographers need to know a marrige counsellor".

Contre-Jour Amour

noreply@blogger.com (zetson) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 12:50:00 +0000

This week's assignment on dPS was "Contre-jour". That is French for "against the light". The assignment description said that this "exploits lighting and plays with under and over-exposed areas to create a dramatic effect - in other words, the complete opposite to HDR approaches, which try to compress the range of contrast".

I was unsure what to post to this assignment since there were A LOT of different opinions on what this really means. A majority of the submitters wrote in their post that they weren't sure if their photo was correct. The disscussion went on and on. I'm looking forward to see the winners, which will give us a clue of what "contre-jour" actually is:)

Anyway, taken the description above into account, I wanted to use my strobes again. After a couple of days with thinking, I came to think about those classic low-key concert photos, which has a lot of dark (underexposed) areas in addition to stage lights (overexposed) with the artist as the focal point. These photos, at least those I'm thinking of, has a very high-contrast look, which I wanted to recreate.

Unfortunately, I didn't have a stage. Only a small computer room. I mounted three SB-600's in a row wich would function as the backlights. And my last Speedlight, the SB-800, would fill the artist with a snoot. I had to fire all these with Cactus triggers. I mounted the microphone on the microphone stand and did a test shot. To my big surprise, it appeared like one of the Cactus recievers had a malfunction. It triggered the flash constantly and actually drained the battery of the connected Speedlight... (RIP, that one Cactus reciever)

So, since I didn't have enough Cactus triggers left, I had to use the SB-800 on the camera as a commander, and could only use two instead of three stage lights, since I had to use one as a snooted fill flash.

Finally, after some modelling, the setup ended up like this:

My wife sat to the left in this setup shot and pointed the camera on the stage lights. After some testshots, I ended up with these settings (all-manual):

Backlight: 1/64 power at 24mm

Fill flash: 1/8 power at 24mm (forgot to set it to 85mm...)

Camera: 1/200 at f/9 *)

Lens: Nikkor 35mm f/2D AF

*)I recently read that in order to get a star-shaped sun, use a narrow aperture. I'm glad I read that, because that is the effect I wanted in this shot.

What was important to me was the right facial expression in addition to the composition. I didn't have a specific plan. I just told here to twist and turn the camera for each take. Halfway in the shooting I found out that I couldn't pretend that I was singing. I actually had to scream loud to get that intense look... After 30-something shots I got one that both she and I was pleased with:

Then I had to walk into the digital darkroom. After increasing the blacks and exposure in Adobe Camera Raw, I imported it into Photoshop to add a gradient map adjustment layer. I think this is the best way to do a high-contrast B&W conversion. I also had to erase some lens flare and a part of the light stand in the background. I felt that a little recomposing was needed too, which was very easy to perform due to the large black areas:)

The final image after editing:

Contre-Jour Amour

What I could have done differently:

I could have tried to light my face from different directions to see if I got some interesting shadows.
Tried narrower aperture to create bigger "stars". When I increased the blacks in processing, the stars got smaller.