TECH STUFF: All natural light (around 6:30 or so in the evening), on a 24-105/5D2

Quick Tip: Shooting a very wide lens can have some strange (read: bad) consequences when shooting people.  But it can also give you a look a tighter telephoto can’t.  For instance, in the case of the first picture, by zooming all the way out to 24mm (about 15mm on a crop/dx sensor), I was able to stand on my tip-toes and shoot down on them, giving the appearance I was much higher than I actually was.  In this case, it had a pleasing, sweeping feel, pulling in the knotted tree roots and lagoon behind them. The rule of thumb is not to get too wide when shooting close and direct on.

Bruce and Brandy are going to get married.

In all of these I was trying out my new 28″ soft box, so I was doubly excited: taking pictures + playing with photo new toys.

The first picture below was never meant to be an actual counseling candidate, but it turned out to be one of my favorites.

Here are the final four. That’s not a basketball reference. Really, I’m actually impressed with myself that I even thought to clarify that point.

Never mind.

Some tips… I used clean backgrounds. So many times when you’re shooting inside of a house where real people live, normal decorative things can become cluttered when compressed down to your camera’s 2D point of view. Even the last picture, we chose the bookshelf for the counseling theme but purposely blurred it enough to not be distracting, yet still recognizable.

Subtile props. In all but the green background image, there were props. They’re each used a little differently and for different reasons, but I think they all helped drive home the picture we were going for.

TECH STUFF: 5DII + 70-200 mm (f/2.8, ISO 100-200, 1/15-200), 580exII (1/8 power) inside a Westcott Apollo 28″ softbox, triggered by RadioPopper JrX’s.

P.S. Did you have a favorite?  Which one do you think would make the best profile picture for a counselor?

That last one was me.

Kari is one of Caroline’s best friends. Each year they go to the beach together. This year, on their way, they squeezed in some time to do their senior graduations pictures.

Lots of fun:

TECH stuff. Pretty normal set-up, one umbrella-diffused light plus ambient. Shot between 3:30 and 7:30 pm, 5D, 70-200. Fast and easy.

That’s right, I’m milking two posts out of this one. Later this week.

One of the great things about New Orleans in January is that we can go out on a Saturday afternoon and have a really good chance of the temperature being in the sixties.

The weather was great. It was a little overcast, but that can really work toward your advantage for pictures (no harsh sunlight shadows).

This is not us. This is my Mom and Dad.

Check here for my Dad’s site.

First, I used Gimp. If you’re not familiar, Gimp is to Photoshop what OpenOffice is to Microsoft Office. Pretty much everything Photoshop does, Gimp copies and incorporates. For free. All of it. Okay, there’s not nearly as much third-party suport for Gimp, and I’m sure there’re loads of things that PS is much more equipped to handle, but if you’re on my level (somewhere right below beginner…not kidding!), then Gimp is magical.

And if you’re wondering what the catch is. There’s no catch. Gimp was originally created for Linux that couldn’t run PS, and since about everything on Linux is free, so was Gimp. Eventually they started making it for Mac and PC.

Okay, the rest of this post is going to be split into two section, before and after the photo.

Before.

It’s very important on an image like this that everything lines up and has even light. To line it all up, just use a tripod. But before I began setting up my light, I decided to use an f/8 aperture. This was to keep both Kristins sharp.

Now for the lighting. I just used one flash, bounced into the ceiling via the ole shoe stand. By doing this I converting the ceiling into a huge light source, which provided a bunch of even, soft light on my scene. If i had used a direct light I would have had a bunch of touch-up because the light fall-off on the background would have made it splotchy.

The only other lighting thing I did was to put a 1/4 CTO gel on to warm it up a little. I was completely overpowering the indoor ambient (shooting at f/8), so I didn’t have to worry about matching light temperatures, I just wanted to do as little in post as possible.

After this, I took a few snaps, and I was ready to start merging.

Merging was easy once I figure out how to do it (with the help of a quick call to my brother). If you install Gimp and follow the four instructions below, it should take you about 2 minutes to do this.

1) Open the first image in Gimp (defaults title is “Background”)

2) Open the second image, copy it to the clipboard and “paste as…new layer” (default title is “clipboard”)

3) Add a layer mask “as white (full opacity)” on the clipboard image

4) Select the paintbrush tool on the “clipboard” image and paint over the area where you want the background image to show through.

And that’s it.

Because my exposures were not 100% consistent, I used the smudge tool to blend where my images met (so it didn’t look like a cut-out).

Also, notice in the original images below, the Kristins don’t overlap or touch. That makes the entire merging process very easy.

First, the gear. Shot on a 5D mk II with a 70-200mm. Flash was a 580 EX II (1/4 CTO gel) triggered with Radio Poppers JrX’s.

Next is a picture of my V.A.L. (voice-activated lightstand, first below). Then, the slightly zoomed in picture I was going for. I included this comparison because one of the most important things to remember in photography is, all the lighting you’re creating and controlling needs only be of concern inside the frame of your viewfinder.  Kristin was standing right outside the frame, holding the light in each shot.

In all the shots here I have between two and three light sources: my flash, the Sun, and the ambient. If you think I’m stretching it counting the ambient, consider how different these shots would look at night. Ambient plays a big role.

We started shooting around 3pm, and the Sun was still high enough to be prohibitive in some circumstances, so we needed to work around it. There are two in-the-bag solutions for this. One, shoot on the other side of the building. And two, have their back to the Sun. This provides a nice rim- or hair-light (depending on the angle).

The next two where shot in the “shade” with Kristin holding the flash.This is a very different look, shooting in the Sun, but the Sun still wasn’t where I wanted it, so I had Kristin hold the flash almost where the Sun was to bring more light in on their face and add the strong, sharp shadow of Drew’s hair onto her face. I don’t always want a hard-light, high-contrast look, but in this case I liked it.The next was another into-the-Sun shot, but I did a little playing around with the Curves adjustment in Aperture.Here are two examples where I used the Sun as a backlight. The first is subtile, it gives definition to the right sides of Raheem’s face and right arm, but the second was in direct Sunlight and has a much more predominant place in the picture. Also, in this one, I shifted the white balance (in post production), to enhance the afternoon Sun glow.The last thing I want to mention is the post-production I did on the picture of Drew I posted yesterday.

Here it is straight out of the camera:I first applied a Skin Smoothing tool to Drew. Then I added a heavy vignette with the intention of leaving it on the left side, but brushing it out of the right side (Drew’s face).

After that, I boosted the Vibrancy tool. I like this especially because it does a similar effect as saturation, but it leaves skin tones unchanged, so you can raise the Vibrancy all the way, and your people don’t look electric-sick.

Here it is with the above modifications, as I posted it yesterday.

Saturday, I put a lens on eBay, and being a photographer, I didn’t want to just do a snap shot, so I did a quick little set up.  I learned a few things, made a few mistakes, but on the whole, I got a couple images that were good enough for my eBay purposes.

Here it is. Clearing off a spot on the coffee table, I laid down 4 sheets or regular, white eight and a half by eleven printer paper.  I set the lens on this. Then I put up a white reflector/scrim (which is translucent) up behind it has a backdrop.  I used all natural light (read: I was lazy), so put a white muslin up over the window that was acting as my main light.  This gave me smooth, soft shadows.

After that, I tripodded my camera, put a 12mm extension tube on my 70-200 so I could get in close, a started shooting.

Here are some thing I’ll do better next time:

Because I was working with natural light, I had a hard time making the lines between the paper go away.  If I would have lit it, I could have blown it out, making it appear seamless.

Also, working with a mix of indoor ambient and outside ambient.  This gives me two different colors. You can see hints of yellow in the second shot. Speaking of the second shot, the overall color is a little different (that would be the sun going and coming from behind the clouds).

Some things I planned for:

It’s fun to use a very shallow depth of field since you can get it so thin on these kinds of things, but that doesn’t really help a prospective buyer get a feel for the item. In this case of the second image, I wanted pretty clear from front to back. f/8 did that for me.

In the first shot, I was conscious of what was reflecting in the lens (it’s easy to forget this part). Also, since I focused on the reflective part, I also framed it so that it would be easy for a viewer’s eye to hone in on that spot. I picked up this tip from pretty much every lens advertisement ever made. They all do that.

And that’s it. If I do any other “product” photography, I’ll do a better (non-lazy) set-up. Here’s a link to my lens on eBay.

I started with hanging a 6′x5′ white muslin. But you can use anything in it’s place. This is probably the smallest size I’d recommend, but I can do a close crop portrait with no problem. And as you’ll see, even if there’s wrinkles or a slight design (a la bed sheet), it won’t show up in the final product. Here it is with only ambient. During this part Caroline wasn’t really paying attention too much, because I was only using her as a stand-in until I had all the lights in place. After, I lit the backdrop from behind.  That’s important because if it’s wrinkled, and you light it from the front, it will more or less accentuate the wrinkles (a couple pictures down).  After lighting just the backdrop in this way, it has the effect of shooting into a bright light source.  Because… it is. By the way, these set-up shots are straight out of the camera which explains the color-inconsistencies.  I’ve adjusted the exposures on a few, just for the sake of illustration.

In the above, you can see two things that don’t belong in the final image: Sam’s thumbs-up. And my umbrella for the flash. Here I turned off the back light, and used only the flash in front. I did this to show the light on Care has pretty good potential, as is, but really makes the backdrop look bad. And then below, with both lights on.  The flash illuminating the backdrop was at either 1/4 or 1/8 power.  The flash on Care was around 1/4 (give or take 2/3rds of a stop). After I had the light levels about right, I started working on the color of the lights.  For fun (and a little bit of diversity), I put a blue gel on the background light, and for a little bit of warmth, I put a full CTO (color temp. orange) on the key (main) light. In the end I got some good shots, but the blue gave me a Saved By The Bell vibe that I’ll be sure to stay away from next time. A caveat. In illuminating my backdrop from behind, I created a hot spot centering on the flash. You can see it above. I noticed this during shooting but decided not to worry about it this time (I try to keep my shoots short, otherwise they begin to get stale). And as a workaround, I had whoever was in the picture stand in front of the spot to cover it up.

But if I wanted to get rid of the spot I could have put another layer of difusion between the flash and the backdrop by hanging a second muslin, or just having someone hold something translucent (a difusion panel or the muslin or whatever). The downside to doing this is having to up the power of my flash. Which makes recycling time slower, meaning I couldn’t shoot as fast.

Here are a couple quick, wide shots showing what the set-up looked like.

Gear

After the camera-lens situation, I had two flashes: Canon 580 EX II on the main light, and my Dad’s Pentax AF 360 FGZ gelled blue for the backlight (normally I use a Vivitar 285 here).  I used simple cheap light stands / umbrella brackets (about $45 together), with one $20 Westcott shoot-through umbrella. The white muslin came free with something-or-other, and the big roll of gaffers tape was about $15. After that I used my new RadioPopper JrX’s to trigger the flashes.

If you’re looking to get into lighting, you can go to MidWest Photo Exchange, scroll down to the “Strobist” section, and they have all-in packages at really good prices. You can also get big sheets of gels to cut your own (that’s what I did), or get individual ones.