use of the snoot

What's that??? A snoot. It essentially tunnels the light like spot light.
I may have mentioned the use of one before, but I was introduced to it by reading Dave Black's page

So generally don't use it as the only flash. Here I used a flash pointed at the ceiling to get reflected light and then increased the power on the flash with the snoot on it to get a focused, directional light.

This next shot, I increase the light that was pointed at the ceiling to minimize the contrast in the lights. I am shooting these at about F4 and between 1/30 and 1/80 of a second with ISO between 100 and 200 in full Manual mode. I find that I generally get better results with 2 or 3 flashes when I go manual on cameras and manual power on the flashes.

For these next shots, I kept playing with the settings of the two flashes to even them out a bit. I find that even at the same power, the snooted flash gives a higher intensity, simply because it is not diffused or reflected, it is direct, and focused by the snoot.

I like not having a shadow behind the subject... to avoid this, increase the intensity of the reflected light (or ambient light with the shutter time being longer) and don't place an object close behind the subject (in the plane of the snoot and subject -hope that made sense

So, then it was time to try 3 flashes - I picked up a lightly used SB-800 a few months ago and am thrilled with it. Unfortunately they don't make them anymore. But they allow you to have an on-camera flash (I usually point it to the ceiling or wall to have reflected light) and still command the other flashes with the SB-800 (in other words, the SB-800 has commander (remote) mode and the two SB-600s I use are the slaves).
This final shot I was really happy with the balance of lighting. I have an SB-600 on a light stand behind the subject (so camera left) shot through a white umbrella at 1/16th power. I also have the on-camera SB-800 at 1/16 or 1/32 power, pointed toward the ceiling with a diffuser on it (just to bounce the light a little before it hits the ceiling)*** And finally the snooted flash is pointed directly at the faces and is also set at 1/16 power. I moved the flashed to be about 4-5 feet from the subject. Without photoshop on my work computer, I won't try a lighting diagram, but maybe I will add it later.

*** the diffuser looks like this

beware of mixed lighting

A couple of years ago, I was shooting my daughter holding our infant son. I used a fill flash to the side, but had a horrid greenish hue to the picture. Someone wisely pointed out that I was probably shooting in a room with fluorescent lights. They were right.
So what do you do to overcome that.
1- You can use a light modifier (they call them gels)
2- You can turn off the indoor offending lights and use your own lights (flashes)
3- You can ramp up your own light (flash, strobes) to overcome the ambient light that is causing the hue chaos.
 There is much talk of this mixed lighting... check out the strobist's blog on using gels to correct for this color.
Anyway, I took a shot today with just our indoor lighting on one side and the morning light from the window left of subject. Here's what you get.  (And I corrected for the indoor lighting)

We could have corrected for the outdoor lighting, and that shows the super-warm temperature of the indoor light.

Not that we always have to have perfectly uniform lighting... We just have to be aware of what hue each light will bring to our image. So simply stated, greenish = fluorescent, bluish = tungsten. Play around with the white balance on your camera or in your photo editing software afterwards. And then you can take it to the next level with gels (more to come).

This image I will use as pick of the day... even though it is really just an example of my next blog.

reflector

So, we're sitting down to dinner on Saturday late-afternoon... Amber was setting out the food, and the sun was coming through the window... perfect shot, I thought... just needs one thing - my reflector.  I have a 41" reflector that a neighbor gave to me in a broken state.  After some time I got around to fixing it, and don't know what I would do without it (oh yah, I do, I would miss a shot like this one)  So the sun was obviously coming in from the camera left and the background was not being hit by the direct sunlight.  Direct sunlight causes such harsh shadows, even when it is coming in through the kitchen window... so grab a white, silver, or silver/gold reflector for the other side.  My 7 year old is getting proficient with holding it just right. And this really overcomes some of those harsh shadows.  Here is the product (sorry I don't have a shot without the reflector)

 

and here is the lighting schematic.

 

Reflectors can be really good indoors and outdoors.  I have seen some photogs who like to sit their subject just at the edge of a shadow (outdoors) and then go really close with a reflector.

So, the pick of the day has a link on it... click on the picture below to go to Kennth Linge's blog on this same subject.

don't throw away images - soften skin

Unless your photo is just really awful -way out of focus or cut off someone someone's head, don't throw it away.  At times I will pick up my camera for a shot and not realize I still have my manual exposure set from a much different lighting.  Like this shot.

Instead of tossing it, I thought I would try something with it.  I took it to photoshop as a black and white image, and bumped up the exposure a bit.   Then with a few selective (using some masks) exposure and contrast adjustments, I found a look I liked much better.

Here is the snapshot of the layers I used.  Sorry, no more explanation than this... but the layers should be quite self explanatory.

I realized as I was about to post this that I have never done the soften skin tutorial.

I will have to do so later, but for now click here for the quick skin fix tutorial

focus on the eyes

In portrait photography... it is essential to have the eyes in focus.  Virtually everything else could be out of focus... but if the eyes are in focus, you have a shot.  And especially if you are shooting close-up.

 

 

 

 

 

shot of the day comes from what I think is one of my favorite wedding photographers out there... I really like to study his images and hope to adopt some of his style into my own. meninenuotrauka (Lithuanian, I believe)

 

Hight ISO and low light

So I listened to a short tutorial the other day about low-light photography. The setting... indoors, no flash available, and not a ton of ambient light to work with... but slow moving subject -- an indoor wedding.

Now how do I make a great shot?   Well, use manual settings, that's for certain.  I want complete control.   I want to shoot manual ISO, manual exposure, manual white balance.  But keep it in auto focus, because you don't want to miss a thing.
1) the option is to lower my fstop to around 1.4-3.0. But the question is, "does my lens go that big"? Remember the lower the fstop number, the larger the aperture, and the more light that is hitting the sensor.  But I have to remember that the lower the fstop, the more shallow the depth of field (DOF). So if I am taking a shot of more than one person, don't fall below f4.0.  Generally speaking, I want everyone to be in focus in these ceremony shots.
2)  another option is the slow down my shutter speed. But I don't want to go too slow... 2 reasons... 1 is that my subject might be moving faster than my exposure and thus be blurry. The second reason is that I will get camera movement that also causes blurriness. A good rule of thumb with that is if I am shooting a relatively slow subject, try to keep my shutter speed around the same value as my depth.  If I am shooting with a 50mm lens, try and keep that shutter speed at 1/50th of a second. If I am shooting a moving subject, double that number (shoot faster) like 1/100th of a second with 50mm lens. Does that mean I need to go 1/600th of a second with your 300mm lens? Try it and see.
3) Finally, to the subject of the day... ISO.  I can increase my ISO. This was mentioned in an earlier post in minimal detail. The ISO essentially defines the quality or graininess of your image. The higher the ISO, the less light that is required to get the same exposure but the more grainy the image will be.
This is where an expensive camera body is enticing.  For instance, the D700 or D3 ($2500 up to $7000) camera bodies handle low lighting great because of their ability to use high ISO values and still look great.


So, I am hopefully going to be shooting an indoor wedding in May.  Last August I used two SB600 strobes (off-camera flashes) attached to the ceiling and pointed toward the ceiling. They were placed just above the action of the wedding, as seen in this image.

And get shots during the wedding, no matter where I was in the room, like these...

It was very convenient, and provided a consistent lighting for me.

But this next time I probably won't have the luxury of strobes in the room. So how do I get those same shots without the added light? So this led me to the high ISO question. Today I have been playing about with high ISO and different length lenses. I also downloaded some noise reducing software trials to see what performed better if I were to need these.

And the results... without using any noise reduction software...

shot at ISO 800shot at IS 640

If I maintained a good original exposure, I found that for my purposes*, ISO of 640-800 worked fine. But when I tried to add fill light or increase the exposure in post-processing, that's where I saw the degradation of the image.

Having said that, I would really like to try and print some of these high ISO images so that I can get a feel for how they look enlarged. That way I can get a feel for how large I can go on the print with what ISO. This is critical when thinking end product... if I just placing the image in a book as a 4x5 image, I should be fine. But what if I am enlarging to be a 2-page spread (22"x8") in the same book? Does is still maintain it's integrity?

So, what have I learned thus far with the high ISO? Make sure my light meter is in the slightly over-exposed region when shooting ISO (not blown out spots, but well exposed). And darker areas show the graininess more than lighter areas.

Stay tuned, I will hopefully be posting re: the orton effect next time.

Pick of the Day...

seen here

Make a photo into a sketch

Kind of a fun trick in photoshop... this has been done many ways many times... but I will give my take on it here. Open an image and make a copy with command J.
Hit the layer style - Color Dodge and then hit command I (for invert)
  Sometimes you will think your image has disappeared here... keep going.
Then on that same layer, select gaussian blur and go medium on that blur.
Come back to layer and choose to desaturate with the hue/saturation slider.
  That's generally where you would be done.

But if you want to try something fun... try motion blur instead of gaussian.  It will give you darker lines.  In addition, you can create a layer from visible layers (as layer 3 in the example is).  And you can then try giving it an effect, like accented edges or something else from the effects menu.

One more thing I tried was to create a layer mask and give the mask a gradient so that I could see through to my original as shown below.  Enjoy. 

Pick of the day: