Lighting test

It's been a while since I've touched this blog. 'Bout time I did something with it, right?

Ok, so for this post I'm just going to explain a couple quick lighting setups. This weekend I'm teaching a lighting workshop, and I wanted to do some simple exercises for the participants to practice with. One of the concepts I'll be going over is combining available light with flash. So what I did for this exercise was use flash for the main lighting and use the available light as fill/environment lighting.

The first setup was extremely simple; one light, a partly cloudy sky, and a garden on the back of the house with some interesting blooming flowers. Here's the photo:

The first thing I did was meter the ambient light for a decent exposure. At ISO 100 and a shutter speed of 1/250, the reading I got was F8. It was partly cloudy, so I wasn't getting a full direct ray from the sun, but it created a nice even lighting throughout the garden without any harsh shadows.

I know that I wanted my speedlite to be my key light, and the ambient to be my fill light, so I adjusted my f-stop one stop down to F11. I then placed my speedlite over the flower, and adjusted the power settings until I obtained a meter reading of F11. Then I simply took the shot. Pretty simple, right? Here's the setup:

Next, I wanted to take the same concept, and simply add a third light source as an edge light to give the image some more "pop." So I went up to the deck on the back of the house, selected a small potted plant and started setting up the shot on a table we have up there.

First, I took the ambient light reading. By this time the clouds had parted and I was getting full sunlight beaming down on me. I didn't want the light to be too harsh for the fill, so I made sure the setup was done under a huge canopy that we have set up on the deck. This created the same even lighting as in the first setup. At ISO 100, and 1/125, the light meter said again, F8. Here's a shot with just the ambient light:

Looks good. Now to turn the ambient down a notch. I set the camera to F11 and took another shot:

Now I set up my first light, which will be the key light. I used a LumoPro LP120 and set it on a stand with a small shoot-thru umbrella and adjusted the power until I got F11. The setting on the back of the light once metered there was at 1/2 power. Then I took a shot to see what I had so far:

Not bad. I moved the light in a tad closer in order to get a little more light on the leaves. (BTW, since I was checking my LCD screen on the back of my camera in near broad daylight, I was using an awesome little tool in order to see the screen properly. Normally, you can't see squat in the daylight on an LCD screen, so you need to either cup your hands around the screen or get something you can put up to it in order to see it properly. In my case, I ordered a loupe from hoodman.com, and I can't tell you how much I love that little thing! It even has a 3 step dioptric ring on it to adjust to your eye. But anyways... back to the post).

Next, I set up another LP120 on a stand (no umbrella, just bare, as I wanted a harsher light to give the photo more "pop") and metered it until I was at F16. I wanted to be a stop above the key light in order to make sure sure the light read brighter in the photo. Here's the shot:

I was pretty happy with the result, so I stopped there. Here's another shot of the lighting setup so you can see where I had everything placed:

And there you have it! A quick way to enjoy 20 minutes of your time in your backyard and create some photos that "pop."

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.

Cheers!

Simple Lighting, Simple Post

The other day I was casually strolling around my house picking up various items I thought were intriguing and putting them into a small box. Afterwards I took the box of stuff I had collected and headed down to my basement and tossed up a quick (and I do mean quick) lighting setup to photograph some of them. I hadn't photographed anything in nature without a model involved in a long time, and since I had some extra time between assignments, I thought, "Why not?"

Nature is simple to photograph, simply because it's just there. I didn't want to do anything complicated, either, since I was basically taking a break from my other work and I wanted to relax a bit. (I do find creating photographs to be more relaxing than sitting in a recliner sipping a cold one, btw.)

So here's the lighting setup:



A simple wooden frame to clamp things onto
A sheet of silver poster-paper
A single energy-saving florescent light bulb with clamp
The white sheet in the background is only there to cover up all my stuff laying around in my basement.

I set the items one by one onto the silver paper, set my camera to Aperture Priority, dialed in F5.6, set my ISO to 800 and fired away. (The white balance on my camera was set to florescent to account for the light's temperature.) After collecting a good number of shots, I desaturated the images a bit and cropped them according to taste. Here are the results:







That's about it. Simple stuff, simple setup. The whole process from collecting the images, setting up the lighting, creating the photographs, and then editing them took about 1 hour. So if you have a spare hour in your day and you're not sure what to do with it, you can productively create some simple yet interesting photographs of things found just outside your bedroom window.

Cheers,
JoeyB

(I'm actually so happy with the results of my return to utter simplicity that I now feel compelled to print, frame, and display the images somewhere nice.)

Outdoor shoot with Kristen Marie

It was a gorgeously sunny day on Thursday. Good thing, considering that that was the day Kristen and I had picked in advance to shoot outdoors at a place out in the Elma countryside. It had been raining heavily a few days before, and luckily the rains held up, the sun came out, and the muddy ground dried up again.

The location was a large grassy/wooded field area tucked behind the house of someone my mother has known for years. After gaining the permission to shoot on the property, I scoped it out for a little bit and sent some photos of it over to Kristen. She agreed it was the perfect spot, and so we locked that day into our calendars. Fortunately there was an outlet inside the garage that bordered the field in case we wanted to bring some extra lighting equipment, stereo (gotta have music!), etc.

We arrived just around 1pm the day of and our makeup artist, Jessica Jean, got right to work on creating the look Kristen had envisioned. In the meantime, I ran about 150 feet of extension cable out into the field along with a stereo and a simple Alien Bees B800/shoot-thru umbrella setup. After a few test shots, I decided to hold off on the strobe at the moment (we used it later on near the edge of the field/garage) and instead just relied on a large 40'x60' white/gold reflector for adding fill. The sun was still very high and so I thought taking advantage of the hard, crispy light would be fun to start off with.

After Jessica finished up with Kristen's makeup and hair, we got her out into the field next to an old gnarly-looking tree to start off. I metered the light (ISO 100, F13 at 125th/sec) and had Jessica bounce some light in to fill the shadows with both the white and gold sides of the reflector. After a few shots, I actually ended up climbing the tree (I got to be 12 years old again! Yay!) and shot down for a couple frames. Then it was off into the middle of the field for some more shots, followed by a little break from the sun. At this point I had also walked into a cloud of pollen, which left my throat closed up coupled with fits of sneezing. Getting older only seems to increase the body's allergies, sheesh! I don't remember signing up for that! Heh...





Getting back into the shoot (and after my throat finally stopped closing up from the clouds of pollen in the back field), we headed to the rear of the garage along with the strobe to get some dramatic lighting. I metered the ambient light again (ISO 100, F13 at 125th/sec), then stopped down to F19 to darken it a bit, then added in the strobe at the same reading to use as my key light. A little bit of reflector opposite the strobe helped to add a little extra fill as well. Kristen's CD that she burned was pumping out some pretty nostalgic tunes that I thought I'd never hear again (hah!) at this point, and so half the photos in this segment actually were of her laughing.



Our final setup was just to the side of the garage next to a large pile of branches below the canopy of a very large tree. I metered for the shaded area: ISO 100, F5.6 at 125th/sec. I set the strobe to flash in at F8 and positioned it directly in front of Kristen.




After all was said and done, we headed out in our separate directions and I got ready for a late afternoon of editing. We didn't take a large number of photos because we captured some really good shots right off the bat. The heat and pollen also kept us wanting to keep things short and sweet for the day as well (my throat was happy it wasn't constricting anymore after we exited the field).

All in all it was a really successful shoot, with some great imagery and some more great memories.

Hope you enjoyed this brief post. :)

Cheers,
JoeyB

Shoot with Michelle

Recently I was in Toronto (one of my all-time favorite places on Earth) volunteering my time and photographic assistance for a friend of mine who owns a music promotion company. It was two consecutive nights of live performances, with a little time between the two for rest (my friends always manage to get a few drinks in me). Anyways, Michelle had contacted me a week prior asking if I wanted to work together. Since she's from Toronto, and I was there for 2 days, and I had a friend (Flo) who is an amazing make up artist, I agreed and we all got together over that weekend and had fun creating some imagery. Normally I don't do shoots last minute like this, but I felt good about it this time.

The location was a high-rise condo with a great view of the upscale shopping district. We had access to a comfy suite some 21 floors up with multi-colored rooms and plenty of large windows. I brought one of my Alien Bee B800 strobes with a softbox along with me to keep things on the light side and to not have to worry about having all kinds of money sitting in the trunk of my car when out at the bar for the shows. In my excitement for the weekend I had forgotten my reflector (d'oh!) so I stopped at an art store and picked up a large white foamcore board; cheap and light. I thought about stopping at a photography store and picking up another reflector, but my budget for the weekend was tiny, and I need those extra toonies for parking meters and beverages.

While Flo was applying makeup, I took a look around the place and decided on three rooms for the bulk of the photos; the main room and two of the bedrooms (one with a giant walk-in closet). We started with the main room. It had a large bay window with horizontal blinds and a large, simple ottoman in front of it. I metered the available light with the blinds partly opened and patiently waited for Flo to finish her magic. After Michelle was ready and dressed in her first outfit, I sat her on the ottoman and had Flo hold the foamcore in front to my right. I purposely wanted get a grainy kind of feel to these first photos, so I shot at ISO 800 with a shutter speed of 1/60 and F5.6. This is where IS comes in handy (because as much as everyone swears by tripods, I can't stand using them...*shrug*... I might use one in the future, we'll see). After a few poses we arrived at some nice moody/dreamy shots.

[Click images below to link to their larger sizes]

Next we moved to the first bedroom down the hallway. It had a cool blue color to the walls, large bed, desk, and another large bay window. Since I love bay windows, we did some more against this particular window. This room had a brighter feel to it, and since the blinds were more of a transparent shade, we were able to get Michelle against a totally white background this time.




We had Michelle switch up her outfit, so we went back out into the main room to wait for her and look through some of the photographs so far. When Michelle returned, she was wearing a soft white summer-type shirt/dress. I looked at the large, dark L-shaped couch in the center of the room and the green wall behind it, and immediately decided to shoot her on the couch. I quickly set up the B800, metered, and then dialed in a setting of ISO 200, 1/125 and F8. I positioned the light with just a 7" silver reflector high above and behind the couch to Michelle's right. Flo stood to her left with the reflector close to fill in the deep shadows I knew were going to be present. We had fun trying different positions on the couch; standing, sitting, laying down. I didn't want to use the softbox (which I use extensively in my shoots) this time because I wanted a harder light. Something that would pop off the screen/paper/wall/etc. in a crispier manner more so than most of my imagery. This actually was a major step in a new direction for me, as I'm usually mister keep-it-soft-and-light. This is all about evolution, right?





After reviewing a couple images from the couch, we moved to the other bedroom where the large walk-in closet was located. I just used the light that was on the ceiling for my lighting. Since the walls and closet doors were all white, I knew I'd have plenty of reflected light in the shadows. For a few shots I got close with the reflector, but it wasn't really necessary for the most part. Now, being that the light wasn't extremely bright, I boosted the ISO up to 1600 this time and opened my lens up to F2.8. I again shot at 1/60. We didn't spend too much time in there as I knew there was only a certain look I was going for with it. Later on in post I decided I didn't like the color version and turned the shots into black and whites that really complimented the grainy feel to them.




After we were done we packed up and said our goodbyes to Michelle. Flo drove me back to my car and I went back to my friend's place to get some rest for the long evening ahead of me. Later that night Flo bought me a drink, and when I wasn't photographing the band, we reviewed some of the photos on the LCD of the camera.

All in all a great weekend, and I learned to just let go and experiment with a new style of lighting for me (hard, un-soft-boxed light) and to always keep a reflector in the trunk of my car!

Hope you enjoyed this post. If you have any questions feel free to ask away. Later on I might add some of the post-production steps to these images, but it's 3:10 AM and I need to get up to bring home some bacon in the morning.

Cheers!
JoeyB

What is Photographer Evolving?

It's just that... a photographer evolving; namely myself. This blog is a journey of my evolution within the field of my most cherished passion: Photography!

So amongst all the other photographers blogging and teaching out there, why am I starting my own? Well for one, it's nice to have a record of what one has done and be able to access that record where ever they are (we can access the web on our phones now!) to be able to refer to it later on. Second, it's my own take on the art of photography, and sometimes it's nice to see another point of view. You can always learn things from others, and hopefully I'll be able to provide a wealth of information (most likely entertainment in my case) for others to learn from, just as I'm constantly picking up new things from those around me.

What kind of photography am I evolving in? Pretty much all aspects, but mostly concentrating on fashion, portraiture, and people in general. People are VERY interesting to capture! There's something about the human story that's so intriguing it gives me goosebumps thinking about all the possibilities that exist for us in the universe. We all have our own universes as well, and I thoroughly enjoy capturing those on film (well, digital film in my case these days... although once in a while I pick up the old 35mm).

What will I be posting? Techniques (photographic and post-production), thoughts, lessons learned (the easy AND hard ways), tips, tricks, etc... you name it, I'll probably be posting on it. The main concentration will be on breakdowns of photo-shoots that I work on, along with the details of those shoots (both technical and general).

So where will I begin? Well, then... how about with the last shoot I did?