Behind the Light

Painting with strobe(s)

We recently did this shot with my friend (who did the running in this picture :) ), just for the fun of it - to try multiple flash exposures in a single photo (often called light painting). The most iconic photo of the shoot is this “stadium light” shot of the car, which is actually done with single bare speedlight flash (sb-600), hand held & hand fired.

So here’s how you do it:

First you need fairly open area, so that the flash light goes just to the subject you want to paint with light, and doesn’t bounce from walls or ceilings nearby. Also it has to be completely dark at the time of the shoot (so ideally you’ll be shooting this during night, or when the sun burns all out).

Place your camera on a solid tripod, so that it doesn’t move during the long exposure (30sec type of long exposure). The actual exposure time is all up to you, or more precisely your running skills - it has to be long enough for you to run/walk around the subject, and stop for a manual flash fire few times.

We went for 30sec (or so), which gave us enough time to walk around the car, and do several flash pops. Important thing is to stop during the flash exposure, or you risk to get the light “smudges” in your picture.

With lens set to around f/8 to get the whole car in focus, we found 1/4 power on the flash unit about right. For the flash triggering, you can use either the test button most flashes have, or even hook the strobe to radio slave, and fire the wireless trigger unit’s test button.

You can experiment with flash positioning, but having uniform shape formed around the subject looks best for start, so hold the flash unit in same height during all exposures and try to keep the same gaps between the pops.

Photo shoot - Fake Spring Photo

(Sorry for the lack of updates lately, have been busy with various other projects, so the plan to do weekly update has quite failed. Let’s aim for monthly now :) )

Another quick shot I did at home as a lighting exercise. Yeah, it’s not shot outside in a sunny afternoon against a blue sky, but in a evening dark living room, with two strobes and few light modifiers applied. Let’s see how it’s done.

We’ve got this pot of daffodils in the supermarket, and after they were placed in the living room, I decided to try if I can shoot them in some interesting way. As it was late in the evening already (means dark), I picked up my speedlights, and started playing around.

Used SB-600 on a stand with shoot-through umbrella first (top-right from the flowers), and shot few pictures of the whole pot - to discover the result is far from flattering, mostly because the background was revealing the truth about the flowers - they just looked like they came in a pot, in the living room, from the supermarket.

So I went closer, to try some macro shots, which also meant i went lower. And while doing so, I discovered this interesting angle evoking shot you would take outside in the garden - the flowers against a blue sky. So hooray, I got my angle, but with almost black background, it was still not quite convincing/appealing one.

Time to grab second flash - I placed SB-900 on the small foot it came with, left to the pot, lighting the background up. Dialed the zoom to 200mm, so that the light had proper punch, and it started to come together, missing like you know.. proper colors.

Gels to the rescue - I learned this cool trick to use tungsten white balance settings on the camera to bring normal colors to blue, so I thought it’s good opportunity to leverage the trick again.

Here goes the trick (Kudos to Joe McNally of course): Set the camera to tungsten WB, and the flash lights will suddenly appear as blue. So did the flowers though - you need to compensate for the WB change by gelling the foreground flash to warm color too. So I placed 1/2 CTO (half density Color Temperature Orange) gel on the SB-600, and they turned back to natural colors.

The blue caused by WB shift in camera didn’t look as vivid as I wanted though, so I also placed blue gel on the SB-900, to make it reealy blue, like on a hot spring afternoon.

Now just some final tuning - light ratios for proper contrast in the scene. It was actually quite quick and easy, as both flashes were commanded from the body via the small pop-up flash - CLS is the way for a  lazy guy.

In a sunny day, the light would be quite hard, so I dialed the SB-600 in the umbrella up to +2EV (which required the CTO gel to be replaced by more dense 3/4 version). To make the blue background more saturated, I dialed the SB-900 down about -2EV.

Ta-da - there goes the completely fake spring evoking shot of the daffodils in the garden.

Photoshoot - Tennis ball

Back to lighting again (the Aperture data management article is already in the works though) - this was a quickie I did during a lunch break a while ago.

My initial goal was to make something cool with the tennis racquet strings, showing the translucent nature, and maybe try to work with the texture of the ball. As I went through the shoot, I also decided to effect the colors in the picture to make it more interesting.

So first I fixed the racquet onto the table, and started placing lights. I knew the spill would be major problem, so I reached for grids immediately - it produces highly directional beam of light with soft falloff on the edges (grids are really cheap/easy to make).

I placed SB-900 right below the ball (pointing up), set the power to 1/16 and attached the grid. Test shot revealed the exposure was bit too high, so I dialed it down to 1/32.

Now to get the side shape of the ball lit, I placed SB-600 on the stand, about the same level as the racquet was, just tiiiny bit above. Again I used grid to help focusing the beam of light, but in this case I also had to prevent the light from hitting the edges of racquet (I wanted to light just the ball).

The solution was easy - I just placed small piece of cardboard along the bottom edge of the flash (these things are called “gobo’s”, as in “goes between you and light”  - in this case it prevented the light from going too low and hitting the frame). I dialed 1/16 power to the flash (been using Alienbees CyberSync for this shoot to get some practice), and I had my picture - almost.

The shadow side of the ball was slightly too dark for my taste. Fortunately I have few small “mirrors” in the arsenal, consisting of piece of reflective foil sticked to a cardboard, so I placed one of these right to the ball (just far enough not to be visible in the frame), to bounce some of the SB-600 light back to the ball. It sure fixed my issue with dark shadow side.

Now, remember the idea of playing with colors? Time to reach for gels, and this turned out to be the most complicated part of the shoot - as not every color combination works with the acid-yellow-green material of the tennis ball. The final/good combination I settled for was 1/8 CTO (orange) gel on the SB-900 below the ball, and dark blue gel on the SB-600 for side light.

Now I had my final picture of the lunch break.

Howto - Image Adjustments in Aperture (& Viveza)

Not about lighting in this episode (I will write how this shot was done later, I promise).

As I spent whole evening in processing loads of photos yesterday, I thought it might be worth sharing my workflow (as it took some time to figure out, and I could use some quickstart guide back when I was starting). So here’s start of a (hopefuly) mini-series on Apple Aperture.

To start with something visually appealing, I’ll cover how picture is adjusted from start to end.

I shoot RAW from hour 2 of day 1 with DSLR. With speed and ease of RAW editing in Aperture (but actually also iPhoto), Jpegs just don’t make sense to me.

So after I finish shooting whatever I decided to shoot (Koudy 90% of time), I import all files into Aperture using following RAW processing preset.

Note - this is highly camera specific, so you may want to experiment with the values for your particular camera model/make.

• Boost 0.75
• Hue Boost 0.50
• Sharpening 0.75
• Edges 0.75
• Moire 0.10
• Radius 4.00
• Auto Noise Compensation ON

You can save settings for any Aperture module, and even set it as default, so all my imported photos are processed with this RAW preset.

The RAW image after import would look like this:

It’s there, but far from stunning.

I don’t know how other photographers do it, but personally I’m not really into the whole “right out of camera” thing, especially with RAWs - these are meant to be developed (unless i understood it wrong).

So here’s how I develop 90% of my photos:

Fix histogram

I’ll hit the Auto Levels on top of the adjustments panel, usually the combined (white) one gives best results for me, but in some cases adjusting each level separately works better (about 10% of images for me though).

This expands the histogram across whole width of the spectrum, so usually the image gains more contrast.

Fix exposure

I rarely adjust the exposure itself (thanx to great D300 metering), but I still do tweak things in this box. Basically I’m still trying to get more contrast in image at this point.

• Recovery +0.30 - prevents the highlight burn-outs
• Black Point +8.00 (+5 for already too contrasty images, +11 if 8 is too weak) - adds global contrast
• Brightness +0.05 - to compensate the huge contrast boost a bit

Enhance definition

Here I tweak the color “punch” of the image - with contrast being handled from previous box, I rarely use contrast slider.

• Definition +0.30 - adds local contrast/sharpness
• Saturation +1.10 - to raise global saturation
• Vibrancy +0.30 - adds local saturation

Sharpen + Vignette

Final fixing - using both sharpen and vignette with their default settings.

Sharpen just sharpens the image a tiny bit, and vignette helps to bring the focus to the center area of the image (I like how it closes the corners and removes distraction there).

Sharpen

• Intensity 0.50
• Radius 1.00

Vignette

• Type Gamma
• Amount 0.60
• Size 0.50

This is how it looks after applying the adjustments in Aperture:

Definitely better for me, subject is more prominent in the photo, and overall the picture has the punch I wanted it to have.

But there’s still some tweaking to be done - now comes the Viveza magic.

I use Viveza exclusively to add more area focus/contrast to the scene, sometimes with just two control points - one to brighten the subject, and second to darken the background/surrounding.

For this picture, I used one darkening point, and four lighteners (to lift the colors of model’s hair, skin and wear) - making the model stand out.

Darkening point (top left)

• Brightness -20%

Lightening points (model’s hair, skin, coat and blue gloves)

• Brightness +10%

And that’s how it’s done - final picture:

Although it might look complicated, it’s really a matter of few minutes (at most).

As I mentioned, I apply these same settings to most of the photos, so then it’s just “three clicks here, and two here” through the adjustments panel. And great thing about Aperture - you can actually copy settings across all photos from your photoshoot.

That’s it for today, I’ll cover Aperture data management in second part of this mini-series sometime soon.

Photoshoot - 7miles boots

My friend David is local distributor of these amazing jumping boots (he’s also very skilled in using them), and asked me to shoot some promotional photos for them. We did majority of the shoot in the afternoon in available light, mostly to be able to do 8fps series.

But as it came to evening, and we had the shots we wanted, I suggested we do some flash lit “fancy” photos just for the fun of it. Do I have to say, these actually turned out as best of the shoot?

I had my two Vivitar 285HVs, with the custom battery packs, nikon SB-600, two lightstands, and the infamous “powerty wizards” - the Gadgetinfinity/Cactus V2s radio triggers (replaced them with Alienbees CyberSync later). Shot with D300 using 70-200/2.8VR from quite long distance.

Good thing about this sport is, you can kind of control (and predict) where the jumper goes. On the downside (there has to be some, right?), the jumper gets tired after short series of jumps, and it takes few of them to get into right pace. So in the end, you have only like 3 jumps out of 10 where he does the best trick, and it’s quite difficult to repeat quickly. 

I placed the vivitars on lightstands - left to be slight side-light, and right to be slight front-light, so they formed kind of light cross-fire. Used bare flash on left side to get sharp/contrast details and shoot-through white umbrella on right for more smooth less defined fill. Both flashes were set to 1/2 power, and we did few shots like that - results were quite good, only missing a little fill from front. 

So I just placed the SB-600 on the floor right in front of David (pointing up at him), with the stofen omnibounce diffuser,and set that to 1/4 power, so it was just really brightening the front-side details than really lighting them. 

David jumped few more times with various tricks he had in the pocket, and yeah, one of them was our best shot of the day. More shots of the day can be found here.

Photoshoot - Chips on black (with reflection)

Not healthiest thing to eat, but in “pepper & spices” flavor these are quite hard to resist. One evening I was experimenting with shooting various objects on glass, so the snack I was having at hand came to be natural part of the experiment. 

As with most home shoots, I used CLS (out of laziness). Pop-up flash on my D300 body was the commander, SB-600 and SB-900 were slaves. Used 105/2.8 VR lens (my favorite), manual 1/200 sec at f11. 

You may notice I like working in manual (M) mode with CLS. It’s the laziness factor again, as you can set the safe values for time and aperture, and light in the scene becomes variable - these flashes will just put in exact amount of light needed for proper exposure.

Now the idea is that the CLS master (commander) flash doesn’t affect the scene at all if you don’t want to (i.e. if you set the power to “—-”). But in reality, there’s a bit of the light leaking into the exposure window - try to shoot a mirror with CLS commander flash set to “—-”, you will still see the master flash in the photo. 

To avoid this unwanted lightsource (it’s bright enough to add catchlight in subject’s eyes), I’m using Nikon SG-3IR - you can do the same with piece of exposed film, or in general any material that passes through the infra-red light (for about 10x cheaper).

I have to admit, this was big trial-error process, as I didn’t know exactly how the light will react with the 1cm thick glass desk I found in the basement. I’ve put the glass on small IKEA table placed upside down (legs up - glass being on those legs) and began the experiment. 

Started with placing SB-900 right below the object, zoomed to 200mm, and fired away, to find out it’s quite what i want, except the light bouncing around, showing the table and legs in the dark - time to use some restriction. Pringles snoot was first of the light modifiers I found in the lighting bag, so why not give it a try? Another test shot revealed the snoot certainly solved the bouncing, and I had perfectly dark background now. 

The crunchy treat needed some more higlight though, so I placed SB-600 on a lightstand, attached a cardboard grid to avoid any light spilling around from top, and made it light from top right above the crunchy.

Few shots later, after tweaking power ratios of both flashes (bottom one went to -1EV while top one had to gain +1EV), I had my “thing on a glass surface” photo, with dark background, reflection and everything.

Photo shoot - Record Player

Call me crazy, we jumped on the old technology train (or maybe are we early adopters of “vinyl revival wave”?). Besides the (quite different) sound quality, playing LP records has its own special magic mood, so you can tell one of the first things besides the apparent (playing few records), I had to make photo of this new/old thing we’ve got into.

As I shot this at home, I opted for the easiest - using Nikon CLS system for remote triggering. You may say why not use radio at home as well, but it’s actually the other way around - why not use CLS, when it just works indoors.

And more - it’ll do everything radios do, plus the benefit of TTL metering. No need to sort out exposure values, just tweak it if the “proper” output is not what you meant to do. You don’t even have to run around and do the tweaks on strobes, just head to the CLS menu on your camera body. It doesn’t get any simpler than that.

As the player material is dark grey metallic, I knew I need to introduce some color with gels, or it would look almost monochromatic. Orange/blue combination being one of the strongest color pairs out there, i reached for the blue and orange gels into my rosco sampler swatchbook (they are free at several places).

To light the scene, I placed Nikon SB-600 on the table left from the player (about same height level as the arm), added light blue rosco gel and attached cardboard grid to prevent the spill of the color all over (I wanted color contrast, not a mix).

Should this be accent light, I still needed main color light - placed SB-900 on a small stand right-top from the player, with orange gel attached, and as I wanted this main light to go everywhere (just opposite from the accent light), I placed white shoot-through umbrella in front of it.

After i took first few test frames (shot with D300 & 105/2.8VR lens at 1/125,f8), tweaking the light positions and actual angle from which the arm looked best, I found the blue light is actually bit too bright for the look I wanted. Having two options (replacing it with darker gel or turning the light power down) I did the easier - dialed in -1 EV compensation on the SB-600, and there i had my moody shot of the ancient technology.

Photo shoot - Freeriders

Few weeks ago, I spent about two hours shooting these amazing guys. It was night skiing session in snowboard park in Rejdice, so it was all about flash photography. There was some ambient light around the jump from the big lights on the track, but it was really more of a “mood light” than anything else. Ambient light to be one less thing to care of then.

I had two Vivitar 2085HV’s with my custom battery packs, on standard air-dumped lightstands+flash mount tilt heads. I can’t say enough how easier the air-dumped lighstands are when trying to adjust flash height in freezing night. As for the rest of gear - Alienbees CyberSync radios to trigger the lights and D300 with 17-55/2.8 to catch the scene were used.

CyberSync being quite new radio system, you may ask how well they work - well, they work rock solid, only glitch I ever encountered with these was battery acting out in the freeze, replacing by new set solved the issue for good. I must say CyberSyncs aren’t best choice for sports/action photography, as the CSRB can do only as much as 3fps, there’s the new CSRB+ which might go up to 10fps. Shooting witht he sluggish Vivitars, fps was not an issue though.

So now to the actual shoot setup - placed each flash on one side of the ski jump, about 5m from the jump edge, as that’s where the action unfolds. Both flashes were aiming slightly back to the jump, but they still remained to be side lights (making strip of the light across the track). Both were about 2m high from ground, and fired at 1/4 power. Early in the shoot I decided to make it more interesting and used dark blue rosco gel on the right light to introduce some mood with color contrast.

How did the shoot go? It was fairly easy, given the guys had to fly through my light trap. Only hurdle for me was to pre-focus properly, as there was deep night all around - I ended up focusing on the edge of the jump and then the AF kept up pretty quickly when the jumper appeared in the cone of available light pointing at the jump.

Clicked a frame (all shot at 1/125s, f/5.6 with ISO between 400-800), and then it was just a matter of checking if the dude is still alive (some of the jumps ended more like big crashes), and waiting for another guy to fly towards me.

More photos are available here.