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going airborne on white

Published
by
Danny
on June 20, 2008
in Photography and Technique
. 1 Comment

kickin' it on white

The master bedroom in my apartment is empty at the moment, so I decided to take advantage of the extra space to do more white background lighting practice. My goal for the session was to get a clean white background and capture a full-body shot in the air without using an actual seamless background and large studio space (neither of which I have at the moment).

Here’s the setup I used:

the bedroom white wall setup

To illuminate the wall, I used 2 Nikon SB-600s cranked up to 1/2 power. I attached a couple of Honl Speed Gobos to prevent the strobes from flaring into the lens (a Sigma 10-20mm ultra wide-angle lens that can pick up *anything*). The main light is a Vivitar 285HV at 1/4 power in a shoot-through umbrella. The big red laundry bin in the middle is where I was standing for the shots.

The exposure on the two jumps featured in this post was 1/250th sec at f/8 at ISO 400. Why ISO 400 when I have so much light and white walls that bounce that light? I forgot that I had shifted the custom studio lighting preset on my D300 from ISO 200 to 400 during a previous session. Oops!

i can levitate

Overall, I’m happy with how the images turned out. I feel like I got a bit too much spill from the background lights, but that’s mostly because I don’t have a whole lot of space to work with. I’m also seriously considering getting a softbox (possibly the Westcott Apollo 50″) for my main light, so I can restrict light even more in such a tight shooting area. Still, I like the final results from my 30 minutes of playing around.

I’ve gotta send out props to Zach Arias and David Hobby for always being so awesome about sharing their photography and lighting knowledge with the world. I’ve learned so much about lighting from reading their blogs and seeing their work. I’ve already attended a Strobist workshop and hung out with David a few times. One of these days I’ll get to a OneLight Workshop with Zack.

it’s all black in back

Published
by
Danny
on May 20, 2008
in Photography and Technique
. 1 Comment

it weighs heavily upon me

I’ve been on a one-light kick lately and really loving working with low-key, limited light shots, especially on black backgrounds. The challenge for me, of course, is that I don’t actually have a black background at my displosal. I typically shoot in front of either the red wall in the studio (a.k.a. second bedroom) or the white wall in the dining room or in open spaces at parks, so my only option is to kill the ambient light with proper exposure and then introduce light sources as needed.

Getting a pure black background is pretty easy to do and really more of a logistical exercise than anything else. I need to make sure I have enough separation between the subject and the wall so that my main light source does not contaminate the background. Open spaces are easier, obviously, since there isn’t a back wall at all. Working inside my apartment is a bit more challenging, but I can do it.

One of the best things about shooting for a black background is that it is very easy to rearrange the composition of the image as needed. As long as I don’t get too much light spill on the background and I don’t have any major highlights overlapping onto the main subject (all of which can be removed in Photoshop), I can fill my source photo with my subject and then play with the negative space as needed.

Take the image at the top of this post for example. It’s pretty clear that I shot it with a single soft light source (Nikon SB-600 at 1/8 power in a 43″ white shoot-through umbrella) up high and to the right of the frame. Knocking out the background is also pretty straightforward by shooting at f/11 and 1/250 sec at ISO 200. What isn’t readily obvious is all that black space on the left half of the image was added in Photoshop.

Here’s what the original framing of the photo looks like:

day 43 - before processing

On the left is the image straight out of camera. That’s the general look I was aiming for. There’s a bit of highlight on my hair to give it some form (at least, it’s visible on my calibrated display) and really no visible light contamination on the background.

On the right is the same image with some Lightroom tweaks (Exposure +2.0, Blacks 0, Brightness +100) to show the background. As you can see, I was shooting near my red wall and not even carefully composing for the background. I knew I was going to kill all ambient, so all I was concerned with was my distance from the wall. As long as I was far enough away from it, I would get no light spillage from my umbrella’d speedlight. Shooting at f/11 and 1/8 power in a shoot-through gave me really quick light fall-off.

For the final shot, I did some exposure and color adjustments in Lightroom, then I went into Photoshop to do a few more fine-tuned tweaks and then expanded the canvas to create more black space. The main reason for redoing the composition in Photoshop is I don’t have a gigantic studio to shoot at the composition I want. Plus, it’s easier to just focus on the main subject (my mug) and then deal with the rest of the image later (I used this same process with my “in a dark place” shot from last week).

Turns out that Zach Arias does the same thing, although he does explain more of the technical reasons for it, and his images are way cooler than mine. I’m not smart enough to think things through that much. I just felt my images could use more negative space, but I was too lazy to reshoot the good frames with the proper composition. Easier to fix it in post. :)

in a dark place

Published
by
Danny
on May 14, 2008
in Photography and Technique
. 2 Comments

in a dark place

Here’s another self-portrait that was inspired by some of Zack Arias’s work (can you tell I’m a fan?). I’ve been wanting to explore low key photos more and create moodier images to balance out all the goofy, playful stuff I typically do for 365 Days. I also wanted to get more practice controlling and restricting light to just where I want it to go. After reading Zack’s latest blog posts, I finally found something that I wanted to emulate and learn from.

This photo is actually more the result of a hybrid of knowledge gained from reading both Zack’s blog and the Strobist blog. The basic principles of killing ambient light I learned from Strobist. Using a single light creatively I gleaned from Zack’s blog.

The image below shows what the lighting was like in my apartment for the shot. It was taken 2 hours after the original photo, but the lighting was pretty close. It was an overcast night in Bellevue. ;)

lighting setup for "in a dark place"

To kill the ambient light, I shot at 1/250th sec at f/11 and ISO 200. That was fast enough to give me a black frame even with the tracklights on. My speedlight was set at 1/16th power, which, combined with the distance from me and careful posing, was just enough light to illuminate my shoulder and fall off quickly down my back. Shooting at f/11 also helped in that regard, since such a small aperture really restricted how much light my camera picked up. I know that whole business about inverse square law also applies here, but that kind of math doesn’t work easily in my head.

Anyhow, as I’m learning more and more, finding the “right” exposure and controlling the lights properly is actually a really easy thing to do. For the most part, it’s all a technical exercise, and, as long as you know some basic numbers, you can get the lights setup fairly quickly. What’s more difficult is figuring out exactly what you want the final image to look like. I’ve always been really good with the “how” part. Now I’m zeroing in on the “what” and “why”.

i can do white backgrounds too

Published
by
Danny
on May 3, 2008
in Photography
. 2 Comments

i can do white backgrounds too

I’ve been reading Zach Arias’s latest blog posts about his awesome seamless white background and decided to apply some similar lighting principles to create a pure white background in my dining room. I only have room for head and shoulder shots, but it works for this exercise.

The exposure is pretty close to what I had in-camera. The only post is a little bit of contrast and brightness adjustment on my face (a bit shiny for what I wanted). I also touched up the corners a little as well. My background lighting wasn’t absolutely 100% perfect, and there was a tiny bit of light falloff. It still worked out ok for the shot.

Here’s a diagram of my lighting setup:

lighting setup for day 27

And here’s what it looks like in my dining room:

work with what you got

Setting up the lighting was ridiculous easy to do. I just wish I had more room, so I could have more control over light distances. I’d also like more space so I could, oh, I don’t know, do a jump shot with this lighting. :)

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