I expect a good place for me to begin talking about lighting solutions is likely my cover picture :-). I shot this picture with my friend Alex, as part of the same shoot that produced The Energy Drink -- though evidently the lighting was completely different ;-). We shot this one against a black backdrop with two flashes, one high camera right to simulate the light coming from the pile that would eventually appear in Alex's hand, and the other low camera left (with one stop less power), to simulate the light dripping off the pile. Both flashes were in tight and set to their highest zoom settings (200mm, for the SB-900), to restrict the light as much as possible. In addition, I had the camera's aperture cranked up to f/25, so as to keep the shadows as dark as possible (the small aperture forces very high flash power, which in turn means that the ambient light by comparison makes as little impact as possible). So here is the original image that resulted from that:
One subtlety possibly worth mentioning is that I had the lower SB-900 set with its head rotated sideways, so as to make the area lit up on Alex's tummy longer and thinner. A surprising number of people don't seem to realize that you can do this with your flashes (or at least with the Nikon SB-600s, 800s and 900s -- and I'm betting that Canon's flashes can do the same). So it may be worth showing what that looks like:
The body of the flash still has the CLS sensor facing the camera, but the flash head is rotated around to point edgeways up. This ability to rotate the head can be handy if you're in one of those situations where CLS doesn't work unless the sensor is pointed perfectly straight at the camera.
So now basically I just had to add the pile of light. I trust no one will be too shocked to learn that was done in Photoshop :-). The first thing I did in Photoshop was to deepen the shadows even further using a Curves layer. I then used another Curves layer to strengthen the contrast of the area to be illuminated by the run-off:
I then created a new empty layer for the light, and used the Path tool to create two paths, a semi-circular one on top for the pile and a trumpet-shaped one for the run-off. I could have done that with just one path, of course, but I wanted the pile to have a softer shine and the run-off to be more concentrated. So I filled both paths with white in the new layer, but I picked a larger feather radius for the pile than I did for the run-off.
You will notice that I have also added a mask to the Light layer, covering Alex's thumb and part of her forefinger, so that the pile appears to be cupped in her hand.
The last step was to add the golden glow to the light. I thought there had to be some terribly clever way to add the glow in such a way that the yellow increased automatically as the white fell off... but in the end all I did was to select the pixels of the Light layer and then trace around its edge with a soft yellow brush (again, with a higher radius for the pile than for the run-off). (Selecting the layer's pixels first meant I didn't add any yellow to anything other than the existing light.)
The last step was to crop the image to a square format, and there you have my cover shot :-). The lighting and the post-processing were both very simple, but I am very happy with the resulting image.
Cheers!
One frustrations I have always had on photoshoots is showing the pictures to the model(s), the makeup artist(s) and any other collaborators involved. While the monitors on the back of the camera have gotten steadily better, the (at best) 3 inch screen they offer is nothing like an ideal way to judge whether the pictures are actually working or not. So I have always been interested in finding some larger, better screen, that would nevertheless be almost as convenient to use as the camera's own monitor.
For a while I had great hopes for netbooks: a better screen to be sure... but the user interface was never ideal (the keyboard is fiddly when you're holding the device with one hand, standing in the middle of a park -- and what do you actually hold it by, come to that?). So I had great interest in tablets, right from when they first appeared -- well before the iPad, in fact. But it was the iPad that really captured my excitement -- here was a device that was actually meant to be used with one hand, no keyboard, while holding it with the other!
Alas, the iPad (both models) suffers from one horrible drawback: it can't read the SD card from the camera. There's a dongle you can buy, yes, but once you put it in, you first have to copy all the pictures you want to review down onto the tablet before you can start looking at them. Not terribly useful when you take a lot of pictures (e.g. with any normal professional fashion model), not what I had in mind at all! And as for the iPad's ever more numerous would-be competitors, e.g. the Samsung 10.1 and HP's short-lived TouchPad, none of them had full-sized SD slots either.
Honestly, I would have been okay with something that had even a full sized USB slot! (I already have an SD-to-USB dongle.) Just provided it was prepared to find some kind of picture storage there...
So when Toshiba announced that they were going to ship a tablet called the Thrive, with the latest release of Honeycomb (then 3.1), and that included -- quelle joie! -- a full-sized USB port, plus -- mirabile dictu -- a full-sized SD card slot as well, they certainly had my attention! The one question I had left was whether it would read the pictures in place on the card, or force me to copy them onto the tablet first. However as the device reached the hands of reviewers, many of them confirmed that the device could in fact view the pictures directly on the card.
It was a bonus that Toshiba was pricing the Thrive competitively as well :-). So when in due course the device finally arrived for sale in Canada (that would be about two weeks ago), I was at the store the very first morning to get one!
It was amusing, in fact: the store's sales staff really weren't up to speed on the device at all. I wasn't about to put down my hard-earned monies without actually verifying that the device really did do what I wanted, but they didn't even have a demo model out yet, and had pretty much no idea of what the Thrive did that was different from any of the other tablets on the market. But I persevered, I verified, and eventually was allowed to walk out of the store with my newly purchased box in hand.
The timing was good, in fact, as I had a shoot a couple of days later, The Ice Queen Confronts the Summer Sun, with Donya Metzger as model and makeup by Anne Szilagyi, to be shot outdoors in a park in blazing sunlight. A more rigorous test would be hard to imagine :-).
The good news is, we liked it :-). The Thrive's 10 inch display has a resolution of 1280 by 800 pixels, higher than either the current iPad or Samsung models, and its 3x2 aspect ratio is almost exactly the same as the pictures my D90 takes (unlike the 4x3 ratio of the iPad). So the pictures fit the hardware very well. The colours are bright and vivid -- I'm sure they'll be better once the colour correction folks get around to porting their stuff to Android, but it's definitely good enough for field work. And the usability factor: pull tablet out of shoulder bag, turn it on, pop the SD card out of the camera and into the tablet, look at pictures, was almost as good as I hoped.
The Thrive also proved useful during the preparation, in fact, as its forward facing camera (even at 2 megapixels) makes a quite decent mirror to let the model have a look at how the makeup is coming along (why do makeup artists never bring a mirror to the shoot? ;-)).
So what about the bad news? Well, to begin with, the screen is close to useless in bright sunlight. For that matter, so of course is the camera's monitor, so this is not exactly unexpected. You have to find some way to shade the tablet in order to look at the pictures, and you need more shade for a 10 inch tablet screen than a 3 inch camera monitor (fortunately, it turns out a 33 inch reflector provides quite a lot of shade ;-)). I could also wish the screen were less reflective (le sigh). But it did work, and all three of us agreed that we would far rather look at the pictures on the tablet than on the camera monitor.
More surprising was the amount of time needed to get from "insert SD card into tablet" to "look at pictures". While the Toshiba's Gallery app (much better than the file manager for this, btw) doesn't make you copy the pictures to local storage, it does want to scan them all to create thumbnails. When you're dealing with an ex-dancer like Donya, you're taking pictures very fast :-): by the end an hour's shooting we had more than 300 pictures on the SD card. And by that point it was taking the gallery app (backed by the Thrive's 1 GHz NVidia Tegra 2 processor) about 90 seconds to be ready to show us any of them. Donya and Anne felt that was acceptable -- perhaps partly because I know to keep the conversation going while the tablet does its thing! :-) But in future, I might want to switch SD cards to a new one every 100 shots or so.
It turns out that the tablet is also good for a few things besides reviewing pictures during a shoot :-). One is that the gallery app actually makes for quite a nice portable portfolio -- rather than carrying a folder full of heavy photo paper! One hint if you do that: copy the pictures to your tablet at (at least) twice the resolution of the tablet. That way, if your client oohs and ahs over a particular shot, you can quickly zoom in on particular parts of it and show them at even higher levels of detail.
Oh, and one other hint: always clean your screen before showing your portfolio to a client. The smudges do show ;-).
Let's see, what else? The Thrive does a decent job of showing video as well, although you'll likely want better speakers if you're showing off your work professionally. It also features an HDMI slot (full-sized, as usual), so you can connect straight into a newer TV as well (I haven't tried this myself yet). It even has a replaceable battery, and nobody else seems to have that -- though I have been getting a good six hours out of one charge on mine.
On the negative side, you don't want to do any serious typing on the Thrive, or indeed any other tablet -- unless you get some kind of real keyboard for it. The on screen keyboard is okay for taking brief notes... but so you know, I'm typing this post on my netbook :-). And the Thrive is both fatter and heavier than than the latest iPads or Samsungs (1.6 pounds, in fact). That's the consequence of all those ports of course.
In summary I am fairly pleased with my new Thrive. It does the one thing that I purchased it for quite well -- I am very much looking forward to my next studio shoot! (And to getting my custom printed shoulder bag for it! :-)) And it does a few other things well enough that it will certainly get plenty of use!
So here's a picture of it -- and a preview of The Ice Queen! :-)
Cheers!
At one point I thought of beginning this blog with a Manifesto, a ringing declaration of what I believe and what I stand for... However on reflection, I'd rather start with a manifest instead, that is, with a straightforward indication of what you are likely to find in this blog, if you open it up.
I am a photographer, so unsurprisingly this blog will deal with photography. Photographers differ in many ways, among them in what subjects they prefer to photograph. In my case, while I certainly enjoy photographing fountains and interiors and scenery and suchlike, my greatest pleasure comes from photographing people. That can take the form of event photography, street scenes or portraiture, but most of my work in recent years has tended to be fashion photography, so expect most of what I post here to deal with that space.
Photographers also differ in their obsessions. Many photographers obsess about cameras and lenses. The first picture they take will be with lens cap on (deliberately! :-)) and the second will be of a blank sheet of white paper. They engage in heated discussions of how much of what kind of distortion this lens produces at that zoom and this focal length.
Perhaps surprisingly, that is not me. I shoot with a Nikon D90, and my usual lens is a Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5 zoom, and my biggest reason for choosing them is that the combination takes good pictures in the vast majority of situations I photograph in. I'm quite sure that for any given specific situation, there is a different lens that would produce a picture that is just that slight bit better... but the truth is my budget has limits ;-), and the D90 and the 18-200 work acceptably well for me.
On the other hand, I definitely obsess about light. Fashion photography differs from a lot of other kinds of photography in the number of different light sources and modifiers one typically employs, and I absolutely love the process of trying to determine, for any given project, what combination of lights (including the ambient light) will likely produce a result that works well for the purposes of the project.
Even among fashion photographers, however, there are differences. Some do most of their work in studio; they frequently use big strobes from companies like Alien Bees, large softboxes and reflectors, and heavy stands to hold it all in place. I however do a large part of my work on location -- and on top of that I do not drive. Consequently, my kit needs to be something that I can carry along with me on public transport. My lights are Nikon speed lights (at last count, two SB-900s, an SB-800 and three SB-600s) and they and my camera and my umbrellas and reflector/diffusers all pack into a small rolling suitcase, plus a shoulder bag for the light stands. My heroes are the folks like Joe McNally and David Hobby, who can make that kind of kit perform magic :-).
Fashion photography (and indeed a lot of people photography) also tends to involve a certain amount of post-production, that is, manipulation of the recorded image in software such as Adobe's Photoshop. And the subject of what can and should be done that way, versus what can not and should not, is also one that interests me a great deal.
So there you have the limits that define what I do, and consequently what I am likely to write about :-): what you will find here will be mostly posts about lighting solutions with small strobes (and what happens after).
Light by the handful, as it were.
Enjoy!
