a couple panos

I shot the above image last night under the soccer field lights. I knew it would be good lighting as the they line both sides of the field (cross lighting). I boosted the contrast in this image by the layers technique that i have discussed in previous posts.
The bottom photo was one i took a month or so ago.
What i like about cropping a photo for the web is that anything goes. I remember in photo school that i hated the 8x10 print size. One reason was that i printed about a million of them and the other was that it did not allow the full neg to be shown. I'm not so "pure" anymore and need to show the full image but i still hate the 8x10 crop. For the most part now i dont set anything in my crop parameters and just set the guides to what looks good. It could be 9.3 x 4 and that would be just fine. Cropping in lightroom is even better. I can fly through a shoot now and crop as i go. If i decide later that i have to change it thats fine, just go back and move the borders, the whole image is still there.

a bit of retouching

I scanned this image today from a 4x5 negative on an epson perfection flatbed scanner. The scanner works great on negs and all looked pretty good, except for the missing parts of the negative. I didn't really have to retouch the image but saw it as a bit of a challenge and decided to just do the peoples faces. That led to the rest of the people and then to the background. I certainly would not say that the job is perfect but i had lots of other work to do and could not spend much time on it. I thought it turned out ok for a rushed job.
I used the healing tool and clone stamp tool only. Lots of sampling and patience help too.
Actually i forgot that i had to fix the little girls face that has the big white blob over the right side. I selected the left side, copied, pasted, flipped horizontally, and moved it into place to cover the blob. I just blended it in after that so it would look real.
Below is the fixed version.

recent photos

Thought i would put up a couple photos i have taken recently. The one above is of david myles (www.davidmyles.com).
I had never heard of him before this and i really enjoyed his music.
The next is a shot of a little guy on a train. He was pretty patient and together we looked for moose, deer, and any other animals that we could think of.

And lastly we have a helicopter taking off. Everyone was pelted with dirt and small rocks off the pavement and had to look away.

These are just a random few shots that caught my eye.

back to hdr

I have been doing a few night shots for a local hotel and thought this image ended up ok.
I shot with a 24mm lens at iso 100 and bracketed over a 9 stop range. Just used ambient light and auto white balance.
The longest exposures were probably around 4 seconds or longer. Use of a tripod was necessary here.
Once downloaded through lightroom i sent 5 of the exposures to photomatix pro.
After tone mapping i basically had the rough start of the image. I did alot of retouching as there was a bit of flare spots in the shot and sidewalks and roads always show tons of cracks which had to be fixed. For the road i just duplicated my background layer and then selected the pavement using a few of the selection tools. I then filled the selection with black and changed this layers blend mode to luminosity. I dropped the opacity to 50% and the road looked freshly paved. Actually i think it ended up a bit too dark in the end after i did a couple curves adjustments.
I rotated the photo a bit to straighten it and sharpened it about 45% with smart sharpen. The curves boosted the contrast a bit and fixed the color. Color here is pretty subjective but in the end i liked it.
I also had to extend the branches as there were none in the upper right hand quarter of the image. I just used the clone tool set to 100% and took branches from various other parts. I filled in some gaping holes in the rest of the branches this way also.
One other part i had to fix was the delta sign. Part of the D was burnt out and the rest of it picked up some blue color through parts of it. I made a selection of the parts i wanted white and hit refine edge and feathered the selection by 1.5. Then just fill the selection with white.

to fill or not to fill 2

As promised here is the other shot i mentioned last night.
I still have the nice ambient light coming in from the window but have also added a sb flash behind my subject and angled a bit towards the camera. I wanted this light to spill onto the wall to my left and highlight the areas behind the computer monitors for separation.
I used the same camera settings to capture the proper exposure for the ambient and just adjusted the flashs manual power until it was the right intensity.
Not sure which i like better, but probably leaning towards this one.

to fill or not to fill 1

This shot will be an example for two discussions.
The first is showing another example for a main light.
When i peaked my head into this computer lab i noticed that there was only one window in the room and there was some pretty cool light coming in from it. Now some of you that follow this blog are most certainly "strobists". I did this post to let you know that it is ok to use ambient for a main light. Believe it or not ambient is not a dirty word (ha).
I chose a shallow depth of field, actually i had to as there was not much light coming in and my shutter speed was getting pretty slow. I was using a d2x nikon at an iso of 560 and the grain is pretty obvious. I could not have gone much higher with the iso. The window was the only light used in the shot.
The second example that this image will show is to try another option. I thought about how the shot would look with a flash added for fill and threw one in to try it out.
I will post that image tomorrow night.

supper sidebar

This is just a quick sidebar on last nights supper.
Used ambient light and a 24mm lens set to f2.8.
More importantly however: salmon glaze was made from 2cloves of garlic, maple syrup, lemon rind, and a touch of honey.

whats in a main light 2

I just wanted to talk a bit more about the main light. I wont talk that much actually, i did enough of that in the last post, but more importantly show an example.
The photo above was taken in a different area of the library in which i shot the image i posted yesterday but in the same type of setting. I had the model in between two rows of books. I placed a flash behind her again like before but placed it in pretty close to the row of books that she is looking at so the shadows would be good and dramatic. This light provided a hair, seperation, light and took care of the books also.
For the main light i wanted a bit softer light and did not want it to spill on the books too much while still being fairly dramatic. By dramatic i mean light a portion of the face and leave some in good shadow. I laid the flash on one of the shelves above where my model is and angled it straight up at the under side of the shelf above it. Luckily these shelves were a light tan color, almost white, which gave a perfect bounce surface. This softened and broadened the light and spilled it back down at her face below. Too easy, and i mean that as it worked really well on the first test. I then just placed her tight to the books and angled her face up a bit to catch the light right. She was perfect for the shot which made my job really easy.
If i were to try this shot again i might play with a CTO warming gel. Probably on the background light. I would be curious to see how that would look.
One of the things i really like about this shot is the hair light. The color of her hair was an added bonus.
Tomorrow we get into "to fill or not to fill".
Yes i know, i'm weird.

whats in a main light 1

This post and the next 3 will be talking about, and showing examples of, the "main light". This of course is the light that does the heavy lifting when lighting your subject, most of the time anyway.
If you used an on camera flash, and no others, then that would be your main light. If you used a flash off camera to camera left and aimed at your subject, and a flash placed behind the subject, then the first one i mentioned would most of the time be called the main light. I say most of the time because there are really no hard and fast rules here. Your main light could be aimed at your background if you wanted it to be.
I would call my main light in the shot above the one that is placed to camera left and is aimed at the models face. I zoomed it in a bit, cant remember how much, as i wanted it to more or less created a slight spot effect. I did not want this light to hit the books in the isles or spill too much down her body. I wanted it to be punchy so i moved some books to my left, at about her face level, and asked a very nice lady to be my light stand and hold the flash in the hole i made on the shelf and point the flash directly at my models face. No softening stuff here.
I placed a second flash (used sb 800's although thats not important, both set to manual) on a light stand behind the model and aimed it directly at her. I zoomed it a bit also so it contained the spill of light. I had to keep going back to adjust it as it took awhile to balance it to the main light. First it was too bright and then of course it was too dark. Ten trips or so back and forth and it was just right. At about this point i always would like to know what my subjects are thinking. Like "he really must care if he is putting this much effort into my photo", or, "I wonder what ratio he is using", or, most likely, "does this guy actually know what he's doing".
So after all this babble what do i want you to take away from this post.
1) There is really no right or wrong way to use a main light. Ex: you can use a direct flash, bounce it, use an umbrella, shoot thru one, soft box, whatever. What matters is what feels right to you at the time your taking the photo. If you want to convey a mood or a feeling then use a type of main light that helps you convey this.
2) Dont be afraid to experiment. Try something you havent tried before or something you read about once in awhile. Your taking photos remember, not doing heart surgery. Whats the worst that can happen.
3) Do what looks right and feels right to you, not what you think someone else wants to see. It's your name that will be going under it in the end.
4) Have fun.
Thank you very much to my model in this shot "A" for your permission to post your photo here. You did a great job in all the shots we put you in and were very patient with me running around balancing lights. One question though, what were you thinking at the time???
I'll go with door number three.

just a little something

It has been forever since my last post.
Vacation has me way too relaxed and my fun photo stuff has screached to a halt. I have been taking a ton of photos but they are all work and no play.
As a matter of interest to me, i just checked the file info on the last photo i have taken with my new camera (bought 10 months ago) and i have taken 27,000 photos with it. I was surprised actually, i thought the number would have been higher. At this rate i will need a new one in another 4 years. Dont tell my wife.
Ok, enough babble.
This was an image i liked of my son that i took last week.
I tried using black and white conversion and played with the color sliders but was never happy with the results. I ended up duplicating the background layer and desaturating this new copy. I then lowered the opacity on it to get some of the color to show through from the background. I did a curve on this layer to boost the contrast a bit and then flattened.
I added a vignette and also darkened the edges and his uniform using the burn tool set to midtones and a strength of 7%.
I ended by dodging his eye a bit using the dodge tool set to highlights.

photomatix with blend modes

I am officially on vacation and here it is 12:10am and i am on the computer working on a photo.
I guess where its of my mom that makes it special and ok for vacation time.
I dropped in to visit tonight and after baking for a client for two days straight, she gave me this pose.
The cooking was all done and she was on clean up or believe me she never would have touched her hair. Cleanest cook i have ever, or will ever know.
It always amazes me how much cooking she can do, not to mention how good it tastes.
I opened the photo in lightroom (i am a full convert now) and processed it for black and white and sharpened. From here i opened the image in photoshop and tweeked it just a bit more.
My default in lightroom is to open images in photoshop as 16bit profoto images. Important for the next step.
I then saved the file as a tif and closed it.
I opened photomatix and then opened this file. I went to process - tonemapping and tonemapped the image with some pretty strong settings. I saved it and closed. I then repeated this process and opened it again in photomatix and applied the same settings. I saved it and closed photomatix.
I opened the original black and white image and the photomatix double process version in photoshop and drug the photomatix one onto the top of the original, while holding down the shift key to center. I then changed the blend mode of the top, photomatix, layer to darken. what this did was give detail to the blown out sections of the image, like the windows and tops of the baking supplies. I did a bit of funkiness to moms skin also but i just created a layer mask and painted in black over her skin and apron. The original layer showed through this mask from underneath and everything looked wonderfull.
Remember that this is a 16bit image so i then went under mode - 8bit. I also went to edit- convert to profile and changed it from profoto to srgb. It was now ready for the web.
This is ambient light by the way shot with a 24mm lens.
The original image is below for comparison.

photomatix interiors

I had to shoot some hotel rooms recently, extremely early in the morning (started at 4am to be exact). We wanted to do the shots before this lounge opened for breakfast at 6:30am. I had started off slow on another room. I did some ambient light bracketed shots but they just were not singing to me. I ended up adding 4 flashes to the room and it got fairly complicated.
I started off in this room just adding one flash in the far right corner by the patio door. It looked good but the ambient in here looked pretty good all on its own. I bracketed from 1/250 sec all the way down to 15sec. I ran 5 of the photos through photomatix which gave me a start. The image looked fairly bland to this point and needed some contrast and some highlights. I did a curve in photoshop and then used the dodge tool set to highlights and did some creative painting around the image. I retouched a bit and sharpened and that was it.
As far as a hotel room goes i really like the coloring in the image. I had my camera set to tungsten white balance which is what made the wee bit of daylight coming in the patio window quite blue.
I find the image i posted here a bit too light and i still need to tweek the curves a bit. This is all i have in me for tonight though.

flash in rain

I have been way too busy lately to stop and smell the roses, or see the roses i should say.
Today it rained, and rained alot.
I have wanted to stick a flash out in the rain ever since reading joe mcnally's book, the hot shoe diaries. I was doing a little surfing tonight and found another cool shot done in the rain and that was all the motivation i needed.
I put a flash on a stand and attached a pocket wizard. I first put a ziploc sandwich bag over it, then two sheets of cling wrap, then topped it off with a semi see through (clearest i could find) grocery bag. I used electrical tape to seal the bottom of the bags around the flash stand and stuck it in the driveway. I set this flashes (backlight) power to manual 1/1. The zoom head was set to about 35 for a fairly wide burst. I put my main light high and to camera left and kept it just at the edge of the my garage, still inside and dry. I set this light to 1/8 manual power and zoomed to 85.
I shot from a lying position with a 80 - 200 f2.8 zoom lens set to exactly 116mm. No reason of course for this, just looked right and i got the zoom info from my metadata in lightroom.
Once in photoshop i retouched a couple distractons away, very minor, and then sharpened, and adjusted curves (a few times).
My flash was pointing just a bit too low and as a result his chest and stomach were too bright and the face was too dark. I adjusted the curves for the face and then duplicated my background layer. I applied a vignette and made it quite heavy. I took the darkness to -50 and the midpoint slider all the way to the left. This brought the tonal levels of the overall image down quite a bit. I added a layer mask and painted in black over the face and upper chest area to bring back the lightness of the bottom layer. I then flattened.
By the way, a few drops of water made its way through the outer bag but got stopped at the cling wrap layer.
Flash still works.
I did that little contrast trick where i duplicate the background layer, do a curves adjustment and bring the highlight slider over three squares and the shadows slider over three, desaturate, and then change the layers blend mode to luminosity and its opacity down to 30 or 40%.
I flattened once more and then just played by adding canvas size to the left, adding a bit of text, and dragging in another photo from the shoot. I lowered the opacity of all these new layers to 70% so your eye could stay on the main image and not be sucked over to the left until you were ready to roam.
One last tidbit of info. I shot this at about 7 o'clock in the evening. It was still very light out but i set my camera to 100 iso and the shutter speed to 1/250 sec at f4.0. This combo darkened down my background, while my large aperature combined with my longer lens, compressed and blured it.

strobing

I shot an event this weekend at which the downtown blues band played.
It was a great event and the music was awesome. I set up two sb flashes up high on a balcony that ran around half of the main area. I aimed them at each other so i had cross light. I filled this light in with an on camera flash with a dome diffuser on it and set at a 45 degree angle. I fired the remotes with a pocket wizard. The light worked out perfectly. I dont want to post any photos as there were alot of government people there and they may not want their photos on my blog.
This shot is of the band with the strobes turned off.

poster

I saw this movie poster in the mall and immediately thought of an old farm house down the road from my house. I look at that house everytime i drive my son to scouts and it really looks like its straight out of the horror shows. I found a digital file of the movie poster online and downloaded it to start. My daughter kindly photographed this house for me as i pulled over to the shoulder of the road and watched nervously as cars raced by.
I opened both photos and then made my new shot black and white and boosted the contrast. I made a rough selection of the house plus a bit of the area around it and drug it over onto the poster. I transformed the scale to fit over the original house and then created a layer mask to hide the parts of my selection that i did not want to show, like the sky around it and grass and trees in front of the house.
I used my dodge tool set to highlights and dodged a couple of the windows and most of the siding to bring out what was already there. I used the burn tool set to shadows and went over the roof and chimneys to darken them down a bit.
That was really about it. I think it looks scarier than the original.
I would drop in and give the farmer a print but i am afraid.

lighting test

I had to do some 3/4 length head shots in the studio today and grabbed my buddy kev to act as a test model.
I set up three lights. Main was placed to camera left up high and shot through an umbrella, angle of light to subject was about 45 degrees or so. Side, hair, light was placed behind kev and up high also, shot through an umbrella. I shot one other light on the background, white seamless paper, to make it close to white.
I opened the photo in photoshop and used the dodge tool, set to highlights, to make the background white.
I next saved the image as a tiff and opened it in photomatix and ran it through details enhancer, i have posted before about how to do a single file in photomatix. Once it processed i tonemapped it and saved it as a tiff.
I opened it in photoshop and did a little trick to it to pump up the contrast. I duplicated the background layer and did a curve adjustment on the copy. I moved (straight across) the top and bottom points of the curve in to the third line, three squares. I then went under adjustments and hit desaturate. I then, in the layers palate, changed this copy layers blend mode to luminosity. From here you just have to lower the layers opacity, in the layers palate, to taste (mine ended up at about the 40% mark).
Then flatten.
I then wanted to make the background darker, it was very light grey, and create a halo around him. I duplicated my background layer and did a curve adjustment on the copy to darken it alot. You will see darkness come right into and over your subject but thats ok. Make a layer mask and paint in black with a nice big soft brush at about a 30 or 40% opacity. Just paint over the parts you want the lightness from below to show through. You can also lower the opacity of this dark copy layer if you like.
I flattened once more and smart sharpened 40%. I cropped and extended the canvas size to create a white border.
If you like this approach to creating extra contrast in your image you could always make an action.
Hit play and its done.
One thing i forgot to mention is that i also used the dodge tool, set to highlights, at about an 8% opacity on his eyeballs.

gelled flash

I broke down and bought a new fancy pants flash last week and i got five minutes to play with it tonight. It came with a gel filter pack and an attachment that holds it on the flash and everything. In case you didn't know, it dosen't take much to impress me.
I put a full cto gell (orange) on the flash and set the cameras white balance to tungsten. What this does is make your flash lit subjects a daylight balance for color but throws your background, ambient light, blue.
I set the flash on a stand and zoomed the head in a bit and aimed it at the girls faces. I put it on ttl and used the pop up flash on my camera to trigger it. I set the on camera flash to not register and could use the cameras flash menu to adjust the power of the off camera flash. It was friggy to say the least but it worked. I ended up with the flash compensation set to -1. I just set the shutter speed for the brightness of the background, you could flavor to your own personal taste.
The girls did some funky poses and since some black flies wanted in on the action, the girls ditched me before i had the light tweeked just right.
My light was wacking the girl on the left in the face and falling off on the girl on the right, there by under exposing her by probably a stop.
I downloaded and converted to dng in lightroom and did all the corrections in the develop module. I cranked up the saturation a bit and put the clarity around 25 or 30. Once i had it looking alright i hit control - E , which opened the image in photoshop. Here i duplicated my layer and did a curve on the copy to darken down the left girls face. I added a layer mask and filled it with black to hide my darker adjustment. I then painted in white on her face, allowing the dark layer to show through, at about a 40% opacity on the brush and just built it up. I sharpened about 35% and was done.
I started to retouch the image a bit but had to go out and then ran out of time.
I will experiment with this approach again as i like the look.

dancing queens

The scene you see is the tester for the dancing segment of my sons first house party. We set up the dancing area in the living room, complete with christmas lights, and my mom and daughter gave it a spin. The party has now been over for an hour and a half and the house is still standing, whew.
This photo was alright as is but i found the floor and my mommas legs a bit on the light side. I duplicated the background layer and did a curve to darken the whole photo. I then created a mask on this copied layer and filled it with black, to hide all of the darkening. I then painted in white on the mask with a nice large brush and an opacity of about 40%. I just built it up until it looked right.

a few shoots

Anyone who follows this blog must have thought i gave it up or something. Not the case. I hit a very busy stretch once more and then the flu moved into my chest. I havent really had the computer on in awhile and am now a touch behind in getting a few photos out.
I had the chance tonight to look at some and thought i would just post a smattering of things i have shot lately.
I will give a brief overview of the images starting with the top left. This was for a brochure on downtown shopping, the shot on the lower right was part of this also. I had to take about 20 shots or so before i had the light looking right. I finally settled on one sb flash bounced into an umbrella and hitting the foreground subjects. I think i turned it a bit away from them also so the light was feathered a bit. This was placed to camera right. I put a flash on the background people and bounced it off the ceiling. It was placed to camera left and zoomed in a bit as not to spill on foreground.
On the bottom right image i had a flash bouncing off the ceiling to camera left for the people and one bounced of the ceiling for the background also to camera left.
The bottom left image was an hdr shot and i used 5 images run through photomatix.
The top right photo was just available light shot from a low angle with a 24mm lens.

couplea things

We stayed at a not too far away hotel last night and our room had this nice high vantage point of the pool area. I had the camera on a tripod and bracketed 9 frames. I like doing 9 because i choose the first, last, and every second fram inbetween, giving me 5 images to export to photomatix.
I may have forgot to mention in previous posts on this subject that by default lightroom will export your images as 16 bit adobe rgb98 files. So when you save your tonemapped file as a nice big tiff and then open it in photoshop it will be 16 bit, rgb98.
Now if you want to save the image as a jpeg and pop it up on the web or send it to your local one hour lab for a nice big wall print then there are a coupla things you may want to do.
1) convert to 8 bit ..... image - mode - 8bit
2) convert to srgb ..... edit - convert to profile - (in the destination space choose srgb)
You are then free to save as a jpeg, use all your photoshop menu items that were greyed out in 16bit, and have good color reproduction from your lab and the net.