Guess My Project

Three 10 feet PVC pipes, four elbow connectors, four straight connectors, a tube cutting tool, eight clamps, and an IKEA bedsheet.

What am I making?

Hint: I am going to need sandbags too.

Softening Harsh Afternoon Sun

Oftentimes I find a great spot to take a photo, but the natural light falling on the location is too harsh. I usually do not have the luxury of waiting for the sun to move to a better spot in the sky. I can splash some artificial light with an off-camera flash, but it often looks...artificial. So if I have a friend around willing to help me, I pop out the old diffuser. Can you tell which photo was taken with the diffuser?

Hint: Look for the photo with the hot spots and sharp shadows under the nose.

For fun, here is my friend Hyun's technique for holding a reflector. Not bad for a first timer!

Always Pull Over

I saw this amazing field of yellow flowers in the middle of winter in Yountville, California a couple years ago. I could have kept driving, but thankfully I pulled over. This is something I rarely see, so I am glad I spent the extra time to snap some photos.

Windshield Diffuser

I like to travel as light as possible when it comes to photography gear, especially if I am on vacation. That means no umbrella + light stand, no reflector, etc.

So what do I do when I need some softer light? I look around!

Our Nissan Cube has a relative large windshield, so I hooked up the old SB-24 to a PocketWizard and shot away.

Would an umbrella have produced a softer and richer light? Sure. Would it and its light stand have toppled in the fierce San Francisco winds? You bet.

Happy shooting!

What Is This? Brian.

I presented a blurry image taken with my phone in my previous post. It looked kinda artsy to me, but it was a total accident. About a month ago, my buddy Brian and I had a double date at a Korean tofu soup restaurant (SGD Tofu House in Santa Clara, CA...so good!). I was already at the table munching on banchan when I saw him get out of his car. It struck me that he wore a blazer. He never wears a blazer! I felt compelled to take a photo. The only camera I had was my phone. As he walked towards me, I started snapping as fast as the phone would let me. I quickly realized that I was not holding my DSLR. Duh.

Despite taking very bad photos, there were some positives that came out of this:

• It kicked off a round of gentle jabs at his new GQ look.
• It provided me with two blog posts.
• It reminded me that I should bring my DSLR out more often, because photo moments can occur at any time and place.

Here are the other photos:

Now go out there and shoot!

What Is This?

I recently took this photo with my iPhone. For some strange reason I expected the phone to react nearly as quickly as my DLSR. But no matter how far camera phones advance, I believe they will never approach the performance of a dedicated camera.

If you absolutely cannot wait, click on the image and see the answer (it is not really that interesting) :-)

Flying Animals!

I had an image in my mind for quite some time: my wife Ahreum surrounded by stuffed animals. I know, it is definitely weird, but what can I say?

I used a very simple lighting scheme. I aimed the key light through an umbrella to bathe Ahreum and the animals in even light. I aimed the background light at the wall and blasted it white. My goal was to avoid creating too many shadows in order to make post-processing easier. This had some drawbacks as I will discuss later. I shot Ahreum and each stuffed animal separately. Here are some behind the scenes photos:

My original sketch. Always start with at least one sketch!

Lighting setup for Ahreum. She stood in front of the rear/left light stand (replace the table with Ahreum).

Lighting setup for the stuffed animals. I lowered both lights and placed the animals on top of the table.

The image did not turn out exactly the way I wanted. I think it looks too flat. This is no surprise since I wanted to drench everything in light in order to avoid having to deal with too many shadows. The effort was really fun though and was an excuse for me to fire up Photoshop for the first time in a long time!