Lighting A Room With Stationary Flashes

I like to complain about having to use on-camera flash to light people when I shoot indoors. Unfortunately, there is no alternative (that I'm willing to employ) if I'm shooting in a large indoor venue like a nightclub. But what if all my subjects are in one room? In a controlled and relatively static situation like that, David Hobby (The Strobist) describes a very cool alternative to lighting with on-camera flash. Here's David's technique in a nutshell: Get two flashes wireless controlled by the camera, put the two flashes on opposite corners of the room, and point them up at the ceiling. His setup provides even lighting to just about every inch of the room. You're now free to move about and take photos without flashing people directly in the face! Unfortunately, what looks good on paper doesn't always translate perfectly to the real world. Here's a diagram of my lighting setup and some original photos: Setup Original #1 Original #2 Original #3 Before I continue, let me set the stage. We were all in Mark's family room. The flash at the top right corner of the diagram is on a lightstand which is visible in the top right corner of Original #1. The second flash is in the top left corner of Photo #2. The second flash sat in a hollow part of the wall connecting the family room to the living room and hallway. Now onto the problems! Problem 1: Everything is too dark. As you can see in the last two photos, the room was not lit up as much as I wanted. I think a big reason was that much of the light from the second flash bled into the adjacent hallway and living room and therefore did not help illuminate the family room. So why didn't I increase the power of the flash? See below. Problem 2: Hot spot in the corners I really didn't like the hot spots in the corners of the room, especially near the first flash (see Original #1). I don't know how to correct it. I'm going to have to chew on this problem for awhile... In conclusion, despite my setup not working exactly as I planned, I'm happy with the results. When I think about how my friends would have looked had I blasted them with on-camera flash, I know I made the right choice by trying out David's technique. By the way, the intro photo at the top of the post looks pretty good, because I increased the exposure in Lightroom. Thank goodness for post-processing!

Get High To Get Wide

A few posts ago, I complained about not having a wide enough lens to capture a table full of food. I ended that post by writing that I should have stood on top of a chair and pointed my camera down in order to get the wide shot. That's exactly what I did when I took this photo at the SoCal holiday party. This photo isn't very good, but I love it when I actually listen to my own advice! :-)

Almost Catching A Perfect Moment

While shooting photos of Mark and his family on the balcony, more friends arrived! Since the flashes were already in place, I hustled the newcomers up to the balcony for some quickie shots. I was trying to take a photo of the setup for this blog before taking everything down when Mark told a joke. The result? Almost a great photo of Jane laughing and not a good shot of my setup. I'd call this the worst of both worlds. Dag nabbit!

Playing With Two Flashes

My buddy Mark has a balcony with a gorgeous view...and a flash. I was glad I lugged my off-camera lighting kit with me to Southern California, because now I had two flashes, a light stand, a shoot-through umbrella, and a tripod at my disposal. I sensed an opportunity for some photographic fun! I wanted to try adding a rim light to provide some drama. I did this by putting the first flash on the tripod at 9:00 camera left and angling it away from the camera. I shot the key light through the umbrella at 4:00 camera right on the light stand. Unfortunately, the camera left side of everyone's face was too dark (especially Mark's because of his infernal baseball cap!), so I turned the rim light into the fill light by moving it to 8:00 camera left. Looking back, I should have upped the power of the key light and moved it to 7:00 camera right to provide a bit more light on their faces instead of moving the rim light. Final lighting setup: I have to admit that I don't like how the photo turned out. It lacks "drama". I should have turned down the power of the left flash to increase the contrast between the right and left sides of their faces. Looking at this photo again, it actually looks like my "fill light" put out more light than the "key light". I really need to be more careful of the lighting ratios! Despite the disappointing result, I am very grateful to my friends for letting me use them as guinea pigs. I learned a lot and it sure beats taking photos of myself!

Autofocus vs. Toddler

Will AF ever be able to keep up with an energetic toddler like Kasey? I doubt it. During the holiday party in SoCal, I spent a lot of time in the family room shooting photos of Kasey and her parents. Whenever I got on the ground and crawled within 5 feet of her, Kasey would charge at the camera. Most of the time my AF gave up trying to lock focus, but I just kept shooting and hoping for the best. While I wish my AF could keep up with her, I sometimes got some cool unfocused shots of her that really conveyed the kinetic nature of this excited little girl.

Holiday Party in SoCal

Just over a week ago I went down to Southern California for a holiday party thrown by my college friends. There were lots of people and plenty of opportunities for me to experiment with my camera. As always, I made a lot of mistakes, but learned a lot too. I look forward to sharing all that with you during the next few days. You can see more photos from that weekend here.

Turning Off The Flash

Now that I'm done complaining about shooting indoors with on-camera flash, here are some photos I took at my company's holiday party sans flash. I like these a lot more. I had to steady my camera on the railing for this shot, because the exposure time was a long 1/5 sec. I took a bunch of shots before I got one I liked. Luckily they were dancing away and didn't notice me huddled on the ground shooting them. :-)

The Challenge of Indoor Flash Photography

Along with a few other coworker/photography enthusiasts, I was asked by my company to take photos at our annual holiday party. This year it took place in a fairly dark and cavernous club in San Francisco. Because I had to stay mobile, I stuck my flash (with diffuser cap) on top of my camera and angled the flash about 75 degrees forward. Basile (see below) was also shooting and noted that the ceilings were high and painted black, so not enough light was bouncing off and reaching his subjects. He suggested that I do as he did and point my flash straight at the subjects. I chose to ignore his advice. I almost never angle my flash that way, because it makes people look flat and gives them the deer-caught-in-the-headlights look, but hmmm, Basile's photos turned out a lot better than mine. Furthermore, unlike my photos, his were not post-processed! There are other factors in play as well, we have different styles, we use different cameras, different lenses, etc. Maybe I just can't help coveting other people's work. Whatever the case may be, my photos left a lot of room for improvement. Of all the environments I've shot in, shooting indoors with a single flash mounted on my camera is my least favorite. I pretty much said the same thing back in October. Because this is a very common scenario, I must continue to experiment. Besides Basile's straight-on flash angle, I saw another photographer with her flash's bounce card deployed. I regret not trying both these techniques at the party, so I'm definitely going to try them out the next chance I get.

Still Want A Wider Lens

A couple of weeks ago, I went to a friend's holiday party and found my camera gear still lacking in the lens department. I love my 35mm lens (52.5 effective focal length on my cropped sensor DSLR), but sometimes it's just not wide enough to capture everything I want in one single shot. My lens couldn't convey how much food was on Allison's large table. But wait! A poor workman blames his tools. If I had been more creative, I would have stood on top of a chair and held the camera high over my head to get the wide angle I needed. Or I could have done the opposite and taken some very nice closeup shots of the food. Oh well. I was hungry and couldn't wait to dig in!

Steadying Shots With A Wannabe Monopod

I don't have a steady hand. In fact, sometimes it seems like I'm so unsteady, that I have to shoot at a much faster shutter speed than a normal person would, in order to avoid blurring my subject. I don't own a monopod, but would like to acquire one someday. Before laying out the money for one, I wanted to see if using a monopod would actually help steady my shots. Turning a tripod into a quasi-monopod is easy. Just leave all the legs folded up into their full vertical positions and then extend one of the legs. What better place to test out my mono/tripod than during a stroll through downtown Redwood City at night? There were a lot of neat things I wanted to photograph without an ugly flash ruining the scene. I wanted to keep my ISO low in order to reduce noise. I also didn't want my aperture to be too wide open, because I wanted to increase my depth of field in order to ensure that more of the scene stayed in focus. My only option was to increase my exposure time.Exposure: 52.5mm focal length, 1/20 sec, f/4.5, ISO 400, 5:40pm. As you can see in the photo above, my exposure time was a long 1/20 sec compared to my lens's 52.5mm focal length, yet there is very little blurring of the stationary objects in the photo (namely the ice sculpture). At that focal length, if the camera were handheld, a common rule of thumb states that to avoid blurring, the exposure time should be no longer than 1/50 sec. Given my shaky hands, I didn't want to go longer than 1/100 sec ;-) Unfortunately, I forgot to take comparison photos of the scene while I (1) held the camera with my hand and (2) set the camera on top of my fully extended tripod. Using a monopod does not completely prevent blurring, only a tripod comes close to completely isolating a camera from shaky hands, but supporting a camera on a monopod goes a long way towards reducing blurring. Go here to see Brian's shot of me and my wannabe monopod.

Attack of the Clones, Redux

One of the things my buddy Brian and I like to do is clone ourselves at night using long exposure times and handheld flashes. Neither photos were multiple exposures, nor were they created by combining several photos during post-processing. The first shot was by standing and firing off the flash at myself (by pressing the test button) in four different spots along the walkway. The second shot was created in a similar fashion, except I augmented his handheld flash with my flash. You can my flashes all around his knees. Because I was constantly moving, you can't really see me in the photo. To read more about this technique, go here.

Coveting Brian's Night Shots

Exposure: 52.5mm focal length, 30 sec, f/9, ISO 100, 11:57pm. After Herie and Gene's engagement shoot, I went back to Stanfurd University later that night with my buddy Brian to take some night shots. I think his are a lot better: better colors, more detail, etc. I'm jealous. Photography is not a contest...but I still want a REMATCH! :-) You can see some of his shots here and here.

More Creamy Creamy Bokeh

To end my series of posts from Herie and Gene's save-the-date/engagement shoot, I want to show another example of great bokeh. I love the way the background is defocused which draws attention to the Herie and Gene. If you want to learn more about bokeh, start here.

Be Ready To Abandon Your Plan

When we took the engagement shoot into the classroom, I set up my flash on a light stand and behind a shoot-through umbrella. I wanted some soft directional lighting. I didn't like the results. Instead of wasting everyone's time futzing around with my equipment, I abandoned the effort and just put the flash on my camera hot shoe and bounced the light off the ceiling. I'm certainly not giving up on lighting subjects using an off-camera flash, but I need to practice more before trying it on important photo shoots. Just for fun, here's a shot Basile took of me setting up the umbrella.

Lesson Learned: No Hiding

I was very happy with these shots of Herie and Gene (especially the one above). When I showed them to my friend Amy, I could barely contain my pride. She took one look and said, "Gene's parents aren't going to like these photos, because they can't see their son." Pishhhhhh...that was the sound of my ego deflating. I thought I was being artsy, but who cares about art when you can't see the groom's face?

Merry Christmas From Sacramento!

Merry Christmas everyone! I spent the day with the family in Sacramento. We had a delicious prime rib dinner. I tried to get everyone together for a group photo, but the response was cold, so I settled for some random shots. I really like the one above of my mom and me (taken by my brother). When my subjects don't want to cooperate, I take what I can. :-)

Photoshop To The Rescue Again

Sometimes I like to tweak the exposure of small portions of a photo, e.g. darken highlighted areas or bring out details in the shadows. There are many methods of doing this in Photoshop (and other programs), but I currently only know of two: 1. Joey L's method of working with two layers in Photoshop. 2. Photoshop's dodge and burn tool. On the left, Gene was overexposed. I used Joey L's method and created two layers in Photoshop. In the first layer, Gene was properly exposed (but Herie was underexposed). The second layer was the exact opposite, Herie was properly exposed, while Gene was overexposed. I then removed Gene's face from the second layer, so that his correctly exposed face showed through. For more details, read this.

In this example, I dodged his hair, and the hair above her forehead. I burned the camera-left side of his face (note splotchiness, my bad!), his neck, and parts of her hair.

If you're viewing this on a browser other than Safari, you might notice that the photos on the right look more warm. This is a color space issue. The photos on the left were saved in the ProPhoto RGB color space, while the ones on the right were saved in Adobe RGB. Check out this post for more details.

Clone Stamp To The Rescue

If I was a perfect photographer, I wouldn't need Photoshop, but I'm not perfect, so I'm glad I have it around to save my shots. Photoshop's clone stamp tool is great for hiding/removing/obscuring things. On the left, there is a light hanging annoyingly above Herie, so I removed it.

On the left, the sun shone too brightly on the sidewalk near Gene's left hand, so I "extended" the shaded portion of the sidewalk.

If you want to learn more about this tool, take a look at this post. If you're viewing this on a browser other than Safari, you might notice that the photos on the right look more warm. This is a color space issue. The photos on the left were saved in the ProPhoto RGB color space, while the ones on the right were saved in Adobe RGB. Check out this post for more details.

Panning, Part 5

Herie wanted Basile and I to take a series of shots of her running towards Gene. I knew Basile could easily handle her request, so I used this as another opportunity to try a panning shot. I like how she's actually in focus (more or less), especially in light of my focus issues. I also like how she's framed by the arch in the background.

Lesson Learned: Be A Better Director

I regret that I didn't do a better job directing Herie and Gene throughout the photo shoot. Having never shot these types of photos before, I didn't really know how to pose them. Thankfully Herie and Gene felt comfortable around the camera and didn't have to pretend to like each other. :-) The pose in the photo above (as well as in most of the other shots) was all Herie's idea. Looking at all the photos I took, it was probably better that I didn't do much directing, because Herie came up with ideas that were much better than ones I would have devised. As a counterpoint, Basile took a photo of me seemingly directing Herie and Gene, so maybe I'm not too far behind where I want to be.

Lesson Learned: Always Check The Focus

Exposure: 129mm focal length, 1/125 sec, f/2.8, ISO 100, 2:02pm. I've mentioned this before: focus is very important. This is especially true when testing a new lens on an important shoot. For Herie and Gene's engagement photos, I rented a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens for the first time. I wanted a great portrait lens: one that didn't distort facial features and one that had great bokeh. Unfortunately, I didn't really know how to use it before unleashing it on Herie and Gene, because I rented it just before meeting them for breakfast. I nearly panicked when I saw the results on the computer, because Herie and Gene were out of focus and blurry in many of the shots. I think these were the possible reasons: 1. Exposure time was too short for the focal length of the lens: The general rule for avoiding blurry photos is to keep the exposure time shorter than the focal length of the lens. This can be a confusing concept to understand, but it's fairly simple to figure out how to apply the rule by looking at an example. If the focal length is 100mm, then the exposure time must be at or under 1/100 sec. When I did the rough calculation in my head while shooting, I forgot to take into account that on my DSLR's cropped sensor, the EFFECTIVE focal length is 50% longer than the focal length indicated on the lens. That means that if the lens says 100mm, the effective focal length is actually 150mm. So when I shot at 1/100 sec, I really should have shot at 1/150 sec! Some of you may know that the lens has vibration reduction (VR) built into it. This means that I can shoot at a longer exposure time, but unfortunately it doesn't help me when the subjects move (see #3). 2. Aperture was wide open at f/2.8: The depth of field was at its shallowest, so it was difficult to get everything in focus: even if Herie or Gene's face was in focus, the other was not. I was so concerned with getting great bokeh, that I never thought to experiment and stop down the aperture. 3. Subjects moved too quickly for me: This would have also caused blurriness. 4. Autofocus point was incorrectly aimed: I relied on a tiny single-point on the viewfinder to determine focus. If my aim was off, then the shot was ruined. At first glance I thought I totally screwed up the photo above, but upon closer inspection, I saw that Gene was in focus, while Herie was not. That means that I wasn't a complete failure! If I had stopped down the aperture to maybe around f/5.6 then both their faces would have been in focus. Oh well, I'll do better next time! Here are some more examples of Herie and/or Gene out of focus:

Exposure: 112mm focal length, 1/100 sec, f/2.8, ISO 100, 11:43pm. Reasons 1 & 2

Exposure: 105mm focal length, 1/400 sec, f/2.8, ISO 100, 12:14pm. Reason 4 (focused on tree on the right...weird!)

Exposure: 105mm focal length, 1/250 sec, f/2.8, ISO 100, 12:19pm. Reason 3

Exposure: 105mm focal length, 1/250 sec, f/2.8, ISO 100, 12:20pm. Reason 2

Exposure: 105mm focal length, 1/60 sec, f/2.8, ISO 100, 12:42pm. Reasons 1, 3 & 4 (focused on her scarf)

Exposure: 123mm focal length, 1/80 sec, f/2.8, ISO 100, 12:59pm. Reasons 1 & 4 (focused on the tree in the background)

Thank goodness for Lightroom's sharpening tool. It isn't perfect, but it did help a little bit. Looking back, I should have continuously checked the focus of my subjects by magnifying them on my camera's LCD screen. I didn't have to do it after every shot, but if I had done it more often, perhaps I would have remembered to decrease the exposure time and stop down the aperture. I threw a lot of concepts and principles into this post. If you're confused, don't worry. In the upcoming weeks, I will revisit them individually and add more detail.

Lesson Learned: Carry A Clif Bar

After an hour into the engagement shoot, I felt a pang of hunger. This was strange since Herie and Gene had just treated Basile and me to a hearty breakfast. It must have been the running around, the crawling, the squatting, and all the physical aspects of trying to capture fleeting moments. Next time, I'm keeping a Clif bar or two in my bag!

Save-The-Date/Engagement Photo Shoot

A few weekends ago, my friend Basile asked me to accompany him on a save-the-date/engagement photo shoot with his friends Herie and Gene. Of course I jumped at the chance! Though both Basile and I are Cal Bears, we sucked it up and shot on location at Stanfurd University as Herie requested. I learned a lot during this three-hour shoot and I'm still digesting it all. In the next week, I'll share all the tidbits I picked up. You can Basile's untouched photos here. You can see Basile's polished photos here. You can see mine here.

Creamy Creamy Bokeh

Exposure: 255mm focal length, 1/500 sec, f/2.8, ISO 200, 12:09pm. I just want to take a moment and write about bokeh. According to Wikipedia, bokeh refers

to the appearance of out-of-focus areas in an image produced by a camera lens using a shallow depth of field. Different lens bokeh produces different aesthetic qualities in out-of-focus backgrounds, which are often used to reduce distractions and emphasize the primary subject.

This is one area where equipment really matters. No matter how hard I try, the bokeh produced by my wide 35mm lens will never be as "creamy" as a more telephoto lens like the 70-200mm lens I rented. The next time I have my hands on a lens that produces great bokeh, I'll compare it with my trusty 35mm and post the results. Exposure: 240mm focal length, 1/500 sec, f/2.8, ISO 200, 12:12pm.