Should photography always be a force for good? Probably. But come on, who could resist doing this to their baby nephew? :-)
Months ago (yeah, it's been awhile since I've posted to the blog) I was minding my own business and watching television, when I saw this U2 commercial for the Blackberry. Ten seconds into the commercial, I saw an image I had to try and imitate: Bono's face all dark except for just a slice of his face lit from the side.
My final image of Brian actually doesn't look very much like the one of Bono, but I captured an image that I would not have thought to if I hadn't seen the commercial and got off my couch.
So how did I do it? It was really simple. Just one umbrella plus very little ambient light, BAM! :-)
Go here to see more shots of Brian.
Most of the time I try to keep out of people's way when I'm shooting candids. But with babies, it's a different ballgame. In these shots, including the one on the right, I stood behind my brother and used his shoulder as a quasi-tripod to shoot our nephew while my brother changed his diaper. Talk about intrusive! If only I had a photo of it!
By perching myself on my brother I was able to:
1. Shoot from a stable platform.
2. Shoot from a perspective that nearly mimicked what my brother was seeing.
3. Focus only on shooting Jakey without having too much of my brother in the shot.
This technique isn't something I'd employ all the time, but with babies, they don't know what's going on anyway, so as long as the other adult is fine with you perched on their shoulder, you're golden.
This post isn't educational nor even that interesting, but when I scanned through my Flickr account, I encountered this photo, and I just had to post it. This is a shot of my nephew's double chin, which I will use against him if he ever acts up as a teenager! :-)
In this ongoing saga of my night shoot with Brian (which is taking far too long!), I want to focus on how one problem can mess up a shot.
What I liked about the shot:
1. Brian's bored "I'm about to go home" expression.
2. The directional lighting at camera left provided by a hot shoe flash shot through an umbrella.
3. The overall subdued earthy tones.
4. The out-of-focus twinkling lights behind his head.
What I didn't like:
1. The out-of-focus twinkling lights behind his head.
How can I both like and dislike the same thing? Look at how I composed the shot. The lights look like they're sprouting from his head. It really bothers me. Once again, this is a reminder of how important it is to be mindful of your composition.
In my previous post, I stated that focusing on a subject at night is very difficult, but I managed to get a more or less clear shot of my buddy Brian. How did I do it?
1. Stabilized my camera on a tripod.
2. Had Brian shine a flashlight on his face.
3. Autofocused on his face.
4. Switched focus to manual, so the lens did not refocus when I pressed the shutter release.
5. Asked Brian to turn off the flashlight and hold very still.
6. Snapped off a shot and examined the LCD. If something was off (focus, composition, and/or exposure), repeat the process.
After what must have been an hour, I finally got the shot above. It was hard work for the both of us!
By the way, there is a hot shoe flash shot through an umbrella positioned above and in front of (camera left) Brian's face.
Here's what it looked like when Brian pointed his flashlight directly at his face:
What's one of the most difficult skills in all of photography? For me it's focusing on a person at night. Autofocus has a difficult time in the dark and I can't manually focus if my life depended on it!
So what's my solution? Since I need to stretch my blog entries out to meet my monthly quota, I'll answer that later today. Yes, I know, it's pathetic :-)
Often I find myself taking photos of friends on a sunny day. If my camera is set to any of the auto or semi-auto modes (aperture or shutter priority), their faces appear too dark. The reason this happens is because the camera is trying to balance a bright background with what is usually a darker face (especially if the person is wearing a hat).
Let's say I'm taking candid shots and don't want to shoot with flash and I don't want to ask them to move to a different spot. What do I do? I set the camera to manual exposure mode and spot metering (I use this setting 99% of the time anyway) and I just meter for their face. I largely ignore the fact that the background will be extremely overexposed, because most of the time I only care about their face.
You can't always do this, for example when you want to make sure that something important in the background is visible behind your subject, but most of the time I find that I only care about the subject's expression.
I shot above her:
I shot below her:
I don't think the pictures are very good, but the set would have looked a lot worse if I had just sat on the couch and snapped away.
You can see the rest of the set here.
I've long wanted to experiment with changing the color of a background using flash shot through a translucent colored object. I finally found an opportunity to try it out, because Jakey had just eaten, so I knew he and his mom would be glued to the couch for awhile. I shot the background flash through my sister's clear blue water bottle so the formerly white wall in the background became bluish. I don't know if the blue helps or hurts the photo above, but I look forward to trying this again with different colors and in different settings.
I love the way light from a window wraps around a person's face. Recently I've been experimenting with firing a hot shoe flash through a translucent disc to imitate the diffused and directional source of light that a window provides. I could have use one of my umbrellas too, but this time around it was simpler to bust out the reflector instead of opening an umbrella and attaching it to a light stand. Either way would have worked in the photo above.
The setup was very simple. I attached a wireless receiver to a hot shoe flash and aimed it through a translucent disc. I could have made the apparent size of the light even larger had I put some more distance between the flash and the reflector, but my goal was to just shoot Jakey, so the apparent size of the light was big enough to provide soft directional wrap around light on his face. To avoid having too much light spill from the top of the flash, bounce off the ceiling, and light the top of Jakey, I placed a plastic case on top of the flash (it acted like a gobo/flag).
To combat the last two factors, in the last few weeks I've begun to shoot in RAW+JPEG mode. By saving my shots in this way I can upload the JPEG's to Flickr right away without having to post-process the RAW files first. I save the RAW files for future tweaking after I buy a faster computer and hopefully after my arm heals.
If you follow baby fisheye, you know that this is sacrilegious because I prefer shooting in RAW over JPEG. But given the choice between sitting on my hands and doing nothing, and shooting in JPEG, well, there's really no choice.
Shooting in JPEG and uploading the images without post-processing present some unique challenges:
1. The white balance needs to be set correctly in the camera. I cheat and use Auto :-)
2. No cropping means I must pay extra attention while composing each shot.
3. The lighting has to be close to perfect as possible, since I can't tweak the exposure after the shot.
I think this whole shooting in JPEG business has been a blessing in disguise. It's made me much more aware of how I compose and light my shots. I can no longer take shots on autopilot and rely on Lightroom/Photoshop to fix my problems.
I don't like shooting indoors with on-camera flash, because the light flattens faces and can cast some ugly shadows. The advantage of on-camera flash however, is that you are very mobile. But what if you take your flash off your camera, remotely control the firing of it from your camera, and aim it at the ceiling? Now you always have a diffuse source of light as long as you shoot in the room.
I employed this technique at my buddy Mark's son's Red Egg and Ginger Party. As you can see in the photo below, my setup was a lot simpler than the two-light strategy I employed last December. I got lucky this time, because the ceiling was very high, so the light from the flash was able to spread out before bouncing back towards the subjects.
How did I do this?
1. I connected the flash to a mini tripod and placed them on a shelf at one end of the room.
2. I aimed the flash at the ceiling.
3. I connected the flash to a radio receiver.
4. I set the flash to manual mode and dialed the power to around 1/4.
5. I connected a radio transmitter to the hot shoe of the camera. Whenever I released the shutter, the transmitter told the flash to fire.
6. Started shooting! Because the flash was set to manual mode, it was easy to modify the power to ensure that my subjects were neither over nor underexposed.
There are a few things to be aware of:
1. Watch out for hot spots. The closer your subject is to the actual flash, the brighter and overblown they will turn out.
2. Avoid shooting subjects in darker areas of the room (unless you like the effect).
So do you need expensive fancy equipment to do this? Not really. If you have a flash with a built-in optical slave, you're ready to go. An optical slave detects when a flash is fired and in turn tells itself to fire. Use the built-in flash on your camera to trigger the remote flash. This all happens in mere milliseconds. You can also buy a small optical slave unit that connects to the hot shoe of your flash. Just be careful that your remote flash and your built-in flash don't overexpose your subjects.
If you have a relatively new camera and flash from the same manufacturer (e.g. Nikon or Canon), you can use their out-of-the-box remote flash trigger solutions.
Give it a try, it's liberating!
You can see the rest of the photos from the party here.
Sometimes I know ahead of time that I'm going to be shooting in a low light situation. This was the case with my company's bowling party, so I pre-planned some shots. I really wanted to shoot some silhouettes, because the shape of a person bowling is very unique. The idea for the shot above was actually ripped off of a bowling shot I saw on Flickr. Full disclosure: Before leaving for the party, I searched for "bowling" on Flickr to get ideas. :-)
In the shot below, I like how the subject and the background look dark and mysterious. It's a little blurry, but I think it's okay in this case.
Off-camera flash can be awesome, but sometimes you can create very nice images with available light, no matter how little of it there is.
You can see the rest of the photos from my company bowling event here.
My friends often ask me what I look for when I'm taking photos of people. I'll talk about things like lighting, composition, and posing, but what I look for most is raw emotion. It can be happy or it can be sad or anything in between as long as it's genuine and intense.
I captured this shot of a coworker at my company's annual bowling extravaganza at the Presidio Bowl in San Francisco. Frankly I'm surprised I was lucky enough to see the moment, much less capture it. It was dark and I had been having problems focusing all day...please no comments about my camera brand (as is usually the case, it's most likely user error and not a problem with the equipment). Somehow all the stars aligned in that sliver of time and I got him. I looked down at the LCD. Yes I know I may have missed another golden moment, but I just HAD to see if I got his expression. I did and to my relief the lighting was decent and it looked like the focus wasn't too far off. I'm not going to lie to you, I felt great, especially since most of my other photos were disappointing for one reason or another.
You can see the rest of the photos from my company bowling event here.
I love the sun, but when it comes to photography, it sometimes isn't my best friend. Portraits don't look as nice when the sun is high and the skies are clear, because the sun casts harsh shadows and your subjects will squint. There are many ways to mitigate this as I've discussed before. For this shoot, I tried #4, which in short says "bring the shade to your subjects, e.g. with a collapsible translucent disc.
My buddy and I shot his cousin's graduation portraits at my alma mater U.C. Berkeley (Go Bears!). It's a lovely campus, but the sun was blazing down on us. You can really see the difference between shooting her under the open sky and shooting her in the shade. Compare for yourself:
Unshaded:
Shaded:
Yes, yes, I know there are a bunch of other differences between the shots like her location, her cap, etc. But notice how in the shade her eyes are less squinty and that the light on her face is more flattering.
Here's a shot of the disc in action. Brian and I took turns holding the disc and let me tell you, it can really strain the shoulders after awhile!
If you don't have a disc, you can move your subjects under a tree, next to the shady side of a building, or any location that will shield your subjects from direct sunlight.
You can see the rest of the photos from the shoot here.
Exposure: 52.5mm focal length, 1/20 sec, f/5.6, ISO 200, 10:00am.
Post-processing in Lightroom: Cropped, increased fill light, reduced color temperature.
To avoid camera shake, I never set the exposure time longer than 1/50th sec when handholding my camera, because my lens has an effective focal length of 52.5mm. When I wanted to increase my exposure time to around 1/20th sec, I put my camera on a tripod and used the tripod like a monopod. By supporting my camera in this way, I reduced a lot of camera shake.
Exposure: 52.5mm focal length, 1/320 sec, f/2, ISO 400, 10:27am.
Post-processing in Lightroom: Increased exposure and fill light, reduced color temperature.
My sister is hours away from giving birth to the first child in my family. It's an exciting time and the perfect time to talk about an image I took of her and her husband last month. It's a very simple photo that I copied from an image taken of one of Amy's friends.
The lighting setup was easy: one flash behind my sister to light the wall. Even though the hallway where I shot them was fairly dark, I did not need to light them with another flash, because their faces were supposed to be underexposed. The reflection of the background light off of the wall provided just enough light to bring out a little bit of detail in their faces.
The setup and shooting only took five minutes, but retouching the bottom quarter of the wall in Photoshop took a lot longer. I had to remove parts of the lightstand, remove the floor moulding, and with a lot of difficulty: even out the shadows.
You can see the color version here.
San Francisco is pure photo gold! There's always crazy stuff going on. Last month the Potrero Hill neighborhood hosted the Bring Your Own Big Wheel Race. It's exactly as it sounds: people race big wheels (and other things like recycling bins) down a steep and windy hill while mobs of fans cheer them on. It is a sight to see...and photograph!
There were some crazy characters:
I had fun playing with panning:
Once in awhile I caught racers losing control:
Focusing/compositional mistakes created interesting shots:
Lastly, I wasn't the only photographer out there!
I had a great time and will definitely go back next year.
You can see all my photos here.
Have you seen the cool album cover of Rihanna's Good Girl Gone Bad: Reloaded? On a lazy Saturday last month, I created a version of it with Amy. Though they look nothing alike and Amy doesn't own a white dress, I saw potential for some photographic fun!
My first problem was how to recreate the extreme body lean. The solution was simple, although the implementation was not: ask Amy to lean against the wall (easy) and use Photoshop to remove the wall propping her up (hard). In Photoshop, I had to give Amy a haircut and redraw her body a bit. :-)
The second problem involved lighting. Because I wanted the light to wrap around her and gradually end in shadow, I needed large directional lighting (I used a flash shot through an umbrella). Unfortunately the light bounced off the wall and lit the far side of Amy's body and arms. This was not good, because these parts of her had to remain dark to match Rihanna's photo. The key was to gaffer tape the black cover of my reflector to the wall and have Amy lean against it. This served to "eat up" all the light on the far side of Amy and therefore leave that part of her in shadows.
The other problems involved replacing the wall behind Amy with a blueish green background and adding the shadow behind her. This shadow actually took a lot of time for me to create in Photoshop, because I'm not very adept at creating gradients.
I love trying to reproduce other people's images, because it forces me to stretch my abilities. The shadow behind Amy alone took me at least an hour!
Check out the set on Flickr and see me impersonating Rihanna too!
Answer: create lovely portraits of Chinese food at Brian's restaurant!
No flash was employed, so Brian and I used tripods to slow down our shutter speeds in order to gather enough light to properly expose the food. The tablecloth was gaffer taped to the wall and table. Note the "seamless" junction between the wall and table. We could have used an iron though!
See the rest of the photos here.
No, I'm not referring to the fact that it's been 25 days since I last blogged! Although that would be accurate as well. I'm actually referring to the Sing Tao Street and Art Fair in Redwood City I attended with my buddy Brian. It had been a long week of shooting for me, so I just plopped myself down on the ground 20 feet in front of the stage, looked over at Brian and said "I'm tired dude, I'm not moving from this spot." I usually run around, looking high and looking low to get the "perfect" shot. It was really refreshing to just sit down and not move while the different acts performed.
If you've met me you know I can't sit still, so a half hour or so into the show, I did actually get up and moved behind the stage. But then I plopped myself down again and didn't move for awhile. :-)
I don't really have a point to make, except that once in awhile it's refreshing to be lazy!
Go here to see the rest of the photos from this event.
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