POTW2012 - Week 2 - Orange

I had a few ideas bouncing around in my noggin for this one. With "orange" as the theme, I obviously considered oranges (and there's a bag upstairs now), a construction area (no shortage there), cigarette tips, things on fire, the usual.

I decided, however, to make an image that was my first impulse, and one that I'm sure everybody with a camera tries at some point - I shot smoke:



While smoke isn't orange, I did reckon I could take any decent captures into Photoshop® and make them orange. So there.

My first edit was boring - just a quick orange layer in "Color" mode and the smoke turned orange. Since that was tremendously underwhelming, I pulled a yellow to red diagonal gradient across the color layer instead. That's much more satisfying.

Setup for the shot is easy, if a bit stinky:



On the table are three burning incense sticks. Both big strobes are snooted, and blasting through the strobes to strike a black flag on the other side. The flag prevents any spill on the background.

The camera is set to manual, ISO100, 1/250, f/6.3, and 80mm (128mm in APS-C terms), and fired with a wired trigger. I grabbed over 100 frames, and this was one of the 20 or so keepers.

Two weeks down, but I don't think I'm done playing with these smoke shots yet.

POTW2012 - Week 1 - A taste of Vintage

New year, new challenge, and hopefully some new techniques to attempt.

This week's theme is "A Taste of Vintage", and, while I wanted to go with the double entendre and provide a food-themed picture, I could not come up with a suitable subject. I do have "vintage" food in the 'fridge, but it's suitable for neither consumption nor composition.

Instead, I give you my battered old workhorse, the only medium-format camera I own, and one of the nicest cameras I've ever used, the Mamiya RB67 ProS.




Lighting on this was relatively simple, and came together quickly. Two Canon 430EZ flashes, at 1/32, and through some homemade snoots, at around 45-degrees to the front of the camera.

The shot was ISO100 at 130mm (208mm with the APS-C sensor) at f/5.6 and 1/250. All light is provided by the flashes.

Setup looks a bit like this:

And that's it - nothing fancy.

Fun with UWA Lenses

So, what happens when you have an Ultra-Wide lens, some shafts of sunlight, and a cat who really wants to know what you're doing pointing that big, black box at her?

Something like this:


An important specification to know for any of your lenses is MFD, or Minimum Focus Distance. The MFD is the absolute closest your subject can be to the focal plane (normally your sensor in a dSLR) while still having the lens able to focus on the subject.

The temptation with an Ultra-Wide is to spin it back to its widest setting, and try to get in as much of the scene as possible. While this is an appropriate technique in some circumstances, it's generally a whole lot more gratifying to use the usually much shorter MFD to take advantage of the inherent distortion in such a lens.

The cat above is quite the butterball, but you'd never know it from the picture. I got down nose-to-nose with her, and shooting at 10mm, got as close I could while still being able to focus. She obliged me (for once) by stretching her neck out to see what I was doing.

Shooting at aperture of f/5.6, to increase DoF (and compensate for any missed focus) I made the shot. If I were using my next-widest lens, which goes as wide as 17mm, I would have had to have pulled the camera back an additional four inches, and it would have looked a more normally-framed shot, and more of the cat's Rubenesque shape would have been apparent.

Your camera is pretty bright...

...but it's not infallible. Take the following two shots, taken moments apart.

For the first shot, I've let the camera do its thing. It's in Program-Auto mode, and the flash is mounted on-camera, and set to E-TTL mode. I think even the ISO is set to auto-select. Metered on the Birthday Girl, and made the picture.



As you can see, the exposure is pretty decent. The camera selected a fairly wide aperture of f/4, because it was pretty dark in the room, and aimed for a shutter speed of 1/60, which is pretty standard for the Canon system. ISO ended up at 800, which is good enough. The flash did fire, but, it was pretty low; basically just enough to add a little fill, if I had aimed it straight-on, which I never do.

So, not a bad picture, overall. It's a good snapshot of a very happy event. Unfortunately, I don't like the dark shadows on Gram's face, and there's no detail in the curtains. Technically, it's a rather imperfect shot.

I've got a pretty decent flash that I tote around with me. I'm using Canon's flagship strobe, the 580EX II, and it's got some sauce. I knew that even with a diffuser and at an angle, this flash is more than powerful enough to light a scene of this size without breaking a sweat. With that in mind, I kicked the camera and flash into Manual.

I metered, once again, on the birthday girl, but deliberately underexposed the scene by around four full stops. To compensate for that, I dialed the flash to 1/32 power. I aimed for the same 1/60 second exposure, but stopped down the aperture to adjust the exposure, and to increase my depth-of-field.



Better, no?

If the flash was overpowering, I would have adjusted the power on the flash. If the flash wasn't powerful enough, I could have opened the aperture a bit, and decreased the shutter to compensate to keep the same ambient exposure.

Overall, it's good to keep in mind that brilliant minds have designed your camera, but none of them are looking at your screen after your shot. Don't be afraid to slip the bonds of auto-exposure every now and then.

Months go by...

So, I'm officially retiring from the 2011 Pic-a-day challenge. Unfortunately, I've been swamped both professionally and personally, and I can't devote the time to these images that they, and you, deserve.

Additionally, most of my personal photography these days is analog - I've been shooting, developing, and now enlarging and printing, a bunch of film. It's a slow process, with roughly a week going by between exposure and final print, so, it's tough keeping a daily schedule.

I will still be posting - this is, first and foremost, a photography blog. Expect more detail shots, more behind-the-scenes and setup shots, and a good bit of darkroom technique, as I become proficient enough to pass it along.

For now, feel free to enjoy a time-lapse video of one of the aforementioned personal projects:



Working on the deck. This was accomplished by setting the camera on a tripod in Aperture-priority, setting auto-ISO, manual focus, and using a "Shoot" brand remote control with an integrated intervalometer. I took one shot every 30 seconds, and combined them into a time-lapse video using Google Picasa.

Hey - Ya'll wanna see something cool?

Playing around with a series of 16 shots captured at Numidia Dragway over the weekend.



Heh.

Shameful, really.

It's been over a month since anything new has dropped on this blog, and for that, I apologize.

I've been shooting (lots!), and have even gotten some editing in (not as much...), but, I'm keeping my clients happy, and, these days, my dance card is pretty full, so, there's that.

I'm anticipating using the upcoming long weekend for massive editing / posting push, so, expect one massive update to the Pic of the Day shots, and then I should be back on-track, and will return to my once-daily updates.

So, yeah - sorry for the hiatus, and apologies in advance for what's going to be a massive, too-long-to-read update, but, stick with me reader(s), and some cool things are coming up. Some street photography, performance, cool lighting, and new film techniques, all on the way!