shayne gray learns photography %$#!

New Blog!

noreply@blogger.com (shayne gray) — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 18:53:00 -0500

shayne gray learns photography has been a really great experience - the community out there is strong and supportive and the encouragement and interaction it's led to has been very encouraging.

So with that, the blog is migrating over to shayne gray photography - not that the learning ever stops!

Please keep in touch and check out the very first post on some Moustache-y Movember-y goodness!

Thanks for everything and hope to see you there.

Sequence Photography!

noreply@blogger.com (shayne gray) — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 02:17:00 -0400

Jumping pictures are always fun...but even more fun off the jumping rock, of course! And what better way to capture the fun than by trying out a little sequence photography?!

We've talked a lot about masking (like in the Matrix post and the levitation post), which makes putting the pictures together easier to manage. Just make sure you bring your tripod, set your camera to "continuous shooting" or "burst" mode and you're done! Well...that's not true - it takes a couple of jumps to find out where your friends are going to land in the water and therefore how to compose your shot, but other than that it's a great effect for relatively little work!

One thing that cost me a couple of good jumps was a shutter speed that was too slow. Even at 1/250 there's still some motion blur....

And just as a footnote: man was I glad I brought a garbage bag with me. I kept it in the camera bag and pulled it out to put the 5d mark ii in it every time I went in the canoe. I felt like an idiot doing it - until we tipped the canoe (of course) as we were getting in close to shore. Think I stopped to help my friends out? Uh uh! Much as I love 'em I went straight for the camera. Yoink! Sorry guys - though I'm glad you're ok.

For more on vintage effects (including vignettes, cross-processing and lomo effects), see this post.

And more fun adventures while camping at Depot Lake:

The $4000 Necklace: What do YOU think?

noreply@blogger.com (shayne gray) — Mon, 1 Aug 2011 00:43:00 -0400

We're going to interrupt our regularly scheduled programming this week to ask you what YOUR thoughts are on Shayne Gray Learns Photography:

Is it possible that the name dooms the product? In other words, in your opinion does "...Learns Photography" take away from the value of past, present and future work posted here no matter how good it might ever get?

So where is this question coming from? Well, it's been a great experience and I've connected with many people both in the virtual and physical world who have been very encouraging. That really helps us to keep going, of course.

But something interesting has happened that I've noticed. I've done a few projects where I've traded my services for something in return and have found that people don't always deliver once they have their photos.

The Psychological Factor

Trades might be a little more of a casual verbal contract than one that deals in cash. The implication of "...Learns Photography" might also lessen the importance of completing a transaction because it's not sold and packaged as "pro".

Also people (understandably) might not see a dollar value in something associated with "just learning".

But this creates the problem that has become a huge issue in the world of photography.

When is it time to sell yourself as a Pro?

Pro photography gear has become amazingly accessible. So what happens? Suddenly EVERYONE is a photographer. A guy walks into a photo shop and walks out with a new $4000 necklace (5D Mark II @ $2500 plus whatever fancy-pants lens on the end of it @ around $1500). On his iPhone on the way home he sets up a website and starts selling himself as a photographer almost immediately.

There's that other whole discussion about those guys selling cheap photography and undervaluing the market for all the others, but I'm not totally convinced about that - and that's a little bit of a side issue to this topic anyway....

The problem is that there's a ton of absolutely terrible photography out there and people are trying to sell themselves waaaaaaay too early.

And that's where Shayne Gray Learns Photography comes in. The idea was NOT to be one of those guys, but to be honest and take time in the learning process and be upfront about it. It was an attempt to continually experiment with different areas of photography and share findings with others perhaps at a similar stage of learning. And that works really well! But...it's possible that it has no other real value.

On the one hand it absolves me of responsibility if a project doesn't turn out (which has yet to happen). On the other hand, people don't want to invest in something with a disclaimer that it might not turn out because I'm just learning.

So what's the solution? Do I give myself more credibility and step away from Shayne Gray Learns Photography to start building a business? Has it been long enough yet?

It's been nice to see that more unsolicited paying gigs have started to come in and perhaps I need to direct my clientele to a more polished platform.

So what do YOU think¿?

Capoeira Mâles - Part I

noreply@blogger.com (shayne gray) — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 22:17:00 -0400

Recently I had the opportunity of working with a really great Capoeira group in the city, Capoeira Mâles.

There are some crazy skilled people in the group and as such...keeping up with the speed in low light can be a bit of a challenge....

Toward the end of the day as the sun is still visible, there's not such a huge problem.

But as you start to lose light there are all sorts of problems to deal with. It's exciting because Cristy's recently taken my old camera off my hands since I upgraded to a Canon 5D Mark II (and I love it...) and she's learning how to balance the triangle for different situations.

As light starts to disappear is when the aperture starts to open up, but f1.4 is maybe not so good for trying to focus on people flying everywhere through the air while I'm making sure not to get my own block knocked off.

Then the ISO is going to start creeping upward, but my personal limit is around 2500 on a 5D and even then it's not great at a certain point.

Cristy in action with the umbrella

So...what to do¿? Well if Cristy's not busy I highly recommend you take her along! She was invaluable (as always). I tried to get her to light faces as best she could but quickly realized how ridiculous those instructions were. People move around in the circle and are facing different directions almost at the same time. Nevertheless booming the light with a shoot-through umbrella so that it caught the action in the circle while still scattering just enough light to be able to see others standing around the circle worked out really well, but test shots have to happen pretty fast to be able to dial in the right settings - for more on that see this post, this post or even this post.

It was a lot of fun and I have a lot of respect for Capoeira and those who have spent countless hours learning how to do it - it's a really beautiful mix of dance and martial arts and I should probably put down the camera and give it a try myself actually....

Stay tuned for Part II....

Bocce Ball!

noreply@blogger.com (shayne gray) — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 20:14:00 -0400

Wow! Things have been pretty crazy busy for the last little while and I'm trying to work through some of the backlog like this Bocce Ball image I took with my Dad on Father's Day and sister (who's actually holding the ball and sadly got edited out - for more on masking in photoshop for this sort of effect, see the Matrix post or the levitation post). For more on vintage effects, click here.

Aside from working on some music for an upcoming short film, I'm excited to be working with Capoeira Malês - more from that project coming soon....

Happy Canada Day!!!

noreply@blogger.com (shayne gray) — Fri, 1 Jul 2011 15:59:00 -0400

Happy Canada Day!!!

...and Happy almost 4th of July to our neighbours down south!

Mel's Tea Party

noreply@blogger.com (shayne gray) — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 01:13:00 -0400

Click any image to see it larger

We recently caught up with Mel in Toronto's Music Garden with her Gloomy Bear, amazing dress & mini-hat and picnic basket that we found at the last minute on the street (full of really great colourful plates, cups & cutlery).

And what a perfect day to pull out the brand new 5D Mark II with a 50mm 1.4 for some golden hour goodness! (Scroll down a little further for some more fun with off-camera lighting composites and to see how the tea party ended!)

And just in case your images don't come off the camera warm enough at a custom white balance of 10,000K, try putting an extra photoshop layer of solid yellow on top at 7-10% opacity. Another cool trick is to create a vintage effect with some light leaks. To experiment with this a little, add a new layer over top of your image and set the blending mode to "linear dodge" Then select a warm red from the colour picker that you're happy with, a nice big, soft paint brush and start painting! Then simply reduce the opacity to taste. For more on vintage effects (including vignettes, cross-processing and lomo effects), see this post.

...and after the tea got cold...it was time to pull out some lights....

It's somehow hard now not to hear Zack Arias' voice, "eyes to the light!" since his recent workshop at CreativeLive.

Cristy comes to almost every creative project and helps out a ton! To keep things portable, I don't travel with a boom (not to mention that they can get quite expensive). Cristy comes to help with the lights, creative ideas and often plays the role of the boom stand among other things.

For the last two shots above I thought I'd try something a little different. I recently stumbled on the really great work of BJ + Richeille Formento and thought that some of their images were likely composites. And even if it takes a while to get that level of photography, I thought I'd try out a similar sinister-looking mood with a similar scene lit in closer, but without showing the light source in a wider shot.

Here are the two images used to make the first composite:

1st of 2 images used with Cristy booming the umbrella

Empty frame to use for masking in our lit subject later in post

Without being boomed, the bottom of the lightstand
is in the pool of light on the ground making
masking very difficult later on in post

To make it work, you need to have that frame with no one in it. Simply open them both up in photoshop and layer them together and mask in your subject - for more on masking, see the Matrix post.

We also tried to light the scene with the umbrella on the stand by itself on the ground, but...as you can see from the photo on the right, the light spill on the ground surrounds the light stand, which would make masking a lot more difficult. So a huge thank you to Cristy for booming the umbrella the entire time.

Cristy booming the umbrella to get the base of the
lightstand out of the pool of light on the ground

And we just couldn't leave without putting all the colourful dishes to good use that we found in the picnic basket!

So much fun....

And finally, thank you to hongkiat.com, webdesignews.com, Jack Chen and 20ju.com for re-posting my Levitation/Textures and Matrix posts this week!

Vintage and Cross-Processing

noreply@blogger.com (shayne gray) — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 22:01:00 -0400

Tres Chicos, Havana, Cuba (click image to see it larger)

Lomo, lomography, faux-lomo...whatever you want to call it, it's become extremely popular in recent years. In fact, we now have our own Lomography store here on Queen St. in Toronto.

The easiest way to achieve the effect is, of course, by going to http://www.lomography.com/ and buying yourself a camera. But since I haven't gotten around to that just yet, here's how you do it digitally....

There are already several good places to find good tutorials on this technique and I've put a list of links at the end of this post, but this is a combination of techniques and different ways to do it for you to put together your way of getting the look you want.

I think it's also important to mention that cross-processing isn't limited to copying that old Holga toy-camera effect. You've seen these curves-layer adjustments in action before - like here in last week's post (especially in front of the truck), here for sure, here particularly in the yellowy pictures, here, and in many others. Once you have a curves adjustment you're happy with, you can mix in the amount of that effect you want to blend in with your image, since you may not want to use it too heavily for everything....

Straight out of camera (SOOC)

So the first thing you'll want to do is take pictures you think will look good with that retro effect. I highly recommend you go to the land of vintage to do this: Havana, Cuba! Once there you'll likely bump into these three chicos on their "bicitaxi". Awesome....

Here's the picture straight out of the camera (SOOC) on the right.

It's really the curves that makes this effect so let's start there.

Curves Adjustments:

There are a lot of different looks you can get using curves and the following settings are simply guidelines. Try experimenting - you can also use an inverted 'S' curve in your green channel depending on the colours inherent in your image, for example....

Start by opening a curves layer adjustment (from the small black and white circle in the bottom right of the program under your working layers (assuming you're using photoshop) and choose curves.

Open the drop-down menu where it says RGB and go to the red channel. Creating an 'S' curve like this takes some of the red out of the shadows and increases it in your highlights - anything on the top end affects the lighter areas, anything on the bottom affects the darker areas, and anything in the middle affects your mid-tones. You can see my settings, but play with them until your image looks good. Don't worry if your highlights start to show too much red - you'll correct that in another channel.

Some say to do the green channel last, but I often go back and forth to make minor tweaks, so I'm going to head right into the green channel.

Sometimes a gentle 'S' curve here is good, sometimes an inverted 'S' curve is good....

Onto the blue channel.

Those blues in the shadows can look really cool even in more..."normal" images. Sometimes it can even look quite high fashion.

This straight line is an extreme inverted 'S' essentially, but will bump up the blues in your shadows and take down the blues in your highlights (resulting in more yellow in the lighter areas).

Now your image should look something like this:

Image after 1st curves adjustment for colour

Playing around with the curves like this can result in some unwanted contrast shifts. If you want to preserve the luminosity of the original image while maintaining the colour of your curves adjustment, switch the blend mode to colour.

You can also alter the overall contrast by making an adjustment to the RGB channel, but it's good to have independent control, so open up another curves layer adjustment and add some contrast with another 'S' curve until it looks good.

Here's the result - and as before if any colour shifts have occurred, you can change the blend mode to luminosity this time to get rid of those while keeping the contrast:

After 2nd curves adjustment for contrast

But now the saturation is...a little overwhelming....

To calm the colours down a little you have several options:
1. you can create a new layer, fill it with black, change the blend mode to hue and reduce the opacity as desired.

2. or you can open a saturation adjustment layer and simply turn down the saturation slider.

Saturation reduced using a black & white layer adjustment at 25% opacity

3. or what I've started to do lately is to open a black and white adjustment layer. These methods are similar, but not exactly the same. Close enough though, I think - still you have the most control with this adjustment. You can play with the settings in the dialogue box that pops up, or...you can just leave them all well alone and hit OK. Now turn down the opacity slider until it looks good. I have mine set to 25% opacity.

And since each layer adjustment opens with its own layer mask, you can use a black paint brush to paint over areas where you want to retain that saturation. For more on masking, see the Matrix post.

Hey! Now that's already starting to look pretty darn good!

Ok now after you've taken a second to admire your work and give yourself a quick pat on the back, you can go on to making a vignette. Adding some vignetting is not essential, but characteristic of that lomo look.

Creating a Vignette:

There are a number of ways to do this:

1. using the photoshop filter under the filter drop-down menu. Go to distort-->lens correction. From there you have "amount" and "midpoint" control in the pop-up dialogue box. This is fine except that you need to copy your background layer first to have control of it on a second layer or use it as a smart filter using smart objects.

2. or painting a vignette around the outside of your image, which I often do - like here for example. Zoom out by using the command - (minus symbol) shortcut (command + to zoom in), select a large (huge) soft paintbrush (with brush opacity somewhere between 50-75%), and just paint around the outside of the picture. Easy-peasy! When you're happy with your paint job, reduce the opacity of the layer to taste.

3. or by using a quick levels adjustment. The first step here is to select your lasso tool (shortcut "l") and draw in a rough selection like this:

Lasso tool to make a selection

Now feather your selection for smooth edges:

And choose a radius appropriate to the resolution of your image. Mine was fairly high res so I chose the max - 250 pixels:

Now you've made a selection in the centre of your image, so we need to invert that. The shortcut is shift command i (or go to the to the select drop-down menu and choose inverse).

Now go back to the layer adjustments palette and select levels. Move the left slider to the right to increase the blacks until you have it around where you think it looks good (or just play around with the midtones slider). Now you have independent control and can change that at any time or adjust the opacity of that layer. Note that if the dark areas around the edges look a little weird or overcooked, change the blend mode to luminosity.

Great, now we're ready for a little sharpening!

Sharpening:

~ A few things to note before we continue ~

Really this topic deserves its own article, which I promised to get to in my very first post! There's already been so much written on this and it remains a contentious topic. Still it's worth mentioning because there are so many lomo tutorials that talk about using LAB sharpening. "LAB" refers to Luminosity "A" and "B" channels.

This method is a bit of a pain because you have to switch the colour space you're working in which means that you can't preserve your layers - you'll have to flatten them first to make the conversion. Then you'll have to switch back. Each time you make this conversion there's some quality loss (especially at 8-bit) so it's a destructive method of working.

A lot of people love the advantages of working in this colour space and say that its main advantage is that it applies sharpening to the luminosity directly thus avoiding any colour shifts and fringing that can occur during sharpening in RGB.

If you're interested in reading more on this, see this article (particularly the comments!) and this article (part IV of V so get comfy).

While its true that there can be some minor shifts when sharpening, luckily there's a quick fix without having to switch colour spaces!

~ Now back to our programme ~

Sharpening can be used as a contrast tool as well as it turns out - like this high pass filter technique for example. All sharpening does really is enhance contrast between light and dark pixels. For normal sharpening, you would conventionally stick to a lower radius (plus/minus 1 pixel). But you can also experiment with a higher radius to extend that contrast a little further....

Go to your original background layer (your starting image) and make a copy of it (shortcut: command j). Now you're going to apply your sharpening on this layer to retain independent control (again, you could also use smart objects/smart filters). Now go to the filter drop-down and select sharpening then unsharp mask. I not only name that layer "sharpening" but I've also started writing the settings in as part of that layer's name so that in the end it's called, "sharpening-50/25/4. Let's look at those settings for a second.

The amount is pretty straight forward - it's the amount of effect you want to add. The radius is the number of pixels you want to extend contrast over. The threshold controls how much contrast has to be in any given area before the filter takes effect - that means that if there's not much contrast in one particular area (like a smooth surface or a cloudless sky), no sharpening will be applied. The higher the number, the less overall sharpening will take place.

You can see that I've chosen the amount at 50%, a radius of about 25 and a threshold of 4. Pretty aggressive settings for standard sharpening, but we're going for a little more of a lo-fi image here, so experiment a little. Watch out for a radius that's too high with ridiculously high amounts because you will see some halo effects creep into your image. This is why it's good to have your sharpening on a separate layer - if this happens, you can either re-think your settings or mask those parts off.

We said above that some colour shifts may occur in RGB colour space using this method - here's how we counteract that: under the edit menu go to Fade Unsharp Mask.... This will bring up a pop-up menu - choose luminosity.

Note that you can only use the fade function of any filter directly after you apply it!!! If you forget and go back to do it later, that option will be greyed out....

And now here's how my layers palette looks:

Final thoughts and a few more examples:

There's a really great tutorial here if you'd like to take it further with a little bit of lens blur and film grain - I've found personally that some images look great with those extras and others...not so much.... It's still a great tutorial and a cool image that he's working on though and looks great in the end.

Also check out this set from Christine's 70's party.

Links to other good tutorials:
- from "Post Production Pie" SLR Lounge you can check out this tutorial that I just linked above in 2 parts.
- Ashley is a certified Adobe expert and has a lomo tutorial here and a cross-processing tutorial here. Both worth the watch in addition to some other really great tutorials there.
- here's another way to do it from Photoshop Girl (using LAB sharpening!)

And now a little more Cuba:

SOOC

Oops! Have I missed something?! Help share resources by adding them with a short description in the comments section or write me and I'll make sure it gets posted!

Chihiro Noda starring in "A Change of Plans"

noreply@blogger.com (shayne gray) — Sun, 5 Jun 2011 20:28:00 -0400

Chihiro Noda

Update: Thank you to Ardean Peters for the fun behind the scenes coverage!

Maria is a wonderful makeup artist. Together we've been planning one particular idea for maybe two months now, maybe longer, but it involves a sunny day and a chaise lounge. We've already had to cancel it once because of rain. This time around it was looking promising until about an hour before we were supposed to start. Too late to cancel again, so...what do you do¿? Make lemonade and hope it at least stays dry.

I was really looking for that summery, care-free, washed-out look and wanted to shoot into the sun to get that effect, except...no sun! So we changed locations and the entire concept at the last minute, which also worked out well. I still have plans for the chaise, but had the weather not been so lousy, we wouldn't have done this particular project, so it's all good.

Originally we even had a different model booked, who cancelled at the last minute. Chihiro is actually a makeup artist (!), but agreed to step in as our model. She said she'd never done it before, so I thought very hard about things I could have her do so that she wouldn't feel awkward trying to pose. It turns out that she's a dancer as well (!!!), which I only learned when we put the Cambodian guitar down. I thought she made a pretty convincing model and she's super cool - very easy to work with!

So where did the Cambodian guitar come from? Well, the short answer is: from Cambodia.

I saw it at a garage sale I happened to pass and bought it (for cheap) from a guy who went to Cambodia to visit his brother who'd been living there. I saw it and almost caused an accident trying to get the bike across the street to take a closer look. I thought I might be able to fix it up and actually play it. Yeah...I'm still working on that, but it makes a great prop in the meantime as it turns out.

We were also lucky enough to have Ardean Peters on hand, who you might remember from our adventures with Mike Gayden. We've both worked together with Maria before on a couple of short film projects and that's how we met Nancy, who was also there to help with creative ideas (and to help us carry all the gear). Nancy's also had some experience playing violin and was able to give Chihiro a fast lesson on holding the bow convincingly.

So no washed out care-free Summer Sun. So to try and match the ominous clouds we went for something more dramatic with our lighting setup. Cristy and Maria traded off booming the umbrella overhead to create that shadow under the chin and give the jaw some shape. Then we had two kicker or rim lights both about 45° behind our model to add drama and separate her from the dark, industrial background.

After we exhausted the possibilities with the Cambodian instrument scene we thought we should somehow use the truck, which was parked right there. I know...maybe that's already been done, but we had to give it a try and keep the creativity going in search of more drama....

By this time though, we had lost quite a bit of light and it was really hard to try and get any of the sky in the scene, so I gave up trying and just went with a near black background.

I love the idea of people coming together and throwing out ideas to try and while you're there you might as well try them!

We set a couple of speedlights in front of the truck's headlights and really...I hadn't planned on taking the stands out in post, but...I had extra frames without the stands in front of the truck and so I decided to spend the time putting those frames together with with ones that showed the stands in the shot and wound up with this after doing a lot of cutting, pasting, cloning and free-transforming:

But I wasn't sure if it was maybe better suited to a portrait orientation instead of landscape. What do you think?:

What luck - Chihiro also turns out to be a dancer!

Lux and Hani featuring Mid-Day Sun

noreply@blogger.com (shayne gray) — Mon, 30 May 2011 00:47:00 -0400

Shot with my new (!!!) 5d Mark II (with 50mm f/1.4)
Click any image to see it larger

This week's project was a little last minute at Toronto's Harbourfront Centre with Lux and Hani. I arrived not expecting to shoot in mid-day sun and...wound up shooting in it anyway. On top of that the different skin tones between the two models made for some very difficult conditions to shoot in.

Read on for some creative solutions....

Exposed for subjects-dock (way) overexposed

Exposed for dock-everything else (way) underexposed

The solution was difficult to find. The silver reflector just wasn't bright enough and the speedlights are no competition for the sun. To try and overpower the sun a little, the only thing left to try was putting all 3 lights together in a bundle and firing them out of a reflective umbrella (try it and you'll find you lose less light than using your convertible umbrella as a shoot-through).

Quick test to make sure they're firing correctly-looking a little ridiculous, but otherwise good!

And we're good to start shooting! This was also the first time I got to really try out my brand new 5D Mark II!!! I know there's likely a Mark III around the corner, but...I couldn't help myself after finding a reasonable deal.

Anyway, using the umbrella with the bundled speedlights meant keeping the umbrella in nice and close (like about two feet - lucky Cristy was there to help!).

The eyes fell into dark shadows really easily so I tried as best I could to keep the eyes towards the light. I also saw quickly that the light source had to be physically closer to the darker skin tone to try and balance our shots. For more on balancing the ambient light with artificial light, see this post, this post or even this post.

The umbrella was so close that I had to remove the umb. shaft in post for this shot, I think....

Test shot: blown highlights & clipped shadows

Now let's back up a little - we actually started the day in a covered area and worked our way into the speedlight bundle.

The first thing was to check out the environment through the lens. Typical situation with blown highlights and clipped shadows as you can see here on the right.

Step one was then to find the exposure I wanted for the sky first while making sure to stay within the max. synch speed for my speedlights (as shown below).

That worked out to 1/250 sec. at f/11 ISO 100. Step two was to pull out the same reflective umbrella and get as much as possible before getting spotted by security. For this time of day in this weather I decided to leave the softbox at home.

Also with 2 people at f/11 this is where I first started thinking we should start bundling. We put 2 speedlights together, but only turned one on to start. (I know I've mentioned the Nikon SB-26 before, but that built-in optical trigger makes life really easy for around $100 off Ebay)

2 speedlights stacked, but only one on to test first

Both lights in 1 umbrella but...it still needed to be moved in closer at full-power

Amazing the difference the light makes - here with and without for demonstration:

Here's what the scene looks like with no extra light besides ambient

Here with 2 speedlights in one reflective umbrella at full power just outside of the frame

And we're good to start shooting:

Now here's where we first ventured out into the sun (miraculously without getting kicked out of the theatre area first). And now it's 11:30am....

I mentioned before that I just couldn't get the reflector to do enough on the really bright dock. Maybe it was just difficult to even see my LCD screen in the bright light or maybe in was the dock, but I was quite surprised by how well it worked using the silver side of a 5-in-1 reflector kit on the brick.

Again take a look with and without:

With silver reflector

Without reflector - big difference! (click images to see them larger)

It was a little hard on the eyes to have the reflector on them continuously, but after posing, composing and getting the settings we were ok to hit them with the silver side to take a frame or two.

The sun is camera left slightly behind - filled with a silver reflector camera right

The Toronto International Circus Festival was going on at the Harbourfront Centre with Zero Gravity. Lucky for us, the characters walking by were really nice (and very photogenic!):

And finally to jump back to the end of the day (end of our shooting day at 2pm), Hani wrangled us a boat to take a few shots on! And out comes the reflector again:

Thanks Carson for letting us shoot on your beautiful boat!

Definitely another learning experience - we had a lot of fun, but...it's so much easier to shoot closer toward the end of the day (or the beginning) and you have so much more control. Lesson learned - save up for some big studio lights that can take on the sun!

And one final demonstration from Cristy on blowing up a balloon:

...awesome....

Tune in again next week for more unplanned mishaps!

Melodie of Movement

noreply@blogger.com (shayne gray) — Fri, 20 May 2011 19:44:00 -0400

Hula Hoop! (Click any image to see it larger)

I mentioned in last week's post that the cheery blossoms were just in bloom - a little late this year. Nevertheless we took full advantage and met up with Melodie of Movement in Toronto's High Park. Last week I also promised some hula hooping goodness, so here it comes....

Melodie is a radiant personality and a beautiful human being. It also helps that she knows how to use all that wavy hair as a really great prop!

Huge thank you as always to Cristy for helping out with the lights - as small as a 28" softbox is...it seems to catch the wind no matter what direction it's facing. She's been getting to know her way around that softbox pretty well lately!

This week there's not much of a tutorial, I'm afraid. See the Zack Arias post for more on this kind of lighting and balancing ambient. We'll get into cross-processing for that vintage look another time soon (see pictures below). For now if you're really interested, there are a zillion tutorials online - just google "cross-processing" or "lomo effect" or "lomography" +tutorial. I haven't found any single tutorial that I think has it all, but if you put them all together and do a little experimenting, you should be able to figure it out with some basic curves adjustments. Feel free to leave comments if you need any help....

Series shot with Canon 50mm 1.4 - such a great lens

Other than that, the theme of the warmer months is going to be portraits, portraits, portraits with as many people as I can fit into a Summer. I'm hoping to have a collection of ~~interesting~~ amazing people doing something special to produce a complete body of work that somehow fits together coherently so I can get a website up and running.

So...if you're an artist, performer or just someone with an ~~interesting~~ amazing look, attitude or style, let me know and we'll go out and do something creative together - don't be shy now....

Couldn't help myself - had to take some of these just before we met up with Melodie:

Levitation Photography and working with Textures

noreply@blogger.com (shayne gray) — Fri, 13 May 2011 19:37:00 -0400

Die Fliegende Französin: The Midnight Craving

Last weekend I convinced a good friend of mine, Tess, to do a levitation for me. What a great sport! I really need to get a large stool or step ladder to do more of these, but she said she'd have some around the house.

I got there and she said, "how about this one or how about this or this?" I might have been pushing it a little, but she knows I'm looking out for her safety and said, "how about this one on top of that one?"

Next thing I knew she was teetering on a laundry hamper on a stepping stool. Awesome....

If you missed it, we've seen Tess before-sort of.... She asked me to take this picture of just her outfit one time quite a while ago now while we were at a party. Since she didn't actually want to be shown in the photograph it gave me a chance to try out the "render people invisible" function on my camera, which worked surprisingly well! Hard lesson learned though NOT to use cheap UV filters....

The Light and the Levitation

Natural light only from window camera right

It took a few minutes of walking around and looking at the room to find the spot where I wanted to setup the camera. It also helps to look through the viewfinder and see what the camera sees as well.

It was 7pm and there was still plenty of natural light with east-facing windows=no direct light coming in. The first thing was to take a shot of the available light in the room. The fridge is right beside the window and...it's white, so it came out a little hot, but gave me a good idea of the light in the room from the camera's perspective.

Then I wanted to cut out some of that ambient light and knocked down the light in camera to near black and worked my way back up in 1-stop increments until I got the amount of available light I wanted in the scene:

Background shot used in final composite

One more stop brighter this time with a Nikon SB-26 speedlight in the hallway at 1/2 power bounced out of a 45" reflective umbrella. This is a really great flash with an optical slave for between $100 - $150! We also stuck a Nikon SB-24 in the fridge at 1/8 power gelled blue (also a great flash for $70, but no optical slave). And this was one of the two images used in the final composite:

The next thing was to get the light coming out of the fridge on our model. To soften that light, it was facing away from our subject (I also didn't want to blind anyone...).

Ambient light with speedlight gelled blue in fridge

Then with our laundry hamper in place on top of our step stool, Tess grabbed her stuffed beaver that she brought all the way from Germany as a great prop. I ended up using one of our very first frames (though we ended up taking a lot of variations).

And to actually put the two final shots together in photoshop using masking techniques in layers, see the Matrix post from way back when I didn't even have any lights yet!

2nd photo used in final composite image (straight out of the camera)

Using Textures and Effects

texture by  JoesSistah

Miguel suggested exploring textures a little further a week ago or so. Glenn also asked about "movie effect" colours, so I thought I'd combine them here.

Here's the first texture I used from  JoesSistah... (pictured left), which is a great resource for textures by the way, although mine's a little lighter (click the image to get it in full resolution). I added it in a new layer on top and blurred it using the "gaussian blur" filter at 19% (filter-->blur-->gaussian blur), changed the blending mode to "overlay" and reduced the oppacity to 77% - to taste. The blur took out some of the sharp lines and turned them all into colour blobs essentially.

Click image for full res version

The next texture I'm sure I got off of PSDtuts.com, but I've had it on my computer so long and didn't take note of the author - sorry about that.... I have a better system of labelling my textures now so that I can give credit.

In any event, I turned it around 90° of course and again changed the blending mode to "overlay" and reduced the oppacity to 19% - again to taste. Try also experimenting with "soft light" (less contrast) and "multiply" (darker) blend modes.

This texture was not blurred and you can see it working on the walls and on the fridge. I didn't want it to show up on the model though, so you can just mask away any areas you don't want to show up in your final image.

More on textures here in the Screwhead Gets a Tune Up post.

Another thing I have done, which I find adds a little extra is to run the image through Photomatix and make an HDR image out of a single RAW file. More on HDR later. This step is not essential, but I think it does add something if not totally overused and over processed. There's a little bit of that effect that I used in the Cohiba image and The Matrix for example. In this image I used some light Photomatix goodness and toned it down to about 40% also on "overlay". It can look like quite painterly, so it can be very effective to blend into the mix.

There was another effects layer I used, which I talked a little bit about in the Geek! post. Make a flattened copy of all layers (while retaining all the layers below) by using the Photoshop shortcut: command option shift e. Now desaturate it (optional, but your colours might come out funny if you don't) - the shortcut is command shift u. Then apply a high pass filter at somewhere around 150 (under filter-->other-->high pass) and change the blend mode to either "soft light" or "overlay" and reduce the oppacity to taste for a little extra punch.

The very last thing to add was a vignette - lots of people have different techniques in varying degrees of complexity. Use the filter if you like (filter-->distort-->lens correction), but what I really like to do is grab a giant soft brush, create a new layer, turn the brush strength down to 50% or so and simply paint around the image. Then change the oppacity of the layer to taste.

And that's it! Try your own levitation experiments and get creative with textures and send me your results.

Tune in next week for some hula hooping fun in Toronto's High Park during cherry blossom season!

Update:
For more on textures tune in to creativeLIVE for Doug Landreth's 2-day class June 10th & 11th on using textures and cool processing tricks and download his cool Texture Pack right here!

Workshop with Zack Arias!

noreply@blogger.com (shayne gray) — Sun, 8 May 2011 13:46:00 -0400

See setup shot below

The CreativeLive workshop with Zack Arias last week was absolutely worth the 3-day commitment. We just had the chance to get out there and give some of it a try.

I've been scouting for a location for a project next weekend and came across the vacant lot you see above. I asked Cristy if she would come out and model with a prop. She chose the accordion - awesome choice....

I'm using speedlights, so...I can't overpower the sun in the middle of the day out in the open. Around sunset I'm in business and on those nights when there are some clouds in the sky, I get excited.

Mixing Ambient and Artificial Light - part II

Test shot for ambient light in the environment

There have been a couple of related posts on this that you can check out here and here if you missed them. The idea is to take the shot first without your lights and see what kind of light is available. From there - as long as you're within the sync speed you need to use your lights (usually up to 1/250 sec.) - you can control how bright or dark the scene is going to be.

In the picture on the above, you're seeing the scene exposed more or less "properly" with the help of my 28" softbox. The buildings in the background really don't represent Toronto's finest architecture and there isn't a lot of detail in the clouds. To bring out that drama, increase your shutter speed to make the scene darker and bring out the colour and detail of the sky. David Hobby, "The Strobist" calls this "the drama button" with good reason.

The next thing to do is to see what aperture setting that leaves you with. In the above scene, it's still relatively bright as we're shooting into the direction of the sun. This means I have to close my aperture down to get the shutter speed to sync with my lights. The shots at the top were taken at 1/250 sec, f/9, ISO 100 and still my speedlight was at full power a few feet from my subject. And since I had my light in the softbox, I know I'm losing more than a stop of light.

Now that the exposure is set, it's time to compose your shot.

Some important take-aways from Zack's workshop:

"Head in a clean spot" - I wonder how many times he actually said that over the course of the workshop. It was enough to understand that it's important, so even though I already generally try to be aware of things growing out of heads like tree branches and so on, I was really trying to be ultra-aware of that.

"Eyes to the light" was maybe the second-most repeated phrase. Without having someone look directly into the light, it keeps the eyes bright and gives you some pleasing catch light.

Funny - as soon as I knelt down on one knee Cristy was immediately worried. Everybody knows you don't shoot up at people - especially women or you get a thick, unflattering neck. Zack's solution: have your light source just above the person's head to create some shadow and shape the jaw line. Works great! Also, shooting up like this helps with "head in a clean spot".

Having the light chase the lens - Zack talked a lot about this. The idea is to have your light source above your camera. If you're shooting without sandbags or an assistant, put your foot on the bottom of your lightstand - mine almost went over a couple of times....

Another setup we tried was lighting the background and the subject with the same light source. I ran into some trouble with the darker green paint as it was more reflective and came out too bright. I had to try and work with that in post even after trying to reposition my light. Finally the solution was to find a part of the green wall without the darker paint on it, which worked out much better. Again, "eyes to the light".

Our cherry blossoms in Toronto are coming out a little late this year - I'd really love to get out this week and try out some more of this type of portraiture with a cherry blossom-filled background if anyone's willing to sacrifice themselves for an hour or so - wish me luck!

...and as in this previous episode, watch for the model snatching your camera away from you to leave you standing there with an accordion like this:

Night at the Opera-backstage

noreply@blogger.com (shayne gray) — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 20:23:00 -0400

Behind the scenes: you can see a woman on the left of the frame -
she's standing pretty close to centre stage

Behind the orchestra pit below the stage

This week a little something different: not so much about amazing photography and well-planned shots and cool techniques as much as unique experience and a peek into something you just might not see every day.

I recently played with an opera company of all things on a short tour of their Rossini's "Barber of Seville" production. As someone who's studied guitar, it's not something I do every day since realistically...there's not a lot of guitar in the opera repertoire (and I must admit that I'm doing more photography these days than music anyway).

Hammerson Hall from the orchestra pit

Some of the halls were quite nice and since I don't play throughout the entire opera, I thought it might be an interesting opportunity to capture a different side of the event that many will likely never see.

I love the idea of being able to run around behind the orchestra pit while such a formal event is going on. 1300 people are sitting there behaving themselves quietly in their chairs and I'm completely alone to walk around directly behind the music and under the singers (under the action) in a completely different environment.

Looking into the orchestra pit (and into the hall): they built add-ons
to the stage so that it wrapped around the front of the pit so that it was
directly in front of the audience. If you above that timpani, you can see
almost half of "Figaro"...or was that The Count...¿?

Happy Easter! Bokeh Hearts - more fun DIY

noreply@blogger.com (shayne gray) — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 13:48:00 -0400

Happy Eastertine's Day! Setup shot at the bottom of this post.

I've seen heart-shaped bokeh images like this before, and this is probably the most widely used shape for making pictures with a custom bokeh, but I was never quite sure exactly how to do it. I was also excited to try and see if it would work first before trying out some more creative and elaborate shapes....

Here's how it's done. First the easy way - go ahead and order the online kit here or here. If that's not for you, here's how to do it yourself.

There are lots of places where you can find these kinds of tutorials, but many of them use a special lens hood, which you have to fashion and then...store somewhere when you're not using it (which will likely be most of the time). If you have a UV filter, you can use it instead.

What you need:

Canon 50mm 1.4

- a fast lens - I have a 50mm 1.4 (the much cheaper 50mm 1.8 is an amazing lens for just over $100 and will work as well)
- a UV filter that fits the thread size of your lens
- cardboard/cardstock or dark, heavier construction paper (I used my girlfriend's cereal box - see below)
- scissors
- exacto knife or precision craft knife
- pencil

What not to do:

It took some time to figure out how I was going to get the piece of cardboard to fit exactly into my 58mm thead without using a compass to draw a perfect circle.

Try this instead:

Get some cardboard from your girlfriend's cereal box like this:

Then put it back on top of the fridge like this so she doesn't notice you've used her still-full box (there just weren't any empties lying around):

In the end I put the filter threaded-side down on the piece of cardboard, grabbed the exacto knife and cut around the thread being careful not to damage the actual filter. This is better than tracing with a pencil because the pencil doesn't get right in there like the knife does and I found the circle to be an absolutely perfect fit. No calculations...no fuss...no muss....

The next thing is to figure out the size of your aperture. The shape that you're cutting out is actually re-shaping the aperture - you can see a 5-blade aperture at work because because of the pentagon shape it produces when a light is out of focus. If you look below you can see my lens' 8-blade aperture at work. The trick is to make sure that your shape is within the diameter of your aperture blades.

To calculate this, take the focal length of your lens, which in my case is 50mm. I can use it as wide as f1.4, but I'll probably want to leave myself some room and calculate for f2 (also a much easier calculation). Think of f2 as 1/2 your focal lenght - 1/2 of 50mm = 25mm (or 50mm ÷ f2 = 25mm). If you have an 85mm lens for example, it's the same calculation - 1/2 of 85mm = 42.5mm and so on.

Now draw that 25mm field onto your cardboard circle. I drew a square, but really it should be a circle - I just made sure to stay well within the corners.

Make your edges as smooth as you can - I broke off the first digit of the knife to make sure it was as sharp as possible. Any stray fibres will be noticeable later. Maybe even wet your finger and go around the edges to get them nice 'n clean.

Now put your new bokeh filter into the thread of the lens and screw in your UV filter.

Next step: go and try it out hey!

Christmas lights without heart-shaped bokeh filter

With heart-shaped bokeh filter (and Christmas lights!)

Integrating your bokeh shapes into a picture:

I set up some red Christmas lights, which makes a good colour for hearts, of course. The object is to have them at a reasonable distance in the background. If you don't have any Christmas lights immediately available, wait until night time and then go outside and use the street lights and traffic lights instead.

Make sure the distance between you and your subject is much smaller than the distance between your subject and the blurred lights:

Here's the setup shot:

Setup for the picture at the top of this post:

Setup shot for "Happy Eastertine's Day!"

Nikon SB-26 @ 1/64 power in softbox 1 1/2 ft from delicious milk chocolate model bunny.
Red xmas lights 11 1/2 ft from delicious model bunny.

I only had one bunny though unfortunately, so the final image is a composite of two to give our bunny a partner (before he gets gobbled up!).

And if you want to get really creative and take it a couple of steps further, try spelling out some words with your custom bokeh shapes (and make sure to watch the music video!).

www.diyphotography.net/ is an amazing site. Check out their posts on custom bokeh shapes here and here.

And for a little more on the subject, visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zENUI8n0Rtw&feature=related and http://ishouldwritethisdown.blogspot.com/2011/03/from-on-high-official-music-video.html.

Good luck, have fun and as always...send me your results.

Happy Easter!

Amazing....

noreply@blogger.com (shayne gray) — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 13:48:00 -0400

I'm afraid this one's going to be more text-based, so...I've decided to do 2 posts this week for those who just come for the pictures - what's a photo blog without pictures after all¿?

The Flash Bus - first workshop ever

Speeding our way to Buffalo New York to catch up with the Flash Bus

I recently went to the Flash Bus workshop in Buffalo, New York with Joe McNally and David Hobby (The Strobist). This was the first workshop that I've ever taken and I have to say...I was very impressed!

Firstly, these are pretty good guys to get a first workshop from, but what amazed me the most was how gracious they both were. They've reached a certain status by now and still come out to shake everyone's hand while their audience stands in line before the doors open to have a quick chat with anyone who wants to. To me that's a very human element and really is in-line with the community that David Hobby has set up.

For a guy who's just been learning photography for just over a year now and off-camera lighting for around 6 months or so, it was an amazing opportunity to talk to both of them and spend a full day listening to how they approach different lighting situations and build it all from the ground up.

There were people there, needless to say, with some very fancy-pants gear - one guy even had two bodies with huge assault lenses attached. I don't know where he thought he was, but...he wasn't hurting anyone...just looked a little over-zealous is all....

Thank you Joe McNally!

Joe and David were continuously being photographed the entire day by many of the 350-member audience. I was lucky enough to be in the 2nd row close to the middle, but I only took a few pictures of them toward the end. There was one that I was happy with - the others I threw away.

Cristy saw it and said, "you should send that to them!" I showed her a flickr group dedicated to Flash Bus pictures, which represent a fraction of the total pictures taken during these events across their 29 city tour. I had already posted it on Flickr anyway, but decided not to add it to any groups or anything.

Later that night just before bed my blog stats were so high that I was sure there was a glitch in the system. So I refreshed and the number was significantly higher. After a few refreshes I went looking to the internet - it looked like a lot of hits were coming from Twitter, but I couldn't see from who.

Turns out Joe McNally had written, "#theflashbus at Indy. Shayne Gray made a fun capture....http://bit.ly/ffn2cC", which links to my blog - 'cept there were no Flash Bus pictures here at the time. Shortly after, Joe tweeted again, "here's that capture from shayne gray.... http://flic.kr/p/9y96jj the Q&A sessions have been fun....", which goes to the relevant Flickr pic.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that it really is a great community these guys have built. The other take-away is just how powerful social media has become. When someone like that points at you...a lot of people look.

Bit of a different scale, of course...but it's amazing how Lady Gaga changed Maria Aragon's life in less than 140 characters....

Anyway - you're amazing man, Joe, and richer in life experience and incredible adventures than most. Thanks for the encouragement, knowledge and wisdom!

And guess what I got from Cristy shortly afterward...a big, fat "I told you so!"

Time Lapse - Set up for Michael Gayden Shoot and balancing the subject/ background Exposure

noreply@blogger.com (shayne gray) — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 16:30:00 -0400

It was my first chance after a long, cold winter to go outside and try shoot something with speedlights during the day to see how they stand up in bright, late afternoon daylight. It was tricky to use any modifiers since they eat up so much light.

The step that really helped the most to prepare for those conditions was to go to the location(s) first without any lights at all and see what my settings were going to be to get the background exposed the way I wanted during that time of day.

It also turned into the idea that I've started to implement, which is keeping a folder of possible locations for future shoots.

Aperture controls flash/Shutter Speed controls ambient light:

Straight out of the camera (SOOC)

Here's a location I decided not to use in the end. The first step was to take the picture on "Aperture Priority" mode to control... obviously...my aperture so that my camera could give me its advice as to what the shutter speed would be to give me (at least its interpretation of) a "correct" exposure. The object is to get the shutter speed within the limits of my max sync speed for my lights, which is 1/250 sec (the standard).

SOOC underexposed by almost 1 stop

This brought me to f/16 at ISO 100, which gave me a shutter speed of 1/125 sec. That means that I still have wiggle room to drop the exposure of the background by 1 stop (1/250 sec.). Here's a second shot of the location at 1/200 to give you an idea.

Then I went home and pulled out the lights to see how they would perform at those settings. Turns out...speedlights (my Canon 580 EX, Nikon SB-26/SB-24) have a hard time keeping up with such a closed aperture at that ISO setting. They still worked bare within a range of 5-8 or 10 feet on full power individually, but my modifiers were nearly useless.

In the location below, there was a lot less light since it's between two buildings. There's some nice bounce light from the brighter building directly across from the scene here in this picture and settings were much more small flash-favourable at f/8, ISO 200 (a 3 stop difference!). But take a look at the second photo too see what happens as soon as that sun disappears behind a cloud. I was quite surprised at just how much light you lose! ...and at how much the white balance is thrown off.

SOOC-backround exposed "normally"

It's also a good illustration of how aperture controls the flash (look at the highlights from the rim lights almost at 45° to Cristy, our test subject) and how shutter speed controls the ambient light. Cristy has 3 lights on her here. The artificial light (the speedlights) is the same on the model in both shots, but the ambient light has changed quite dramatically as you can see.

SOOC-same camera setting-sun behind clouds

Since you're in full manual mode by this point anyway, it's not that difficult to ride your shutter speed to compensate.

All around a great day and huge learning experience now 6 months or so into learning about off-camera lighting! It's highly addictive and the theme of the warmer months is going to be to get out there and shoot as often as possible to try out some great things I learned from the Flash Bus Tour in Buffalo, New York last weekend! More on that another time....

Joe McNally and David Hobby (The Strobist) at the Flash Bus Tour in Buffalo

noreply@blogger.com (shayne gray) — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 02:56:00 -0400

Thanks for the Twitter shout outs Joe McNally and the gang at Flash Bus! Glad you like the picture - we had tons of fun and laughs and you guys...well...I think the photo speaks for itself....

Cheers!

Shoot with Michael Gayden

noreply@blogger.com (shayne gray) — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 01:39:00 -0400

Click images to see larger view

Update: Check out the video!

Mike Gayden is a male model from Rochester, New York, who came up to Toronto to do a photo shoot with us. When he said "editorial" I thought of my 50mm 1.4 and my reflector set, but then he said something about "fashion" and I thought I should haul out the lights and find a couple of suitable locations. I thought this would also be a good opportunity to follow up a little more on experimenting with mixing natural and artificial light from last week's Liddle Red Writing Hood.

I was a little worried about umbrellas and softboxes blowing around in the wind and recruited Cristy to help out. I was also really lucky to have Ardean Peters come out to help with gear and with some of the creative side to make sure I was looking in the right direction at least...(check out more and connect with Ardean here, here, and here). She also took some really great behind the scenes shots that are worth checking out over at her blog. And with our small team assembled, we hit the University of Toronto's beautiful campus for a mix of historical and industrial style buildings.

I was also very happy to finally get my remote timer shutter release and thought I'd take it for a test run. Video coming later this week - I think we're going to have lots of fun with that!

Here's a small sample from the day:

Outtakes:

Ok...off to Buffalo, New York to catch up with David Hobby (the Strobist) and Joe McNally on their Flash Bus tour!

Mixing Ambient & Artificial Light

noreply@blogger.com (shayne gray) — Fri, 1 Apr 2011 10:16:00 -0400

Liddle Red Writing Hood

Update: for more on mixing ambient and artificial light, see this post and this post.

I wanted to experiment this week using my speedlights in late afternoon/early evening sun, but...realized that I really should have been out there a little earlier.... The sun looked like it was in the right place in the sky to give us another hour of light or so, but unfortunately at my chosen location it was already just sinking behind a row of houses.

That meant there was still ambient light available, of course, but I was kind of hoping to experiment with the sun actually in the frame to see how the speedlights stand up. Needless to say...that just plain didn't work out....

In the image above there was a softbox camera right almost at 45° to Cristy, our model. To fill in the shadows on the left side we had a bare flash gun camera left 90° to the model. And that's it - the shutter was left open a little longer for the ambient light to brighten up the red wall a little - f/7, 1/100 sec. ISO 200.

So then...self-assigned homework for me: experiment, practice and learn a lot more about balancing light - this is just the beginning! And now that the weather's getting nicer - there's really no excuse not to.

Eager to haul out all the gear tomorrow and try again with a model up from Rochester, New York! Stay tuned for that.

And if you're still kicking yourself because you missed the free 3 day online workshop with lighting legend Zack Arias over at creativeLIVE, don't worry - in case you haven't heard...Zack is Back April 29th - May 1st completely for free. Topics to include - among other things - mixing ambient and artificial light! How about that?!

Screwhead Gets a Tune-Up: Creative Fun

noreply@blogger.com (shayne gray) — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 17:21:00 -0400

Photo Manipulation:
It's fun to think up silly, ridiculous and otherwise impossible situations, don't cha think? We, of course, had to do something with the moustache just before shaving it off - and what better way to create ridiculous hilarity than with a trailer park/trailer trash 'stache and a vintage Herb Tarlek suit to get the mood just right?!

Taking the pictures

String used on a boom to dangle
into my ear where the screwdriver
was supposed to go

The idea here is very similar to the Matrix Restrung post. I prefer to do as little photoshopping as possible - meaning that I always find it easier (and therefore more convincing in the end) to take pictures that save me work later on. I used a boom stand to tie a piece of string that would hang into my ear as I had my head on the desk. Then Cristy, my faithful assistant, swung the string over the boom out of the way. Then we used the string again to show me where I had to hold the screwdriver to get it so that it would be in exactly the same position as my ear in the picture before. I have to say...the placement using the string worked out perfectly. Just don't forget to use a tripod and set your camera to full manual so that all exposures are exactly the same!

Please excuse the fact that I have my shirt off here, but I wanted to have as much neck showing as possible to work with.

Areas masked off to reveal wall in
the background and head on the desk

Processing

In Photoshop I used the shirtless picture as the very bottom layer. Then I put the picture of me standing with the screwdriver on top of that bottom layer and masked away the areas that I wanted to show through to the shirtless guy (for more on masking, go to the Matrix post). You can see in the picture on the right what I've masked off - you'll notice there's an area in front of where my face is on the desk that I also masked because of the reflection on the surface of the desk. It's very easy to forget reflections and shadows!

Since I've masked away the head, there's a little bit of the collar we need to reconstruct. All you really have to do is make a selection around a little bit of the existing collar, paste it and move it into position. Then use the 'free transform' tool (command/control T) to bend it into shape. And because it should look like it's darker on the inside, I used an 'exposure' adjustment layer to bring the exposure down. Then I used a soft brush over the layer mask to mask away the top part, which should be the same brightness as the other side. Because the brush is set to 0% hardness, it applies a small gradient. Realistically there are many ways to do the collar, but this way got the job done easily.

Collar sampled and free transformed into position to look empty.

The next thing were the shadows from the fingers on the head and ear. You can either grab a soft dark paintbrush and paint in your shadows on a separate layer then scale back the opacity or use the eyedropper tool to sample some real shadow colour from the shadow side of the face.

Initially I wasn't sure what to use on the bottom of the neck, but after long deliberation and scrounging around at home, I decided to go with a steel ring.

"Connector" ring for my neck

Without trying to point out all my mistakes, I wasn't very careful to consider where my light source was coming from when photographing the steel ring. I hand-held it simply by the window. In the pictures of our two dudes, the light is coming from above (one shoot-through umbrella). Oh well - yours will be at least one step ahead of mine!

Anyway...import the ring (or whatever object) into the project and resize with the 'transform' tool (command/control T). Again the ring needs shadows - especially on the suit jacket that it looks very close to. If I were to do it all over again, honestly I would probably leave myself more room between the head and the standing me so's not to have to worry about shadows like that. What is important in any case is that reflection again as mentioned earlier. Since there's a little bit of a dull reflection of my face on the surface of the desk, it also has to show the ring as well. Even if it's a very small and hardly noticeable detail, it really has to be done. Your brain will recognize that it's there to help with the illusion even if your eye doesn't necessarily pick up on it.

I copied the ring layer (command/control J) and flipped it vertically (edit-->transform-->vertical flip) and moved it into position. I free transformed it to make it a little straighter and longer then masked away the part furthest from my neck with a large, soft black paint brush again to add that smooth gradient. I initially added a gradient to the layer mask but just had more control with the brush in the end. Then I applied a blur filter (filter-->blur-->gaussian blur) and applied 5.1 pixels to match the blurred effect of the facial reflection in the desk and dropped the opacity till it looked convincing.

Final version before applying the texture

Final Touch

The last thing I did was to apply this texture by  JoesSistah.... There are a lot of great textures there to choose from - Thanks Joe's Sistah! I imported the texture into the project and stretched it into place again with the transform tool and changed the blending mode to 'multiply'. From there you can scale back the opacity as you see fit. Another thing to play with is the colour. If you don't want that hue over your image, you can desaturate the texture first. I chose to leave the colour in and add a new layer filled with black using the paint bucket tool (G on your keyboard - you may have to switch tools if the gradient tool is selected). Then I switched that blending mode to 'hue' and lowered the opacity to 30%.

Texture by  JoesSistah...

I also made a flattened copy of everything (select all layers and hit command alt shift E together) and changed that new layer's blending mode to 'multiply' and lowered the opacity to about 20% to add some darker intensity.

And for some final contrast you can use a "zero levels adjustment" - select a levels adjustment from the from the yin-yang icon (adjustment layer palette) and click ok without making any level adjustments at all. Then set the blend mode to 'soft light' ('overlay' for more effect) and scale the opacity back to taste (about 25% or so).

And that's it!

Let me know if you have any suggestions for improvement!

...and as always, give it a try and send me a link to your results!

Geek! Processing for Punch

noreply@blogger.com (shayne gray) — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 13:53:00 -0400

The Sceptic The Game Show Host The Over-Confident

There are lots of places where you can find images on the Dave Hill look and if you do a quick google search, you'll see what I mean. Though this isn't exactly the same thing, there is a similar element of impact involved.

Andrew Wong (aka One Drop) has some great series of really dramatic situations that he's used his lighting and processing to enhance. He was nice enough to send me a link to get me started. You can get there either on Scott Kelby's blog or directly from Dustin Snipes' blog.

I've played around with this technique before, but never really lit a situation specifically to process this way. I have to say...I think it's pretty cool....

You can read the article yourself and there are other places to find similar techniques, but just to add a little to it, I thought I'd point out a couple of things.

Lighting

Generally there are kicker lights involved (from behind to highlight edges). I only had one kicker (snooted) at about 45° behind me to light up that side camera right, though many use one on each side. You can see another on the background with this cool gel system directly behind me pointed at my 5-in-1 reflector kit that made for a nice (but small) black background. My third light that was used as my key or main light was in a softbox only a couple feet away camera left and slightly above.

I've got a few speedlights (no big studio lights) and as a quick note, I just got a Nikon SB-26, which works as an optical slave and I can't say enough good things about it - it's cheap, the sensor is sensitive and I don't need to mess around with another radio trigger! Check out the Strobist's review here.

You'll see that the depth of field in these shots is quite shallow - I used my 50mm 1.4 prime fairly wide open at either 1.8 or f2 because I noticed the black material on my background was very wrinkled. So instead of ironing it, I decided to blur it instead - and this is how you can iron out any material until it's smooth with your camera! And besides that I kind of like the eyes and stubble tack sharp and quick fall-off into blurred shoulders etc.

Processing

Back in Photoshop you can process your photos as you normally would for contrast and so on. Then duplicate your original layer (control/command J or drag the layer down to the 'new layer' icon in the bottom tray) and desaturate the layer (control/command alt shift U) and apply a "high pass filter" (under the filter menu -->other-->high pass) and change the blend mode to soft light. You can experiment with some of the other contrast modes - overlay, hard light, etc. to see if you like that any better. Dustin says to apply the high pass between 100 - 200. I used 150 and found that worked well. You might as well overshoot and have the possibility of dialling down the effect later with your opacity slider. Note that you're boosting contrast more than you're actually sharpening and that anything darker than 50% grey will go even darker and anything lighter than 50% grey will go even brighter. Watch out for the eyes - if the colour in the iris disappears, you may want to mask that layer off to get that back (more on masking here).

Now create a new layer and switch the blend mode to soft light and call it "highlights". Dustin suggests using a brush at 5%, but again - if you decide you want more later...you won't be able to. I used my brush at 20% and toned it back later. Now with a white paint brush in varying sizes to suit the parts of your image, paint over the highlights. You may find that you want to paint over some areas more than once to make them really come through, but be careful not to go too crazy - my images are fairly hot, but nothing has clipped. In other words, all the detail is still there - there are no highlights that reach 255-white! There are some highlights that I didn't really want to have any brighter, which I left alone. Other areas on the clothes, hair and face I really did want to add more contrast to. Experiment a little.

I created a second layer for my shadows and called it just that..."shadows" and did the same thing with a 20% black brush. I'm glad it was on a second layer because I had more control later and backed off with the shadows more than with the highlights. You can also try changing the blend mode to overlay for even more pop.

Finishing

I didn't have a lot of red or anything else to tone down like Dustin did, so I simply ignored that step. One thing that I think is important is to give the image a final sharpening. As I mentioned earlier, our high pass added contrast and not sharpening per se - although using the high pass filter is one of the many main methods for sharpening. Sharpening is a bit of a contentious topic, but do what you think looks good. Also be aware that default settings in Camera Raw will add a little bit of sharpening when you import your image into photoshop.

Highlight both your original layer and your high pass layer and flatten & duplicate (control/command alt shift E) and label this layer "sharpening". I wanted to get the sharp areas of the eyes, stubble and hair really sharp and applied an unsharp mask (under filter-->sharpening-->unsharp mask) and applied about 100% sharpening at a radius of 1 pixel and a threshold of 4 so as not to apply it to the blurry areas.

Here's some before and after just to show the basic effect:

Before After

Here's how your basic layer setup should look:

...and one final goofy outtake (aw hell...they're all goofy outtakes really):

As alway, try it yourself and send me a link!

Seeing the World Upside Down

noreply@blogger.com (shayne gray) — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 20:34:00 -0500

Two Cyclists (image flipped upside down)

It's perhaps not a concept we haven't been presented with before, but somehow it's still often interesting to look at a natural scene in a bit of an unnatural way by imagining the image in the reflection as "reality" and the reflection as some kind of resulting effect....

I've always liked this photograph by William Self. The nice thing about a shot like this is that you don't need a lot of expensive equipment except for an interesting subject and...a bit of water.... I realize this might sound a little over-simplified and perhaps it is on many levels, but without getting into that discussion I decided to take advantage of the natural climate on a recent trip.

It rains almost as much in Vancouver, Canada (not the one in the U.S.) as people say it does, which presents an opportunity to try out some of these reflected images in the puddles left over everywhere. While I was there I even caught a few sunny days and found some time to take a walk around the city with the camera. The open water is constantly moving, so...it's quite impossible to use for any meaningful reflection, but the puddles everywhere are more interesting than I normally give them credit for. The more I looked, the more I saw....

Here are some of the highlights (all upside down, of course):

Upside down bridge¿? No...actually it's less thematically related except that it's still in Vancouver and is kinda cool....

Strawberry Splash - High Speed Photography with simple gear

noreply@blogger.com (shayne gray) — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 18:15:00 -0500

f/8, ISO 100, shutter speed: 2 seconds (click the picture to see it larger)

I recently came across some of Pascal Bovet's images on Flickr and found that he'd linked a lot of his stuff to his website with many of his behind the scenes tricks - and of course I had to try this one out!

Initially I set everything up as he described with one light on my background and one light for the scene pointing down from above (see setup image below).

The basic idea is that you typically hit a ceiling with your flash sync speed somewhere around 1/250 sec. which is fast enough to capture many things, but...not fast enough to capture others.

One way of getting around this is to leave your shutter open longer in a dark environment and trigger your lights manually. A flash burst from your speedlight is a lot faster than 1/250 sec. Using my Nikon SB-24 to light the glass and the strawberry, for example, at 1/16th power gives me a flash duration of around 1/11000th of a second!

In an earlier post on water drop photography, I mentioned the same thing - only I discovered that little tip on super fast flash durations after I'd already tried everything out. If you're at all unclear as to how this works, Pascal has some useful diagrams or check out this video from Paul Duncan.

Very first try and missed completely!

Setup

First you're going to have to do some test shots. The idea is that you want to be in a very low-light environment - you still have to see, but the darker the better. From my kitchen, it was fine to leave the bathroom light on just in the hallway. This should give you an entirely zero-black test shot without popping your lights (or very close). This will take a little bit of balancing though because you're also going to have to adjust your lights/camera to make sure that you're getting a decent exposure when you fire your lights. Pascal suggests a shutter speed of 4 seconds, although I found 2 to be plenty - but I also had Cristy working the remote shutter release. As soon as I heard the shutter, I was able to drop the strawberry with one hand and fire the flashes with the other.

Depending on how far away your camera is, you might want to set your aperture to at least at f/8 to make sure everything is in focus, although I found that even slightly shallow from several feet away. You're probably safe to set your ISO to 100 and leave it there. Put the fruit in the glass and autofocus - then switch to manual focus and leave it there.

Brighter background light to try &
wash out the colour of my painted wall.
It wound up also overexposing my glass & the
water. This needed a bit of work in post with
curves & levels to get some of that
detail back and still you can see
the colour of our walls

You can see from the pictures that the strawberry is relatively large in relation to the opening of the glass. I recommend you use your second or even third-best strawberry to start with. I had a little trouble with my aim at the beginning and made a big mess of my best and reddest one....

What didn't go so well....

I followed Pascal's lighting setup, but somehow couldn't get things to look quite right. I got the background (my kitchen wall) to go completely white as it's normally an off-white/cream colour. The problem was that the glass full of water almost has a fish-eye effect and you can see a lot of the room in it - pictures on the wall/awful off-white paint on the wall. I thought the water splashing around might solve that problem, but...it didn't entirely....

I also tried a higher output setting on my background light, but was eventually blowing out the glass and the smaller water droplets.

Then I decided to try a few without the background light and go for an underexposed black background, but found that there were other reflections to deal with, although with a little practice, that can definitely be made to work (see more on photographing glassware and other reflective surfaces from Scott Eccleston at Weekly Photo Tips).

Final solution

What worked best for me was to simply go with a single light from above (see setup image below) and create a smaller, more easily controlled environment using a few canvasses still in plastic and some foam core.

Obviously you'll have to take several shots as water is, of course, a little unpredictable. One thing to think about is that there's nothing stopping you from combining images later - let's say the strawberry is perfectly in place in one frame, but the splash is unspectacular. Not to worry - you'll likely get another frame with a great splash and an out-of-place strawberry. No problem - put 'em together:

good strawberry position good splash composite of the two

Despite a few initial problems, the keeper rate was actually quite high once we got the hang of it. Try it for yourself, post your pictures and send me the link!

Oops! Have I missed something?! Help share resources by adding them with a short description in the comments section or write me and I'll make sure it gets posted!

Getting to Know Your Own Modifiers

noreply@blogger.com (shayne gray) — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 18:24:00 -0500

Preamble....

For a small number of you, this post might be very insightful and you may even feel so motivated to carry out the same experiment. For the vast majority though...I realize it might be a bit of a slog, so don't worry...I completely understand - but be sure to tune in next week when we get into making great, crisp images of fresh strawberries splashing into a wine glass full of water and freezing the action at high speed.

Since I first got my first umbrella some 6 months ago and my second umbrella, softbox and reflector set a couple months ago I've been meaning to get to know them a little better. What's the difference in light quality, what's the difference in catch light, how much light am I losing/gaining using one vs. the other¿?

I finally decided it was time to find out. I did a whole pile of test, which were by no means completely comprehensive or overly scientific, but I did manage to find the answers to some of my own questions and feel better equipped to handle different situations as a result.

Thanks to Cristy for being patient enough to sit there the whole time. I know her glass looks very close to empty in some of these shots - just for the record...a refill was offered but declined.... So not to worry - when YOU come to model for me, you're sure to get at least a couple glasses of wine out of the deal too!

After some quick research online, it turns out I'm not the only one with the idea, of course - Zach Arias (or "Zach One Light" - the guy is amazing!) has offered up this Modifier Rundown where you can see much more on umbrellas, softboxes, octabanks, striplights, gridspots, etc. I just plain don't have all those great toys (yet), but I thought I'd share a few results for other geeks with similar gear on the outset of their creative lighting endeavours.

There's no shortage of different ways to make someone look terrible and in my series of tests, I definitely came across a few - I think it's important though to take the time just to see what different things look like for comparison. I also think it's a good idea to put your best work online and save the less-good stuff for home study. And to that end, there is only a small part of our experiment posted so as not to bore anyone too terribly or post terrible pictures....

Setting

Everything was shot with a Canon 50mm 1.4 prime with Cristy 3 feet in front of a dark background 4 or so feet from an off-white/cream wall to her right (yes...we have a relatively small living room...). One thing to note is that the ~~cheap~~ inexpensive Westcott kit stands don't allow the speedlight to point into the centre of your umbrella, so...your light will always sit a little high.

All images have been treated with bare minimum processing. Since they were shot in RAW format, they did need some mild sharpening, etc.

If you decide to do the same thing with your own gear, yes you can rely on the EXIF info later, but...that won't tell you how your speedlight was zoomed, where it was in relation to your brolly, how far it was from your subject, etc. so grab some note paper (lots) and a pen and get ready to write it all down. The picture taking took some hours, but studying the images with the notes and compiling the results after has taken me a few days, so get ready to learn a ton should you opt to assign yourself the same task.

I must admit, since I'd already read Lighting 101 over at Strobist.com with David Hobby some time ago, I was initially a little confused as to why the shadows seemed to actually get softer when the apparent light size was becoming smaller as I moved it further back. Then it occurred to me: the off-white/cream wall about 4 ft. from Cristy's right was filling in the shadows and lighting more of the environment (including the background) because of the light's own depth of field.

Before we jump in...if you don't make it all the way to the end of the geekery here in this post, I'll totally understand and promise not to get offended, but just be sure to fast-forward to the very end for the outtakes.

Onward - One light:

The first series of tests was carried out with just one speedlight (Nikon SB-24/Canon 580 EX - triggered with Alien Bees Paul Buff CyberSync radio triggers) and one Photoflex 45" convertible umbrella (used both as a reflective and shoot-through) with the shutter set to highest sync speed at 1/250 sec.

Some say you should always mount your umbrella far back to avoid hotspots, others use their umbrella choked up intentionally to make their light source smaller and create more contrast. We tried it all - flash zoomed in, out, placed way far back from the umbrella, in nice 'n close. Try it and compare the images later on to see the effect on your subject so you have a clearer idea of what looks good to you. Then try out different distances from your subject - compensating for lost/gained light, of course - and see how you control the lighting just on the subject or use it to light the whole environment (click any image to see larger version):

Nikon SB-24 at ¼ power zoomed to 50mm, 20" from umbrella:

taken to find out how evenly (or unevenly) my umbrella is being lit

shoot-through reflective bare flash

gradation between light & shadow
and check out those goose bumps - was it really that cold¿?

Two Lights +Reflector (softbox/umbrella/partially collapsed umbrella):

Canon 580 EX used as backlight, SB-24 used as key light, 5-in-1 reflector kit used as indicated - white reflector only.

Photoflex 45" shoot-through umbrella 45° to model camera right:

f/8, ISO 400 with reflector camera left for fill, backlit with Canon 580 EX

same as above without backlight

same as above without reflector

same as above with reflector pointed up (resting on her lap)

Umbrella higher up and closer without reflector - ISO 200

with backlight brighter by 1 stop (damn check out those triceps and shoulders!)

same as above with reflector pointed up (resting on her lap)

Reflective umbrella partially collapsed - quite a contrast:

without reflector

same as above with reflector camera left

same as above with reflector pointed up (resting on her lap)

f/5.6 collapsed umbrella slightly higher and closer to model
very dramatic look - perhaps better for a dude

same as above with reflector pointed up (resting on her lap)

Westcott Apollo Softbox kit (28") - approx. 2 feet away - less than 45° to model:

no backlight, no reflector

same as above with backlight

same as above with reflector camera left

softbox from above/slightly further camera right

same as above without reflector (more shadow camera left)

f/5.6, ISO 200 - otherwise same as above (background is clearer)

f/8, ISO 400 - otherwise same as above (background even clearer)

45" Photoflex umbrella (shoot-through) for direct comparison at same position ½ stop brighter than softbox:

without backlight/still without reflector
the bigger light source makes the light softer

with backlight
these last 2 images resemble the softbox in closer with reflector - see above

Open to comments, critiques and/or corrections.

For a cool video on using one light as both your main and background light, check out this cool video with lighting master Tony Corbell and listen toan interview with him (and many others) here on Nik Radio (2/17/11 release).

Conclusions:

I compared the output of my Canon 580 EX and SB-24 - interestingly Canon rates its Guide Number at 190 (138 zoomed to 50mm) while Nikon rates its GN at 164 (138 zoomed to 50mm), but the Nikon appears to be almost ⅓ stops brighter. My flash gun from the late 80's is actually more powerful¿?

You can see from the tryptic under the "one light" section that the light is softer using a shoot-through in comparison to a reflective umbrella. The trade off is that you lose light (about ⅔ stop). This means if you need more light, using a reflective umbrella is the more efficient alternative, but...you can't bring it in quite as close.

I'd seen/heard of people using a partially collapsed umbrella (reflective) to direct the light and control the spill feathering the light more like a softbox. I found that to be very contrasty and might be a dramatic effect well suited to a guy - not so much a glamorous look....

I also wanted to see if there was any difference (besides 2") between the Photoflex and Westcott convertible umbrellas - turns out there was a very small difference noticeable when the images are side by side, but as you might expect, the difference is pretty negligible. For the record it looked like the Westcott is perhaps slightly cooler.

A softbox eats up a lot of light. Since it's only something like 28" it's a little more contrasty than my umbrellas - time to save up for a bigger one.

Outtakes:

this...is...awesome...!

Still here¿? You made it! Thanks for reading....

Oops! Have I missed something?! Help share resources by adding them with a short description in the comments section or write me and I'll make sure it gets posted!