I got together again with model Midas I Write (MM#1564051) for another shoot. He wanted to do something with an octopus tentacle coming out of his hair. He also has these cool star tattoos which we wanted to incorporate into the piece, so the name Poseidon just flowed out naturally from this.

Shooting Info
I shot this with a my Pentax K200D and my Tamron 28-75mm f2.8 lens. I wanted a relatively shallow depth of field so I set my aperture to f5.0, and then set up my light, an AB800 through my home-made silver beauty dish just out of the frame to camera right… about 3 o’clock. The power setting was fairly low… less than half-power because I wanted my background to go fairly gray (but not black) and I was using a relatively wide aperture.

And yes, that is a real octopus tentacle (technically it’s a leg, but tentacle sounds so much cooler). There’s a fantastic Asian Market down the road from me in the Seattle area and they sell all sorts of cool things like Octopus legs.

This is not a Rule of Thirds diagram, which should have 9 identical rectangles. It looks like the lines were placed at 30% and 60% of the way through, so the middle sections are longer/taller than the end sections.

Now, true, that’s a pretty nit-picky complaint, and if that were the extent of the “problem” I could easily overlook it.

Next is where we start to get into the mythology of the Rule of Thirds. The podcaster introduced the Rule of Thirds as being an almost mystical property in nature. He talked about the Fibonacci Sequence and how it dictates the growth of Nautilus Shells, the pattern of rose petals growing on a flower, and the Rule of Thirds. Now, it’s very true that the Fibonacci Sequence does indeed map out the growth patterns of Nautilus Shells and rose petals (as well as the spinning of galaxies!), it has nothing to do with the Rule of Thirds.

Here is a diagram of the Fibonacci Spiral:

And here is an overlay of the Rule of Thirds grid:

As you can see, the intersections of the Fibonacci Spiral are close, but not equal to the Rule of Thirds.

Why is this important? Because it’s one thing to speak about the Rule of Thirds as a powerful tool of composition, but it’s important not to confuse it with other compositional tools (in this case what is sometimes referred to as the Golden Ratio, or it’s proper name, Phi or ϕ). It’s also important (in my opinion) not to over-inflate the importance of a compositional tool. Indeed the Rule of Thirds is generally held to be a more used and more important rule of composition than is the Golden Ratio, which has all these cool almost-mystical properties.

My last issue with the podcast is that it almost seems like Fibonacci is credited with the discovery of the Golden Ratio (or I guess rather the Rule of Thirds), which is again false. The Golden Ratio was discovered and explored first by the ancient Greeks, about 1500 years before Fibonacci. It is very prominent in the teachings of Pythagoras and in Euclidian Geometry (and other fancy-pants Mathematical terms!). Fibonacci just came up with the sequence which exposed the amazing graphic spiral we now know so well. Indeed Fibonacci wasn’t the first to discover the sequence. He was simply the first European, although from what I understand he discovered it independently. Again, this gets into the “nit-picky” realm mostly because it’s irrelevant to the application of both the Golden Ratio as well as the Rule of Thirds in Photography, but if you’re going to bring it up…

So what’s the lesson? Well, I think it’s two-fold. First, if you’re learning you need to look around at more than just one source of information. If you’re teaching, it’s important to really know your stuff and check your sources.

Again, I want to stress that I’m not suggesting this podcaster’s advice in general is shoddy. 99.9% of the time they give fantastic information. Well thought out, well reasoned, and well researched. But sometimes things slip through the cracks. This one really surprised me because it’s a pretty basic one.

And for more information about Phi, the Fibonacci Sequence and other things related to the Golden Ratio, check out the wonderful book by Mario Livio The Golden Ratio: The Story of PHI, the World’s Most Astonishing Number.

Also, these were shot at the wonderful Earl Harper Studios in Seattle. They were fantastic there, and I highly recommend them!

Seeing as some people are concerned about nudity or for those who may be viewing this at work, I’ve put all the photos behind the jump.

For these shots I used a single AB800 through a white shoot-through umbrella.

As you can see, I specifically lit the scene with this post-processing technique in mind. If you take any old-photo and go through these steps you’ll get something stylistically the same, but it won’t have the same impact as something designed to be made this way. I did this by split-lighting my subject with hard lights that had no modifiers to soften the light. In this case two speedlight flashes at 3 and 9 o’clock to my subject.

Step 1: Crank The Recovery & Fill
When I first learned this technique I was told to crank these sliders all the way up to 100. Personally I find using the full 100 settings obnoxious and the effect overpowers the photo. I find around 50 to be a much more usable setting and so start my effect there and salt and pepper to taste.

Step 2: Do The Same To The Contrast
Again, this slider was originally supposed to go up to 100, but I find 50 a better starting point. I took it up to 60 because I thought it needed a smidge more contrast.

Step 3: Now It’s Clarity And Vibrance
Yeap… you guessed it… take those sliders up to 50 as well.

Step 4: Now Finesse The Exposure
Now it becomes a bit more subjective and less mechanical. You’ve messed with most of the photo settings so you’ll want to finesse the overall Brightness and Exposure here.

Step 5: Now Desaturate
Now you’re photo looks pretty over-the-top and it’s time to bring it back to earth. Grab that Saturation slider and crank it down. I normally start around 50, but it’s really a subjective thing.

Step 6: Tweak It
Earlier than this it was hard to visualize how all these strong effects would actually work on the image, so now that you’ve got it pretty close you can go in and adjust the settings to get the right balance of everything.

And that’s all she wrote. Here’s the final image after all that, then bringing it in to Photoshop where I did a little final tweaking there.

In short I was lagging badly.

Then suddenly this cyclist whips by me at a good clip. I had passed her on the side of the path as she was chilling a few miles back, and she was chugging along.

I’m a fairly competitive guy, and I make it a personal goal to at least keep pace with people in front of me. I push and push till I just can’t do it anymore, and I thought “I’ve got it in me to go a ways at her pace”, so I switched my grip to the lower bars (I’ve got the “ram’s horn” style of street bike handles where you’ve got several options of grip) and started chugging along. After a fairly short amount of time I had caught up to her and was keeping pace with her quite handily.

Two minutes ago I could barely keep the slow pace I was going and now I was hauling tail and not even feeling it. Why? Because I had someone to push me.

And it’s the same way with photography. Reading blogs and taking classes and reading books is all well and good, but sometimes I need someone to come along and just fly by me to get me jazzed up and motivated. That’s why I love going to photo meetups or doing organized photostrolls. I get to see first-hand the work people are doing and how fast they’re flying past me, and it pushes me to be more creative. Not to be better than them, but to keep up. You see, I’m not competing with them. I’m competing against myself. They’re just the thing that gets me off my butt and gives me a target to shoot for.

So get out there and find someone. A friend, a Meetup group, a student, whatever. Just go out and find someone to shoot with. Someone who will push you to be better than you are.

I have been a member of a camera club here in South Africa for the last year and a half, and for the last few months I have been bugged by one thing, I know what “look” they want and either shoot or choose my entries for club evenings based on that (to get max points) rather than submit the stuff I really like. Just this week I decided not to submit pics at the club anymore, it’s just a principle thing.

First, I encourage everyone to listen to this series of videos on a lecture by Wayne Dyer from the 80s called “How To Be A No-Limit Person”. Yes, parts of it are pretty cheesy and it’s so 80s it hurts, but the message remains relative. Specifically the part where he talks about how no one can make you feel anything. When someone “hurts your feelings” what you are saying is that you value their opinion more than your own.

This is especially a tricky area when it comes to critiques. The person who made that comment is willing to sacrifice their vision for the sake of the camera club’s approval, and if he doesn’t get it, then he sees the best way to deal with it is to simply stopping putting his work out there.

I can understand where he’s coming from. I belonged to a camera club several years ago. My club was made up of about 85% retired folks, and correspondingly most of the photos were nature photos. Wildlife, landscapes, and flowers filled up about 75% of the photos on a given night. Needless to say that my style was quite a departure for the group, and I frequently got lower scores than I felt that I deserved as a result. But it didn’t matter to me. Very often I would get people coming up to me and talking to me about my photos that I submitted. They were curious or amused and even though they may not have wanted to buy it or wouldn’t have scored it very high, I was an anomaly and they were curious. Now here’s the thing. I would listen to their critique, and sometimes I would say to myself “that person just doesn’t get my vision”, or alternatively “I see their point, but I feel like the emotional impact of the piece over-rides the minor technical problems”, or perhaps “yeah, I see what they’re saying… I should watch out for that next time”. The point is I listened to their comments and I judged the value of their comments. It also never occurred to me that I shouldn’t submit photos to be judged. To me it was more important that people saw my images than what the score was.

Alternatively there’s a large photography community on LiveJournal that I’m active in. There was a gal who was a semi-regular contributor who organized these fashion shoots, and she would post the results and a description accompanying them. I saw that she was putting in some effort, but to me the quality was extremely poor. On-camera flash and the models all had a vapid, blank expression on their face and wooden poses. I regularly made comments to her trying to be helpful in what I saw as the problems with her photos. Her response always came down to “yeah, but this is just my style”. I got the impression as a critiquer that she was using “style” as a crutch to mask poor technical skills. Is that fair of me? Am I being hypocritical? I’ll be the first to admit “possibly” to both, but ultimately I felt like she was blowing off my comments so I stopped responding to her entries altogether.

The lesson is that we need to be both good critiquers and good receivers of critique. We should listen to the opinions of others, but ultimately it’s only ourselves that we should listen to and go our own way.

Last weekend I went out to do a fashion shoot with Daniel (aka Midas iWrite) (MM#1564051). We had a great time. I wanted to get a very masculine, harsh look to the series, and I think we achieved that very well.

First we found a great location in Pioneer Square. An alley very near the one I used for the Fight Club shoot. This gave me a great setting, and we got there in the evening with plenty of light left in the sky, but because we were working in the shade it was soft and directionless. No worries, I was going to compensate for that with strobes.

For these first two shots I just rim-lit Daniel, with a strobe slightly behind and to each side. These were a Vivitar 283 and a Vivitar 285 speedlight. I didn’t use any modifiers because I wanted the light to be harsh and specular.

Next I moved David into this doorway. Because there’s no light bouncing into the doorway, it acts as a subtractive lighting scheme, so positioning him at the edge of the doorway I had a lot of lattitude to use natural light to good effect.

This shot I used just one of the speedlights to camera left. The reflection in his glasses is the tops of the buildings on either side of the alleyway, which acted in this instance almost like an extremely large strip-light!

Another doorway. This time I used a white umbrella to shoot through to soften the light on him.

Now we’re back to our harsh lighting. I lowered the shutter speed to kill as much of the ambient as I could and placed the bare strobe to far camera right. There was a set of bars that created some great shadows in the doorway that I really tried to capture.

And here’s a shot of Daniel playing in the doorway with the bars. I brought my second speedlight back in for this one and got that split-lighting setup going again. The one to camera-right however I shot through an umbrella to soften the light and act as more of a fill light.

I’m a big fan of Zack Arias, and if you’re interested in learning lighting, there’s few guys better suited to teaching great, simple lighting techniques than Zack. And best of all, he’s doing a FREE lighting class next weekend over at CreativeLive. It’s available free if you sign up to watch it live, or you can pre-order a downloadable copy for $79. A steal!

Enjoy!

So, again, sorry for the lame “coming soon” post, but I promise it’ll be worth it.

Why… it’s a… er… I dunno either. Let’s take a closer look!

Why it’s a 4×5 view camera!

It’s a Calumet. That’s all I know. We bought it from a friend who’s mom was selling it on behalf of his uncle. it was a great price and she wanted me to have it because she loves my photography. I’ve never had the opportunity to play with a large format or a bellows camera of any kind, so this whole thing is 100% new to me. I’m gonna dig around and try to find instructions online to figure out how to make this thing take photos. I’ve figure out how to change the aperture and shutter speed. Composing’s going to be interesting as with view cameras you are composing upside down. So your top is on the bottom, the left is on the right and to focus well you’ve gotta stick a black sheet over your head and look at the screen through a loop.

I can’t wait to get started! I’ve got some polaroids and some sheets of film, but I don’t know how to use them, so any help is greatly appreciated. Let’s rock this thang!