9 Ball

Interesting shot that was technically challenging to create. Back later with the details. Folks at Flickr have pushed this one up into Explore at the moment -- that's cool...

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Tampa Photo Shoot

Been busy. Drove to Tampa this past weekend for a Stock Photo shoot. In addition to the models, wound up shooting HDR stuff at sunrise as well as other little knick-knack shots. No studio work. It was a fantastic experience. Here are some random bits and pieces of the work.








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Product Photography: Halloween Tater Head

We are trying to recreate newspaper ads this week. I saw this Halloween Mr. Potato Head over at Target paper insert and thought plastic would be fun to work with...

The intent of this photo is to be delivered to graphics person for cutout. As such, my primary concern was delivering clean edge to make it easier for them to cutout, and dealing with that white-on-white arm on background. (Already did the cutout here -- was pretty easy given the clean edges).

Shot this on white perspex table at f/22 -- blew out the background (to about f/32 and a half), then lit from overhead with a large softbox and put a white card in front to left of camera to bounce some fill light onto him. I then took big black flags and ran them down the sides, helping the plastic pick up some darker look around the edges. He was standing in sort of a tunnel/box with white top/back/bottom and black sides. I think I got enough light in the lower half, but sure would have liked a tad more between the shoes. I tried once to light from underneath the perspex, but that started to washout the detail too much.


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Mike Gerber: Atlanta Track Club Photography

Had opportunity to meet with local Atlanta Track Club runner Mike Gerber -- Mike is a great guy and willing to help me out with some 'lone runner' shots. Met Mike at sunrise at Chattahoochee river as the fog was just starting to roll off the river -- brought a strobe, umbrella and battery pack as well. Funny thing was that the river trail was crowed as heck, and we were able to fake these lonely shots on a bit of a side trail. This is what we came up with... Thanks Mike!

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Product Photography: Roomba

Practicing product photography. This is the 5th Generation Roomba from iRobot.

Setup: Large bathroom window facing north, providing light coming through doorway into bedroom as back light. About 2 feet off of ground and behind robot, I put a big black flag -- otherwise my bathroom wallpaper was going to reflect on the top of robot. Look in the circular plastic part in the front edge of robot and you can see what else I used: from left to right there was a large softbox, then the camera, then a big white card, and the there was a strip box turned on it's side. I color balanced the strobes with 1/2 CT Blue gel.

The original photo I was trying to copy is here: http://store.irobot.com/home/index.jsp (as of 10/31/08)
I like mine better because of the softer look of the back lighting. I do like how their photo drops off to black in the upper right.

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Hockey Jones

I am performing some local sports photography this week. Went to the local skate training center, caught this at a game. Was going with motion photography this time because of both the low light, but also because shots around 1/15 or 1/30s are pretty good at showing the motion of fast sports like hockey. Was also scoping the place to see how one might get some strobes in there as well. Canon 100-400mm lens at 370mm, f/8, 1/15s, ISO 800.

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How do consumers fill their photo needs?

I'm posting this anecdote because I think there is a key lesson here for photographers trying to market their photographs.

Last night, my oldest daughter was on her computer and wanted a photo of her sister for a project. I have hundreds of photos of each of them from over the years. The photo computer and I were in the next room -- open for business. I am the source, the "stock house" of the family photos. You want colorful pixels of the family? I'm your guy.

So what does she do? Pulls up Google, types in her sister's name, and voila! there are a handful of photos of her sister for her to grab from the internet. Which she did. In a matter of seconds.

She got her photo. I lost a "sale."

How many times a day does this happen in the photo market?

There's a lot to be said in this story for what's happening to pro photographers, amateur photographers, consumers, stock houses, and support industries at this very minute. Are photographers tapping into this hidden demand the best we can? How much market potential is being lost? How should consumers be educated about licensing? How can we make it the most efficient for everyone to 'buy and sell' in a manner that is fair to everyone? Is Google the storefront?

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Saying Prayers

Saw something like this in Joe McNally's book. Shot in our living room, had a medium softbox on a stand centered about to top of her head, and placed to camera right. I then had a 580EX speedlite mounted on my camera and pointing straight up to the ceiling, giving some nice even down lighting as well.

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Juana Molina's Un Dia made me do it

On Wednesday night, UPS delivered Juana Molina's fifth album Un Dia to my door. According to the iTunes at my home desk, I've listened to it 9 times. Plus twice in the car. Plus 4 times at work. Yes, I obsess.

Looking back at a lot of my photos, I realize that I recall and associate the music I was playing when I took them. Not quite synesthesia, but there are some definite memory triggers between music and photos. I have a feeling that the trippy Un Dia music (especially Los Hongos De Marosa) is going to start showing up in my photos. Here's a tip of the hat to the layers in Juana Molina's music...



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Me and the Mrs.

I took these two shots on our 23rd wedding anniversary a couple of weeks ago.

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Helicopters

Today, one of my classmates says something like "hey, I've been asked to shoot buildings from a helicopter. Any ideas?"

I'm so envious. I can't afford my very own helicopter -- gotta save money for photo equipment. Anyone in Atlanta need aerial photos and have access to a helicopter? Feel like strapping me and my camera to the side and taking me around the city? email bjw at mindspring.com and I'm yours.

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My better shots of the week

Stopped shooting scissors and started shooting people last week. These are the ones I liked the most from this last week, you've already seen one of them. I'm curious as to which one, if any, grabs you the most emotionally.






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How to use ***Off Camera*** Flash and Rear (2nd) Curtain Sync on Canons (maybe other cameras)

A neat ability on some cameras and their flash systems (some but not all Point and Shoot and DSLR) is ability to fire a flash at the *end* of an exposure instead of the beginning. For long exposure times and where your ambient and flash are quite balanced, this can give you cool motion effects (blur) with a final pop of light at the end to freeze your subject. This is referred to as 2nd Curtain or Rear Curtain sync. Here is a pretty good description over at O'Reilly Camera Hacks.

Here's a sample basic rear-curtain sync photo from guille.db photo on Flickr:


So at a minimum to do this, you need a camera with rear curtain sync ability, and if the flash is not built in, you need a hotshoe flash that also has this ability. For me, my equipment would be the Canon 5d and a 580EX flash unit. I am not sure about other manufacturer's equipment, other Canon cameras, other Canon flashes etc. You will have to do a bit of research to see what you have.

***However**** in the case of my Canon equipment I am limited to using their freaking proprietary system to get rear camera sync. The minute I start bringing in Pocket Wizards or Alien Bees, or the Time Machine, or other studio sync equipment, I'm stuck and my off camera options go basically to 0. And I don't want on-camera flash. No.

But I made a hack. All you need are:
1) a canon camera that supports rear-curtain sync and manual mode (you shoot manual, right?)
2) a built-in flash or Canon-compatible camera flash unit that supports 2nd curtain sync (I know for a fact 580EX does, but good bet that any of the EX flashes do). The flash also needs to be able to slip into manual mode, or in the case of the built-in flashes, you need the ability to disable the 'pre-flash' / redeye reduction, etc. flashes.
3) *additional* off camera flashes lights, etc. The external flash in #2 is just your triggering flash, you will need other external lights.
4) an optical slave trigger, about the size of your first thumb joint. I buy mine from Lon over at FlashZebra: http://www.flashzebra.com/opticalslaves/index.shtml I use the 1st one #0050, it is about $10.
5) sync cables for the radio triggering device or whatever you use. I use the PocketWizards. You are going to need a cable that goes from the optical slave to your lights or radio trigger or whatever. In my case I needed a short PC to MiniPhone cable to connect the optical trigger to the PocketWizard.
6) Tape or ingenuity or something to figure out how to hold everything together.

Assembly
0) Read all of these instructions first.
1) Attach the flash unit to your camera via hotshoe (if not built in).
2) In camera, turn on Rear(2nd) Curtain Sync. In my 5D this is located in the menu.
3) In the flash, enable the Rear(2nd) Curtain Sync. On my 580EX, there is HighSpeed/ Rear curtain button; the icon for RearSync is 3 triangles pointing right, 2 open and 3rd one filled in.

4) Let's test the basics. Do steps 1-3, then put camera in manual. Set aperture to whatever, and set shutter speed to 2 seconds. Press the shutter. Don't freak if you see an immediate flash (we will deal with that in a second), but at the end of your exposure (2 seconds) you should see another flash. This is the rearSync flash. This is the good stuff.

Get this basic stuff working before moving on.

5) Now, if you saw a first flash when you pressed the shutter above, this is your ETTL or metering or redeye reduction or whatever kicking in. You need to kill this or this hack won't work. On my 580EX, it was the ETTL metering preflash, so to turn it off all I did was to put the flash in manual mode. (You do shoot your flashes in manual mode, right?). If you have a point and shoot I can't help you. Figure out how to get that first flash off before moving on.

6) Let's test again. Set camera to manual, set aperture to whatever, set shutter to 2 seconds. Press shutter button. There should be *no* flash until the end of the 2 seconds.

Get everything working before moving on.

7) Now we are ready to trigger our off camera flash. Put the optical trigger on your cord and connect to your external flashes or triggering system. Aim your on camera flash at the optical trigger. The rear curtain sync flash should fire, setting off the optical flash, and then all your external flashes should fire.

You may be done at this point. You may decide that you like all that light from your on-camera flash to bounce around and light your scene. You may not. I don't know what you are trying to do. In my case, I wanted to use ***only*** my external lights and wanted to kill the on camera light in the scene. This may be your situation too, as if you are using 2nd curtain sync you are probably doing something special and are a bit in control-freak mode.

Here's what I did to kill the light.
8) I took one of those Stofen light cups and put the optical trigger end of my sync cord into it and mashed it on top of my flash. You can be ingenious too and use tape.

9) To kill the light, I pointed my flash straight up in the air, and took the black flash case for my 580Ex and put it over the cup and top of flash. I have what looks like a giant black bar sticking from the top of my camera. With a wire sticking out. On the back of that, I velcroed the pocket wizard. It looks really scientific and really unprofessional. Also, in the manual mode for the flash, I cranked the power all the way down; my 580EX goes all the way down to 128/th power. No sense in waisting power.

All in all it works. I think it was a lot of work to get around the fact that Canon can't close a dang curcuit in the camera when the 2nd shutter moves instead of the first. If they had done that, all that was needed was to put a sync cord or PocketWizard on the camera (like normal). If this is something you Nikon shooters are laughing at because Nikon does this already, let me know. I'm making a list as to why I should jump ship to the D3...

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Athlete Lighting

I'm going to be asked to photograph sports and dance figures for class this winter. I'm pretty sure that this is going to require me to somehow celebrate the human body, so testing out some lighting ideas along those lines. Ansley is quite a sport. She's becoming quite comfortable in front of the camera...

Single 2'x3' softbox, 2 o-clock in the frame. We are a bit too close to the white background, would like a bit less light back there next time...

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