Unions

Was reading "Light Science and Magic" earlier -- mostly looking at white-on-white techniques. One of the techniques was putting a mirror on a table and then putting a light source in position to completely cover the "family of angles" for the shot. Thus, the background for the image is really the reflected light source. In addition, you get top lighting and a bit of reflected underlighting as well.


Started playing with the idea (this is mirror and large softbox) and then started playing with water and food coloring... These abstracts are the result -- started off as two separate drops of coloring, these are the drops at different stages of "mating." Thought it interesting how the red and green would overlap but not quite mix. I guess one is heavier/denser than the other.




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Just came extremely close to losing the race

"One man's race to become a world-class studio photographer before his wife finds out how much money he has spent." reads this blog's tagline above.

Just came extremely close to losing the race. Won't go into details but I can tell you 2 things:

1. It was a close call, but the race is still on.
2. In consideration for being allowed to even touch a camera in the future, any future spending on photography will now have to be funded from a "personal spending" allowance. Jackie is holding the reins on the "photography dollars" and will give me my "allowance envelope" every other Friday.

I just had to buy some batteries from Radio Shack using next Monday's lunch money.

I guess this photography dollar crunch means I need to get a bit more serious about the race and about making some side money doing this...

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Laser Redux

This is our previous friend, the white mask, coupled with 4 laser levels from Woot.com -- 1 vibrating.

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Mirrors and Jewelry

Saw something like this in a lighting book once. Some jewelry that my Mom made and gave to Jackie. Mirrors -- both in and out of shot, snooted light, and softbox. Floor tile from Home Depot.



Showed the above photo to some of the family, no one figured out that half of the image in the the photo was a mirror. The shot below makes the mirror a bit more obvious (I believe).

Not too thrilled with these shots, but I think this setup idea has potential. At the moment the mirror contributes nothing more than a bit of huh? and confusion, but there is some 'double-take' potential here for just the right circumstance...





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Simple Onion

Onion in studio, stripbox to upper left, fill softbox coming in from lower right. From the pantry.
















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Entropy Masks

I took a couple of shots with "entropy" in mind, not sure which one I like the best so I put them into same image. Shot in studio with projector.

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Wheat Bread

Was setting up for some food shots and took a snap of a piece of store-bought "wheat" bread. Used a strobe with a 20-degree grid raked across the top of the bread, then bounced off a hand-held white foam core for some fill. Background is a white plexi table with a little light thrown underneath.



This second shot is a crop from the photo. Look at the little strands of gluten (I hope that is what those strands are!).



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Some Studioware

I took this 'quick-and-dirty' shot to show a fellow classmate what the Canon ST-E2 transmitter looked like -- thought would be good to share on the blog. The ST-E2 is a flash signal transmitter that sits in the hotshoe of a Canon camera and acts as a "master" to other Canon speedlights. The advantage of the ST-E2 is that it is cheaper than a speedlight, gets your speedlight off camera, and also transmits all that good Canon ETTL information when you need it. Disadvantage is that works only with Canon equipment.

Also shown is a Canon TS-E 90mm Tiltshift lens (see this blog post for more info). And of course the camera that Jackie has nicknamed "My Precious" for me.

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Lensbaby

Shot with a Lensbaby with Wide-Angle attachment. Photo of shipping tubes for Roscoe gels.


Still haven't learned too much about how to best use the Lensbaby in a studio setting -- tried it on food over the summer. All I can get out of it is abstract stuff -- which is fine but I need a bit more artistic / compositional talent to find a good use for it. Only acquaintance that I've seen master the Lensbaby is Kathleen Clemons -- took a food photo course from her earlier....

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Simplicity

I highly recommend The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda. Lots of good ideas in there just waiting to get out.

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Tilt Shift

Put on the 90mm Tilt Shift lens last night -- goal was to really try out the Live View remote shooting via a tether on the 1DsIII (for my 5D setup, see Shooting Tethered with Lightroom and How to Install and Shoot Tethered with Canon and Mac). With Live View remote on the computer, you can actually see what the camera sees and do all adjustments (except remote focus) from the computer. Gonna be great for studio/product work.

However, though the goal was to test Live View, I thought the resulting comparison photos of the tilt shift were interesting. If you are not familiar with Tilt/Shift lenses, they basically allow you to change the plane of focus coming from the lens -- typically the plane is parallel to the camera and lens, but a tilt shift allows you to rotate, tilt, and shift the plane so you can basically line it up with objects in the frame for better front-to-back focus.

In other words, you can "lay" the plane of focus on a flat object, like a blanket to get stuff sharp at angles you typically can't do with a normal lens.

An example with a still life in the studio. For this shot, pretend we are selling light meters, and the goal is to make the Sekonic light meter as much in focus as we can, while leaving the rest of the objects slightly soft and out of focus. We want to call attention to our light meter "product"

1) We start with Image #1) f/5.6 with no tilt (a normal macro lens for example). We focus on a point on the lightmeter, in this case the words ISO 1 A. So notice that the words and label in the front, and the Sekonic brand name are out of focus. This is what you would expect with f/5.6 -- a shallow depth of field with stuff blurred in front and back of the focus point.


2) With a normal lens, one option is to increase depth of field -- we could adjust to f/11 for example. We see the result of this in image #2 -- f/11 with no tilt -- the plane of focus is still parallel to the camera, but we still have softness in the front and back words.

We could continue on using f/16, f/22, etc, but that would render more and more of the other objects in focus. With everything in focus, we'd not be sure what the real product was.

3) Let's go back to our f/5.6 aperture now, and apply some tilt. With the Tilt Shift lens, I tilt the front glass element forward and down, so it becomes more parallel to the surface of our product. In the case of the Canon T/S lenses, the most they can tilt is 8 degrees. 8 degrees doesn't sound like much, but you can see that the writing in the meter has improved. There is still softness, especially towards the front of the meter, and I could have played around with focus a bit more to adjust, but given this equipment, this is basically a depth of field issue.

Also, comparing images #2 and #3, they are very similar. There are some subtle differences when you begin to blow these up to 100% (or in print), but basically the focus in the lettering in the T/S version is slightly more consistent front to back.

4) If the lens tilted more, we could have used just a bit more tilt to smooth out some of the focusing issues. Alternatively, we could have raised the camera a bit more so it was looking down at more of an angle, but that could lead us to unwanted composition issues. Alternatively, we could also buy a $20-30K+ medium format camera with better controls over plane of focus....

In image #4, I lived within the constraints and upped the depth of field by closing the aperture. Overall, we have a good in-focus coverage of the meter (product) from front to back, and in addition, we have kept just enough openness in our aperture to blur the surrounding objects to tell our brains what not to focus on.

There is probably some additional tweaking to be done here, but remember that I was playing with the new Live View feature! Without that, I would have been looking through the viewfinder, and with my bifocals, focus would have been all over the place!

(Update: I did go back and tweak the tiltshift, aperture, and lighting. Used the rotation feature of the lens to rotate and align the focal plane to better match the lighmeter. Also bumped up the aperture to f/16. The better alignment allowed me to keep most of the surrounding space out of focus while giving me better depth of field on the lightmeter. As for lighting, went with a 580EX flash in a white umbrella, and used a handheld white reflector to add some detail to the right hand side...)



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