Dean's Light Box

HDR: How it Works

I've talked about high dynamic range (HDR) images in the past.  This is how I do it:

Taking Out the Trash

How to Use Lightroom

This is how I use Lightroom with my photographic images.

Download OverviewOfLightroomPostProcessing

You'll need the newest version of Quicktime (7) to view it.  It will look like nothing is happening for several minutes--be patient.

Lots of lessons learned here for me.  Video is a lot of work, for starts.  I need to shorten my videos so that I can post them on YouTube and then embed them here.  More to come.

Back to the Landscape

EV went to one of her friend's birthday party yesterday in town so I took the two hours to explore some places I hadn't been before.  I drove up Chalk Creek Canyon toward Wyoming and then off to South Fork.

 

55mm, 1/125th of a second, ISO 200, circular polarizing filter.

Tomorrow evening, I'll be posting my first "screencast" vido showing how I post-processed this particular image.  Please check on back! 

Second Nature

One of my goals is to practice basic lighting enough so that it becomes second nature and I can turn my attention to composition, capturing the right moments, and trying new, more creative lighting.  Toward that end, I asked DD if she would mind if I took an informal portrait of her five minutes before dinner was due to be served.  She graciously agreed. I ran and grabbed the camera, light stand, flash, and umbrella.  We all raced downstairs and out the basement door to use the sunset as our backdrop.

In almost exactly four minutes I set everything up and took two frames.  The first was under exposed so I increased the flash output by two stops (I used manual mode) and took the second frame.  And this is what we got:

 

38mm, 1/60th of a second, f/8, ISO 200, SB-800 flash shot through a white umbrella above and camera left at 1/8th power.

Notes: DD is pretty darn cute and it is hard to take a bad photo of her.  The lighting on her came out just like I had hoped so it seems like my "make lighting second nature" aspirations were pretty much achieved here.  There are a few things I'd do better next time, however.   There's way too much ground vs. sky in the background.  But. to get more sky, I would need to use a lower camera angle.  While DD is very cute, low camera angles are typically not the most flattering for people.  I'll have to put some thought into how I'd solve that, aside from climbing to to the top of the mountain.  Using a longer focal length might do the trick, but then I'd need a remote flash trigger of some sort so I could leave the flash right by DD and back up several feet with the camera.

I also would have experimented with faster and slower shutter speeds to see what effect we could get with the ambient light.  My guess is that a faster shutter speed that allowed in less light would have been more interesting and dramatic.  As it was, I had to darken (burn) the background in Lightroom to get it where I wanted it.

I purposely used manual mode on the flash because I've found something interesting with Nikon's CLS (Creative Lighting System).  CLS flashes like the SB-800 fire a series of pre-flashes to do their through-the-lens metering and to communicate to other CLS flashes wirelessly.  The problem with these pre-flashes when you're photographing people is that the pre-flashes often result in blinking eyes.  I cannot tell you how many shots of DD and EV I have with droopy looking eyelids when I shot with the CLS mode.  On the other hand, I try not to "throw the baby out with the bath water" and use CLS mode for subjects that don't blink, at least sometimes.

Manual mode, on the other hand, doesn't fire the pre-flashes.  This saves your batteries and prevents most blinking problems but it comes at a little bit of a cost: You're on your own to get the right exposure.  Fortunately, with practice, this becomes pretty much a non-issue.  I just take a shot, look at the LCD, adjust the power on the flash up or down if it needs adjusting and usually get the right exposure by the second frame.

So that's why I usually stick to manual mode.  And at some point I'd like to get some wireless flash triggers--so I'm not tethered with the hotshoe to flash cord.

Hard Light

When I first started to study flash lighting, I tried to diffuse my light source nearly all of the time.  But it seems that in many cases hard light adds a nice sense of drama.  The trick is to create that sense of drama without leaving too harsh an effect.

I didn't feel like I got the hard-light profile shot last time I tried so I gave it another go this evening.  This time I used a single flash set about 4 feet away, camera left, with a snoot:

50mm, 1/500th of a second, f/16, ISO 800, flash camera left set at something like 1/32nd power with a 10 inch cardboard and duct tape snoot.

A couple of notes:  ISO 800?!  Ugh!  That was a result of my consumer camera sharing the ISO button with the button that lets me zoom in on the preview to make sure the frame is in focus.  The 500th of a second shutter speed ensured that all of the ambient light was not captured--the background is the slightly pinkish, whitish wall, approximately 5 feet back.  But of course, you can't tell.  It also helped that the camera was only about 4 feet from me and the flash was snooted and aimed at my mug so that it didn't illuminate the wall.

Additional note: When you walk around with your flash connected to your camera via a coiled cable and then add a cardboard snoot to the flash, people are quite convinced that you're a pro.  After the show the other night, a friendly, enthusiastic younger fellow came up to me in a somewhat timid fashion and asked what that thing was on my flash.  I told him, "Can't talk now, sonny, got another shoot to get to..."  Not really, but it was flattering that he asked, as if I knew what I was doing.

New Cary Judd Podcast Episode

Cary Judd's new CD just arrived and Cary did his CD Release show last night at the Velour Live Music Gallery in lovely downtown Provo, Utah.  Ok, downtown Provo isn't exactly lovely, but Velour is a very cool little venue run by Cory Fox.

I just produced the latest episode of the podcast about the music of Cary Judd and hope that you'll give it a listen.  In it, he talks a little about a couple of the songs on the new album and keeps me on my toes as the interviewer.  Since he lies to interviewers when he doesn't like the questions, I find each episode to be a rather amusing challenge.

You can subscribe to it over at iTunes which is the one of the best ways to listen because you'll automagically get every new episode as it is released.  If you're more into manually managing your life, you can also listen over at caryjudd.com.

The concert was great and gave me a chance to put my off-camera lighting skills to good use.  In the shot above, I used the snoot on my SB-800 to fill Cary's face.  It helped that I tweaked the front of the cardboard snoot so that it was round rather than rectangular like before.  That's the beauty of quick and cheap DIY equipment--you can tweak it as needed without a worry.

Snooted flash again in this shot during the sound check.

And here we get the full ambience, complete with blue fog.  This available light shot highlights why I'd love to have a little more high ISO performance.  But, in this case, the sort of grunge-noise effect isn't horrible.

Cloud Shadow

Shortly after I made my way down to the basement office for work this morning, DD called me back upstairs to see a rather unusual sight:

200mm, 1/1000th of a second, f/8, ISO 200.

A cloud shadow.  DD suggested that the vertical cloud blocking the light was actually a contrail.  Pretty unusual.

Parley's Sunset

When I drive to work, I take I-80 over Parley's Summit.  The summit pass sits at just over 7,000 feet and is usually where the weather is most...active, shall we say?

On the way home from work today, I noticed that the sunset was shaping up with some pretty dramatic clouds and colors so I did a little scouting through the Olympus Cove neighborhoods in hopes of finding a nice vista of the Salt Lake Valley.  It seems that you have to be in the backyard or deck of one of those homes to actually access the view.  So I headed up Parleys, writing off my efforts as part of the scouting game.

When I reached the summit, I noticed that the light was close to peaking so I exited the interstate right at the summit and took one of the windy roads back toward the valley.  I happened upon a trailhead just off of one of the residential streets and saw the sunset like this:

55mm, 3 bracketed shots around 1/3rd of a second, f/11, ISO 200.

High vs. Low Key

Back to some actual photography today.

This is an experiment comparing high and low key product-type shots.  DD's christmas ornament music box serves as the subject and the venue is the DIY light tent.  Nothing fancy with the lighting here, just the standard flash to the right, flash from above, both set on manual somewhere between 1/16th and 1/64th power.  The method I use to get the exposure right these days is often referred to as "chimping."  You manually set the aperture where you want it to control the amount of flash, set your shutter speed to control the amount of ambient light you want and then set the flashes on manual and guess at how much power you need.  Then the chimping comes in when you take a shot, look at the LCD and histogram and adjust from there.  Rinse and repead.

Question is, which works better?

High Key:  50mm, 1/60th of a second, f/8, ISO 200.

Low Key:  50mm, 1/60th of a second, f/8, ISO 200.

Lesson learned:  I should have tried increasing the shutter speed for the low key shot to see if I could eliminate some of the ambient light falling on the background.  This would make the post processing easier and less time consuming.

So which works better in this case, high or low key?