It's been a while..

I know, I know. I've been rather busy with non-photography related stuff lately, but I haven't neglected my camera(s) completely. I managed to fill 2 more rolls on my Hasselblad (see my Flickr) and I've been shooting some macro. Firstly though, some business. I shot the following yesterday with this exact picture in my mind:



I used my flash mounted to a shoot-through umbrella at full power. I placed to the left of me, maybe half a foot away, set to wide angle for maximum light dispersion (as much as the flash is capable of anyway). Camera off to my right, manually focused at the spot I was going to be sitting in, roughly. Focus wasn't extremely important since it was going to be a hard B&W silhouette. Camera wide open, ISO 400 for maximum yin/yang between noise and light gathering abilities and click! Yeah, I did have to do 'some' processing to remove the remaining detail, but I'd say this was a success.

Best macro of the year (from my camera anyway):


I'm rather proud of my macro. I've been following this bud since its inception right after the snow slowed down here. Make no mistake: to date, it has yet to actually stop snowing. There was still a 'flurry blizzard' just this morning. Ridiculous. Anyway... There will be many more macros of this particular Lilac over the course of the next few months.

^_^

Macros, Because You Know You Love Them.

I'll start with admitting this wasn't entirely an original idea, although I can't for the life of me remember who I got this from. I do like the results and I'm putting it on the "to explore" list.

I don't think this needs to much explanation, I included a pullback! Yeah, don't expect it too often. I like a little mystery to my work.

50mm, ƒ/11, 1/250sec and ISO 100. OCF camera right @ 1/8 power.


Pullback with same settings:

I'm a photographer. A studio photographer, apparently.

So I went for some more inspiration searching today, and ended up plopping a teddybear on a tripod, chucking an umbrella light in front of it and snapping away. The experiment ended with a thought. It's much easier to play with light in a controlled environment. Even if this environment was built with a speedlight, an umbrella and two pieces of white poster board as reflectors. I think the next item on my wish list is a set of real lights.

Here's the shot, pretty much SOOC:


And here's the pullback:


It was almost too easy to get nice light this way. I can totally see why people do studio over natural light, because there's no time of the day you couldn't shoot, and you don't have to drag your gear all over.

Inspiration. Maybe?

So it's that time of the year again. Halloween. What did I wait with photos through the most beautiful season of the year for, you ask? Well, that's what happens when you get into an inspirational funk. No photos, at all. Now, however, I found myself with this burst of energy and creativity. And a daughter who, dare I say it, wanted her photo taken. This is an opportunity I couldn't pass up.



Now that I have your attention, let's proceed with the rest of these.


Up to no good, I tell ya.


Hm, cute, but that face doesn't fool anyone, yanno.


Ah yes. More distractions.


Mama wanted some attention too.


The color version of the first pic. Notice how her cheeks are oh-so-close to being blown. Lucky, because pics like this don't get a reshoot. I didn't intend to take this, as she was too close to the umbrella, but it was too cute to pass up. Lucky lucky.


One more for the road. Natural light this time. Yum! And all this recent talk about medium format B&W film has made me want to beg my mom for her Yashicamat, that she has never used. It's new, not like-new, and all I need to do is load film and call it a day! I wish.

Calibrated!

Today I received the Spyder3Express display calibrator. So I grabbed the umbrella and shot this:



Now with real colors and everything! I'm excited. All this time I knew I was missing out on being able to see hidden color detail and proper white balance, but now it's actually clear I had no idea what I was even looking at. The road to consistent colors is almost over!

^_^

365/181 Objects That Tell Something About You/4

Maybe I should have just combined all these in a "food" photo of sorts. Well anyway, I also love ice cream. More specifically, and yes I know, boring, Vanilla Bean.

Lens and Camera Settings:
50mm ƒ/2.0 @ ƒ/8.0, 1/250sec and ISO 200. Flash OCF @ 1/2 power, shot through umbrella camera right.

365/180 Objects That Tell Something About You/3

I also love coffee. It practically defines who and what I am.

Lens and camera settings:
50mm ƒ/2.0 @ ƒ/4.0, 1/250sec and ISO 100. Flash OCF @ 1/4th power through umbrella camera right.

365/178 Objects That Tell Something About You/1

I think I like this theme! What can I say, any excuse to write about myself, right? Anyway, I'm sure this is a big surprise to everyone:

Lens and camera settings:
14-54mm ƒ/2.8-3.5 II @ 54mm, ƒ/3.5, 1/250sec and ISO 400. OCF camera top right @ 1/4th power.

365/175 Food/5

More OCF play, this time shot through the umbrella. Very nice diffuse light!

Lens and camera settings:
50mm ƒ/2.0 @ ƒ/2.8, 1/250sec and ISO 100.

365/174 Food/4

Oh yes, I just received my cactus triggers, 4th version, for those who care, and yeah they work. 40 exposures, not a single missed shot yet. These must be much more reliable than it's bast brethren, because I don't see much of the issues the older versions have. That said, I did just receive them and I haven't put them to the test in real life situations.

The light from OCF is in one word: awesome. Expect many many more photos with this setup.

Lens and camera settings:
50mm ƒ/2.0 @ ƒ/2.0, 1/320sec (my new max sync) and IS0 100. Flash @ 1/16th power.

365/151 Negative Space/2

I decided to play a little with low key photography, and I think it looks interesting! Definitely worth exploring more, maybe with a more cooperative model.

Lens and camera settings:
14-54mm f/2.8-3.5 II @ 14mm, f/13, 1/250sec and ISO 100. Flash @ 1/2 power fired into umbrella.

Playing with light: Low Key

Last night I stumbled across an article about low key photography, which completely reminded me that this in combination with B&W can create some of the most dramatic photos. Of course I wish I had remembered this at the beginning of B&W week, but now I have a reason to whip out the flash again!

Lens and camera settings:
14-54mm f/2.8-3.5 II @ f/11, 1/250sec and ISO 100. Flash OCF at 1/4 power.

365/126 Affection/5

Helen taught me this trick (HRP on ILP). Before PP, there used to be a flash dead smack in the middle of the heart, the heart was also upside down (arms just simply don't bend that way). I set my camera to f/22 and 1/250 (highest sync speed) and ISO 100 to remove all ambient light, and I set the flash to 1/8th power to shoot just enough light into the picture toward the camera to work as a back light but not illuminate the top of the hands (camera side). This resulted in just the inside rim of the heart being illuminated. In PS I used a levels layer to set the black point to exclude everything but the brightest part of the photo. And now we arrive here:

Lens and camera settings:
14-54mm f/2.8-3.5 @ 35mm, f/22, 1/250sec and ISO 100. Flash @ 1/8th power, firing toward the camera.

365/109 Shadows/2

Not very interesting, but I do have to say I love these colors, again. Take a hint Adobe! Olympus has much better color rendition than ACR, at least make a few default curves for the E-3 or something!


Lens and camera settings:
50mm f/2.0 @ f/8.0, 1/250sec and ISO 100. OCF camera right @ 1/16th power.

365/108 Shadows/1

My wife volunteered to be my subject tonight, so I went with ultra dramatic light, and thus shadows, which is what we're working with here.


Lens and camera settings:
50mm f/2.0 @ f/2.0, 1/250sec and ISO 100. OCF camera dead right @ 1/8th power. WB @ 5400K.

365/106 Framing/6

I'm not sure if this works, but I made a promise to give it a try, so here it is:


Lens and camera settings:
50mm f/2.0 @ f/8.0, 1/250 and ISO 400. OCF camera left, bounced off colored card.

365/97 Capturing Motion/4

To take this photo, I set my camera to take a long exposure (f/22, 8 seconds), on a tripod and then dropped a balloon and manually set off my flash a few times. Here is the result!


Lens and camera settings:
50mm f/2.0 @ f/22, 8 seconds, ISO 100. OCF handheld flash @ 1/4th power.

365/55 Catchlights/4

A more difficult subject today, because my little one went to bed before I had a chance to grab the camera. These cats run when I grab my flash, I'm thinking because of the noise it makes when it recycles, so it makes for a hard photo to take, especially since they don't like to be chased either.

I finally got him comfortable on the couch, light stand set up and here it is!

50mm f/2.0 @ f/2.8, 1/160sec and ISO 100. Flash bounced into 45" umbrella, 1/2 power, camera left.

Umbrella Play

Completely off topic to the 365 themes, I decided to play around with my umbrella-mounted flash a bit more. I think it's love at first sight! It might be time to seriously think about investing in a good remote trigger and maybe a second flash. I love the way I can control light now! Much more precise than simply bouncing light. Here's an example:

50mm f/2.0 @ f/5.6, 1/160sec and ISO 400. Flash @ 1/2 power.

Sure I could have opened my aperture, but I wanted more depth of field, and I didn't want more power from the flash, so the ISO had to take one for the team. It's all good, just try to find noise in this image, and don't pixel-peep, I mean noise that actually interferes with the overall quality of the photo ;-)

I think I definitely could benefit from a more powerful key light. This flash will work great as a fill flash in slave mode though!

365/49 Pictures of Words/5

A little present from my wife! She must have felt bad for my camera situation, so she replenished my ridiculously expensive body wash. And it's pretty much the perfect subject of this week's theme! I can't believe how clear the focus popped out of the frame! I guess my eyes got used to the small viewfinder, because this was all DOF work.

f/4.0 happened to be the perfect aperture to get just the word "Philosophy" in focus. That aperture, in combination with my new light setup (45" Westcott umbrella) makes this look great! I invite whoever actually follows this blog to browse back through this 365 project, I suspect there's some clear learning progress throughout the past 50-ish days, although I'm bad at judging this myself.

I would like some CC on this photo, maybe some pointers as to what I could have done better and/or different with the light or focus maybe?

Lens and camera settings:

50mm f/2.0 @ f/4.0, 1/160sec and ISO 100. Flash bounced into umbrella, 1/16th power.