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.

365/108 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.

365/74 Perspective/2

My daughter has this crazy obsession with dinosaurs, and I felt they'd make a great subject one of these weeks. Maybe this week is that week!

Lens and camera settings:

50mm f/2.0 @ f/2.0, 1/250sec and ISO 200. Sun, ehm, flash bounced into umbrella, behind camera right @ 1/4th power.

365/60 Color Accent/2

Day 60! The past 2 months flew by! Looking back at all the photos I've posted here, I've made a good amount of progress. It's always really cool to see how much a person learns when they do projects like this!

So today I grabbed this green heart shaped container with M&Ms in it, and randomly placed a candy heart in it. Instant accent color! I think tomorrow I should look for accent colors outside instead of creating my own, anybody can create a photo under controlled circumstances, it's much harder to use natural scenery to achieve the same.

Lens and camera settings:

50mm f/2.0 @ f/2.8, 1/250sec and ISO 100. Flash bounced into an umbrella overhead @ 1/16th power, further reduced using a paper tissue (flash was putting out way too much light, even at its lowest setting, with the umbrella raised all the way to the ceiling).

I'm currently working on a little article about the inner workings of dynamic range and how digital cameras are different from our eyes in respect to exposure. Keep an eye out and when I post it, grab a cup or two of coffee, it'll be a long one!

365/59 Color Accent/1

There's a lot left to interpretation with this week's theme, so I'm going to take a best guess and hope that this is what was meant when the theme was announced. A plate with blue markings on it and blue beads on it for the bokeh-background.

50mm f/2.0 @ f/2.8, 1/250sec and ISO 100. Flash bounced into umbrella directly overhead @ 1/16th 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.

365/53 Catchlights/2

The kid learned to cross her eyes, my wife really doesn't like it, I think it works for this week's theme :P

It's also a great opportunity to play with my umbrella for off camera flash! So we're all clear, the pop-up flash is about the worst way to set off your off camera flash. It created a nasty hot spot all over her hair. I can't wait 'till I can afford a set of Pocketwizards!

50mm f/2.0 @ f/2.8, 1/160sec and ISO 100. Flash fired into 45" Westcott @ 1/8th power.

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.