October 1st, 2008 Chris Beaumont
As promised, the lighting setup from this post.
It’s a fairly standard setup I supposes. The shot above doesn’t actually give an accurate description of the final setup, it’s just the only shot I had that showed all three lights. The actual setup used for the final shot is described in the lighting diagram on the left. The backdrop light was mounted on a floor stand so as to be out of the way.
All the flash heads are Bowens GM250 units. The backdrop is a grey colorama roll.
I really shouldn’t try to write blog posts while I’m watching movies. It makes it hard to concentrate! The Iron Man DVD just got released and I’m getting it out of the way. So far so meh. Robert Downey Jnr is good for the role, but there’s hardly anything in this that sets it apart from the roller deck of bland comic book adaptation movies we’ve been forced to endure these last few years.
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September 25th, 2008 Chris Beaumont
This is my buddy Ross. I’m doing a website for him at the moment and he wanted a few formal shots taken to go on his bio page. As with quite a number of the shoots I do, the actual shots that meet the brief of the project aren’t that interesting to me. They’re professional and functional, but don’t say anything interesting.
So to satisfy my creative urges I take a few shots while I have a victim under the lens, of which this is one.
One cheeky way to get a nice thoughtful looking pose like this one is to suggest a technique for getting a natural smile to the subject. By looking away from the camera for a moment before the shot is taken, you explain, taking care to keep an neutral expression on your face and then only smiling when turning to look at the camera, a healthy natural smile is achieved, helping to avoid that held-too-long-forced-smile that everyone is so keen to avoid. This technique actually works quite a lot of the time, but it has the added benefit of allowing you to snap off a shot of your subject looking thoughtfully off into the distance in between smiles.
The setup for this shot was to use three Bowens GM250 studio strobes. One with a softbox camera right and in front of and pointing at the subject, one through a snoot camera left and to the rear of the subject to give the edge highlight on the left of the subject’s face and head, and one on a floor stand with a beauty dish to the rear of the subject pointing at the backdrop to give the glow on the backdrop. I’ll post some shots of the setup soon.
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September 15th, 2008 Chris Beaumont
In this shot, I’ve combined the ambient light in the room with an external flash unit (Canon 580 EX II) that’s placed to the left of the scene. The flash unit is lighting the subject (my Mum 
), while the rest of the scene is lit by the ambient light, which is basically that lamp on the shelf, although there was another light on in the kitchen but it wasn’t really adding much light.
Now why would you want to do this, you may ask. The problem is that the ambient light isn’t enough to light the scene evenly. If you expose a scene like this so that the subject is correctly exposed, the settings will have to be so open that you will over expose the lamp on the shelf. If you expose so that the lamp on the shelf is correctly exposed, the settings will be so closed that the subject will appear in darkness.
To overcome this, you introduce another light source that you have fine control over and then balance the exposure settings on your camera with the power settings on the light source to achieve the overall exposure you’re after.
As I’ve said, I used a Canon 580 EX II flash head as my controllable light source - the method for achieving the balance is as follows:
- Make sure the flash is off
- Take a reading that will expose the ambient light (in this case the lamp on the shelf at the back) put your camera into fully manual and set your camera to those settings.
- Then turn the flash on and take test shots, adjusting the power of the flash until you’re happy with the balance between ambient and flash.
Of course, you don’t need to use flash. You can use any kind of light, as long as you have pretty good control over how much light it can put out.
In the image below, my other source was the sun, which was setting to the left of the scene and lit my brother up nicely.
I don’t of course have control over the power of the sun, but it’s a legitimate source of light! Use it any way you can
For lighting techniques like this, and much more besides, head over the Godfather of external flash lighting David Hobby’s Strobist.com site.
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August 18th, 2008 Chris Beaumont
I have made a video tutorial! For me this is tromendously exciting. For you, less so perhaps.
Anyway I would love it if you could have a look and let me know what you think, give me some constructive feedback (I know that I sound like a bell end so there’s no need to point that out) then that’d be super awesome.
I picked a nice easy technique to make a tutorial about to start with - faking tilt shift using Photoshop.
Video Tutorial - Fake Tilt Shift (Quicktime MOV - 1024×768 - 92mb)
Things I have noted that I need to work on in the future include:
- I don’t actually explain what Depth of Field is, I just sort of assume that people will know what I’m talking about - this is probably bad.
- When explaining what tilt shift is via the wonder of wikipedia, I click on a link that I’m looking at for the first time during the tutorial - it’s pretty obvious that that’s what I’m doing, I think, and I sort of pause and stumble a bit when I’m doing it. This also is probably bad.
- The cursor doesn’t show up very well in Photoshop when I’m trying to explain things by motioning with it - could probably do something about that.
- The sound clips nastily a few times - need to run a limiter and normalize!
Posted in Technique, Uncategorized, Video Tutorials | 4 Comments »
August 2nd, 2008 Chris Beaumont
This was an experiment in taking a portrait using a longer focal length, which I’ve oft heard quoted as rule number one for portraiture.
The only lens I have is a 17-85mm zoom lens, and this was taken all the way out at 85mm. The idea is to compress the background and flatten out the space between subject and surroundings.
It definitely works - much more impactful.
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June 25th, 2008 Chris Beaumont
I’ve been listening to the really very good This Week In Photography Podcast for about a month now, and one tip that co-host Scott Bourne dropped in a number of episodes stayed with me as something I wanted to try out for myself.
The tip in question was intended for use as a studio portraiture technique, but we’ve been looking for a way to liven up some of the product photographs that we use at CNET, and I thought I would give it a go on some products.
Scott’s tip is basically this - in order to get really soft lighting from a studio flash head, don’t just use a softbox, but move your subject as close as you possibly can to the surface of the softbox without it getting in your shot. This is a pretty non-intuitive thing to do, as you might expect the light to get harsher the closer it is to the subject, but Scott assured his listeners that the reverse was true, and that the light would wrap around the subject and provide the desired effect.
You can see in the image on the left (click the image to enlarge) the setup I’ve used for these shots. Scott said that you should have your subject only a couple of inches away from the softbox - in practice I found this very hard to do without getting the edge of the softbox in the frame, so it was more like 5-6 inches away. The technique has produced the desired result - a really nice, soft light that you can see in the main image of the HTC Touch Diamond above, and also in the image of the Sony Ericsson W330i on the right (click the image to enlarge).
This one-light technique does have some limitations, however, largely that any details on the opposite side to the light remain in shadow. Scott did say that part of the result of having the subject so close to the softbox would be that the light would wrap-around the subject and do the job of rear lighting. I did not find this to be the case. As you can see in both the product images, there is no edge highlighting, and the rear of the products is in darkness. This isn’t really a problem for the HTC and Sony Ericsson shots, as all I’m really trying to do is show the face of the phone in detail, and the fact that the rest remains shadowy is part of the overall effect of the shot.
I also tried the technique with a digital camera - the Fujifilm FinePix F100fd. With this shot, the lens jutted out on the right hand side of the camera and blocked the light that was coming from the left, leaving the right hand side in shadow and the image looking unbalanced (click the image on the left to see what i mean). To solve this, I asked my lovely assistant Natasha to hold a white reflector (see the image on the right), which bounced the light nicely back onto the right hand side of the camera, allowing the details there to be seen (see the main image below for the results).
Overall I’m really happy with the results from using this one-light technique. The images that you see have been tidied up slightly in Photoshop, but appear pretty much as they did coming off the camera. I suspect I’ll be using this method quite a lot in the coming months
Many thanks to Scott Bourne of TWIP Photo for the tip, and to Natasha Lomas for putting up with me calling her Assistant Lomas.
Equipment used in this shoot
- 1 x Bowens GM250 flash unit
- 1 x Bowens 60cm x 60cm softbox
- 1 x Lastolite reversible reflector
- 1 x Canon 30D body
- 1 x Canon EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM lens
- 1 x Natasha Lomas
Posted in Photography, Technique | 2 Comments »
June 22nd, 2008 Chris Beaumont
I had the pleasure of visiting the Emirates Stadium recently - quite wonderful piece of architecture that strangely seems to lack the blood curdling atmosphere of other stadiums i’ve been to. The sound seems to waft straight out of the top of the stadium. In contrast, the new Wembley, which I went to a few weeks after this, had much better acoustics.
Arsenal were pretty spectacular that day, humbling poor Derby by five goals. I’m not an Arsenal fan, I should say My heart belongs to Liverpool.
Post production notes: This is a panorama made up of 5 different images. Getting good panoramas is tricky. The key, for me, is getting the right manual exposure. I hold the camera up and take exposure readings across the range that I want to photograph, from left to right. Usually you get a range of readings back, as some shots will be darker than others. The trick is to set your camera to something roughly in the middle and then take all the shots at that exposure.
Then you need to download an amazing little application called autostitch which does all the hard work of melding the images together. It really is incredible how accurate it is - i’ve been trying to do good panoramas for years now, and autostitch is by far the most usefull tool i’ve come across. Once autostitch has worked it’s magic, I brought this image back into photoshop and cropped and straightened and did the usual saturation boosts and contrast adjustments.
Posted in London, Photography, Technique | 2 Comments »
June 5th, 2008 Chris Beaumont
Taken for the Strobist Lighting102 “Work That CTO” assignment.
[singlepic=18,150,150,left] [singlepic=15,150,150,right]
To get this shot, I used two Canon 580 EX flash guns (one a 580 EX II, one a 580 EX, which my friend and work colleage Drew Stearne kindly lent me for the evening). As you can see in the image on the left (click to enlarge, nextGen gallery style), the key light was placed camera left, facing in at about a 30-45 degree angle to the subject. I used a snoot which I knocked together out of an old mobile phone box, with the CTO gel gaffa taped over the front (see image on the right). I also used a white umbrella to diffuse the light. To mount the whole thing I setup my Manfrotto tripod and gaffa taped the base of the flash to the tripod head. Ordinarily I’d use masking tape to do the job (gaffa tape leaves nasty, sticky marks on your kit!), but I’d run out and gaffa was all that was to hand.
The second 580 EX was placed on a stool to the right of the camera, slightly behind the subject (image below). I was using it as an edge highlighter, and left CTO off, to give a nice blue tinge to the right edge of James’ face and body. Unfortunately I didn’t have it dialed in quite right and the highlight isn’t as strong as I’d like, but nevermind.
[singlepic=16,150,150,left]
Once I had the kit in place, I exposed for the sky and then dialed the flash heads in until I was happy with the balance. Both flash heads were triggered using the Canon ST-E2 wireless trigger.
For post, I used Lightroom to crop to 2.39:1 aspect ratio, and then did a little selective dodging and burning to boost contrast here and there, but not by much. What you see is pretty much how it came off the camera, which is such a rare occurance for me that I’m really happy with how it all came out
See the rest of the entries for this assignment on the flickr group.
Join the discussion on this assignment here.
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June 4th, 2008 Chris Beaumont
If you’re a photographer and you don’t know about David Hobby’s Strobist blog then head over there immediately and absorb everything his wonderful site has to offer. Pretty much everything I know about stobe lighting (using flash guns to light your pictures) I learned from him.
This is the first strobist lighting assignment I’ve taken part in - it involves the use of CTO lighting gel. CTO is essentially just a light orange filter that you place over lights to warm their colour up. The effect that this has when you combine them with the tungsten white balance setting on your camera is what you see above; everything that isn’t lit by your CTO gel filtered light comes out blue, while everything that is lit by the CTO gelled light has true colours.
What’s so brilliant about Strobist in general is the way the site continually throws simple, pratical ideas at you and encourages you to go out and shoot with them. It’s a tremendously satisfying way to learn.
Subscribe to the Strobist flickr group and join in the fun!
Posted in People, Photography, Technique | 2 Comments »
As promised, the lighting setup from this post.
