Christmas Morning

Someone asked me how I lit these shots I guess I never gave it much thought however it is a nice way to get some great “snap shots”. So here you go. I just used one light for these shots. I used my Sunpack 622 on a radio slave. It's a great big flash and has lots of power but the reason why I used it is the way that it is built I can set it down anywhere without a stand. It's battery grip makes a kind of a stand. That was important because I didn't have the time to set up or test this shot and I didn't want to further the stereo type of camera geek. I found a corner of the room and put the flash down there and aimed it up at the ceiling. I aimed near the middle o the room so the light would rain down at about 45 deg. I needed to pop a few shots to get a good exposure tweak the ISO and shutter till I found a balance between the ambient and the flash. I got ISO 800 f5.6 at 1/60 a second. What is real nice about this light is since it is not on the camera and most of the action is in one place I can shoot away with out much thought to the flash. The Radio slave gives me freedom to move around and as long as I keep the flash behind me and my subjects stay in about the same place I get a real uniform light. The advantage to not having the light on a stand is that I was able to grab the flash and set up when the action moved to another room. Here the flash is to the right of me aimed at the wall and ceiling behind me. I reset the f stop to f/7.1 checked the preview and shot away.

Lighting with refections

Another Jewelry related shoot. I might be getting a rut but I did learn a lot on this shoot. The background or substrate for this shot was a very refractive material that was almost black, a bit like black acetate. The main or key light did two things for me on this shot. Fist it lit the product and second it provided the reflection to separate the subject from the background. This key light was a strobe shot though a 20 degree grid spot and then though a large piece of frosted plexiglass that was being flown over the subject. By bringing the Key Light very close to the plexiglass I could create a small circle of light that would reflect off the substrate. Another way to shoot it was to move the Key Light way back and then put a flag or cutter on the plexiglass to create a hard line. A third way was feather off the light off the plexiglass to create a soft edge on the reflective surface. A secound light is set up low and to the left of the camera. It's job was to create some sparkle to the silver jewelry. It has a 40 degree grid spot and was set to a lower power than the Key Light. In a shot like this it is important to remember that refections are like a rubber balls. They bounce off a surface on the same angle that they strikes it. So I had to angle the lights so the camera could see the refection that I wanted it to see. Here is a bit more tech stuff. ISO was 100 Shutter was set at 1/125 and the aperture was set to f/16 and f/22 I bracketed each shot with the aperture. I turned the image stabilizer off and set the focus to manual. The image stabilizer was having some trouble. I think it had something to do with the reflection. By putting the camera on manual focus I could place the focus plane in the front third of the subject to maximize the depth of field. Well this is a pretty complex shot so if you have any questions please leave a comment. Of course no one is reading this so I won't hold my breath.
Aloha for now

Jewelry Shoot

Well this is a little like the last post. This was not really a head shot the idea was to show off the jewelery. For this shot I used a “Clam shell lighting technique”. I put a soft box over the top of the subject,very close. Then I put a large bounce card at the bottom and popped two small lights off of that. One light would work but I wanted to keep the recycle time down so I used two a there lowest setting. I needed to hit a f/16 to get everything in sharp focus so the power was set at much higher than it was set for the head shot. In addition to the soft box and the bounce card I hit the left and right of the face with a grid spot. This hard light coming from the back gave the face some shape and highlighted the earrings. You have to watch for the light and make sure you don't light up the nose. That can be nasty.

Head Shot

This was a pretty successful head shot I thought. The background was kinda unique. I had shot in the black paper and wanted a different look. I had some hard board laying around the studio, it's a thin flexible board looks like peg board with out the holes. Well its not to heavy so I hung it with a quick clamp and a auto pole. It took about 2 min to set. Then I bounced the background light off it and bumped up the power a bit. I used the shoe reflector so I could create some graduation. I was shooting at f/5.6 and if I had metered it would got about f/11 at the background right behind the sitter. My lens was the 85mm prim so the trick bit is staying on top of the focus. There is very little depth of field with that lens at f/5.6 so it's important to reestablish focus after each shot. The short depth of field gives the background a nice glow and because the background is flat it bounces the light right back at you. The only real problem was that I was using a scrap and it was only about 4 foot square so I had to work to keep it behind the subject. Hey what the hell if it's not a little hard it's not really art. Tech Stuff Key light was a soft box about 3 feet from the subject. The background was 6 feet behind the subject and the camera was about 4 feet from the subject. There was also an umbrella on the right that was a working as a fill light . The lighting style was cross and the ratio was darn near 1 to 1

Lighting 101

Lighting 101 a class for anybody interested in lighting as a photographer. Topics will be on camera flash, dedicated and non dedicated flash, studio equipment, bounce cards, reflectors, and more. This is a hands on class with a minimum of lecture concentrating more on real time learning. The class is limited to 8 participants and will run 6 to 8 on three consecutive Mondays. First class is Monday November the 9th the fee for the class is $100.00 Check my Blog at www.hiphotoworkshop.blogspot.com for more information. You can contact me at john_chisholm27@yahoo.com

Photo 101 Class
Starting Nov 4th
This photo class will cover photo basics like Aperture Shutter speed ISO how to navigate your camera and composition. The class is held at studio F22 in Kaimuki and will run for four Wednesdays. Each Class is 2 hours running from6pm to 8pm. Contact John at 808-285-1907 or E mail at john_chisholm27@yahoo.com

Portrait Professional

Portrait Professional Rocks
this is a new retouch software that I got over the Internet and I think it's real great. The best part about it is that it is real fast. I retouched this same photo in Photo-shop and it took me about 20min to finish I used several layers and a lot of stamp tool and it came out pretty good, I did the same shot in Portrait professional and it took me 2 min. from open to save. That's fast ...super fast. I think the final result is was better than my photo-shop attempt. The Portrait Professional smoothed evened out the skin whitened the eyes and the teeth and removed small wrinkles automatically. Then I used the detail brush”. to hit any thing that it missed. Portrait Professional will also reshape the face to, “make it more beautiful” and as scary as that sounds it does work and you can dial it up or down separate from the skin details or turn it off completely. The best thing about the skin detail is that is leaves the skin texture and removes the blotches and wrinkles so the shot doesn't look over touched or super soft. The software it very easy to use. All you do is map the face with the outline it provided and tell it to process the shot, and boom your done. If you want to turn the effects up or down then just save the shot and move on to the next shot. Like I said it takes about 2 min. for each shot from open to save so you could retouch all of you shots and your client won't ever have to see a single untouched shot. I think it is worth a look you can download a free trial that you can play with it, however, if you want to save anything, it will cost you $60.00. That is a pretty good deal I think check it out at http://www.portraitprofessional.com/
Aloha