Lighting Notes - Part 3 of 3 - Softbox

If you haven't read parts one and two yet, you should.

At this point in the shoot I've shifted to a softbox. Yep, that first shot's still back and to the left. You'll notice it's kind of in-between the grid and the umbrella. You still get nice shadow, still get the dark background. The edges are a bit softer though, and it's spreading light over a larger area. In the second one the light's been moved forward - it's basically just to her side - and it's up higher.

I like these a lot. They should be nicer than the umbrellas outdoors - they're not that big - but I bet they'll still catch the wind somewhat. But they provide a really nice quality of light. They do fold up flat so they're portable, but basically into a square. The umbrellas fold up, well, like umbrellas. But they fit better into a bag with light stands which end up basically in the same shape.

The key seems to be to keep them very close to the subject. Compared to a little flash they're huge, but compared to a normal softbox they have... a tenth? a twentieth? of the surface area. You can't put one across a big room and expect it to still act like a softbox.

Lighting Notes - Part 2 of 3 - Grid

If you haven't read part one yet, you probably should.

So the light stand has literally not moved since yesterday's color shot, but instead of a shoot through umbrella there's a Honl grid. It's pretty similar to a normal reflector-and-grid setup except it's smaller. If you're not familiar with that, it's basically turning the light into more of a spotlight.

It does a good job - gives the same feel as my normal setup. Crisp edges, doesn't throw light around, but it's not harsh like purely direct light would be. It does have more of a hot spot in the middle than I'd like, but all in all I can't complain. It'll be interesting to see what I can do with it outdoors.

Lighting Notes - Part 1 of 3 - Umbrellas

I'm just going to do a little three part entry talking about a couple of modifiers I used for my shoot the other day and how the compare to the full-sized versions. If you want more of a full lighting tutorial look for the Lighting 101 series at Strobist.

I'm not a huge umbrella fan but I thought I'd revisit them for this. They're cheap, and outside they tend to catch the wind and fly away (!) and indoors they tend to spew light all over a small space. On the plus side they're the easiest way to have a pretty big light source, and maybe you don't care about light spill for a lot of fill purposes.

Note that I use shoot-through umbrellas - so the light is flashing into the inside of the umbrella, the light shoots out what would be the top if it were a rain umbrella, and that's pointed at the model.

With the color one it's just one light behind and to the left of Maria, with the light sweeping across her. Looks good, but with a more directed source (anything with a grid, really) the background would have been black instead of dark grey. We'll actually see this tomorrow when I use a different modifier from the same position. With the black and white shot it's the same thing, but there's a second light to the right that's sweeping right across her. Note in this shot the light's hitting the background in kind of an unfortunate way - you can just make out the shadow of an umbrella cast on the right hand side of the model.

Basically my conclusion is the same as before - they're fine, they work, but given the kind of control and look I like they're probably not going to be my go-to modifier.

Free International Shipping (mostly)

I dropped the threshold for free international shipping from $99 to $39. This would cover any kind of normal situation - I just left myself a little leeway so I won't end up losing money if I offer some low cost option at some point.

It's just an experiment - if I don't see any kind of sales increase I might as well pop it back at some point.

Domestic shipping's still free!

Reminder

The Samantha pictures are going away tomorrow.

Craigslist

I've posted before about the disturbing trend from unloading your crap on eBay to Craigslist. Well, this cements it.

Collaboration

I get asked sometimes how much direction I have to give the models and what percentage of the shoot is due to which contribution. The answer is that it depends - with a new model I'll literally be demonstrating each pose and having them mimic it. ("Like this, but elegant!") With an experienced model like Maria I can pretty much say "That one's the main light, keep your torso pointed roughly towards that corner, have fun." With some setups and models I can say "Let's do some sitting bendy poses - it should look good as long as you don't leave this area" and then I just keep an eye on them to make sure they haven't wandered out of the sweet spot. With some setups the range of angles they can face and how far they can move is very small, and other times it's very large. It's just a question of experience and communication.

Here I wanted to see how the light looked at a variety of angles without moving it around and remetering and all that so I set the power and the camera so it would look right on her torso at roughly arms length, understanding that her arm would probably burn out, and asked Maria just to play with some different angles. And look at that - the position of her arms, the angle she's looking, the way she's holding her hips and letting her legs angle in - it's all just about perfect.

I didn't take a shot in normal light, unfortunately, but that thing she's holding is a little itsy bitsy softbox held onto a flash with velcro. I think she's holding onto that connection because it was kind of loose (so she's worrying about dropping my gear too). And there's a wireless receiver held onto the other end of the flash with a rubber band. Fancy. There's light leaking out the seams because I wasn't super careful putting it together - I'll be more careful next time but I doubt it will go away entirely without a little gaffers tape. But such is life.

That's a Lumiquest LQ-119 for the photographers out there. Canon 580 EX II flash, Honl speed strap holding it on, CyberSync CSRB+ trigger. You could do it with a cheap manual-only flash (it's in manual mode anyway) and a sync cord instead of the wireless trigger, and the speed strap's just a convenience as well. So if you already own a flash and sync cord we're talking $40 and a model as good as Maria and you're all set. (The background doesn't matter, just don't let any light hit it.) And you could probably cut up some plastic and make something pretty similar to the softbox for that matter. Get a gallon milk container, paint all but one side black... photograhy can be as expensive as you want, but it can be pretty darn cheap too if you're a bit creative.

San Francisco Carnaval 2009

I added some Carnaval Pictures to my much neglected travel/hobby/whatever site. They're just for fun but I thought folks might like to take a look. Note the pregnant gal (pictured here) and the photographer with a Rollei TLR. I'd like to get one - I have a Mamiya TLR (a C330) which is a giant tank of a camera and while it produces wonderful shots the Rollei's just so tiny and cute... and expensive, unfortunately.

If anybody's wondering why we have Carnaval in May, when everybody else has it earlier in the year (just before Ash Wednesday - same thing as Mardi Gras, it's just a regional naming thing) - it's too damn cold in San Francisco to do it any earlier.

New Pictures: Maria Strobist Part I

I'm doing these out of order so this requires a bit of an explanation. As I mentioned, I got some lightweight stands and modifiers so I could use little battery powered lights off-camera. And as regular readers know my go-to model for any kind of a gear test is Maria. She's reliable, easygoing, she's experienced and familiar enough with what I want that I can just kind of tell her vaguely what I want and I can focus on the gear and not her, and she's lovely which sure doesn't help the final shots either!

We did basically a three part shoot. The first was in the studio. Now, the whole point of this stuff is to be able to use it on location, but to really see how the modifiers look and to get used to their quirks it just seemed easiest to replicate a standard nude studio shoot. So we did, and I'll use those shots over the next little while to talk about lighting and what different modifiers look like and such.

The second part was clothed in a couple of different dresses, in my backyard, under a couple of weirdo lighting conditions. I purposefully did some in awful conditions and some not. I played with some different ratios of flash light to ambient light, and tried some different angles. But I just used a single flash, and just a little softbox. Nothing fancy, just doing some testing.

The third part was taking some of the outfits we didn't use in part 2, and photographing them very quickly in the studio, dragging one regular studio light back into the room. It was just a quick way of getting some shots of those outfits without much risk that the new techniques wouldn't pan out or whatever.

So the dressup set I just posted is parts two and three. Basically it's like the bonus material from the main shoot, except I decided to get those done first so it's turned into more of a teaser. None of it's super polished but I think it's fun and thought I'd put it up for a while, anyway.

Don't forget that the Samantha pictures have a limited shelf life!

Art Nudes Blog

Do people know about the Art Nudes blog? It's in a popular format. There's a bunch of blogs and blog-like sites where somebody basically just posts links to art/porn/whatever. But this is the only one I'm aware of that's consistently good - even if not every photographer is my kind of thing you can see why somebody would link there, and it's been around a long time and never changed into a glamour or porn site. Not that there's anything wrong with that but do we really need another one?

They've been kind enough to link to me occasionally, starting I think in 2006. I can't say it's something I read the whole time, but I've had it in my list of feeds for a while and it's been well worthwhile. Check it out.

New model: Samantha

This was a weird shoot. It was kind of an unusual set of circumstances. I started to recap them but they're not that interesting - suffice to say that it was almost more like an extended pre-meet than a normal shoot, and I wanted to try a couple of experimental things. Not only was it only a half an hour shoot (!) but a great deal of what I tried failed badly (and will never be seen by anyone, sorry). In fact this is the shoot that convinced me to abandon on camera flash and invest in some more portable/quickie lighting options that don't involve me lugging studio gear around. I've used studio gear out in the field (literally, in a field) but it's very heavy and slow to set up and not always the best solution.

So the point is I put up a few shots where I used natural light.

The second thing you need to know is that I'm not linking to this other than the blog or the picture-only feed (icon to the right or on any image page). Just the blog (I'll also do a tweet pointing at this entry). The third thing is that I did two things to add an element of excitement - I dropped the price by half, and I'll be deleting the pictures in a week or so. Think "Impulse purchase" and that's what I had in mind. I reserve the right to put one or two in my odds and ends set, but at normal prices.

Past that, I have some non-model related shots to deal with, and then I'll start posting a bit with my initial experiences with the little flashes and my great combo nude/clothed shoot I did the other day.

Update: The experiment is over.

Oh, thank God

The house closed today - we no longer own it. It was looking really dicey for a while - the incompetence of the whole mortgage/real estate industry is astounding. Big shock, I know, but all the new rules haven't helped any. Even the competent people don't necessarily know exactly what the new rules are, or if somebody incompetent is lying to them or not.

It was supposed to close on the 12th. And the 5th for that matter. Anyway, on the 8th in anticipation of having a little extra cash my one splurge I ordered one of the new MacBooks. I'm not usually an order on the first day kind of guy but my Dell piece of crap has literally been falling apart and it's just getting embarrassing. Keep in mind I use it for things like letting portrait clients pick their shots so it kind of needs to be reliable. I got one of the new 15" models - very nice. It's been a while since I've owned a Mac and there's a bit of adjustment but it's just crazy fast. 2.8 GHz but feels much faster than my 3.0 desktop (running XP). And it's just plain annoyingly faster than my old laptop - like what the hell was it doing being that slow. I don't know if it's the OS change or just fast subsystems (this is the first laptop I've used with a 7200 RMP hard drive) but just going by the CPU it shouldn't be this much faster. I suspect it's mostly an OS issue because the desktop machine's a pretty decent machine and it just doesn't have the same snappy feel.

I had a great shoot yesterday - testing little flashes both indoors and outdoors, nude and clothed. I have a nice little two light setup at this point. I'll post some of those once I get Samantha's shoot done, but I'm super pleased with how it went. With the right modifiers little battery powered flashes can do wonderful stuff once you get them off-camera. I have a couple of little things I want to get but it's already a quite workable setup. The point's the extreme portability - the whole two light setup combined weighs a fraction of what one of my normal lightstands weigh. I wouldn't normally use them in studio except while learning - they're for location shooting.

I went to the Ansel Adams/Georgia O'Keeffe exhibit at SFMOMA. They did a great job - lots of his work in New Mexico so you could really appreciate how they approached the same thing from different directions. It'll be there until September - if you're going to be in San Francisco this summer it's worth a visit. If you haven't seen original Ansel Adams prints you've never seen his work - many of the shots are absolute technical perfection and the posters they had for sale were a fun contrast - vast stretches of black that were highly detailed in the originals. I've seen quite a bit of his work before but there were some I was aware of but hadn't seen including a shot he took at Mills College which is a couple of miles from here (Fellow f/64 group member Imogen Cunningham's husband was a professor there and she did portrait work at the college.)

So I think that's the news. Look for the Samantha set soon (it's small, I just haven't had time to sit down and finish it up) and then some posts about the little-flash (aka strobist) stuff.

PS The baby really, really likes "Hoe Down". (Aaron Copland) Can't stand "Fanfare for the Common Man".

So what's the deal with this trash thing?

Hell, I don't know, I don't live in city limits.

For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, San Francisco finally got set up to compost food waste, and in typical San Francisco fashion they're doing this draconian over the top approach where if you get caught putting food waste in your garbage you can be fined big bucks.

City composting of food waste is great. We've had it since 2002 here. You chuck all of your leftovers, yard waste, pizza boxes - pretty much anything biodegradable - into a giant green bin and the city takes it away every week. They use some of it in city parks, and sell some of it to landscaping companies, and they give some of it back to residents who could use some free compost. Works great, and since we also have a big blue bin where you can pitch anything even vaguely recyclable (they sort it out on their end), that also leaves a pathetic little grey bin for actual garbage. It's all voluntary and I think most people are pretty good about it because you can have as many blue and green bins as you want but the grey ones are expensive if you want to upgrade to a larger size.

But throw a banana peel in the garbage bin in San Francisco and it's a $100 fine. And of course they haven't even considered the practical issues - even if you don't believe people will try to screw unpleasant neighbors by putting greenwaste in their garbage bins (maybe leave a bit hanging out so the garbage guys will see it) what if there's some tourist who is walking down the street and throws something in your bin that doesn't belong? Sorry, that'll be $100.

And they wonder why everybody moved to the suburbs...

Customer Service

These two scenarios happened two days apart, two miles apart.

1. We were in an office to do some paperwork. They weren't ready, they put us in a conference room, said it would be 10 minutes. 20 minutes later the baby is getting increasingly fussy and apparently our calming noises were too much because somebody came over and without saying a word shut the door on us. The whole time there's not a word, no "somebody will be with you in a moment", no apology, no explanation, no nothing. 10 more minutes go by - we're there 30 minutes total now, and still nothing. We get up and leave. No apology from them at all.

2. I'm in a pizza place (Pyzano's). At the table next to us, where they ordered just before us somebody comes out to tell them a mistake was made with their order, and they're sorry, and the new one's already in the oven, but it's not going to be done in the 15 minutes promised. 5 minutes later somebody comes out and apologizes again and brings some free delicious-looking cheese bread stuff so they can nibble while they're waiting. Another 5 minutes go by, they get the pizza and another apology. It's been a total of 25 minutes since they ordered and they've received one explanation, three apologies, and some free food.

Pyzano's is always packed. Friday and Saturday nights there's a line out the door and an hours wait for pizza once you get to that point. They could afford to blow off a few customers. Heck, I've seen the owner get into an argument with the customer where the customer used one swear word and got their money refunded and their ass kicked out and told never to return. But if they said 15 minutes, and it's 25, they make sure you know what's going on, and do what they can to make sure you're OK.

Interesting to see how some companies get it and some don't. You would think with the dodgy economy companies would try to pay some attention to this kind of stuff (the apologies are free, and how much could that cheese bread stuff possibly have cost?).

PS Father's day is coming up. Amazon.com Gift Card

Update: We did in the end go back to place #1 to finish up our house paperwork (it was a title company). And they were totally different - actually were ready for us, offered us something to drink, etc. etc. Apparently sometimes the squeeky wheel does get the grease (and I think our agent, who sends them a ton of business, read them the riot act). Hopefully they'll remember that for their other customers while they still have other customers.

Kite Aerial Photography

In the mid 90s I experimented a bit with flying cameras from kites. I'm by no means an expert, or even intermediate. It's just something I did a couple of times - fun, but hard to get really good results. It occurred to me the other day that digital cameras must have made this a lot easier... and I have a perfectly decent point and shoot that has some problems that wouldn't be a problem for this (bad flash, that kind of thing). I Googled around and sure enough there are lots of people doing great work. It's a fun perspective - up high but still low enough you can see small things on the surface.

Basically you need a kite that's large enough to have some extra weight on the line somewhere (my rig's about 12 oz, some are much heavier), and you need to be pretty comfortable flying it. I haven't done a ton of flying largish kites lately so I pretty much get to start back in a field of dead grass (fascinating foreground interest in those shots, I know). But basically you go out there, fly the kite up enough that it's stable, clip a harness with your camera onto the line, and send it on up.

Mine's a braindead harness that just holds the camera mostly level. The camera just takes a picture every couple of seconds. Better harnesses will just turn in place (so you get all angles) or are radio controlled (fancy!).

Sounds simple, but keep in mind this is the kind of kite where you wear gloves so the line doesn't cut your hand open, and you now have let's say a one pound weight a hundred feet up in the air that you could drop on somebody's head. So you do want to go into this with a bit of thought.

So at this point for me there's a lot of flying the camera maybe 20 feet off the ground over something softish and remembering how the kite feels and what to do if the wind changes. I lifted it up maybe 50 feet twice - once pointing back at me and once away. I didn't take any video this time but obviously it's easy enough if your camera supports that.

If you're curious about what this technique is capable of, go to Brooks Leffler's site - he sells gear and kites so you can see what those look like, or for the results just go to his flickr gallery.

I'm not sure how serious I'll get about it this time around but the next steps are basically just to keep getting comfortable in different conditions - fly the camera if I'm confident, fly a dead weight like a bottle of water if I'm not sure, don't fly if conditions are too far off of what I'm used to. I have enough experience from last time to know you have to have the kite flying part pretty well down before spending a whole lot of time/energy/money worrying about the photography part. I'll report back when I get something more interesting to look at, but I thought folks might enjoy learning that this exists at all...

Paperless Tickets

Somebody mentioned to me that the Miley Cyrus tour is going with paperless tickets. I had no idea what that meant so I looked it up and it's clever. They're using the credit card used to purchase the tickets as a code, basically, so to get into the arena you swipe the same credit card. It effectively becomes your ticket.

I used to do a lot of computer security stuff so I still have this awful habit where I hear about something like that and I try to figure out how to fraud the system.

I can see a bunch of pros and cons. You would have to think things through carefully if you wanted to give somebody tickets. If you got sick and really couldn't go it would be a real pain to legitimately sell the tickets. The scalpers have thought of some lame scary scenarios like somebody on craigslist saying oh, 13 year old girls, I'll sell you these tickets but you have to meet me to get in. Like they wouldn't have to meet him to get traditional tickets, only now they're doing it at the venue and not beforehand in an abandoned warehouse. Sounds like an improvement frankly.

Even if you had access to fake/blank credit cards nobody would believe that you would just hand it over so hopefully people will use some common sense there.

The best fraud I can come up with offhand is to use a low value gift card. Maybe buy the tickets on it, maybe not depending on if they have verificiation in place. And then that's your out - the scalper or fraudster says oh, I'm willing to give it up because it's a gift card that's almost used up, just has a couple of dollars on it. So for $500 you get a used-up gift card that may nor may not really have tickets associated with it. So I'm really interested to find out if there's some kind of way to check a credit card # to see if there are tickets associated with it.

It will be interesting to see if it works. I don't know why not - if they have the infrastructure to scan barcodes on home printed tickets, adding a swipe machine probably would be a little slower but not much less reliable. But they've never tried it on a scale this big before, and that's always bad news...

Update: Ah, ha! I got curious and checked the fine print on the Ticketmaster site and they're not accepting gift cards. Guess they thought of the same thing I did. So be warned - if somebody tries to sell you a gift card with tickets associated with it, it's a scam.

Monterey Bay Aquarium - Secret Lives of Seahorses

I love the Monterey Bay Aquarium but their timing was bad on this one. Opening a new exhibit within a couple of days of my daughter's due date. Stinkers. And even going to a member preview while 9 months pregant somehow didn't seem like a great idea (nothing like giving birth in an artichoke field half way to Monterey).

Anyway, part of why we've been trying to go to museums and stretch out car distances and stuff is to work up to a trip to Monterey before the summer crowds get too crazy.

Great exhibit - I didn't do a whole lot of photography since it was fairly crowded and we didn't want to dilly dally (and I know I'll be back in February) but I grabbed a few shots here and there. One's from the seahorse exhibit, one's some of the jellies in the outer bay (I have tons of shots of them already but just can't resist). But getting back to the seahorses - they have a huge variety of seahorse and related species - very cool stuff. As usual everything's lovely - the room lighting, the tank lighting, the informational displays. The attention to detail's very impressive.

It's not exactly a secret - they have 1.8 million visitors a year and Monterey's population is 30,000 so somebody's finding the place - but I think most people don't realize just how often they rotate some of the exhibits so I like to mention it when there's something new.

Awesome

If you want to check out some very clever photography of a couple of cute sisters, check out this guy's site. Very creative stuff.

New Pictures: Hollie Stevens

I ended up deciding that it made the most sense to finish up the last of my sets remaining from March, when I was stocking up in anticipation of my daughter's birth. So here's Hollie Stevens. I'll do Samantha's set next time - 7-10 days perhaps.

Updates

I saw Up. Just an amazingly well constructed film - Pixar almost always does a great job but this one's probably in a two way tie for first for me. There's a fun local reference - Fentons ice cream is a real place. When Oakland was trying to screw them I wrote to the city council defending them. I think a lot of other people did too - they're pretty beloved.

WWDC is starting today and the Apple store is down. I've been to WWDC but not in years - the year I went Gil Amileo just took over as CEO. I'm probably going to get a Mac laptop this summer once the @!#$!@# house closes (it's dragging on forever) so it will be nice to see if the lineup's tweaked or not.

My strobist-style gear has arrived from Midwest Photo Exchange (who I really like). It's fun - I just have an ancient 550ex flash for now on a little light stand with a little umbrella and it's triggered wirelessly when I take a picture. The point is that it folds up into an itty bitty carying case and I can take it anywhere including outdoor shoots.

I also started checking into a kind of photography I was doing in the mid 90s and set aside at some point. I just ordered a couple of little odds and ends I need to start doing it again. It's one of these things where I was thinking "Hmm, I bet with digital cameras that's a lot easier" and sure enough there's lots of folks doing it. It deserves its own post so I'll do that when I have some results in a couple of days (hopefully). Then large format's probably the next thing in the queue.

I'm shooting for a new set up on Wednesday but no promises. The regular business of doing model and portrait work continues (and I had a great portrait shoot Friday - maternity shoots are always so fun) but I find that having a project or two like the stuff above helps keep things fresh. But that's part of what's so cool about photography - if you get stuck you can always go do macro work or shoot bears or try some astrophotography. Sometimes it costs a lot of money but often you can rent...

Can't wait!

I've been checking now and again and they finally have Coraline up for pre-order on Amazon. Includes both 2D and 3D and four pairs of 3D glasses. Gotta love it.

I saw it in the theaters on a whim - I just had some vague idea that it was supposed to be good, and nothing else was playing, and I had some time to kill before being somewhere, and what the heck. Loved it, got the book, loved that too.

Post Shoot Notes: Samantha

Since my backlog's basically gone, and since I'll probably edit this shoot first since it was just a quickie I thought I might as well go back to my traditional post shoot notes. As always, I just grabbed a shot based on the thumbnails.

This was a location shoot (meaning in this case indoors but not at my place) using mostly natural light but some shots use on camera flash, typically bounced against a wall or the ceiling or something. It was maybe 30-45 minutes of shooting and a normal shoot is 2-3 hours so it will probably be a short but sweet set.

I'll try to get them done around the weekend or a couple of days later but no promises.

The one odd thing about this shoot is that this is the first model I've shot nude who was born in 1991. I've shot slightly younger models but I don't work with 18 year olds that often and apparently either I hadn't yet this year or it just hadn't clicked but I definitely had a little moment of "That can't be right."

I'm feeling old.. but it's going to be worse next year. 1992 is the year I graduated from college and got married.

New Pictures: Finch

Here's Finch, this time at the Albany bulb for those of you who know your bay area shooting locations. This is the 14th nude shoot posted this year so I'm pretty much exactly where I want to be schedule-wise.

I have one more nude shoot and some non-nude stuff I've already shot that I need to go through. I have a mini-shoot scheduled for Monday but regular readers will know not to count chicks before they're hatched (or until they sign a model release?). It will be a bit different so we'll see if it works or not - it's possible that not a whole lot of pictures will see the light of day. Basically I'm going to allocate an hour to something and we'll see what happens.

The other bit of news is that I finally bit the bullet and ordered some odds and ends that I need to get a small flash (the kind that's designed to stick on top of a camera) operating remotely. I had most of it, and I've been meaning to play around with strobist-style techniques for a while, but between one thing and another I never quite got everything I needed. Now, I have a battery unit for my big studio strobes, and I've used them outdoors but my taste in studio gear tends towards big heavy steel c-stands and the like. The idea here is to have something more portable that can be carried to location shots that aren't near a car so I don't have to purely use available light. Should be useful, and in terms of learning new stuff there's just enough there to be fun, but not so much that it's too much to deal with right now given everything else going on in my life right now... I think things need to stabilize a bit before I pick up my 4x5 camera again...

Anyway, hopefully I'll have the stuff in a few days. Just one light worth for now, since that's how many manually adjustable flashes I have, but if I enjoy it I'll get a second flash and enough goodies to make a little two-light system.