Working in Black and White

I hope you’ll check out my books: Photographing Architecture and Understanding and Controlling Strobe Lighting. Please get copies, if you haven’t already. Of course you know that one reason for this blog is introduce the books and get you to consider one of my classes at BetterPhoto.com: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting, Portrait Lighting on Location and in the Studio, Getting Started in Commercial Photography

The first portfolio class went really well. Please let me know if you want to be on the mailing list. Here’s some more information the next meeting is Tuesday May 21, 2013, 6:30 pm room 407 at the Indianapolis Central Library. This is a great opportunity to make a greater commitment to your work and learn more about how others see your work. Still only $20. I look forward to seeing you if you’re near Indianapolis.

I started out with a Kodak Retina and a roll of Plus-X. The first film developer I used was D-76 and I printed with Dektol. I guess you could say that I have my roots in black and white. If you’ve looked at my work you can see that I still see a lot of shots in black and white. I’ve mentioned, in these notes, that I’m doing some work with my 8X10 film camera. I wanted to talk about how I’m working with those images in digital. It doesn’t really matter whether you start with a digital image or a film image; these techniques make better final images. I start with a low contrast scan of my negative. If I were shooting film, for traditional silver gelatin printing, I would want a negative that I could interpret in the darkroom and that is a low contrast negative. Of course my new negatives aren’t really low contrast, because they need high density so I can print them using the Vandyke technique. Even though these techniques aren’t  really new I think it’s important to work with them from time to time.

If I’m starting with a color image, usually from my digital camera, I’ll look at the red, green and blue channels. The differences can be really huge. When I shoot with black and white film I use color filters to get the kind of control. The important thing to keep in mind is that you can make choices about what parts of the picture you want to make black & white. In addition to the red, green and blue channels you can mix the channels together.

I know there are a lot of programs for working with your images, but I use Photoshop for just about everything. It’s big, it’s complex and it offers wonderful control over your image. I mention this because I’m going to show the changes I make to an image in Photoshop.

Scans always have some dust and perhaps the negative has some defects, so I’ll fix those right away. I like to do this at the beginning because I’m working on a gray-scale image rather than a color image so the fixes are quicker, especially with a big file. In this case the file is over 100 megs, because the original negative is 4X10 inches. I want to get the biggest scan I can. Negatives are delicate so it’s best to make a digital copy as soon as possible. I make a flat, long scale, scan to capture as much information as possible. I shoot digital images in RAW for the same reason: to have a copy that can be interpreted as many ways as possible. I’ll save this image, so I can return to it.

I’ll create a new copy of the image, and the first thing I’ll do is open up Levels. I’ll position the sliders at the edges of the histogram. I may move the center slider to adjust the middle of the curve. This isn’t as controlled as using curves, but it makes the image look better quickly. Next I convert the file to RGB using mode. When I printed with an enlarger on silver gelatin black & white paper I used warm toned paper much of the time. Even when I used a neutral toned paper I usually developed in Selectol to warm the paper up a little. I can change the pallet, warmer, cooler or whatever once I have an RGB file. Now I open up curves. I like to depress the bottom left of the curve and raise up the upper right, usually I don’t make big changes here.  This makes the middle tones of the shot a little more contrasty and makes the highlight ands shadows look a little more like a silver gelatin print. Next I’ll add color, while still in curves, by choosing the red curve. For most images I’ll raise the bottom of the curve about 7 units. Then I’ll go to the blue curve and remove about 8 units from the middle of the curve. You can add as much color as you would like this way.

I wanted to lighten the boots, so I used the dodging tool. On the original I also did some sharpening, but that doesn’t really show up on this small file.

I wanted to discuss another thing I like to do in curves. If you take the bottom left of the curve up to the top of the graph you file will be all white. If you pull the center of the curve back down, usually around 1/4 from the bottom of the graph, interesting things will happen.  If you didn’t add any color to your shot it will look a little like a solarisation (also referred to as the Sabatier Effect) an old darkroom technique. However if you did the toning you’ll get a sort of dual tone solarisation, which is really fun. You can see how well it worked here. I usually refer to this as a u-shaped curve.


Please check out my classes at BetterPhoto.com:
An Introduction to Photographic Lighting,
Portrait Lighting on Location and in the Studio,
Getting Started in Commercial Photography
Thanks, John

New Images from Indianapolis Central Library

I hope you’ll check out my books: Photographing Architecture and Understanding and Controlling Strobe Lighting. I hope you’ll get copies, if you haven’t already. Of course you know that one reason for this blog is introduce the books and get you to consider one of my classes at BetterPhoto.com: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting, Portrait Lighting on Location and in the Studio, Getting Started in Commercial Photography

Pictures this week are from a shoot I did at the Indianapolis Central Library. The first portfolio class went really well. Please let me know if you want to be on the mailing list. Here’s some more information the next meeting is Tuesday May 21, 2013 at the Indianapolis Central Library. This is a great opportunity to make a greater commitment to your work and learn more about how others see your work. Still only $20. I look forward to seeing you if you’re near Indianapolis.

I’m still looking for a studio space here in Indianapolis. I’ve checked on a couple of spaces, but they have been too large, and therefore too expensive. I’d like to have the extra space and I could have a couple of offices for related businesses, but I don’t want to have to commit to a more expensive lease. I’m going to continue checking out spaces. My goals, right now, are to have about 1600 feet, with a large commercial or cargo door. The actual studio space must be at least 20X30 feet. I will need air conditioning and heat. You always here “location, location, location” applied to real estate. I think the key is to be sure you understand what you want in a location. I want to be in a good area of town, but I don’t need to be in a mall or on an expensive street. I can be a couple of blocks off the boulevard especially if the parking is good.

I’ve written about processing film and scanning it before, but as I did a lot of work with my 8X10 Toyo recently I thought I would discuss this again. I’ve made some changes in the way I’m processing film for printing Vandykes. I’ll be discussing how I’m scanning the film as well.

I started out working with a two-part developer based on Kodak D-23. The idea of a two-part developer: separating developer and activator, is that you can process almost any film at almost any temperature, which certainly makes things easier. The problem was that the Vandyke process, and most alternate printing processes, requires a very long density range with a very high maximum density. That is the film records the information in a way the makes the whites and blacks further apart, because the printing process tends to push the tones closer together. So I’ve switched to Ilford ID-11 developer. The biggest differences between the two developers is the addition of hydroquinone and the inclusion of the activator (borax) in the single solution developer. I’m using a dilute version of this developer with a very long development time because it makes a longer tonal range. Of course it’s kind of annoying that the processing time is now thirty minutes. If I were going to try and print these negatives on traditional silver gelatin photographic paper it would be difficult, and would require special paper or special handling.

One of the great advantages of scanning a negative is that you make a good scan of a negative that wouldn’t print well without special handling. I set the scan to keep the detail in the whites and black while maintaining a lot of detail and light in the mid-tones. My actual scan looks pretty flat. Of course the scan is in black and white, and I scan in 8-bit depth. I’m making very large scans: 3200 dpi. The first thing I do with these scans is basically spotting. I remove dust and so on. Since the scans are the first thing I do after processing there isn’t much of this. The next step is to make a copy of the scan and convert it to RGB. As many of you know I like a warm color palette. I use curves for this. I will raise the red curve about 7 units at the very bottom of the curve. Then I’ll move the center of the blue curve down into the yellow about 8 to 10 units. This makes my black and white image a slightly warm black and white image. Then I’ll adjust the whole curve, usually by deepening the shadows and lightening the highlights. This is how I make the final image less flat. Of course sometimes the curves will get rather complex. Then I’ll do a little sharpening, usually with smart sharpening in Photoshop.

I used my own shoes

There is one more thing I do with curves: you can see it in the shot below. This is a u shaped curve. I raise the bottom left of the curve to the top of the box and lower the center of the curve, usually to about the 1/4 line. If you do this without adding the red and yellow first you get an image that looks a little like a solarization that you might make in a darkroom. If you change the curve after you change the color you get the two-tone effect you can see in this image. I think this is a really interesting effect; of course it doesn’t work with most images.

This image was processed with a U shaped curve

Please check out my classes at BetterPhoto.com:
An Introduction to Photographic Lighting,
Portrait Lighting on Location and in the Studio,
Getting Started in Commercial Photography
Thanks, John

I hope you’ll check out my books: Photographing Architecture and Understanding and Controlling Strobe Lighting. I hope you’ll get copies, if you haven’t already. Of course you know that one reason for this blog is introduce the books and get you to consider one of my classes at BetterPhoto.com: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting, Portrait Lighting on Location and in the Studio, Getting Started in Commercial Photography

I’m stating a portfolio building class this Tuesday, here in Indianapolis. It will meet at the Central Library at 6:30 pm April 16. As this class goes on it will meet in the studio I’m going to open. I really hope you’ll be interested in this class. I think it is a very good thing to get feedback on your images and to build a group of images that work together. This is going to be a small class, about 10 people, so you’ll want to sign up now. You can contact me by e-mail: john@siskinphoto.com or you can sign-up with PayPal. I’ll be bringing a few shots that will be part of my show at Indiana Landmarks in June. I’ve attached a few of those shots to this blog post. I really think it’s important to hear what others have to say about your images and to learn to talk about photographs.

It looks like I’m going to open a studio here in Indianapolis. I hope to actually write a book about the experience, and you’ll be able to see what’s going on here in the blog. Right now I’m looking for the right location. I have a couple of appointments to go searching next week.

When you want to start a studio the first thing to decide is what you’re going to do in the space. If you’re going to shoot portraits and book weddings you’ll need a studio on the boulevard, whatever the local boulevard is, and you’ll need a window full of portraits on canvas. Of course I have more commercial goals than that, so I want a studio with a cargo door in an industrial park. I expect to need at least 600 sq. ft. of shooting space, and maybe an office and a lock-up area. I don’t expect to ever get a walk-in customer. I would like to be near printers and machinists, as well as graphic artists. I may work with a partner, so I might need another office. A partner drops your costs by 50% which means a great deal. I don’t think I’ll shoot cars, but I want to be able to shoot a motorcycle. I want to keep a low profile. I want to be able to load items into the studio easily. I want people to feel secure when they came to the studio for classes or for jobs.

When I started my studio in Los Angeles, I was in my early twenties, and didn’t have any money. So the choices I made were more about cost than anything else. This was the only choice, but it was a choice that created trouble for the quarter century I had that studio. The location had some problems, but it did have fabulous parking. I can’t really explain how important parking is for an LA studio. Many of the things I built into that studio could have been better. Things like the seamless holders and the rail system I built to hold lights near the ceiling, but the bottom line is that they worked. I wrote this article (www.siskinphoto.com/magazine/zpdf/buildastudio.pdf) a few years ago about building a studio. I expect to do things a little differently now. I will do more articles, and maybe a book, about this new studio.

And don’t forget the books!

Understanding and Controlling Strobe Lighting: A Guide for Digital Photographers
Photographing Architecture
B  Four

Thanks, John

Candlelight Home Tour #2

I hope you’ll check out my books: Photographing Architecture and Understanding and Controlling Strobe Lighting. I hope you’ll get copies, if you haven’t already. Of course you know that one reason for this blog is introduce the books and get you to consider one of my classes at BetterPhoto.com: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting, Portrait Lighting on Location and in the Studio, Getting Started in Commercial Photography

This week I shot another home for the Candle Light Tour of Indianapolis’ Old North Side. This is also a fabulous home, but why would anybody put a home on a tour that wasn’t fabulous? The interior of this home is very different from the last home, more of an Italian flare, and less of a period piece.

I knew that there would be less time to do this shoot, which reduces what can be done. It’s hard to set up to light a room, do the shot and clean up in two hours, which was all the time I had. In this case I did one very difficult shot that included several rooms and a simple shot of the kitchen. And I did leave the house in the required two hours.

This is the final version of the dining room shot. The exposure was 1/30th of a second at f11
and an ISO of 400. Six strobes were used.

This is the first shot. As you can see the dining room opens onto two other rooms, one with a piano and another room on the right. To add difficulty both these rooms open onto other rooms. The room on the right opens onto a stairway and the music room open onto a front parlor, at least that’s what I think it is. Because I knew I had very little time I brought less lighting gear, just three Norman LH2 heads, three power packs (the 200B units) and a pair of Sunpak 120J strobes. Of course I also brought the camera, and a bag of assorted stands, tripod and umbrellas.

I set up the camera at the far end of the dining room, so that I could see into all the rooms I mentioned. The first light was a 200B placed at the opposite corner of the dining room. I used the 60-inch umbrella on this light to give a softer look to the light in the dining room. I also held a Sunpak 120J in my outstretched arm above the camera to help light the dining room. The Sunpak 120J strobes have about half the power of a Norman 200B, but they do have simple automation and can be set to much lower power settings then the 200B. One nice thing is that the two strobes use the same strobe tubes and can use the same accessories. I placed a shoe cover over this 120J; it was a quick way to modify the light.

In the room on the right I set up another Norman 200B. I used a 30-inch shoot through umbrella because it threw light in every direction. Even so my original placement of the light, to the left of the door, didn’t work because the light was visible in the shot. So I placed the light to the right of the door. Perhaps it would be easier to say nearer the camera? Anyway this hid the strobe. This light also gave enough light to show the stairway. The strobe was set to full power. I used a 1/4 CTO filter to give warmth to this light and add separation from the dining room.

Now the biggest problem is the room with the piano. At first I thought the slave wasn’t working because the room stayed so dark. The problem was that room was really dark. The walls are medium gray and the piano is black, so you can see this might be a challenge. I started bouncing light off a white satin umbrella, but wasn’t happy with the shot until I took the umbrella off and used light directly from the strobe onto the room. Even after this I had to lighten this area a little in post-production. By the way this light had a 1/8-CTO filter for the same reasons as I mentioned above.

So that brings us to the front parlor. If you’ve been keeping track you’ll know that the only light I have left is a Sunpak 120J. So I put that on a stand. I used it bare bulb, no reflector at all. I though it would help the separation between the front parlor and the music room. I think it did help. No filter on this light.

If I had more lights I would have used a second more powerful light in the music room, maybe my Calumet 750 Travelite. I would have had lights on either side of the music room. At the time I would have used two lights with umbrellas for the front parlor, but now I’m not sure it would be better. The bare bulb was good, and it didn’t show in the mirror. Did I mention the large mirror in the front parlor? I’m sorry there’s no diagram for this shot, but the diagram was becoming as complex as the shot.

Here’s the shot with the lights turned off. I think lighting makes the picture. Most of the post-production was dodging and burning. I also adjusted the perspective a little and removed a few things at the edges. You can see the image without these fixes below.

I had a few minutes left so I dragged the 60-inch umbrella into the kitchen. I liked this kitchen because it fit into the overall design of the house so well. As people who have taken my class: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting will certainly know kitchens can be a challenge to shoot.

The strobe, with the large umbrella is on the left side of the camera if you’re looking into the shot. I used the full 200 watt-seconds with this light and a 1/4-CTO filter to warm up this side of the shot. I used a shutter speed of 1/30^th of a second to keep the windows bright. The view out the windows wasn’t very interesting. I had to adjust the angle of the chandelier in the picture several times to remove reflections. As before I did a little dodging and burning, as well as fixing the perspective. I also warmed up the shot a bit; I like warm kitchen shots. I think the lighting really helped the shot; below is a version without my light.

Candlelight Home Tour #1

I hope you’ll check out my books: Photographing Architecture and Understanding and Controlling Strobe Lighting. I hope you’ll get copies if you haven’t already. Of course you know that one reason for this blog is to sell the book and get you to consider one of my classes at BetterPhoto.com: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting, Portrait Lighting on Location and in the Studio, Getting Started in Commercial Photography

I am involved with Candlelight Home Tour in the Old North Side of Indianapolis. The tour will happen on Halloween this year. I’ll add more information about the tour in later entries. I am also doing this with a few people from the Indy MU Photo Club. So I have a small audience for these shoots. The plan is that I’ll shoot one room, with my lights, and they’ll shoot the rest of the house. Yesterday was the first shoot, and it went very well, although more time would have been welcome, especially for the people from the club.

I started by looking around the house, and I settled on the dining room, because of the look of the room, and also because of the complexity. I was particularly interested in shooting into the two connecting rooms and the windows at the same time. The second camera angle was interesting because of the way the staircase was framed in the door. It was easier to shoot, first because the lights were set up and because there weren’t any windows.

You can see the position of the lights in this diagram, of course everything isn’t exactly to scale. The A light is a Calumet 750 Travelite set at 1/4 power. It creates the overall light of the shot, and is positioned near the camera so that the shadows are less visible from the camera. I bounced the light off a 60-inch umbrella, with a black back, to create soft shadows. Of course there is a lot of information about placing lights in my book: Photographing Architecture: Lighting, Composition, Postproduction and Marketing Techniques The B light is a Norman 200B modified with a 30-inch shoot through umbrella. I normally don’t use umbrellas in this way, but here I’m trying to add light quickly to a small ancillary room, and this is a quick way to do it. I used a 1/4 CTO filter over the light because I wanted the two rooms on the side of the shot to have different colors of light. Rosco makes these filters that enable you to modify single lights in a shot. Of course you can modify all the lights in a shot in the camera and in post-production. Light C is also a Norman 200B with a 30-inch shoot through umbrella, but it doesn’t have the 1/4 CTO filter so the color is cooler. This fits because there is a window this room. The light moved from the first position, which is shown to the other side of the room to keep the reflection of the light out of the mirror. In the first shot I placed the D light to open up the left half of the room. I used another Norman 200 B and a silver umbrella. The silver umbrella is a little brighter than the white satin umbrellas I use most of the time, but the light is a little harder. In this case the extra brightness helped. I also used a 1/8 CTO filter to add just a little warmth to the edge of the room. When I made the second shot I pulled this light back just a little and changed its direction so it lit the hall rather than the room, position D2. This wasn’t quite enough to create separation on the staircase so I added a Sunpak 120J light at about 1/4 power. I used the standard bowl reflector on this light, so it was hard light, and pretty bright. I like the sparkle it added to the staircase. I just got a couple of the Sunpak 120J units, they are similar to an older Quantum strobe, but use high voltage batteries I already had. I use a lot of older equipment mostly because I started buying strobes a long time ago. I spend a lot of time helping the students in one of my BetterPhoto classes identify the type of equipment that will work best for them. The exposure was f11 at 1/15 and ISO 200. The exposure needed to be long for the windows and the lighting.

I looked at the shots in Adobe Bridge, and of course it was easy to choose the shots I wanted to work on. When I do architectural shooting the last shots are usually the ones I want to use. Next I opened the horizontal version of shot 1 in Adobe Raw. I reduced the blacks to 3, and I moved the fill light to 12. The exposure was a little dark, so I increased the exposure using the exposure slide. Then, since the right wall was too dark, I opened two separate versions of the file. The second version was much brighter than the first, almost a stop. I mixed the two versions of the shot using layers in Photoshop. I also did a little sharpening and use the dodging and burning tools here and there. The result is at the top of the shot, and I think it worked really well. Oh, I also adjusted the perspective just a little to get the verticals right.

This version was handled the same way, except that I used a little vibrance and saturation to make the carpet a little more colorful.

On this shot I increased the exposure a little and added just a little fill light. I only needed one version of this shot, so it was quick to process. I didn’t have as much time to do this shot, so I’m quite pleased at how well it turned out. About the only thing I had to do in Photoshop was use the burn tool to darken a couple of highlights.

Large Format Lenses

I hope you’ll check out my books: Photographing Architecture and Understanding and Controlling Strobe Lighting. I hope you’ll get copies if you haven’t already. Of course you know that one reason for this blog is to sell the book and get you to consider one of my classes at BetterPhoto.com: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting, Portrait Lighting on Location and in the Studio, Getting Started in Commercial Photography

I was going to write about some more handy equipment in this issue, but I decided to put that off. I think I’ll be back to talking about stuff, particularly DIY stuff soon. I had breakfast with another experienced photographer, I don’t want to say old, a couple of days ago. We talked about some of the things we miss from the old days and both of us missed watching a print come up in a tray of developer. Whenever I talk about this with someone we end up using the word magic. When you put an exposed piece of silver gelatin paper into a tray of developer there is no picture, it’s just white paper. As you agitate the print in the developer the image slowly appears on the paper. If you’ve ever seen a Polaroid SX-70 print develop, it’s like that, only better. I know I’ve written about this stuff before, but I find it interesting and, well, magical.

8.25 inch Gold Barrel Dagor on 8X10 film

Photography, before digital was mostly about magic goo. Like baking a cake you followed a recipe, and if everything was done properly, you got a picture. If everything was done well the picture would last. It’s been that way since William Henry Fox Talbot first made a paper negative. Fox Talbot used sodium chloride, table salt to make his images safe in daylight, so salt was the first magic goo. The thing is that few people really understood how the chemicals interacted, but a lot of us understood how to control what they did. Perhaps the person who understood the interaction best was C.E. K. Mees who ran Kodak Labs.

63mm Zeiss Luminar on 6X7cm film

I bring this up because, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m doing some personal work with my 8X10 Toyo camera. This brings me back into the land of magic goo. I’m testing different developers in an attempt to make a more perfect negative. I used Kodak chemicals, both HC-110 and, more recently, Xtol, to develop film for decades. Now, however, Kodak is imperiled, so I need to look for another supplier. It’s amazing how many things that I relied on Kodak for. At breakfast I discussed the Kodak Camel Hair brush with my friend. Kodak made things that couldn’t possibly have made a difference to their bottom line, but made a difference to photographers everywhere, like a good brush for cleaning film holders. I’ve been mixing a version of a Kodak developer, D-23. I got the recipe from The Darkroom Cookbook. Those of us working in the old ways are going to have to make a lot of things from scratch.

48cm Goerz Berlin Dogmar 8X10in. film

The problem is to know if everything is working well. Today I processed test negatives in D-23 and in Xtol. I’ve ordered some ID-11, an Ilford developer, and I’ll process a negative in that next week. I find that I do a lot of testing. I’ve mentioned before that a photographer needs to test equipment. If you don’t test you’ll never really know what you’re doing. Then you’ll not only believe in magic, you’re relying on magic that you don’t understand. I’ve attached copies of the negatives I processed in Kodak Xtol, they have a longer contrast range than the negs I did in D-23.

65mm Schneider Super Angulon 4X5in. film

Another magical area of large format photography is lenses. Although I’ve studied the physics and worked with the thin lens equations, I still find the way in which lenses bend light quite magical. At least as far back as 1840, when Joseph Petzval developed the first portrait lenses, people understood how much the lens affected the image. The goals of lens design, at least until the 1960s, were to make a lens that was sharp, had large coverage, even illumination, strong contrast and was fully corrected for spherical aberration and chromatic aberration and eliminated coma, unless you were trying to make a soft focus lens, in which case none of these might apply. It’s important to understand that you couldn’t, and still can’t, make a perfect lens: all lenses designs are compromises. But older lenses made different compromises so some are considered classic and others crap. I’ve always been very interested in lenses from Goerz and Schneider. I am pleased that I currently own two Goerz lenses, an 8 1/4 inch Dagor from the American version of Goerz and a 48cm Dogmar that is from Berlin Goerz. I’ve already mentioned that I recently acquired a 14 inch Dagor that is a Schneider Dagor. The Schneider Dagors are the last of this noble design. I am also getting a lot of use from my older Schneider Angulon (actually it is old enough to be a Jos. Schneider & Co.) and I also use a wide angle G-Claron from the modern version of Schneider. Of course I also carry a bunch of diopters to create soft focus lenses, for more about these check out this article.

135mm Schenider Xenar 4X5in. film

The pictures this week are all large format images. I put the format and the lens name in the caption.

65mm Super Angulon 4X5in. film

I’m looking at apps for my phone that will help with metering and other aspects of large format photography. So far I’ve found that beeCam Lightmeter is interesting. If you have any suggestions let me know at john@siskinphoto. I’ll put up people suggestions in a future blog. By the way I’m using an android phone, but if you have a suggestion for an iPhone I’ll be happy to pass it along.

Please consider one of my classes at BetterPhoto.com:

An Introduction to Photographic Lighting

Portrait Lighting on Location and in the Studio

Getting Started in Commercial Photography

If you’re in the Indianapolis area there are other opportunities as well. I’ll be showing much of my personal architectural work in June at Indiana Landmarks. Please come look.

More Tools and Tips!

I hope you’ll check out my books: Photographing Architecture and Understanding and Controlling Strobe Lighting. I hope you’ll get copies if you haven’t already. Of course you know that one reason for this blog is to sell the book and get you to consider one of my classes at BetterPhoto.com: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting, Portrait Lighting on Location and in the Studio, Getting Started in Commercial Photography

I wanted to continue with the equipment and tips I was talking about in the last entry. I always enjoy talking about these sorts of things. I feel that the equipment manufacturers often try to make us all create images in similar ways, and I prefer to be creative about making pictures. For instance there are a lot of lenses built with vibration reduction technology, and this is a great thing. But, as I mentioned in the last entry, you can use a chain pod, which will also reduce vibration. The chain pod will work with almost any camera and lens, including the stuff you already own.

I've put a radio trigger on an optical slave so that I can use multiple sets of radio slaves.

The first thing I want to mention, because I just figured it out, allows me to use two different radio slave systems together. I try to buy a lot of receivers when I buy radio slaves because I have a lot of strobes. The problem is when I need even more receivers the signals of the two radio slave systems don’t always match up. I discovered I could put the sending unit from a second set of radio slaves onto an optical slave and trigger both sets of slaves together. One thing I’m looking for now is a very sensitive optical slave to extend the range of my radio slaves. Please note that I am still using inexpensive Chinese radio slaves with good results overall.

Cine foil is a flexible aluminum foil that can be used to block light and as lens hood.

A couple more things that are in my camera case, that I didn’t mention last time, model release forms, cine foil and a GretagMacbeth ColorChecker. Of course it is always wise to have a release form whenever you shoot a person or private property, because there are severe limits on publication without a release. Because so much of my work is for clients there are times I can’t get a release, and so can’t use a shot in a book or article. Here’s a link to a good release form. I really like Cine foil, which is black aluminum foil. It can be used to control

GretagMacbeth ColorChecker, gives me good gray samples and pure colors.

the spill from a light or as a lens hood in a pinch. A couple of pieces take up no room, and can be a real lifesaver. I keep a roll in the studio. The GretagMacbeth ColorChecker is the most accurate gray and color sample I own. Since I always shoot in RAW I will shoot a sample image with the ColorChecker after I finish the set-up. I can use this sample to make the color accurate on all of the shots with the same set-up. You can also use it to help you make pleasing color, because you can see how a particular setting will affect the colors you’re using.

Perhaps I should mention that I have several camera cases, not only do I have cases for my lights but I also have hard soft and small camera cases. I store my main camera in a Pelican case. I really like this large hard case because I can store almost my entire system, everything I would take on location anyway. Also the Pelican case provides very good protection and it is pretty easy to ship. Another good thing: the Pelican cases are ugly. I avoid the fancy cases that draw peoples’ attention; you don’t want to have your camera gear stolen. The problem with a hard case is that it’s difficult to work out of, so I have a couple of soft cases for when I have to keep moving. I have different sized cases so that I can reduce the load when I need less equipment. I’d like to see a case that would allow you to add external sections, so you could create the right space to fit your gear. Of course I have a lot of gear so being able to customize a case would make it easier to work.

Almost all my cases are used. I buy inexpensive used cases from camera stores, thrift stores, surplus stores and even antique stores. I will get a case even when I don’t have anything specific to put in it, if it is cheap and in usable condition. I stuff cases inside cases to store them; otherwise I’d have run out of room long ago. It usually turns out that I need most of the cases I get. I even keep much of my studio gear in cases; you never know when you’ll have to do something unusual on location.

A useful case from Home Depot

Most of my lighting cases have come from military surplus stores or hardware stores. I’ve used a lot of ammunition cases over the years because they are very strong and also waterproof. I often add a 1/4X20 threaded nut to the cases. This allows me to put a stud to mount a light onto the case. This means that I have a short light stand, or a stand I can put on a table, without having to carry another stand. I have a lot of lighting cases because I can’t use a case so heavy that I can’t actually lift it. I also have a wheeled cart, which can make it a lot easier to get lights and cameras to location. Light stands and tripods go into a large duffel bag.

These cases have 1/4X20 threads so I can attach studs for my lights.

Rolling cart, ammunition cases and duffel bag. Ready for a location shoot!

I saw this on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4aE2f07ON4&feature=player_embedded. As a long time fan of Edward Weston’s photos it was nice to see it again.

Please consider one of my classes at BetterPhoto.com:

An Introduction to Photographic Lighting

Portrait Lighting on Location and in the Studio

Getting Started in Commercial Photography

If you’re in the Indianapolis area there are other opportunities as well. I’ll be showing much of my personal architectural work in June at Indiana Landmarks. Please come look.

Handy Tools

I hope you’ll check out my books: Photographing Architecture and Understanding and Controlling Strobe Lighting. I hope you’ll get copies if you haven’t already. Of course you know that one reason for this blog is to sell the book and get you to consider one of my classes at BetterPhoto.com: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting, Portrait Lighting on Location and in the Studio, Getting Started in Commercial Photography

There are things in my camera and lighting case that aren’t cameras or lights. Some of these are pretty obvious: if you have lights you must have light stands. If you have cameras you’ll have lenses. This post is about the other things, some of them are used constantly and others hardly used. But they are all critical once in a while. If you have some favorite gadgets please let me know. I’ll post the information. Because this site got spammed you’ll need to let me know by e-mail.

This is probably my favorite. It’s a vice grip that has tripod sized threads welded onto it. I can put on a small ball head and use it to hold the camera or a light stud and it’s a light stand. Vice grips can attach to almost anything. I don’t know of a commercial supplier for this, so, if you want one, you’ll need to visit a welding shop. Here’s the ball head and the lighting stud. This is the small lighting stud that fits all my lights.

I also have this clip that I put a tripod thread on. It can hold a small light, or notes. By the way tripod thread is 1/4X20, unless you are European.

This is another sort of lighting stud, basically it allows you to mount two lights on a single light stand. This is useful when you need more power. It used to hold four lights, which is why there’s a hole. This is another thing I don’t have a supplier for. Any suggestions?

I know a lot of people have 5 in 1 reflectors but they don’t really appeal to me. I do have a piece of bubble wrap with a silver and a white side. Good as a reflector and extra padding. The piece I carry is about 18X24 inches. I also have a piece of duvatyne in the case. Duvatine is a very black cloth used for blocking light.

This is another old friend: the chain pod. Here’s more information. They’re easy to build. If you must spend the money you can get one from Calumet.

This is another one I wrote about before. It’s a shoe cover that helps modify light. For more check out this link.

I don’t use this much, but it doesn’t take up much room. It has been important on come occasions. It’s basically a raincoat for the camera. Here’s a modern version.

I also have a laser pointer. This helps me focus in low light by giving me a target. I have to remember to check the batteries once in a while. I don’t use it often, but when I need it I really need it.
pointer

The next two items are still in my case, but I find I use my smart phone for both: a level and a flashlight. Especially with architectural photography leveling the camera is important, and I often need to see things in low light.

There are other things I should at least mention:
Model release, adult and child
Property release
Gray card
MacBeth Color checker
Cine Foil
Gaffer Tape. This is actually on the cases, which makes it easier to find

Clothes pins. I use these to hold filters on lights.
Please consider one of my classes at BetterPhoto.com:

An Introduction to Photographic Lighting

Portrait Lighting on Location and in the Studio

Getting Started in Commercial Photography

If you’re in the Indianapolis area there are other opportunities as well. I’ll be teaching a class in commercial photography next spring at Ivy Tech.

Happy Holidays!

Lighting Kits?

Most people buy strobes twice. I’ve said this before. They buy a cheap kit first, and unfortunately most kits aren’t really cheap. They can learn a couple of things from this kit. The first thing they learn, and this is an important thing to learn, is whether or not they enjoy controlling the light in their pictures. What most people want to do with a camera is to capture a scene, to keep it as a memory, or to share with others. A few people want to make a photograph, control the light subject and background to make an image that wouldn’t exist without the photographer stepping in. For instance few families stand in order of height around the holiday decorations, unless someone is making a picture. Since I’ve been teaching lighting for more than twenty years, the people who want to control the light, make good light, in their pictures, are the people I’m working with. As people who read this blog know, I often write about light and I’ve written a couple of books about light Understanding and Controlling Strobe Lighting: A Guide for Digital Photographers and Photographing Architecture: Lighting, Composition, Postproduction and Marketing Techniques. These books might make good gifts for other photographers. You might consider giving a photographer one of my classes: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting, Portrait Lighting on Location and in the Studio and  Getting Started in Commercial Photography Or buying a class for yourself. By the way, all the images this week are strobe image, and most of them are from my books.

In addition to teaching you about whether or not you want to make good light, that first lighting kit often teaches you about what you want when you buy lights again. Of course you learn this by being frustrated by the problems with your first lights. Many inexpensive kits use fluorescent bulbs for light. These can only be used effectively in rooms without other light sources, and they have little or no control over the relative power of the lights. These and other continuous light sources might be good for cheap video lights, but they aren’t much use for still shooting, because you won’t have good depth of field and a short shutter speed. Strobes, or flash if you prefer, are much better lights for still cameras. They give you more light, better color balanced light, and they stop action. Unfortunately there are many strobe kits that have too little light power to do any of this. In my An Introduction to Photographic Lighting class at BetterPhoto.com I ask students to work with a couple of very cheap clamp lights. You can learn the important first lessons from $15 worth of lights as well as from a $300 kit. Plus you can use the clamp lights in the garage when you’re through doing photography with them.

Here’s the way I think about power on a strobe, or even on a continuous light: I might want to shoot in a room that had direct sunlight, and in that case I would want my lights to be much brighter than the sunlight or whatever other light there might be. If my light isn’t much brighter than the existing light than the existing light will define the kinds of pictures I can make. Of course the size and color of the room will have a lot to do with how much power I’ll need. The other big consideration is the way I modify light. If I was using hard light, direct from the strobe, I’d need much less strobe power than if I was using a large light modifier, like a soft box, umbrella or a light panel. Since I often use an umbrella and a light panel together, and the combination is inefficient, I need a lot of power. I find, based on extensive experience, that I need at least 600 watt-seconds to be able to overcome ambient light in most situations. I have and use many lights with less power, but in most situations I have at least one strobe with 600 watt-second to set the tone of my shot. Keep in mind that raising the ISO will raise the sensitivity of ambient light as quickly as the sensitivity to light from the strobes, so a higher ISO won’t always reduce your need for powerful strobes. In my classes I often recommend the Alien Bee B1600. I like this unit because of both the power and the quality.

If I were doing location work, where portability was critical, I would compromise on this. I might also accept longer recycling times, but in most location situations I would really want to have quick recycling. Keep in mind that one common location situation is shooting an event, and picture opportunities can happen very quickly. The first choice for a location strobe will probably be a powerful dedicated strobe from your camera manufacturer: perhaps a Canon 580 IIEX or a Nikon SB900. Many will get additional dedicated units from the manufacturer when they want to do more complex lighting. I can see that a second dedicated unit might be useful for shooting events, but only if you have an assistant to position the light, but for most situations a manual unit would do as well, and it would save a lot of money. I particularly like the Lumopro unit.

Of course the type and quality of the accessories is really important to evaluating a kit. Much of the advantage in a kit is the discount you get on accessories. Unfortunately many kits include poor accessories. For instance I like to see umbrellas in a kit, as I think they are good tools. If the umbrellas don’t have a removable black back they are pretty much useless as light modifiers, because you can’t control the direction of the light. Many people selling kits save a couple of bucks and include only translucent umbrellas, which is too bad. Here’s a list of the tools I would like to have with one light: light stand, barn doors, bowl reflector, 45 inch umbrella with a black back, a light panel and a sync wire or a radio slave. Here’s an article about shooting with one light, there’s a lot you can do! Additional useful accessories include: a snoot or a grid spot, a small light stand and a large umbrella, maybe 60 inches. I already put a list of the basic kit I often recommend on this blog here

Happy holidays. I hope that you receive light for the holidays!

Shooting Large Format at Indiana Landmarks

Since I’ve been writing about architectural shooting lately, I should start off by mentioning my book Photographing Architecture. Available at Amazon and other fine booksellers.

Of course my other book: is also available, why not get the set?

And my classes continue at BetterPhoto.com. I’d like to meet you in class.
An Introduction to Photographic Lighting,
Portrait Lighting on Location and in the Studio,
Getting Started in Commercial Photography

I’ve been continuing to shoot architecture with the 8X10 camera, and I must say I am having a fabulous time doing it. I did a shoot at a building called the Indiana Landmarks Center, which was formerly the Central Avenue Methodist Church. After restoration the facility is just stunning. I did several shots with the big camera. Two of my favorites are reproduced here. These are scans of the Vandyke prints. As I mentioned in previous blog entries the reproductions are very different from original prints. I will be selling originals soon, so you’ll be able to have an original for yourself. I am going back to the Indiana landmarks Center, probably tomorrow, to do some more shooting.

I should add a few technical details, in case anybody is keeping track. Both these images were made with my widest lens: a 165mm Angulon. This lens has about an 85º angle of view, which is very wide for large format, but not quite as wide as a 20mm lens on full frame 35mm film. I’m continuing to process in a two-bath version of D-23. The first bath is 5 minutes and the second just 3 minutes. I’m pretty happy with this, but I do need to increase the exposure a little. I’m using HP-5 film from Ilford currently, but I’m looking at other options. A box of 25 sheets of 8X10 film costs almost $90, so I want to be careful about what I choose. I’m actually shooting two 4X10-inch images on a single sheet of 8X10-inch film. I use a dark slide I’ve cut in half to protect the unexposed side of the film in the camera. This works really well, but I have to be careful not to double expose.

The image on a Vandyke print is made from silver, like modern black and white photo papers. However the light sensitive coating is mixed by hand and the chemical reactions are very different from modern photo papers. The coating is then brushed onto watercolor or other fine art paper. I’ve been having some difficulty coating the paper, but I think I have it figured out now. If you’re interested in more information about hand coated papers and the chemical/mechanical history of photography you should check out The Keepers of Light by William Crawford. Since it is out of print a new copy can be quite expensive, but Amazon offers used copies at reasonable prices.

After shooting digital for the last few years it is really interesting to travel back in time to large format cameras and older printing processes. As always shooting a big camera makes me a more careful shooter when I return to shooting digital.
Please consider one of my classes at BetterPhoto.com:

An Introduction to Photographic Lighting

Portrait Lighting on Location and in the Studio

Getting Started in Commercial Photography

If you’re in the Indianapolis area there are other opportunities as well. I’ll be teaching a class in commercial photography next spring at Ivy Tech.