Photo Notes A place to talk about making images.

And I am continuing the shameless plugs at the beginning of the blog. My book Understanding and Controlling Strobe Lighting: A Guide for Digital Photographers is on Amazon.com. The wonderful folks at Shutterbug magazine are printing a 3 page excerpt in the next issue. Please pick up the magazine.  Here is a sample chapter from the book. Of course I still hope that you will consider purchasing my fine art book B Four: pictures of beach, beauty, beings and buildings. Frankly purchases of this book mean a lot to me, and it is also a fine gift for any occasion. As you know I teach for BetterPhoto.com. I really hope you’ll sign up my class: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting. Sign up are very good this month!

I used a Rosco CTO for the background. The light came from a snoot which was covered by a piece of cine foil with cuts in it.

I’ve continued to work on the projector powered by a strobe. The results have been very effective, as I demonstrated in the last blog entry. While the strobe projector is very effective for putting light or an image onto a face, it isn’t giving me as much ability to control background light as I would like. People used to project images behind a subject before Photoshop. Now, it’s easier to drop in a background, after the shot, using Photoshop. However it is really good to be able to add color and dimension to a muslin or canvas background. You can change the background color easily this way and make the background lighter or darker in different parts of the shot. The strobe projector I built isn’t really bright enough to do a change a background unless

This time I used a magenta gel and a piece of foil with holes cut into it.

the light on the subject is very low power. You can do this, but it isn’t what I really want. I am hoping the strobe projector will show up in a magazine article soon. For the background on this week’s shots I have been putting cine foil over my snoot and cutting various openings. I am attaching a picture taken with a piece of cine foil with straight cuts, which has a warm filter. And there is another shot using cine foil with several holes in the foil. This second shot has a magenta gel, which makes a very saturated background. Of course both shots are made on a simple mottled gray muslin background. This is really a fun way to change the background. I should point out that it only takes seconds to change the cine foil and/or the

The foil and gels I used for these shots

colored gel.

For these shots I used a strobe set at 250 watt-seconds pointed into a 45 inch umbrella with a black back. This was the light for the subject. I used a gold reflector on a light panel frame on the opposite side of the face. I also used one more panel, with a black cover on it, behind the umbrella. This reduced white light spilled on the background.  If you get light from the umbrella on the background it will mix with the colored light and reduce the saturation. The strobe in the snoot had 1200 watt-seconds when I used the CTO gel and the foil with the cuts in it. For the other set-up, with the magenta gel, I used 800 watt-seconds. The camera was set at f8 and ISO 100. This really works much better than my tests with the projector light. In the tests with the projector the aperture was at f5.6 and the power was set at 2000 watt-seconds, and the background was still to dark.

The cover of my next book. This book will be available in the fall of this year!

I hope you’ll suggest my BetterPhoto class An Introduction to Photographic Lighting to other photographers you know, or perhaps you’d like to give it as a gift? Amherst media sent me the cover for my second book, you can see it above, of course you can still look at my first book on Amazon . Also if you look at the March issue of Shutterbug you’ll find a three page excerpt form my book. I am so pleased that they did this.

All the light is from the strobe projector using a cookie of little holes. I think the light in the eye makes this wonderfully effective.

And I am continuing the shameless plugs at the beginning of the blog. My book Understanding and Controlling Strobe Lighting: A Guide for Digital Photographers is on Amazon.com. It got as high as number 15 in photographic lighting books! And there was much rejoicing! But is is dropping now, so you need to buy a couple of copies, please! Here is a different sample chapter. Of course I still hope that you will consider purchasing my fine art book B Four: pictures of beach, beauty, beings and buildings. Frankly purchases of this book mean a lot to me, and it is also a fine gift for any occasion.  As you know I teach for BetterPhoto.com. I really hope you’ll sign up my class:  An Introduction to Photographic Lighting. Sign up are very good this month!

When we last saw this project, back in December, I showed some of the parts I used to make the projector. The most involved part is the tube that holds the lens and the series 7 filter holder. The

This tube is the key to making the projector work.

Series 7 filter holder is used to hold the cucoloris, or cookie, that creates a pattern, or a slide that is used to project an image. You can see where it fits on the image of the tube. The finished version of the tube is 4 inches long. There is a slot that is an inch and a half wide and 2 and a half inches long cut into the side. I cut the slot with a Dremel tool. This is quick, but you do need to be very careful. Dremel saw blades can break and fly at you. There are three other cuts made into the front of the tube that are the same light as the shot. These make the tube expand enough to hold the lens. On the other side I ground out the interior of the

The Series 7 filter holder and a couple of cookies. One cookie is cut and the other is blank

tube enough to hold the filter holder. You could do the same thing with 52mm filters, but you would probably have to remove the glass filters. I used the Dremel tool to do the grinding. Dremel tools are very versatile.  There is nothing special about the Series 7 filter holders, except that I had a couple of them that weren’t doing anything. You would probably need two 52mm filters so you could put the cookie or the slide between them. I made the cookies from cine foil. You would also need to cut a mask of cine foil if you wanted to project slides, to keep light from spilling out the sides.  I cut the foil with and X-Acto blade and other tools. This tube is really the only significant part you’ll need to build and it isn’t terribly difficult. Although I did build four versions before I got it right.

I used a cookie with slits cut into it.

The projector is not very bright, especially with a cookie or slide in place. At ISO 100 and 10 feet, without any cookie the meter reads f5.6, so the guide number would be 56. Most of the time you won’t be using the projector very far from the subject, so it is bright enough. By moving the lens in the tube it is possible to go from a hard edge, or if a slide a sharp image, to a soft edge, or if a slide a soft image. This gives you considerable control over the image. The difficulty is making changes to the projected image while shooting. If the projector is near the camera, as it was for the demonstration images, it can be reasonably convenient to shoot. If you are projecting a background or lighting the side of a subject than it is more difficult to arrange the image. A remote control release for the camera might be useful, or it might be helpful to work with an assistant. I am still working on ways to use the projector to create a background, which has been difficult. The problem with backgrounds seems to be the low power level of the

I really like the effect of the slits cut into the cookie. It is simple and effective. There is a filter over the projector and over the background light.

projector as well as the difficulty of getting it in place. Part of what makes this difficult is that when you are at the projector you can’t also be looking through the camera, so what looks right might not be right.

The samples this week were made with simple cookies. One is slits cut into the cine foil and the other is just holes. I used filters over the projector lens for color. On a couple of the shots I put a strobe behind the subject to add light to the background. I used colored gels on the background light as well.

I still offer a class at BetterPhoto, I hope you’ll consider taking it: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting And please consider my book: Understanding and Controlling Strobe Lighting: A Guide for Digital Photographers.