Photo Notes A place to talk about making images.

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December 4, 2009

Projector Blues

Filed under: Film Technique,Lighting Technique — John Siskin @ 10:38 pm

Blue Light Years ago I went to a lecture about lighting, I think it was put on by Kodak. The photographer had these awesome little lights, hot lights, with built in baffles that allowed his to precisely control where the light went. Similar to working with barn doors, but with a harder edge, and more control. The lights had lenses so your edges could be harder or softer. I thought these lights had to be the best thing ever for tabletop work. The only problem was that I didn’t own them.

I had already seen work by Moses Sparks that used a slide projector to project images on top of the human body. You’ll understand that this was in the dark ages before Photoshop. So it suddenly occurred to me that I could get the precise lighting that I wanted with the slide projector. You can see an article about doing this kind of work, with film, at this link.

When I first started working with digital cameras one of the hardest things to give up was the creativity the slide projectors gave me. Because I could control the placement of the light, project color and images, and control the brightness of the light, the projectors were awesome tools. Digital cameras, the several I have owned anyway, can’t keep the shutter open for ten minutes, while you turn on and off timers. Red Light

Recently, I got an upgrade firmware package for my camera that improved the way it works with long exposures. While it is not a ten-minute exposure I can now do a shot at one second, before I had noise problems with anything longer than 1/20^th of a second. So I can now use the projector to add special lighting effects to portraits and other shots. Really a great thing! White Light

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Thanks, John

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November 27, 2009

Photograpy, just an art?

Filed under: Commercial Photography,Photography Communication — John Siskin @ 8:31 pm

When I was in college I used to have discussions with my roommate about photography and art. Pedro thought that photography wasn’t an art, and of course I thought it was. I have not gone over to Pedro’s point of view, but I want to point out that photography is more than just an art. Photography is a language. It is a way of communicating information, the information may be about anything from spark plugs to another planet. Painting, at least picture painting is only an art form. Could you imagine putting Pablo Picasso in a U-2 spy plane and having him overfly Cuba in the 1960ies? Perhaps we could send Thomas Kincade to Mars and have him send back mass-produced delicate canvases showing the light on Mars? Photography is much more than an art, it is integrated into the way we see and communicate.

I used a microscope to make this shot.

Perhaps we should categorize photography as art or craft, and some things as both. Certainly photos taken by a spy plane are all about the technology, the craft, of photography. When someone hike 10 miles to get a shot of a waterfall they are probably try to create art. When someone spends all day in a studio taking a picture of a flower, it’s because they want to do art.

Buckhorn Falls in Angeles Crest. I have shot these falls several times.

I think there are problems when we talk about certain kinds of photos: perhaps those we class as commercial art. If I spend all day taking a shot of a Harley-Davidson is that art? Honestly I don’t know. Perhaps it has to do with how I use the image, but that seems crazy. So if I sell a Harley poster it’s art but if I sell the shot to Harley it’s commercial? How about family portraits made for money or executive portraits? Most photographers do a lot of work that is hard to describe as art, but that doesn’t reduce the value of the work. Photographs can communicate, and be important, without actually being art.

Indian Motorcycle, click on image to see an article about this shoot. You may need to right click to download.

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For information on shooting a motorcycle click

Thanks, John

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November 18, 2009

Editing

Filed under: Looking at Photographs,Photography Communication — John Siskin @ 10:27 pm

Made with my custom Super-wide camera that uses a 28mm Nikkor lens on 120 film

Editing photographs is not only difficult, sometimes it is heart wrenching. Often each image seems a special and unique expression of your creative vision, how can you bare to part with even one. Get over it; this feeling is personal. No one else will ever experience your photographs the way you do. You remember the day, what happened before and after, you remember the client and you remember whether you got paid. The viewer doesn’t experience any of this, and for the photograph to be effective for the viewer you have to give him/her an image they can perceive in their own terms. That is the purpose of editing. I am going to attach some photographs I made to this blog. I designed and built the cameras that made these images. Because of that intimacy no one else will ever perceive the shot in the way I do. I hope they will like it, but they will inevitably have a different feel for the image. You may think editing is time consuming, and it is, but it will make you a better photographer.

The first step in editing is shooting. You need to shoot a lot of images. The last head shot job I did was around 300 images, but on a product job I might shoot only 2 images per product. Since we are now working in digital it is important to always shoot that extra image, or extra dozen images. It is always easier to shoot more than it is to go back. Although Eisenstaedt was famous for just taking a few shots for an assignment, we will do better not to emulate him.

Made with a custom camera that uses a Speed Graphic body and a 30mm lens

In order to edit effectively we need to be ruthless. The first step is to remove everything that is clearly a mistake. With a portrait type job this is generally pretty easy. A mistake is an image that doesn’t grab your eye. A mistake is an image that is out of focus. A mistake is an image that is not focused on the subject. A mistake is an image that is blurry. If you shoot in raw a shot doesn’t have to be perfectly exposed, but if the shot is two stops from perfect exposure the shot is a mistake. If the strobes didn’t go off it is a mistake. Get rid of all this stuff, you should have plenty more images. I understand the Photoshop CS 15 will be able to fix everything, but that hasn’t happened yet. Photoshop 16 will be able to make your entire childhood perfect. Yes there are many mistakes you could fix, but you could spend days working in Photoshop. It is better to move through the process quickly. But you might as well save these images somewhere.

Step two is to get rid of everything that makes the subject look like a doofus. So that shot where the subject is checking out your shoes? Gone. At the same time you should part with all the shot where you awkwardly cut off body parts, hands cut in half and so on. Yes a lot of these shots could be saved. If you shot enough you shouldn’t need to save them.

I used a custiomized Graphlex SLR with a 180 soft-focus lens from Fuji

I used a custiomized Graflex SLR with a 180 soft-focus lens from Fuji

This should do it for negative editing; that is removing images because of problems. With any luck you have removed any where from 20 to 50 percent of your shots. Good. The other thing you have does is to look at all of the images that are left at least twice, well you went through the images twice didn’t you? That familiarity with your images is going to help a lot in the next go round. When you look through the images this time, look for images that are particularly fine, not just acceptable. They should have something special they may need cropping or other minor work, but the quality of your vision should be apparent. Also you want to look at the images as if you didn’t shoot them, as if you were seeing them not editing them. Look for an image that really connects. Certainly you can keep images you are unsure about, but you should end up with less than 10 percent of the images you started with.

Made with a digital camera mounted on a customized 4X5 Toyo C

I do this in Adobe Bridge, but there are certainly other programs that would do as well or better. As I go through each step I display the images larger, so that I get a better feel for the shots. The next step is to bring the images into Adobe Raw. Raw gives me a better look at each image, and I can begin the image processing. In raw I can do batch corrections on color, contrast, saturation and so on. I can also crop my images and do a variety of individual corrections. I will do my final choices on editing in raw. An image may get left behind at this point for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it is something I could fix, but don’t want to, or perhaps two images are very similar.

Finally I will open up all of the images that made it through raw in Photoshop. While I will rarely remove an image form the group in Photoshop I will perfect the images in Photoshop. This is where I will sharpen and do other detail work. Now finally, if the client asks for just there shots (not likely on a head shot) and I don’t have any personal reasons to make a choice, I can say enie minie moe….

Made with a lens I built

You can download a copy of my article on building cameras at this link: www.siskinphoto.com/magazine/camerabuilding.pdf

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November 8, 2009

Fluorescent Lights?

Filed under: Basic Photo Technique,Lighting Technique — John Siskin @ 5:16 pm

I have written elsewhere about fluorescent lights for photography. I didn’t say anything complimentary there, and I don’t intend to say much that is nice in this blog. So if you really love the new compact fluorescent lights as studio lights, it might be best to stop now. Still, the results of my tests were somewhat less dire that I had anticipated.

I was finally able to borrow one of these lights (a Top Lighting PB-85 120v 85 watt) so that I could run tests. I certainly didn’t want to buy one. I did several tests: first I used my spectrometer to look at the color distribution of the light, that is look at the light spread into a rainbow. My spectrometer is made from cardboard, a couple of razor blades and a small piece of diffraction grating. It is not a tremendously accurate device. It was not designed to be used with a camera. Still I am including pictures of daylight and of the fluorescent tube. You can see that daylight is continuous, smooth. The fluorescent has big bright lines and big dark lines, so no continuous spectrum. So the nature of this light is very, very different from daylight.

Fluorescent Spectrum, notice how the spectrum is banded rather than continuous

Sunligth Spectrum, it is smoother in the spectrometer.

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In my second test I made a picture of a Macbeth Color Chart with strobe light and the fluorescent light. The color of the two shots was very different, so I would not want to use the fluorescent light with my strobe. However when both shots were white balanced, in the computer, the shots were very similar. Really the fluorescent tube was a closer match than I would have expected, after the white balance. Please keep in mind that white balance will not enable to correct a shot for two different light sources.

Fluorescent version of the Color Checker, white balanced.

Strobe version of the Color Checker, white balanced.

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In the third test I made 10 shots at a shutter speed of 1/180 to see if the light would be consistent on all the shots. I did not expect this to go well. Fluorescent tubes are supposed to vary with the cycling of alternating current electricity. In this country the power cycles 60 times a second. So 1/180 should be only part of a cycle. In this shot the color did not vary by as much as 1%, really quite impressive. Since the shots all looked the same, I am not including them.

Finally I compared the overall quantity of light to a 600 watt Smith Victor quartz light. The quartz light was 8 times more powerful than the fluorescent light. Although I could use an array of these lights to increase power, I could not get the power and hard light effect that I can get from quartz lights.

On the whole the light performed better with color than I had anticipated. However the unusual spectrum leaves me suspicious that there will be problems in the real world, especially with fabrics. Certainly the low power disappoints me, but if your camera performs well at high ISO levels, this may be less of a problem for you.

Thanks, John

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October 26, 2009

FABULOUS NEW BOOTY LIGHT!!!!!

Filed under: Basic Photo Technique,Lighting Technique — John Siskin @ 5:36 pm

Sand Canyon Home There are a lot of lighting products on the market, and many of them are mostly hype. There are only so many ways you can manipulate light, and few of them are new. So you can make a light source larger with an umbrella, soft box or a light panel. If you want to put light in just one part of an image you will probably need a snoot, grid spot, or barn doors. There are other ways to do these things, but they do about the same things. Changing the name doesn’t change the product much.

One of the things people have tried to do for a long time is to make the little light source on a camera mount strobe, like the Nikon SB 900 or the Canon 580, act like a bigger light source. When you have a large light source the light hits the subject from all points of the source, so you get less shadowing and softer transitions between highlight and shadow. Vivitar introduced a bounce card for the 283 strobe in about 1976, so the manufacturers have been at this for a while. The Vivitar bounced all the light off a card, simple but didn’t change things all that much. Later designers bounced light off the walls of the room, so that there was a lot of fill light. This was more effective. So you see products from Sto-fen, Lumiquest and Gary Fong. There are differences in the way they move the light around and where they move the light, but the idea is similar: some light goes directly to the subject and some is bounced. Now this idea works, and it is probably the best idea for event photography, and will work well in other situations.

Taken with a direct flash. See the hard shadows and the high contast? What a difference the BOOTY LIGHT makes!!!

Booty light shot!!

I have decided to introduce a NEW and FABULOUS way to spread light from a camera mount strobe, or many other kinds of strobes. Did I say it is NEW and WONDERFUL? I have to make sure I use enough hype here. It is the BOOTY light, yes this FABULOUS new light is actually a shoe covering. You can by TWO for only 79¢, YES less than a dollar. That makes these WONDEFUL, NEW units less than one half of one per cent as expensive as a Gary Fong Lightsphere II. Didn’t I say this is FABULOUS?

Seriously these are useful tools. I have used them on several occasions, because I needed to be quick of I needed a camera mount strobe to add to a monolight on a stand. In addition to the before and after shots, necessary to introduce something as WONDERFUL as this, I have a shot from a recent project where I used the booty light and just one other strobe with an umbrella. I had to work quick on this shoot. So think about it: Don’t you need a Booty light? Here’s a link: http://www.envirosafetyproducts.com/product/Tyvek-Shoe-Covers.html You can also buy them in quantities of over 100, even CHEAPER!!!

Thanks, John Siskin

Ps. One size fits mostly all! WONDEFUL!!!

Pps. Collapses for easy storage and WILL KEEP THE CARPETS CLEAN!!

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Booty Light on a Norman 200B, one size fits almost all!!

Booty Light on shoe, It's dual purpose!!

Another location shot with the BOOTY LIGHT the booty light is the only light on the outside of the door, the strobe with the umbrella is in the room past the door.

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October 12, 2009

Natural?? Light

Filed under: Basic Photo Technique,Lighting Technique,Photography Communication — John Siskin @ 5:41 pm

Taken with both continuousl light and strobes. Link to an article about the Tools of Light

I’ve seen a lot of photographers, and some of talented armatures talk about natural light. So maybe I should too. I hate the term natural light, simply because in our culture natural is always good and artificial is always bad. When was the last time you saw a product advertised as NEW! Now with More Artificial Ingredients!! So my first problem is that when someone speaks of natural light they are making a value judgment about light sources. Second, people aren’t always consistent about the term; really natural light ought to be used to describe sunlight, moonlight, starlight, and less useful things like molten lava and the back end of lightning bugs. If you use only natural light you are not going to take any pictures more than a few minutes after sundown or, if indoors, never very far from a window. Of course this limits the pictures that you take. Many people seems to include, in their use of the term natural light, any light source that happened to be there, including such poor quality light sources as fluorescent light and sodium vapor light. I would prefer terms like existing light and ambient light or even found light. We could call the light we make for a shot created light or controlled light, or even perfected light.

I think that the real problem that people have with making light is between continuous light sources, like quartz lights, and instantaneous light sources like strobes. There is no question that it is more difficult to place and modify lights that you can’t see. So often photographers are confused because the shot they see has no relationship, or little resemblance, to the shot they took with the camera strobe. Of course the reason is that the strobe was in a place no light came from, and had a quality of light that wasn’t present the moment before you took the image. It’s as if you switched off all the lights and put a spotlight on your head. So if you are going to get strobe to work for you, you need to learn take control of the way the light works. It isn’t the fault of the light, and it isn’t because the light is instantaneous the problem exists because the photographer expects the strobe to work by magic. Instead the photographer must understand how light can be controlled and used. Then we will make better images because we can control the light.

I should also mention that while you can do things with continuous lights, there are problems that only strobes can solve. Strobes are much brighter than other sources, many strobes are brighter than daylight, so you can control a mixed light environment. Also strobes have a true daylight color balance, so they are easier to use with daylight. Strobes are smaller and lighter than continuous lights with equivalent power would be, and they consume less power.

Link to an article about one light portraits.

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October 2, 2009

What Ratio?

Filed under: Lighting Technique — John Siskin @ 2:55 pm

First I wanted to start with a picture from a recent shoot. This image is part of a fund raising. I used nine lights and about 3500 watt-seconds to make the image. The alpha channel was made at Deepetch. Since I’m writing this time about a subject I’ve discussed before I wanted to add a new picture, here, at the top of the blog.

I wanted to talk about talking about lighting. I really hope that at least a few of you will want to talk back about this. Here’s the basic problem: we need to use language that is actually descriptive of the photographs we make. By way of example, Adams often wrote about the “luminous quality of the light.” While this sounds great, I’ve never felt that it was really very definite. Would glow have been better?

The example that is the most trouble to me, as I teach lighting, is using ratios to describe lighting set-ups. When people first stated discussing lighting in terms of ratios they used hard lights, that is just the light in a reflector, no soft box, no umbrella, no light panel. If you think about the design of the lights as a clock face then the subject was in the center of the clock face, the camera and the fill light are at noon and the main light is at 3 or 9 o’clock. If you do this, then the right and left side of the face will have very different light values, and the transition will run down the center of the face. The difference between the brightness of light on the two sides of the face will be in direct proportion to the strength of your lights. If you make a light brighter, whether, by moving the light closer or raising the power there will be a direct result in the corresponding part of the portrait. I should measure the light falling on the subject; the ratio I am really interested in is the light reflected by the subject. However if I measure the light falling on subject, an incident reading, I get the same results. I am attaching an image made with hard lights. You can see how different the two sides of the face are.

3:1 ratio with hard light

All this is fine. The way the lighting is described, and the results of the light, are actually closely related. The problem comes in as soon as you start using large, or even medium sized, light sources. Now there is no relationship between the ratio and the way the subject looks. You’ll note that I said, NO relationship, not some kind of qualified relationship. First the two sides of the face are not lit differently, but the difference between the two sides is a softer gradation, perhaps there is no difference. So the light on the two sides of the face can not be described as a ratio. You could say that the power of the lights can be described by a ratio, and you can measure that. The problem is that this ratio, based on incident measurement of the light, has no direct relationship to the way the image looks. What describes soft light? The size and position of the light are descriptive. Please understand that I like soft light better than hard light, but I want to describe light accurately. Do the ratios tell you anything? Here is a soft light shot with the same 3:1 ratio as the hard light shot, but you can’t find that ratio in the face.

3:1 ratio with soft light. Where is the ratio?

So, here’s my problem, how can I get people to stop talking about ratios, with soft lights? These ratios don’t describe anything useful about how the shot was made. You could use the same ratio, and get an entirely different look. How can I get people to talk about the size of the light source, the position of the light source, and what the light does to the subject, this information is actually useful. If you want more on this subject you might check out this article: Hard Decisions and Soft Light (www.siskinphoto.com/magazine/zpdf/hard-softlight.pdf) and I have an article coming out in a special issue of Shutterbug that will also relate to lighting.

You can see most of my articles at this link

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