My Photography

Noir Tests

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 21:56:06 -0400

Because I worked with color so much in my class last Winter I’ve been wanting to do some black and white work. Specifically I’ve been thinking about trying to emulate the noir look from the 40’s. So the other night I set up a couple of lights and played with positioning and brightness. I used Adobe Lightroom to get the grayscale look I wanted. Unfortunately I had only myself to use as a model but the goal was to get the lighting. I’m pretty happy with the above results. Now I just need to do an actual shoot with this setup.

The Setup

I used two lights and this time I had my Sekonic L358 light meter to make things easier. My initial thoughts were to use a grid spot to throw a circle of light on the background and use a second light with a softbox low to provide fill over the rest of the image. For the grid I used a 20° and quickly learned that I had to get in closer than I wanted to get a small circle. I didn’t like that because the light and stand would get in my way while shooting. So I moved the spot to camera left. I was worried that the circle would be more of an oval but it was fine.

You can see the setup here:

My thought was to have the circle about two stops brighter than the fill. So I turned on the spot and adjusted it until it read f/8 at ISO 200. That looked like this:

I turned that light off and then adjusted the fill until it read f/4:

Together they looked like this:

The next challenge was simply to find the proper spot for the model to stand. Initially for some strange reason I stood too far camera right:

I think I did that with the thought that my face should be in the center of the circle but because the light was off axis I really needed to be positioned farther that way.

Once I figured that out it was easy to get the look I wanted. I think for next time, however, I might only make the fill light one stop lower than the spot since I would like to brighten the images a bit more but when I do the spot gets blown out and the circle is not as well defined. I’ve also ordered a 10° grid spot so that in the future I can move the light farther back and still get a smaller circle.

Contest

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:14:47 -0400

So there’s a contest being run by Aperture Nature Photography Workshops to win a cool Drobo. Help me out by clicking the link.

Late Night Photo Shoot

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 22:57:40 -0400

There’s something about doing a last minute photo shoot late at night. This is Burgundy. She thought shooting against a red background would be good and I agreed. However, I think the black and white images are a little more striking.

Another Gabby & John Shoot

Sat, 9 Aug 2008 11:06:28 -0400

I want to shoot with the kids every so often and they were up for it. John was difficult to work with on the shoot so I tried to get him engaged by having him do some jumping. Then during Gabby’s shoot I had John hold a blow dryer to make Gabby’s hair fly.

I think I’m getting better at getting the lighting I want. I wanted this to be high key. The trick was I didn’t have a light meter so I had to adjust the two lights using a gray card and the histogram on my camera. Basically I set the camera at f/11 and shot a gray card where the kids would stand adjusting the light until the histogram was in the center. Then I set the second light and shot the background until the histogram was pushed all the way to the right. Not perfect but close enough.

On the spot portrait shooting

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 11:02:38 -0400

This weekend I went to the west side of the state to do some exploring. In Grand Rapids I walked around shooting some architecture. While I was at the DeVos center two couples approached me to take their photo. I thought it would be a good test to do some on-the-spot portrait shooting. You can see the shots by clicking each photo above.

For the shot on the right I was using my Sigma 10-20mm super wide angle lens. I had been shooting with it to really capture the architecture and design and wanted to see how it can be used for creative portraits. I really like it but I need to be very careful where people are placed within the frame because the lens really distorts the image around the edges.