Ken Knoll Photography

Amazing news: I have my data back. Everything! What a great relief!

I spent the last weeks searching for the same hard disk that died in my desktop computer in order to try to swap the electronics from a working disk to my broken disk. The same meant not only the same brand and model (Samsung SP2504c), but also the same manufacturing date and same PCB (printed circuit board) version. Finally, I found an exact match. Actually, I bought another hard disk from a slightly different manufacturing date to perform some first tests. Today, the package arrived.

The first test run was not too promising: I swapped the electronics of the newly acquired disks to see if in general the transplantation could work. It didn’t. The one disk was four months older than the other. It did run up, but didnt show any data. When I swapped the PCB back, I saw that the operation hadn’t harmed the disk. So I took the risk to swap the PCB into my broken disk. It started (long moment of silence) and then all the partitions showed up in my system. Connected the external backup drive and started the backup – you cannot believe how happy I am right now.

The operation cost me about 40 bucks instead of 1500 for data recovery – thanks, ebay. And, yeah, Lord of the hard disks: I got the message. I’ll backup every week from now on. Promise.

Last week, I had the opportunity to help out a friend who works at the university. One of the institute’s more prestigious projects, the so-called quadrocopter (like a helicopter, only with four instead of one rotor), needed to be photographed for the all-new website. Should this be any interesting to me? You betcha! Trying to make the nerd stuff look interesting for generations of students to come sounds like a great challenge.

And in fact, the quadrocopter itself doesn’t look all that spectacular. The guys at the institute could probably spend an hour elaborating on the inner values of that mean machine (that I refer to as the robocopter when the professor’s not around), but from the outside, it’s not all that impressive. It’s maybe 40 to 50cm in diameter, has those big soft balls at the four ends so that can land safely and a lot of electronics in the middle.

So my friend and I thought “why go the easy way if we can make this thing look like an UFO?”. Add some drama! With fog, landing lights, and everything, this thing has to look huge! So the way to go was clear and we set up a plan for the shoot. The perspective was more or less given, since we wanted the quadrocopter to look big and impressive (thus use a wide angle from below) and use the whole image in a rather long heading image (so the perspective had to be from the side rather than from straight above or below). To create that UFO look and feel, we decided to add dramatic shadows by setting the robocopter up in a very dark improvised studio and light with very tight spotlights. To make some highlights in the area around the robo visible, we decided to add some fog – the part that makes this shot work.

How do you create fog? Well, I asked an old friend of mine, who’s in the sound & light biz – these guys must know. I quickly understood that a hazer (i.e., a fog machine) would be the wrong choice, ’cause we had the whole thing set up in a small room and didnt’t want to die early from smoke poisoning, plus, we didn’t need to have fog everywhere, but just in the right place. Dry ice was the way to go. Throw pellets into warm water, it gives you 30 seconds of great, dense fog that you can play with. Fortunately, we managed to buy dry ice in a city nearby. The fog it creates is heavier than air, so it stays on the set if you block all the exits.

Speaking of, the setup for the whole thing was a little more complex than the stuff that I normally do. First, we darkened the room with large dark curtains which I still have from my Photo Booth Series. Then we set up two tables as our playing ground, framed them with cardboard on all sides to block the fog. Since we were going for very defined dark and light areas, we didn’t want to have any light bouncing around, so we put black fabric on the table and the sides. Also, since we were going to shoot upwards, we put more black fabric up against the wall on one side of the table.

The robo itself was rigged easier than we thought: Actually, we wanted to rig all four sides to stands – however, After I attached the first of the four sides to the stand we thought that it did look cool enough to do the job. The opposite side simply lasted on the table. We set a heater right next to the robo to warm up the water for the dry ice and we were ready to shoot.

As you might know, being a photographer on a budget means that I do not possess a gazillion flashes. Thus, we took one flash, put a super tight cereal box snoot on it and took about 300 single pictures, each highlighting a certain area. The fog starts to create a pretty dense carpet if you don’t do something about it, so we just whirled and blew the fog until it started to look interesting. In the end, we selected the exposures we liked best and stacked them into one big file to mask them out. Piece of cake, but still a lot work (and quite hard to keep track of which layer shows which part of the image). A lot of work for one single picture, but a great experience and great fun, too.

It’s the first weekend in a long while that is completely free of any obligations and todos – I handed in a major paper at my university and my upcoming final thesis is not going to start before september. What a great feeling! I was planning on doing some location scouting in the region. I heard that there is a real sand dune in the middle of a small town nearby (I honestly don’t have the slightest clue as to why or how it ever got there), so I was going to check it out. And, while I’m there, do some nice, quick and easy portraits.

Not alotta gear, just my small diy softbox with a half cut of cto to add some spice to the nice available light. The dune itself turned out to be smaller than I expected, and well, with less sand. Well, restrictions are often a good thing, ’cause they force you to be creative and work with what’s there. Speaking of which, I had the 50mm walk-zoom lens on the camera, which I almost use exclusively on my camera since I can’t afford any other lens right now – another layer of creativity jogging restriction.

So I worked with some perspectives that I don’t normally use that often (model sitting, me standing) to try out something new, we had a little fun with throwing sand and freezing it mid-air (which is surprisingly easy) and walked around on the dune to find new perspectives and backgrounds. One thing that I’m really excited about is that David Hobby, who said that you start to get the kinda-scary ability to guess exposure and power levels pretty close to the optimum, is absolutely right: It normally takes me about one to three test-images until I’m perfectly happy with the light – no flash meter, no scientific method needed.

It really is that easy: Measure the environment, decide at which level relative to your light it should be, guess the power level on the flash (depending on distance, light color, light shaper) and pop some test frames. And once you’re good to go, you can just fire away – or switch roles and let the photographer be the model.

Word-of-mouth marketing works! This nice guy here is a friend of a friend. He was planning to send out applications starting next week, so he needed a nice portrait – pronto, por favor! He wasn’t too happy with the portrait that a professional photographer had taken of him the day before. Following the advice of that friend he stumbled upon this blog and really liked what I did for those guys. Fortunately, I had all my equipment at the university that day (I’ll tell you why very soon), so we arranged a spontaneous shooting at the nearby university building.

For this shoot, I was going to try different setups. As you know, I like to add a little structure or a pattern to the background to spice things up a little. Yet, due to the comments I received about the last pictures, I decided to do one shot with a more classic background. For that, I had the model stand in front of a plain dark gray wall (actually, a door), aimed one flash on the background to add a little gradient and lit him with my selfmade umbrella softbox from top left and bounced some light back with a reflector from the right. Again, I added a cardboard-gridded flash on camera right, from behind his face to add a little highlight on his jawline. This is the picture that he liked the most and that he will use to send out his applications.

The other shot is more like my “classic” style – a nice pattern of some stairs, softbox top right, reflector from the left. Even if he’s not going to use it, it’s great to have a variety to chose from. And that’s what makes me different to most professional photographers: Even though the whole shoot took about 30 minutes, I had about 90 pictures in the can, meaning that at least a few of them had the right expression – it’s just a matter of statistics.

I said that before – it’s just great to have great friends. ‘Cause those great friends are cool with coming with you and have a great time doing some sunset backlit shots somewhere in the fields around Darmstadt. I’ve had this kind of look going through my head all day and it felt great to turn it into a reality (that kind of reality that ends with .CR2, that is). I wish I could do this kind of thing way more often. Trying different lighting situations, angles, techniques… this is, to my mind, what you need to do to become a good photographer.

These pictures were all natural light, I just brought my little gold reflector with me to bounce some of the sunlight back into the face.

It wasn’t easy this time: Practically no fans on the streets of Darmstadt, almost a 100° F again, the atmosphere was nothing like it was before… I know, we didn’t win the world cup this time, but hey – third place! Come on, people! Well, anyways – I did meet a few fans who were kind enough to take the time for some portraits – so here goes the concluding batch for my series! I’ll think of something to move on to, I think I’ve got a few ideas in my mind.

Oh, and doing the post on my laptop really isn’t as cool. Need a replacement for my desktop soon…

Wonderful news: My hard disk died. Most recent backup: 3 months old. Why did it die? Ironically, I bought a new disk to be on the safe side, put it in my pc, connect all the cables – Computer runs up, crashes – old hard disk is dead. Of course, there is officially no connection between putting in a new hard disk and the death of the other, but it seems like a strange coincidence. I could beat myself up for not backing up more frequently, but there are always other things that seem more important at the time.

So it’s basically my world cup series (the hi res) and some other projects that I’ve been working on that’s lost, maybe a total of 30 GB, I’ll have to see whether I can afford data recovery.

Anyways, I’ll snap some mo’ world cup pictures tonight, I’m just not sure where I will do the post (laptop screen is really not made for that).

Unfortunately, Pulpo Paul was right. Germany has lost the match 0:1 against Spain. It was not a nice game to watch – it amazes me how great the impact of spirit, and self-confidence seems to be on our team’s performance. Well, we can still go for third place, but the way that these fellas played in the previous games, I would have loved for them to get to the finals. I watched the game in Frankfurt this time, at the Westend Campus and I snapped some quick portraits before the game – people obviously didn’t know we were gonna lose :)

One last session to go – I wonder what my next portrait series could be – any ideas?

What a great day. 100°F. 4:0. Again, Darmstadt was one big party after the game. Actually, it didn’t start well: When I came to the Luisenplatz before the game, everything was dead. No fans, no folks at the annual Heinerfest, no big crowds at the big screens. I had to run around for a while to get some pictures in the can. But as soon as the game was over, it seemed like people were coming out of their holes like mad. The familiar walk through the tunnel, the flags, the vuvuzelas…wow! I took some pics before and some after the game – can you tell which ones are which?

Hey, if you read this because you were photographed by me – especially if you are that lovely lady from the first picture – send me a message or a comment if you like the picture. If yours ain’t here, send me a message, too! I only put up a small selection to keep the blog from exploding. I’ll add a new series as soon as I find the time – There’ll be room for some mo’!

… and the best news is: Two more games – two more world cup features for me and you!

Here are some portraits that I did for Jerry, who asked me to take some “nice” pictures of him after he saw my new World Cup portraits and liked the “look”. Well, of course I said yes: I would never want to miss out on a chance to get some more practice, especially when I can add a little light à la David Hobby and test some new equipment.

The day was beautiful, which means it was beautiful to everyone who either doesn’t take pictures with small flashes or to owners of some serious high-power flashes. Why? Well, I guess my model for the day kinda liked the bokeh of my 50mm lens (the only agreeable lens that I own), so I was definitely going for low aperture values. Of course, I coulda just placed him in a shaded area and snap some quick and easy portraits with the ambient light (which is basically what I do with the World Cup portraits). Too easy – I wanted to add light. Overpower sunlight. Have control over the lighting – just because. Being a studious reader of Strobist (who, ironically, posted a new story dealing with this issue a couple of days later) I knew that there are several ways to stop down the environment so that your small, weak flashes can actually overpower the ambient.

So I was prepared. I took a crappy slow lens (35-135 f/4-5.6), screwed the polarizing filter on to kill another few stops (when at the right angle to the sun), set the ISO down to 50 and picked a nice location with lots of trees that should give some shade. However, once we were at the location and I finally metered the ambient through the lens, I realized that the number-one measure to avoid the issue (go to a shaded area) worked so well that I didn’t need anything else. Switched back to the 50, and I could even go for apertures around f/5 with times around 1/200s (can’t sync any faster than that with my camera) and had the flash on 1/2 power. This way I achieved my goal number one for the day: control the light.

My second goal for the day was to test my new DIY umbrella softbox. As you might know, I’ve worked with cheapo umbrellas so far and I’ve been pretty happy with them. It’s really easy with them to get light onto the subject. However, it’s really hard keeping light off anything else, which is not a problem in big spaces, but it sure is one in small rooms. To put it in Joe McNally’s words: The hardest thing about lighting is NOT lighting. The standard solution in the biz is, of course, the softbox. Soft, yet directional light that doesn’t go everywhere. Being on a budget (as usual), I decided to DIY one. I found this beautiful tutorial which gave me exactly what I was looking for: I want everything to fit in my gear bag, so it had to be foldable like an umbrella – just like the Westcott Apollo, yet, $150 less cost. Got me a reflective umbrella for the cheap, did the magic and there it was, my ticket to directional light. I was pretty happy with my preliminary tests that I did with this handsome model I had flown in for the night, but of course, this baby was waiting for real action.

Well, the third goal I had in mind was to get the light up high, away from the classic 45°-camera right. Also, I wanted to test several positions to find out how to feather the light (i.e., turn away the softbox center from the subject so that not the hottest area, but the soft edge hits the subject). So I had the box up high camera left – and I was a little unhappy with the results. Too much on the hair, not enough in the face. So I threw in a small gold reflector camera-right (held by my lighting assistant for the day) to get some nice, warm tones. Also, I put a half cut of CTO on the flash and balanced for daylight. The reflector saved this setup and I was very happy with the soft light and that little sparkle in the eyes. I allowed some of the ambient light to mix with my main light – this way I didn’t need a lot of bang from the softbox, just about enough to create some nice skin tones. Being able to improvise definitely seems to be a crucial skill.

For my personal portfolio, I wanted some “moody” and more dramatic shots after we were done with the two other light setups. Normally, I like my subjects to give me (or my camera) a big smile – you know, my standard “nice” portraits. With this shot I was going for something with more “character”, like the Johnny Cash shot from Michael Grecco. So I put a cardboard grid on my flash and had him look right into the light that I placed 4 ft away. I like the tight hotspot and the nice falloff. I might become a grid fan – when used on the “right” face, it’s a nice look. It’s certainly not a classic beauty light, but, fortunately, some faces can definitely take it. Overall, a great learning experience!