Finally, I want to give you guys a chance to glance behind the scenes of that birthday shoot i did for my brother. My goal was to create rather dramatic shots (as opposed to creating perfectly-smooth lit images), so in most shots I opted for my newly built DIY beauty dish. This decision was rather spontaneous, so I actually ended up building the dish the night before and the paint on it was still wet – literally! Basically, the beauty dish is a big salad bowl (you wouldn’t believe how many stores I had screened to find the right shape!) and a flower pot saucer lined with aluminum foil on the inside acting as a reflector. The light it makes is somewhere in between soft and hard – seemed like a a good match for a “manly” shoot.

As you can see, I used the dish on the shots on the bridge from up high and left. Why the oblique angle, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you: a) He’s wearing glasses, so any light source at the standard 45° angle would show up as a reflection on his glasses and b) my goal for this shoot was to try different things and go away from the same old. I thought it looked rather interesting. In fact, it looked a little too interesting (in terms of dramatic), so I decided to fill in some light from below and right with a silver reflector. The reflector is being held by my lovely assistant of the day. This lighting technique is basically what I used on almost all the shots – dish from above, sometimes fill in a little with a reflector. Really easy. And the light was really smooth enough so I didn’t have to touch it up a lot in Photoshop – in fact, I think I never went above 1/4 power which allowed for fast recycle times and still gave me apertures around 4 which was enough (or little enough) depth of field for me. As a matter of fact, being a “strobist” I do take some pride in trying to exposing somewhat correctly – I always try to hit the correct exposure by chimping on the little screen since I don’t want to have to bump up the exposure by 8 stops afterwards in the raw converter.

This shot in the cafe was done in no more than two minutes including set-up. As David Hobby once wrote, pretty soon you get the kinda-scary ability to guesstimate the settings on the camera and the strobe: I ended up at something like f/2.2, iso 400 and a sixtieth of a second. As you might have guessed, little reflector on the side. Oh, and cloudy white balance to warm it up. This is the out of cam exposure (as are all images in this post), so comparing to the processed images below you get the idea what the on-set lighting already gave me without a whole lot of photoshop editing.

In this shot, you can see the spotlight character of the dish and the nice shadow it creates. Without the fill-in reflector it’s definitely a relatively harsh light (since I had to place it at a certain distance to the subject due to the framing), but I like it that way. The exposure on his face is a little too high on the neutral setting, so for the final image (see posts below) I went with two different raw exposures that I merged into one image (which is something that I end up doing quite frequently whenever I want to darken the background).

I hope you enjoyed this short explanation – if you have any questions, shoot me a comment!

I finally had the time to process the portrait series that I did for my friend Michael, who wanted the attendants of his farewell party photographed. I’ve let the poor guy wait for long enough, so here it is! As I wrote in the announcement below, this series is not really the flattering type. Hard, directed light from straight above created harsh shadows that I occasionally softened with a small fill flash, yet, in other occasions I let parts of the face go completely dark. I found the effects very interesting since they allowed me to focus only on what I wanted to show of the portrayed person’s face in contrast to showing the perfectly balanced, even exposure of the whole face. Who says you can’t show those nose shadows? Break the rules! More pictures here.

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.

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 ? 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!