Ken Knoll Photography

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.

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.