Tutorial - Lucid Light Photography

Tutorial

January2nd

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Fun with color temperature.

Posted in: Self Portraits, Tutorial

In an effort to keep up with my project 365 this year, I’m leaving my camera and 1 off camera flash on a stand set up at all times. This sparked a random selfie session this afternoon.

I just hung these sheer panel curtains in my room and I just love how soft the light that comes through them is. I wanted to play around with it and started messing around. I decided to throw the white balance to tungsten (the light bulb) to change the neutral daylight to blue. I under exposed the background to enhance the blue, and figured out the right aperture to balance my 1/8 power flash. I put a full cut of CTO (though I wish I’d doubled it now) over my flash and stuck the flash in my shoot through umbrella. I added a reflector just under the camera to fill some shadows and went with it!

Camera:Canon EOS 40D
Exposure:0.01 sec (1/100)
Aperture:f/5.6
Focal Length:24 mm
ISO Speed:800

Here’s a lighting diagram of the set up:

If you’ve never played with flash gels, head over to Strobist and meet your next obsession.
September21st

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DIY Light Box

Posted in: DIY Gear, Studio, Tutorial

I’ve been meaning to make one of these since I saw this.

A night on ebay searching out a working film camera since my 2006 Canon decided to stop working just in time for my Photo III class! I ended up scoring a beautiful Canon TX in great condition with 3 Canon lenses (a 50mm 1:1.8 S.C., a 35 mm 1:3.5 S.C., and a 135mm 1:2.5), a flash, 3 filters, shutter cable release and lens cases…

aaaaand an “as is” vintage Kodak.

The vintage Kodak is what pushed me to finally make the lightbox. This thing is beautiful.

I haven’t stopped looking at it since it came Saturday morning. It appears to be fully functional. It’s medium-format, takes 120 film and has four apertures, which from what I’ve read is rare for affordable cameras in the 20s like this one. I read somewhere (and apparently forgot to bookmark the link?) that the Hawk-Eye cameras were originally made by Boston Camera Company, who was bought out, and then bought out again by Eastman Kodak.

I believe the bellows were replaced because they shouldn’t be in such good condition.

ANYWAY! The light box!

You’ll need:
A 12x12x12 box
Tracing or gift tissue paper (white). You could chop up a shower curtain, too.
Masking or gaffer’s tape
Box cutter
First Aid (just in case)

These photos should make the process pretty easy on you. You’re basically tipping the box (with the bottom tapes and the top flaps open) on it’s side, open end facing you. Cut off the top and bottom flap so only the left and right remain. These will be used to keep the light from spilling into your lens.

Now cut a large window into the top and left and right side of the box. Tape the diffuser material you chose (tracing paper, etc) over the windows. Finally, hang a piece of cut posterboard (cut it to fit your box) from the top to make a seamless background.

Now you can use daylight, flash (off camera), or simple lamps (but be sure to set your white balance to the bulb temperature, or shoot RAW) to play with the direction of light. Experiment with different colored backdrops and sliding black posterboard window-blockers on one side to get a dramatic side light with no reflection.

If you look at these two photos, you can see the difference moving the light makes:

Side lit:

Top lit:

For my knitting readers (waves), your stash and projects look great in these, and it can be done outside in the sun with a point and shoot camera (turn the flash off, set to sun/daylight).

Etsy sellers, collectors, ebayers…all have a great excuse to use one of these so give it a shot! And if you do, leave me a comment so I can see how you made out!
September9th

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School – Week One

Posted in: Studio, Tutorial

Well, it’s that time again and I’ve FINALLY gotten my “foundation” art courses mostly done…done enough to finally be allowed to start my photography courses! I’m still stuck in a painting course and have two more crappy drawing classes to slog through of course, but it is so nice to finally be enjoying school again.

My Photo III class assigned color film work for the first project. I had to dig out my Canon Rebel K2 and blow the dust off of it, only to find out something’s wrong with it. It keeps powering off and blaming the brand new batteries…very irritating. Now I own 5 non-working film SLRs.

Anyway, our first assignment is playing with complimentary, analogous and tertiary color combinations. We looked at some examples in class and talked about what the colors conveyed in each image. I was thinking about the nudes that Annie Leibovitz did under those video lights. They made the skin look somewhat grotesque. I thought I’d play with the idea of unattractive skin lighting and think I got some OK stuff. I will post when I get my negatives scanned (assuming my camera malfunctions don’t earn me back some blank rolls.) I did some shots of my limbs under a gross green gelled flash against a deep red backdrop.

For my 2nd roll of film I wanted to do soothing colors and again broke out the flash gels and whipped together a tabletop studio. Here’s a couple test digital shots with lighting diagrams. I snooted my flash with my DIY snoot (made of cardboard and duct tape…FANCY) and put on a light green gel from my Rosco sample pack, I also took a custom white balance reading so the camera wouldn’t warm up the cool light.

Today we had to do a group assignment, each group taking a color and shooting it with it’s complimentary color and analagous color and then an example of it in a monochromatic shot. My group shot for a while on campus and then went home with one third of the assignment a piece to make a few extra images. This was my favorite for mine (I had complimentary).

And two others:

(Another complementary)

(monochromatic)

Now that the fun homework is done, I’m off to read text books. Blerg.
May4th

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Perfect color with gray cards.

Posted in: Tutorial

I have had gray cards forever and never bothered to use them, dumb idea!! These things are great!

A gray card is just that…a gray card. The color is a “medium gray” according to your camera’s reflective light meter. I’m not very science-minded so you’ll have to do a quick google for complexities beyond that but what I do know is that if you implement this little bugger in photography where color correctness is key (which is like, most photography) like food photography.

Knitting is a major hobby of mine aside from photography, I’m just as obsessive about fiber as I am about photos. Both are expensive hobbies that cause my husband’s eyes to glaze over when I talk about.

When I post my WIPs (that’s works in progress for you non-knitters) to Ravelry (biggest/best knitting community evar) I really hated putting that “color isn’t exact” disclaimer in the notes on my project pages. I see your eyes glazing over photogs, stay with me! Yarn color is a big party of the creative process when you select a pattern to knit, so I want to show it off right!

Here’s the sample image, I used the eyedropper white balance tool in Adobe Camera Raw CS4 to get the proper slider numbers…

And here’s the color correct photo. I used the numbers I got from the eyedropper white balance in ACR and set a custom white balance:

And here’s the straight from the camera jpeg for comparison:
(with my camera set to Auto White Balance)

Here’s another example where the difference is even more striking. Food is another form of photography that I can never seem to get “perfect” with AWB or even the sliders in Lightroom/ACR.

Sample image, corrected with the eyedropper clicked onto the gray card:

Corrected image…yum…(that’s sun dried tomato pizza btw):

And the SOOC jpeg on AWB:

Pretty cool, eh? I think I’ll be using cards more often!