When natural light and a reflector can help creating a studio shot

When playing with lights sometimes you never know how many you might need and if you don't have enough, well you still have the sun to help you. For these photos I had two SB800 but, to achieve the desired effect I needed an extra help.

No "moving" reflector has been used for
this shot

First of all let’s see how I organized the table. I have a squared piece of glass sitting on top of four plastic cups to separate it from the base. Under the glass there is one SB800 with a red gel, above the glass we have the Molix' Finder 110 sprayed with water. Off camera right slightly above the subject is the other SB800 through a translucent umbrella, while the window of the room is opened and its position is again on camera right.

Here we are using the "moving" reflector
but the SB800 with the red gel has been turned off

On camera left a friend is holding a silver reflector with a bit of a hammered surface; is not flat and smooth and it works better for what I want to achieve. The exposure time is 2 seconds, enough to be able to play with the light coming from the window and mix it with the speedlights.

Shot taken with the setting described in
the post

When I take the shot my friend is moving the reflector for the 2 seconds of the exposure and the light coming from the uneven silver surface paints some sort of “blurred” background with liquid lights and shadows while the product has been perfectly lit by the SB800. The water sitting on the glass surface also helps achieving this result but as you can see in the three shots, the difference really pops out.

It is very exciting for me to always explore new ways of lighting a product, the studio gives you so many different opportunities and the subjects never complain J I hope this give you some ideas for your studio work and if you think of a way to improve it your comments are always welcome.

Lightroom 4.1 final version

After my terrifying experience with LR 4.0 and the volume of negative comments running around the web I thought that the guys at Adobe would have to work hard to fix all the bugs the program was carrying along, and they should work fast too because the competitors are fierce and ready to snack on any failing software, especially if it comes from the nº 1 in the industry.

My major problem was speed, so I worked on two directions, first of all I upgraded my main hard disk to a 2TB unit and my graphic card to a 1GB model, and my second move was to wait until Adobe would come out with a final version of 4.1, since the Beta was still presenting some flaws.

Last week the final version of 4.1 was announced so I diligently downloaded my tons of megabytes and installed right after 4.0. Things, I must confess, have changed quite a bit, the workflow is faster, the banding has disappeared and 4.1 is usable now. Let me be perfectly clear, is not as fast as 3.6, still is quite sluggish when moving from image to image or when is “thinking” and loading an image in the 1:1 view but for sure there’s an improvement since my previous post.

The trouble remains when using the clone tool and paint brush but I think there’s a way around it. There is a major difference if you use the clone tool at the beginning of your process or at the end (or midway) of it; when used at the beginning it works quite normally but if you have played with other sliders before, it can become a bit of a pain in the neck. The paint brush works a bit smoother but it is also affected by how far have you gone with your editing.

From what I have read in the net the culprits seem to be the clarity slider and the chromatic aberration and sharpening modules. My investigation hasn’t go far enough to study the individual parts so I cannot add much more to what I have learnt from others, but anyone can do a test at home and see how it works for him. Bear in mind that everyone has a different story, and what might work for me is probably not working for somebody else and vice versa so the true experience is the one you can make in your own machine.

This is it for the moment, hope it helped a bit, any question drop a comment; I might be out for few days but will be back on the 19^th. 

Lightroom 4.0, what a headhache!

More or less three weeks ago I bought Lightroom 4.0, the improvements and features over 3.6 looked so promising that I didn't hesitate a second to order it. Once installed I stared to update few photos to the new version; I was aware that the program was going to interpreter the settings and adapt them and I also knew that the images would probably look quite different. This was indeed confirmed so I had to re-edit a bit of photos, but I discovered it was extremely hard.

The program was sluggish to say at least, the lag when moving the mouse around the image, or clicking from one photo to another or doing all sort of thing I could easily do on 3.6 had become incredibly long. But this wasn't the worst problem, in fact once I started playing with the clone tool and paint brush things went out of control. The delay became unbearable and surprise surprise, a very odd green banding started to show up in my monitor. What was even more annoying was the fact that the green banding would also transfer to the photos exported to a folder in my hard disk, turning them unusable. 

I browsed a bit the web and discovered that I wasn’t the only one with such problem, in fact hundreds of people, at least among those following specialist forums, were suffering the same delays and other more or less important flaws. Adobe put out in extreme hurry a 4.1 version that haven’t sort out the lag problems, is a beta and the final version will be released in June but it looks like they still have some work to do.

To make a long story short I deleted 4.0 from my PC and went back to 3.6a giving up the truly amazing new features that the new Lightroom was packed with. I don’t think Adobe will refund me for the purchase of 4.0 and I’m not even interested, what bugs me is that I will have to wait until they come up with software that rolls at least as well as the previous one. I have learnt my lesson the hard way, next time before any upgrade I’ll let the others do the test for me and then decide whether to join in or not. 

Making of...

How do you think I made this photo? Few hints: There's one main light and a fill light and in the background there's a .... The exposure is 4 seconds, does it ring a bell? New high tech stuff can make miracles for your studio shots

Putting the lights within the frame. Sculpo crankbait by Molix, studio shot

One of the simple rules I have understood in this photography business is that eventually there are NO RULES!

I have seen some cool images of guys putting their lights within the frame and for this reason I decided to try the same in one of my studio shots. What I wanted to reply, in a way more reduced scale, were the stadium or stage lights, all pointed to the subject that is the center of attention.

To achieve that I had to work on a table longer than usual and using a wider lens, otherwise I would have either missed the two SB800 that you can see in the frame, or too close to the subject with serious problems, at least for me, to control the light. In my first attempts I only used the two visible light, but even though the lure is translucent I was missing a good deal of light on it. After several try with reflectors I had to pick up a third light, Metz 58, and use it at its lowest power with a tight zoom and a grid to make the Sculpo pop up.

The result is in front of your eyes, I love the lights in the background even though I would have love them showing a "star" instead of the rectangular shape of the SB800, and I would have loved the product to be a bit bigger but I think I can work that out a bit.

If anybody has an idea of how to improve this kind of images please feel free to drop a comment either in the blog or in Flickr, I'd highly apreciate.

Special feature: Deep Trouble, the article that appeared in Sport Fishing December 2011 issue

Doug Olander, chief editor of Sport Fishing Magazine has given me the permission to post in the blog "Deep Trouble", the article that appears in the latest edition of SF in December. Is quite a complete feature with lots of information for the jigging enthusiasts and I'm honoured to have participated in it. To read it just follow the link: ARTICLE

Have a look at the Sport Fishing Magazine web site as well.

Thanks a lot to Doug, Sport Fishing Magazine and Bonnier Corporation

Here's an interesting video about lighting with mirrors

Main light? A mirror!

That's right, the main light I have used for this shot is a circular mirror where I bounced the light of an SB800. The reason for this is because the snoot that I have doesn't give me a perfect circular rim of light and most of all because not long ago I watched an interesting video about lighting a product with mirrors and it looked pretty interesting to me. Interesting and challenging I add, in fact it is all about studying the angle of the light, a study that I believe most studio photographers had to go through at one point in their career. Since I don't use continuous lights, I had some trouble in finding the right angle to achieve the shot I wanted, it costed me a bit of batteries life through a bunch of test bursts until I figured out where the circle was going to sit for my shot. Hence, contrary to the appearences the speedlight is on camera right gridded it with a Honlphoto grid to control the light spill as much as possible, and it bounces the shaft against a circular mirror that becomes the main light and lit the three lures. Everything has been controlled with the Nikon CLS system. Camera Nikon D7000 with Nikkor 60mm f2.8 micro lens.

Composing a landscape shot

When composing a seascape photo there are some elements that we want to combine in order to achieve a better shot. Having a nice scenary in front of your lens sure helps, but it might not be enough. A dull sky could kill our best intentions or a harsh directional light, can bury the image in a blink of an eye. Those fantastic sunsets don't go any further than the simple snapshot if we don't have a foreground that helps the composition, and this photo here might give an idea of what use can we make of any subject to strengthen the image.

Another important point to stress out is where to place the horizon. When we start moving our first steps in the magic world of photography we take specific care to put subjects and horizon exactly in the middle of the frame, something that could work for a very specific image, one in a hundred maybe... To give more strength to our photo we should try to move that thing to a different level, maybe higher, maybe lower, left or right, away from the dead center anyway. This is called rule of thirds and has been created by painters in the previous centuries, we are only borrowing it from them. The more extreme the latitude of the horizon, the more dramatic is the shot, even without a predominant foreground, like in this case.

We also need lines, straight or curved, that can somehow guide the view through the image, or to a specific point that we consider to be the most important of the image. A pinnacle of rocks that comes from one side of the image and slowly dives into the hot spot of the photo, will help the viewer scanning the frame and hitting the target, the dramatic stormy sky like in this shot for example.

Remember that we are on the coast; there are rocks, sand, stones, old logs, rippling water, many different elements with something in common: texture. This is an element that could create a shot on its own, it really depends how we are able to grab the light hitting the texture and what kind of editing we apply in post production. Even a gloomy sky has its own texture, and again it will help creating a dramatic atmosphere that looks so good on seascape shots. Black & white edit sometimes helps.

Last but not least, in fact is probably the most important thing of the whole creative process, the light. I'm not going to be the first one to tell you that a sidelight or backlight (when the sun is facing you)  is the ideal one for your best image, but I'll be the millionth and one to repeate it because it really is the heart of the matter here. For several different reasons backlight is my favourite, but is also the more complicated to handle, in fact you will need grad filters (I used a tobacco grad here) to control it and even so, nailing the exposure and keeping the highlights under control will not be very easy. Pick up the sun when is low on the horizon, either at sunrise or sunset and your photo will gain some amazing long shadows and if you are lucky to have a cloudy sky with the red ball filtering through it, you're in photographer's heaven.

Molix Vario crank. Fake HDR studio shot

Molix Vario crank. Fake HDR studio shot, a photo by Nicola Zingarelli on Flickr.

There are millions of things you can do in a studio and another million you can do when you finally open your image in Lightroom, or any editing software for that matter. One day, bored to death, I decided to try a fake HDR of one of my lures shots: this is how I worked it out.
First I made two copies of the shot (virtual copies in Lightroom) at + 1 1/2 EV and - 1 1/2 EV, then I opened them together with the original shot in Photomatix. Here I edited the blended image with a bit of a not too realistic processing and the result is in front of your nose. Brighter colors, and more details, something that pops out of the screen, almost 3D, but probably too unrealistic to be taken into consideration. Good fun though!

www.nicolazingarelli.com
www.caranx.net