“My Eyes Hath Seen The Light”

So I am not quite ambitious enough to begin a 365 project, taking a photo every day of the year.  I would be setting myself up for failure.  A photo each week sounds much more my speed and an attainable goal, so I figured why not, right?  The idea I had in mind was one that I actually shot and had planned on posting.  However, while waiting on the rain to calm down at work the other day, I started experimenting a bit with the Speedlights and ended up taking something entirely different.

After all, it was “Face-Up Wednesday“.

Here is a quick outtake, which was me getting the lighting where I wanted it.

Strobist: Single SB-900 on a light stand, with green gel, inside of the small room camera right.  I had it aimed toward the ground.  Nikon D80 + Nikon 24-70mm on tripod triggered with remote.  Speedlight triggered with CLS (+3.0). Camera settings:  1/100th; f/5; and ISO200.

For you Nikon shooters out there that have not yet had the opportunity to experiment with the Creative Lighting System (CLS), you are missing out.  While at first it takes some adjustments, it is really quite fun.  And while not the solution for every shoot, it certainly has it’s place within the photographer’s toolbox.

First, this is a result of boredom and curiosity.  I have to admit I have seen similar shots on Flickr which served as the inspiration behind this experiment.  I searched and searched but did not bookmark the exact shot that I used as a rough foundation, so please forgive me. I took a setup shot, and while it is relatively accurate, I did some minor adjustments before the final shot.  But overall, this is what it looked like:

On the kitchen island, I placed several tall glasses as the backdrop.  I figured that these, when hit with the Speedlight, would provide some nice bokeh curtain behind the figurine.  Since I left all of my light stands at the studio, I drug a stool and some boxes over to one side of the glasses.  I pointed the SB-800 toward the glasses.  Next, I setup the SB-900 on a tripod, shot through the umbrella to give a little softer light coming from above.  Everything was triggered with CLS (SB-900: +3.0; SB-800: +1.0; Built-In: Off).  On a tripod, I setup the D80 & 50mm.  The camera settings were ƒ/1.4, ISO 200, and shutter at 1/50.

Here is the result (including xpro treatment using Nik Color):

Next time I might try this with some gels.

I recently ordered an ABR800 and found another reason to love Alien Bees…  their boxes make for great DIY lightboxes!  I was reading a recent blog on how to create your own macro studio and thought, why not actually try it?  So I did.

Like any true photog & blogger combo would do, the entire process was documented.  First, I was reading the Strobist Blog which had some great information.  Mostly, I admire the DIY folks and stand in awe of their ability to achieve really great results from next to nothing.  But something struck me with this project, especially as it is something that I truly need.

The Strobist blog says that it cost them $10 (with a bit of a stretch).  Mine cost $1.  That of course is assuming that you have all of the items already, which I did.  I used the ABR800 box, which with the top flaps removed it was about 12” x 12” x 18” (if I remember correctly).  I also had some plain white paper from a large easel pad that was at work (the department was going to toss it out!).  We already had tape as well.  So really, I just needed some posterboard and then I would be set.  I ran up to Publix and got 2 sheets for $1, came home, and started cuttin’.

First, I have to admit that this took me two tries.  Normally I wouldn’t mention it except that the first time around I made the cutout too large so the box was too flimsy.  Also, I had cut the top, which I didn’t really need to do.  So before you get started, get a tape measure and also figure out which area of the box allows the box to sit most steadily.

Grab your measuring tape and measure out where you want to cut.  Given the size of my box, I measured out 1 ½” from the edge on all sides.  I cut out three sides but in reality, you could get away with cutting out the left and right sides.

Should you opt to cut all three sides, you should have something close to this:

Next, grab the paper (obviously you need to get something that will allow light to come through) and put it on the areas that were cut out.  I chose to put the paper inside of the box but I doubt it matters as long as light is allowed to come through.

I then took the posterboard, cutting it to fit the inside, and placed a sheet of it under the top panel of the box.  The Strobist blog made mention of that and how the reflective surface of the posterboard would help with the lighting inside of the box.  I then took the other sheet of posterboard and cut it to fit long ways. It was placed along the back and bottom panels, with the curve in the back similar to a cyc wall.

For shooting, that was rather simple.  For you Nikon folks, CLS works great here.  I placed a single SB-800 facing the left side of the box (TTL + 2).  The onboard was set to TTL -2 to put some light on the front of the object, but not too much.  I would have really liked to put another light on the right but didn’t have one handy to use.  Still, I was pleased with the result.  The below images were shot with a D80 and a 24-70mm f/2.8 lens, hand held.

Here is the setup shot for the above images.

Total credit to the fine folks at the Strobist blog for this idea and their fine write-up.  It was really fun to try it myself and now I have something that is actually functional which only cost me a $1.  Can’t really beat that.

A lot of the photos and tutorials, and to some extent the resources, have a serious tone to them.  Last night I decided to have a bit of fun and what better way than to create a project which enables you to laugh at yourself? Creative self-portraits are fun, but can be a little tricky.  Resources are important, however, a plan is even more critical to your success.

First, here are the items I used:

• Nikon D80
• Sigma 18-200mm
• SB800 Speedlight
• Tripod
• Two different outfits
• Giggling daughter (optional)

The first piece is to have a plan.  Think of a theme.  Think about how the image will come across.  You do that anyway (or you should) when you take pictures any other time, so this should be no different.  In fact, here is where it is more important because you are telling a story with the images you are creating.

I was initially inspired by fellow creative Kriegs who setup a self-portrait shot in a pool setting.  The photo portrayed him sitting on the edge of the pool with his feet in the water.  He brought in another photo of him as if he was about to push himself into the water.  I thought it was a really neat shot and thought that I could try something similar.  But I have no pool and if I did, I wouldn’t want to just duplicate what he did.  Being limited in what I could actually do at the time I wanted to do it, I thought about something in the living room.  I wanted to portray two sides of my personality, one serious and one playful.  So that would need two different sets of clothes.  The idea came to me about sitting down trying to read but being bothered by my own practical joke side.

With an idea in place, it was time to put it into action.

Since I was setting up in the living room, I setup the tripod where I wanted.  I took a few quick test shots to make sure the settings were what I wanted.  Then it was time to put on outfit #1 (serious mode).

I will be the second to admit that I am still learning when it comes to taking my D80 off auto and moving into more manual settings (the first person is my friend Dave).  Would you be surprised to know that up until last night, I did not know how to set the timer on the camera, or if I would even be able to do that.  So let’s start with that first.

A quick plug to The Complete Guide to the Nikon D80, who offers an extremely wonderful resource on the D80 camera.  For those who want a manual for their camera, I would start there.

On the top of the camera, you will need to locate the frame advance button.  Press it until you see the timer indicator.

The camera will also allow you to change the timing of the shots, but I found that 10 seconds was enough for me.  I pressed the button to fire off a shot, which triggered the timer, and then ran around to the couch to try and look somewhat serious.

The next shot, with outfit #2 (not-so-serious mode), took a few tries to get correct.  Obviously I am standing over the other me and looking down, so I wanted to make sure that everything was as seamless as possible.  For example, I tried this with another position in the living room, and the me that was standing up was not directly looking at the me sitting down.  So it took some planning and going back and forth to and from the camera to check the image.  The standing shot needed my eyes looking down at the me sitting.  I also needed to have the brown bag close enough to the other me so that it would make sense what I was doing.  I actually had to take this shot about 9 times to get the position and lighting correct.  When I was done, I had the following two images:

Since I used a tripod when taking the shots, merging the two images in Photoshop is relatively easy.  I opted to use the first image as the base image and the second one was imported into the first.  I then took the photo of me standing and trimmed away the background.  There were some slight lighting differences in the two so I used a combination of levels & brightness/contrast adjustments to match them up the best that I could.  The merged image was as follows:

Notice that I also did some slight cropping and resizing.  In the photo of me sitting down, you can see that I am wearing the same black Nike shorts as I am standing up.  So I cropped that out and sized the photo up just a tad so you can’t see them.

We all know that I seem to be unable to stay completely away from Photoshop and knowing that, you can understand why I kept going with the post-processing of the image.  I made a copy of the entire image and then pasted that into a new layer in a new group.  This way I have the original merged layers (if I want them) and can continue to edit with a new group using a copy of the merged photo as a base.

I copied the merged photo into a new layer and converted it to black and white using “Desaturate” (Control + Shift + U).  I changed the blending mode to multiply.  I also brought out the colors of the brown paper bag and my watch to help punch up some of the colors.  I also made a copy of the black and white layer (with blending mode again set to multiply) and applied a Gaussian Blur to it.  After that, I trimmed away me from the image so that only the background was left.

The next step involved applying some subtle textures to the image from Ghostbones and Paul Grand.  The last step was to add one final adjustment layer for curves to help accentuate the final image.

Feel free to drop a comment here or on the actual Flickr page.