My business partner and I had been on enough shoots to know that we could easily wear out a Speedlight during a single shoot.  Changing batteries, while it doesn’t take too long, can eat up time when you are losing light.  Additionally, there were plenty of times when it was not practical to use two Speedlights because we wanted the light in the same spot.  Everything is setup to be as quick and efficient as possible.  So when we opted for a DIY dual Speedlight rig, we new found the answer to a lot of problems.

On a recent engagement shoot, we ran into some issues when both hammering away on a single Speedlight.  We had some misfires.  We had to wait on the unit to recycle. We also wore the batteries out to where we had to change them.  Not a great situation to be in, messing around with your gear like that.  Sure would be cool to have two lights on a single stand so Mark could use one and I could use the other, right?

That’s what we did.

I have to give all the credit to my business partner Mark for setting this up for us.  Using this guide from DIYPhotography.net as a guide, he built a dual Speedlight rig for less than $10.  Here is what he came up with (sorry for the cameraphone photos):

OK, so what does having 2 Speedlights on a single stand allow us to do?  Well, one Pocket Wizard is set on a different channel than the other.  This way I am using one of the lights and Mark is using the other.  We can place the light in a certain spot and still utilize it together without wearing out a single Speedlight.

It is amazing what $10 can do for a photographer!

“Midnight Snack” | 52.9

Something interesting happened to me the other weekend. Someone asked me “Hey man, what is going on with your weekly project thing?” I was not really sure anyone had been following along, which is partly why I did not feel super guilty for missing a few weeks. So where have I been?

Life here has been…well….hectic to say the least.  My wife and I are expecting our second girl (due date of Feb. 1st, 2010) and I have been fighting a sickness for a few weeks now.  Throw in an incredibly hectic schedule and this project just took a back burner.  But something clicked when asked about it and it kinda lit the flame back, so I thought I would pick things back up.  My brother-in-law and I have really been working hard on our own photography business and studio.  With so many irons in the fire, some things have to get let go.

Enough of that…

The shot of my head was taken at our studio using two Calumet Genesis 400 lights shot through 45″ umbrellas.

I brought the image in, flipped it so the lighting would match what I shot of the fridge, and then processed it a bit further. The image of me looking into the fridge was shot using two Speedlights.  On the second shelf of the fridge I had an SB-800 shot @ 1/8th up toward the top of the fridge.  I also had an SB 80DX behind the open door @ 1/4th power shot toward the door.  This light ended up not being much in the final image given the post-processing.  The camera was mounted on a tripod and set on a timer.  The Speedlights were fired with CyberSyncs.  I don’t have a behind the scenes shot for this one because I really just wanted to get the light out of the fridge and close the door.  Plus nobody really wants to see a shot of my messy fridge.

The greenery was a stock photo that I purchased from iStockPhoto.  I looked briefly online but couldn’t find exactly what I wanted.

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.