<![CDATA[Artur Gajewski - Diaries of photography]]> http://www.arturgajewski.com/blog/photography Sat, 04 Sep 2010 04:30:10 +0000 Zend_Feed http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss <![CDATA[Coloring black background with a strobe and color gels]]> http://www.arturgajewski.com/blog/photography/view/article/255
Helios black/white collapsible backdrop

Black background, as funny as it may sound, makes a perfect color for making white or colored halo behind the model. The things works in such a way, that you put a Stofen light modifier on your flash and then place the strobe about three feet from the background facing it. Place it so that the stand and flash is behind the model so they won't show up on the final image.



Then all you need to do is to find the power setting which is good enough for the effect you want. I usually start with 1/4th power setting. Below is an example on how the backround light illuminates the background when the model is in fron of the strobe.



Then you just pop in the key light and the portrait is done.



Next comes the coloring the background. Best and easiest way is to still use the same black background and add a color gel into equation. By placing the color gel between your background strobe and Stofen, you illuminate the bakcground with the color. You can also mix different colored gels to get exciting colors as well.

Little word of warning: When you use color gels, make sure the model is far enough from the background in order to prevent to color spill into model's hair. If the model sits too close, especially blonde hair can be colored with that color as seen below.



]]> Sat, 04 Sep 2010 04:30:10 +0000 <![CDATA[DIY gobo, snoot and grid snoot]]> http://www.arturgajewski.com/blog/photography/view/article/253
So I went through couple of DIY tutorials on the web but after all decided to use my own gray matter and work on a design that would fit my strobes and needs. This ain't no astrophysics after all.



The materials are simple:

- One microwave popcorn box
- Electrical tape
- Painting tape
- Five black straws from Ikea
- Couple more pieces of cardboard

I started with a grid snoot as I knew this will take most of my time. The popcorn box was surprisingly good for my strobes so that I didn't have to bend the cardboard much at all. I just cut out some of it to make it a nice frame around my 430EX strobes. Black straws I cut so that each was about 3cm in length and I needed 9 straw pieces per row. I placed te cut pieces side by side so that there was no space between them and then I stuck them into the painting tape like in the picture below. By glueing them into the frame would have looked more pro, but takes much more time and patience which I don't have either... especially patience.



When all five rows where in place, I taped all rows together with another round of painting tape.



After this all I had to do was attach the straws into the frame. I created double-sided tape from the electrical tape to attach the straws. When the whole package was done, I wrapped it again with couple of rounds of electrical tape to make the frame stronger. Some of the corners had empty space but I don't see this as a problem.



Below is a picture of what kind of light this grid snoot produces. Because the grid was done with circular straws, the spot will be circlular as well. If you would have rectangular straws the outcome would have been rectangular as well. The shape of the grid snoot does not affect the light shape on the wall.



Next I built a snoot which was a whole lot easier to accomplish. I used the popcorn box for this but you can use your favorit cereal box as well. Just make sure you empty it first.

After I cut out a frame with perfect fit with length of about 15cm, I taped the electrical tape around it to make it strong. Now you can squeeze it flat to fit it in your camera backpack and when you need it you just grab it out and form it according to your needs.



Light travels according to the direction of snoot but disperses some of the light around the target as seen on the picture below.



This snoot procudes a little larger light spot as the grid snoot.



I haven't tried these light modifiers in my portrait shoots yet as my younger models are not up to modelling today. Once I do get them to model for me I will post some results here.

I also built a gobo but since the gobo is just a rectangular cardboard, I will not go into how it was built. Anyone can cut out a rectangular peace of cardboard I would presume.
]]> Sat, 04 Sep 2010 04:30:10 +0000 <![CDATA[Light strobe stands are a joy to have...]]> http://www.arturgajewski.com/blog/photography/view/article/251
My point today was exatly that. When my younger daughter Adele wanted to go out to do her street art, I decided to grab my portable light stand and shoot her with bare strobe (don't worry, I didn't really shoot her). I wanted to get better-than-out-of-your-little-camera pictures of her and using off-camera strobe is the way to go. Besides, shooting with bare strobe without all the umbrellas and softboxes minimizes the chance of being seen crazy in my neighbors' eyes.



I have two light stands. One is big and sturdy but it comes with a price of being heavy. Another one is cheap and light which works just fine if you shoot without umbrella. With umbrella this stand will not stand for long on even smallest wind. Up until now I always had a tendency to grab my heavier stand.

This evening we had a beautiful sun and thus I set my shutter speed to 1/250s and the ambient light got correctly exposed at f/7.1 so I set my flash either to 1/2 or 1/4 power, whichever exposed my daughter best. It all depended on where I placed my strobe in relation to her. Mostly I tried to do cross-lighting, having the strobe light coming on 180 degrees in relation to the sun.

Few times I under-exposed the background to bring in the flash on her little more. This in turn gave the pictures a more of a 3D effect.



Even though most of the time Adele wanted to draw on the street and other things she usually likes to do outdoors, she asked me few times to take a portrait of her. I just couldn't resist and perhaps the outcome was the best shot of her tonight...



The idea of using small stands and bare strobes came from Brent Williamson, a father in New Zealand who also loves to photograph his kids.

Check out his Flickr photo stream to see some amazing bare strobe lighting!

Check out rest of the photos of tonight's session
]]> Sat, 04 Sep 2010 04:30:10 +0000 <![CDATA[How to get perfect white balance?]]> http://www.arturgajewski.com/blog/photography/view/article/249
This is the reason why lately I have taken into habbit to use a gray card whenever I shoot more serious portraits, like my kids. I have a grey card I purchased from eBay that fits nicely into my camera backpack. The usage is really simple:

1. You always shoot in RAW mode, adjusting white balance in JPG images is a pain of a butt.

2. Before actual photo shoot and after you have set the shutter speed, aperture and your lighting, ask your model to hold the gray card and take a shot.

3. Start doing the actual photo shoot.

4. Open all photos in post production, in this example Lightroom.

5. First we process the reference picture we took in step 2. Take the white balance pippet (press W) and select a spot inside the gray card to set the neutral gray. You instantly notice and the skin tones become more natural.

6. You copy this white balance setting (Ctrl+C and then make sure you only check the White Balance) and paste that into all the rest photos from that current set.

Please note, that as the day goes by and you change locations, you need to take new reference shots as described in step 2. This is because the ambient light changes as well as other conditions.

Below two examples of my daughter hold a gray card. On the left side is the photo of imported RAW file into Lightroom and no processing done. On the right side the photo is color corrected by obtaining the correct white balance according to above instructions. Left photo might look OK to you if you wouldn't see the image on the right, but the truth is that the left image has a blue tint.


Raw white balance Corrected white balance





























You can get these gray cards really cheap on eBay. Try search with the keyword Ezybalance.]]> Sat, 04 Sep 2010 04:30:10 +0000 <![CDATA[Portrait photography on easter]]> http://www.arturgajewski.com/blog/photography/view/article/247
The sun was shining warmly in between few scattered clouds and I decided to do some cross-lighting photography. It has been a while since the last time as it's known fact that Finnish winter is long and dark. So I had to take back the time I missed and start shooting.

First I set the ISO to th lowest possible, ISO 100 in my situation and max shutter speed that is syncable with my flash, which in my case is 1/250s. Then I set 1/4 power in my flash and tried test shots with shoot through umbrella. Because it was really sunny day, I decided to use shoot through umbrella instead of reflective in order to stay away from competing with the sun.

So the point in the photo shoot was to use sun as the rim light and flash as the key light. If the sun comes from behind and left of the model, you place the flash opposite so that it is to the right of you.

I then set the aperture based on the exposure of the model. If the model gets over exposed, you dial up your aperture to make the f-number bigger. If the model is under-exposed, you increase the aperture to make f-number smaller.

But what happens when the sun get behind the clouds? Easy. Because the model exposure is set by the aperture, you don't want to touch that. The ambient light is controlled by the shutter speed, so when it suddenly gets dark, you dial down the shutter speed. Just remember what shutter speed you had before, because when the sun comes back it's easy to get perfect exposure without trial and error cycle.

Here are some pictures of the easter session with my daughters:

Adele pose Aliisa laid back

And here are rest of the pictures at Flickr.]]> Sat, 04 Sep 2010 04:30:10 +0000 <![CDATA[OneLight Seminar DVD]]> http://www.arturgajewski.com/blog/photography/view/article/245 I got a chance to check out the double DVD called OneLight Seminar DVD and had an urge to come and write you about it.

Zack Arias is Atlanta based strobist that can be categorized as David Hobby-type of photographer. His seminar covers use of strobes in such a way that only one strobe is used in his photography either bare, with umbrella or beautiful Wescott Apollo 50" softbox.

The package includes two DVDs, both are two-hours in length. In the first DVD he tells you a lot about basics of light and gear. The latter disc contains video of him working with his clients. Zack talks a lot during the photo shoots and explains you why he does things the way he does.

The first disc didn't quite have too much of new information for me. Perhaps the inverse square law thing was new to me and he explained it really well so that even I could understand it.

Second disc, as I mentioned earlier, shows client work. I really liked this one as you got a feeling you where right there in action with him. Perhaps the funniest things were his team being kicked out by security twice in a row in different locations. They were shooting on private property without permits.

In addition impromptu photo shoot of party people sowing up at a parking lot was neat to see as well. Zack's face after photographed girl yelled "Oh my god I look so good on that picture" was just priceless.

All in all I really liked the videos, even though it didn't contain much of new stuff I didn't learn from Strobist's blog and other sources on the internet. The most value in this seminar was to see a pro working with his clients.

Zack Arias - OneLight Seminar DVD


]]> Sat, 04 Sep 2010 04:30:10 +0000 <![CDATA[It's a beautiful world]]> http://www.arturgajewski.com/blog/photography/view/article/243 It's been really quiet for when photography is considered. usually this time of year is quiet in wedding photography and I haven't had the time to promote corporate photography services, so pretty much lately I have been doing family photography with my EOS 400D only.

Few weeks ago we got an idea at work that I should take portraits of our whole team. So today I brought my gear to work and setup my lil'strobe studio at the back of our office.

usually when I browse through fashion magazines where sexy blondes do their poses, I tend to think what the studio looked like outside the frame. In some cases it was top pro studio but for sure others where low-budget warehouses. I am not beautiful and there is no way you can make me one, but as illustrated in this picture, it doesn't matter what the surroundings beyond the frame is, we can have a bautiful picture of this beautiful world.

]]> Sat, 04 Sep 2010 04:30:10 +0000 <![CDATA[AG Bouncer in the media]]> http://www.arturgajewski.com/blog/photography/view/article/241
So this program on Star showed hectic life of models and designers working on the show and bunch of papparazzis were taking pictures of Michael Kors. During that scene I noticed one of the photographers had AG Bouncer light diffuser attached to his flash. It seemed to be made of the real IKEA material and correct attachment system and all. It was nice to see my creation used by a pro.

The recipy for AG Bouncer is still available at:

http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-Gary-Fong-Lightsphere
]]> Sat, 04 Sep 2010 04:30:10 +0000 <![CDATA[Photographying our gerbils]]> http://www.arturgajewski.com/blog/photography/view/article/239 Two weeks ago we got three girl gerbils for us. At first, everything seemed OK until we noticed one of the girl gerbils was actually a boy. So we had to get a new terrarium for it as well as another boy gerbil as his friend.

Now that the gerbils got used to us, I decided to take some pictures of our new babies. I used external flash and pointed it toward the ceiling and little bit tilted toward the back so tha the flash would not reflect from the glass walls of the terrarium. Also, I didn't want to stress the gerbils with direct flash light.

The gerbils didn't actually get bothered with the flash light or the focusing aid light coming from the flash (which I don't like being pointed at me). The gerbils are very quick to move from place to place, so I rarely managed to get a good picture with single shot, unless they were monitoring what's going on, as if guarding their nest.

Pictures of our gerbils

]]> Sat, 04 Sep 2010 04:30:10 +0000 <![CDATA[Thoughts about flash light modifiers]]> http://www.arturgajewski.com/blog/photography/view/article/237 Recently I have noticed, that I use less and less light modifiers on my flash. Only color correction gels are the most frequent in use, but otherwise I tend to leave out the Stofens or my DIY lightsphere thingies. I have started to use the flash light more in the bounce fashion, where I direct the flash to a wall or ceiling that would create most attractive and natural looking light. In one forum, I learned a trick where the user turn the flash 180 degreen into her back and little upwords without any light modifiers. I put this trick into test and it turned out really good. I like the results of pictures taken this way if the walls and ceiling are white.

If the walls and ceiling are dark brown colored, the ofcourse you cannot bounce the light. In these cases I use the Stofen cup on my flash and have it pointing little upwords, creating softer light that in-your-face approach.
]]> Sat, 04 Sep 2010 04:30:10 +0000