Category Archives: Photography

Discussions about photography.

Lighting, Photography, Portrait, Project 52 Assignment

Cell Phone Portrait

Last week’s Project 52 assignment was to pretend that a local cell phone distributor and online data service (think AT&T or Verizon) had contracted with me to shoot a point-of-purchase poster sized image that people would see in their stores and kiosks.

The “art director” had scribbled some concept of how he/she wanted the phone and the model to be positioned in the frame of the photo. (Check out the sketch by clicking on the Project 52 link above.) The photo was to be tall and skinny (3-wide by 7-high), and there was to be some room down the left side for the addition of text on the final poster.

A major part of the exercise was to also to submit a realistic estimate for the job. I’ll not go into that in this post.

Last Friday I received my order of three Einstein studio flash strobes from Paul C. Buff in Nashville,TN.

I also purchased the Cyber Commander radio control units, and several light modifiers to go with these flash units.  I had spent all of Friday evening, almost the entire day on Saturday unpacking, inspecting, and putting together everything to make sure it was all in good working order. Sunday morning and early afternoon I spent trying to figure out the Cyber Commander radio control for the Einstein lights.

I was tired of all of this unpacking, organizing, and studying, so I told Barb that I was going to go our for my 3 mile walk, and when I got back, we’d try to take the photos for the Project 52 assignment I talked about above.

When I got back, it was about 3:30 PM, and I was hoping that we would be done by 5:00 – but I also was going to be using a whole bunch of equipment that was new to me. I told Barb that I was really going to need her to be ultra patient with me for this shoot.

First thing to do was move the couch and coffee tables out of the way, and swing my Lazy Boy around so that I could position it where the fireplace would be visible behind the edge of the chair.  Even though it was sunny and 60 degrees outside, I lit the fireplace and turned it up pretty high, just to make the flames visible. That was the easy stuff…

Brought down my trusty Gitzo tripod, got out my favorite portrait lens; the Canon 85mm f/1.8. I definitely wanted the fireplace and mantle to be very blurry in the background, and the only way to do that is with a wide open aperture (low f-stop number). I put the camera in Manual mode of operation, set the ISO to 100, the shutter to 125th of a second, and since I wanted a shallow depth of field (that’s why the background would be blurry) to a fairly wide open f/2.2.  (The lens is capable of f/1.8, but lenses are not their sharpest at either extremes of their f-stop range.)

For the lighting, I used all three Einstein flash units. I put one inside a 47 inch octabox on a light stand about 3 feet to the camera left side of the chair. I also put a grid on the front of the octabox, as I wanted to keep the light coming out of it going straight out, and not also lighting up the fireplace and mantle behind Barb.  To the camera right side of the chair, I put an Einstein inside a 32 inch by 40 inch softbox, and positioned it so that the front of it was about 4 feet from Barb’s face. Lastly, I put the third flash unit on a short light stand, put a 7 inch reflector on the front of the light (one that you could also add colored gels to), and aimed it at the wall between the fireplace and the mantle (thus called a background light).

Using the Cyber Commander, I set the power level of the flash unit in the 32 inch by 40 inch softbox about ½ the power (1 f-stop) below the level of the flash in the octabox on the left. I also set the power of the background light to about ¼ the power (2 f-stops) below the flash in the octabox. I was going to have to take a few test shots, using my Sekonic L-358 flash meter to make sure that the lights were putting out the amount of light that I had set my camera to get a correct exposure with.

After about 4 iterative test shots, I pretty much had the photo that you see above. It was OK, but not terribly exciting. It should meet the requirements of the Project 52 assignment – but not until it was cropped to a 3-wide by 7-high aspect ratio.  Now my camera, a Canon 5D Mark II has a light sensor that is a 6-wide by 4-high aspect ratio. I could get it close by simply rotating the camera 90 degrees from the landscape orientation to the portrait orientation. That’s easy enough for me, as I keep an L-plate permanently attached to this camera. That allows me to reposition the camera without changing any of the angles of the ball head on the top of the tripod.  Even so, some cropping must occur in post processing (I use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom). Here’s what the same photo looks like with a 3-wide by 7-high aspect ratio.

Of course, you can’t see a 3-wide by 7-high aspect ratio photo while looking through a 4-wide by 6-high viewfinder on the camera. You can kind of guesstimate how much of the photo will have to be cut off (cropped) to get there, but you don’t really know until you do it on the computer. I didn’t do that until the shooting was all over, and then when I saw the result, I was pretty disappointed that the fireplace had to be pretty much lopped off and wasn’t even part of the photo anymore…  I could have set that chair up anywhere!

I had to submit at least 3 photos for the Project 52 assignment, so I had to get imaginative. I didn’t want to re-position Barb or the chair very much, as the sketch I had received from the “art director” although crude, was pretty clear about how they wanted the model and the phone to be positioned within the frame of the picture (also known as “composition”). I’m not sure how creative this will be perceived by Don Giannatti (the pro who operates Project 52), but my solution was to try a few colored gels over the reflector on the background light.

I thought that if I used an orange gel, it would give a nice warm appearance, just like the flames from the fireplace.  Here’s how that cam out:

Not too bad, but let’s see how taking it a little but further would look. Here’s the effect I got by using the Magenta gel on the background light:

Here’s what you get with a Rose colored gel:

OK, so that one probably went too far, but it does kind of match Barb’s cell phone, her painted finger nails, and her red lipstick, so I will submit that one as one of the group.

Since I already thought this was as far into the “red spectrum” that I wanted to go, I decided to reverse direction somewhat and head into the “blue spectrum”. I also slightly repositioned the tripod and camera a little, so as to see a little more of the fireplace. Here’s how the background appeared with a Light Blue gel:

Not as bad as I had anticipated, but it definitely gave the photo a “cooler” feel.  So I went  further towards a stronger Blue gel, and here’s what I got:

Not bad, either!  Kind of gives me a Red, White, and Blue sort of photo. Even better, having repositioned the tripod and the camera slightly, I could now see more of the fireplace after the photo was cropped to the 3-wide by 7-high aspect ratio.

In conclusion, I hope that my attempts to make the various photos “different” by simply changing the colored gels on the background light meets Don Giannatti’s approval.  We’ll find out next Wednesday evening!

Landscapes, Photography, Project 52 Assignment

Lake Travis in a Historic Central Texas Drought

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Last week’s Project 52 assignment was to pretend that a major online magazine wants you to shoot the photos for a lead story on the impact of weather in your area.  The historic drought in central Texas immediately came to my mind, and specifically how it has affected LakeTravis. We have been hearing on the local TV weather that Lake Travis was down more than 50 feet (15m), but we have not been out there to see it ourselves. Seemed like a great way to make my Project 52 assignment!

So last Saturday, Feb. 11, 2012 on a chilly 40 degree morning, Dad and I headed out to see LakeTravis. The sky was clear and a beautiful shade of blue! While on RR 620, just past Comanche Trail, but still about 2 miles east of Mansfield Dam, we pulled into the parking lot of St. Luke’s on the Lake Episcopal Church. This is normally a very scenic overlook of the beautiful waters of LakeTravis. Using my Canon 5D Mark II camera, I put a circular polarizer filter on the 70-200mm lens, mounted it all on my sturdy Gitzo tripod, zoomed the lens to 140mm and took the photo of the lake you see above.

(Note: you can see a larger version of each photo by simply clicking on the photo – just be sure to press the “Back” button on your web browser to return to my story.)

In a normal year, nothing that appears “sandy brown” would be visible – it would be under water.  Land being visible in the middle of this lake is such an uncommon occurrence that when it does “come to the surface”, the exposed land is referred to as “The Sometimes Islands”.  Right now they are peninsulas that have lots of vegetation growing on them. The small clump of trees on the far right are on Windy Point.

We moved on to Mansfield Dam Park. With all of the stark, barren exposed rock, the bright blue sky, and surrounded by water, I knew that the circular polarizer was really going to help by reducing glare. I changed my lens to the 24-105mm (with the circular polarizer), and we got out of the CR-V to walk around. It was very windy, and with the temperature still very close to 40 degrees F, we were quite cold.

This is looking east towards The Sometimes Islands, and yes, that is the Oasis restaurant on the cliff just to the left of the tree.

The boat ramp was closed. This was the last of all the boat ramps into Lake Travis to close, and currently there are not any boat ramps open to get a boat into our out of Lake Travis. In the photo above, it doesn’t appear to be such a great distance down to the water, but the next photo changes that perspective.

It wasn’t windy on this north shore, so I decided to spend more time investigating this area.

From here, it still appeared to me that there was no reason to close the boat ramp. What would stop anyone from simply removing the orange pylons and backing their boat into the lake for a care-free afternoon of cruising around the lake? Well, maybe this would prevent that:

But even if that didn’t stop them, this certainly would.

We decided to move on and head out and see how things appeared over by the popular lake-side restaurant named Carlos ‘n Charlie’s. We turned right onto Hudson Bend Road, and then a left onto Highline Road.

If your boat is already in the water, and docked at a marina, you are OK, as long as the marina is floating and can be moved further from the shore as the lake levels drop.  That appeared to be case at Emerald Point Marina, which pretty much surrounds Carlos ‘n Charlie’s.

Of course this doesn’t look anything like the photo that you see on Emerald Point Marina’s web site, but then I exaggerated the appearance of the distance by using a wide-angle view by zooming my lens in to only 24mm. But even so, it really is quite a way out from where it would be in a normal year.

We then decided to head back over across Highline Road to see what it looked like on the other side of Carlos ‘n Charlie’s restaurant.

If you’ve ever been there when the lake is up at its normal level, you know that the water line isn’t very far below the tops of the cylindrical concrete supports – and you can see the stains on them showing just how high the water should be! This was looking towards the northeast, and by turning to my left, and looking towards the northwest, you could get a sense of the fabulous view that the current customers were experiencing.

Although this photo doesn’t show it as well as I had hoped, the water level is at least 20 feet below the ledge. The ledge is higher than anything on the few boats remaining in this shallow part of the marina.

I thought it was would make an interesting photo to zoom my lens out to 105mm and get as much of a close-up as I could of the beached floating boat dock that was in the previous photo.

It was getting close to 1 o’clock. We were getting hungry, and the Longhorns were about to play Kansas State in basketball, so we packed up our photography equipment into the CR-V and headed home. We didn’t have much conversation on the way home. I’m sure it was because were were somewhat in a state of shock over what we had just seen. The only hard thing left for me to do was to choose which 3 photos to submit for my Project 52 assignment.

Food, Photography, Still Life

Happy Valentine’s Day – Chocolate Lovers

I’m not sure where the connection between Valentine’s Day and chocolate comes from… Does it really matter?  Just be sure to enjoy some today!

I took this photo on my kitchen table, using natural light. I placed a large diffuser just out of the frame to the right of the plate. I then positioned a large white bounce card to the left of the plate. To capture the largest depth-of-field (front to back in focus) I set the 100mm macro lens to the smallest aperture it was capable of (highest f-stop number): f/32. With the camera’s ISO setting of 100, my handheld light meter told me that the proper exposure would be obtained with the shutter set to be open for 8 seconds.

Photography, Portrait, Project 52 Assignment

Editorial Portrait of an Entrepreneur

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A few weeks before last Christmas, I became aware of Project 52. This is a web site that makes “real world assignments” to those learning the aspects of commercial photography. Since this is an area of photography that I would really like to get into, I thought that I would have nothing to lose, and everything to gain by participating in this exercise.

From the Project 52 web site, Don Giannatti explains: “What does “real world assignments” mean? It means you will be given assignments that are similar in scope and diversity as any commercial photographer in a small town. It means authentic work that is exactly the kind you will get the day your shingle gets posted. We work hard to make assignments that both challenge the creative, and produce work that could end up in your portfolio.”

The 4th assignment for 2012 was to make an “Editorial Portrait of an Entrepreneur”. You can find the assignment description here: Project 52 2012 Assignment 4.  As you can quickly determine, the assignment can be “faux”, or stated another way – “pretend”. Thus explains the photo at the beginning of this post.

Here is my lighting diagram that I used to create the photo above:

Hint: Click on any image to see a larger version.

The assignment required 2 photos: one showing the entrepreneur in their environment (see above), and one photo to be a close-up of the entrepreneur. For the close up shot, I simply took the camera off of the tripod and handheld it as I physically got closer to her, which you can see here:

If you would like to hear what Don had to say about my photos, you can go to the Assignment 4 web page, scroll down to where you see the “Audio Crit for Page One”, click on the Play button, and let the audio begin downloading. Once the download progress is about 50% complete, simply drag the leading edge of the white slider to the 31:15 mark.

Landscapes, Web Site Development

Photo Galleries are Back!

I surprised myself today and actually got my old photo galleries up into my new web site this afternoon!  If you look at the little black bar below my logo at the top, you should now see [About Gregg], [Contact Gregg], and [Photo Gallery] menu items. If you hover your mouse over that last one you should see it pop-down, showing the sub-menu items.

Clicking on any of those sub-menu items should open that web gallery in a new window.
Of course, they still have the dark gay background theme of my old web site, so maybe I’ll put some effort soon into making them look like they belong with this new web site.

Now that I’m getting more comfortable with this new WordPress method of creating and managing my web site, I should be able to concentrate more on photography again soon.  If you like what you see, click on the “Leave a Reply” link right below this line.