Thinking About: The Shot List May 20, 2009
Posted by Leonard Low in Assignment, General Comments, Portraiture.Tags: Assignment, here we go, nervous, omg, photo shoot, portrait
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Tonight I’ll be writing up my final Shot List for tomorrow’s portrait shoot. While I’m going to have to be quite spontaneous and creative with the individual portraits, I have a fair idea of the shots I want for my assignment. In both cases, however, I’m going to change some of my techniques considerably from how I did my first portrait session:
- I’m going to shoot from further away from my models, whenever I can. This is for two reasons: firstly, it will give my photos a flatter, more flattering (no pun intended) perspective; and secondly, it will allow a more forgiving depth of field. This handy Depth-Of-Field calculator shows that using a 50mm lens at f/1.4, from a distance of 2m, gives me only 13cm of acceptably sharp depth of field (much of which will be slightly blurred and out of focus). These are the settings, and the distance, at which I’ve been shooting most of my previous portraits, so no wonder I’ve had trouble getting the eyes in focus! At a range of 3m, the acceptable DOF more than doubles to 30cm, making it possible to focus close to the eyes and get them sharply in focus in the shot.
- I’m going to be shooting with a narrower aperture – NO WIDER THAN f/2.8. Again, this is for two reasons. Firstly, an aperture of f/1.4 contributes to the unforgivingly tight depth-of-field mentioned above. Shooting two stops narrower (f/2.8) at a distance of 3m gives me an acceptable depth-of-field of 60cm – which should give me nice, sharp facial details. Should I desire a blurrier background, I can always add extra blur in Photoshop later; but I cannot bring back detail lost due to shots being out of focus. Secondly, although the lens I’m using, a 50mm f/1.4 prime, is optically excellent, it suffers from some documented sharpness and flare issues between f/1.4 – f/2.2. So shooting with the aperture narrower than f/2.8 will avoid those optical limitations and result in sharper images.
- I must remember to remove my protective filter this time.
Although it has no explicit optical effect, it is another piece of glass for light to pass through, and has caused flaring and ghosting with some night shots in the past. Removing the filter removes a potential cause of problems. - Attention to detail! If there’s one thing my first portrait session taught me, it is that every tiny detail shows up in these photos. The smallest hair or shadow out of place can ruin the portrait! So I’ll be much more careful with composing and taking my shots this time around.
- More creative lighting and posing. I was very, very conservative with my lighting in my first photo shoot (where I basically stuck with a Hollywood/on-axis formula), but subsequent sessions have taught me to be more creative, and that experimentation can yield some fascinating results.
- Shoot in RAW. It’s better than JPEG. ‘Nuff said.
There’s a truckload of stuff to do tonight:
- Make sure all my batteries are charged, my memory cards are clear, and all my equipment is working perfectly (e.g. lens, viewfinder and menu screen clean!).
- Make sure all my equipment is packed, ready to go (including battery chargers – just in case).
- Write up my final shot list, keeping all my “lessons learned” in mind!
- Make up some platters of food to keep my models fed and occupied while I’m shooting.
- Keep reading through the portrait photography books and magazine articles I’ve been collecting, so that hopefully some of the advice will seep through into my subconscious.
I am nervous as all heck. Keep those fingers crossed for me!!!!
Preparing: Professional Portrait Shoot May 19, 2009
Posted by Leonard Low in Assignment, Contains Images, General Comments, Portraiture, Studio.Tags: artist, hair, make-up, model, models, portrait, portraits, Studio, stylist
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Oh my god. I seriously hope I haven’t bitten off more than I can chew here.
I’m preparing to do a really big portrait shoot, in which I’m hoping to achieve a few things:
Take my “final” photos for my major assignment for PHOT122. This will involve getting my models to hold unlit light bulbs in various poses, though some of the bulbs will be made to APPEAR lit, by using a strong, focussed, on-axis light.- Take portrait shots which will be “portfolio pieces” of my own work – a visual summary of my learning in this course. Whether or not I decide to start doing professional work, I think it’s valuable to create some beautiful images that show my ability at this point in time. I will be giving copies of these photos to my models (who are mostly my friends who’ve volunteered for this!) and to my make-up artist, in return for very generous student pricing on their professional services.
Yes that’s right. I’m getting a professional make-up artist and a seperate hair stylist to work on this shoot with me. It will be as close as I can manage to a professional portrait photo-shoot. Somehow, I will be trying to coordinate eight models, two stylists, and various interested spectators, while trying to stay focussed on taking the best portraits I’ve ever taken.
Keep your fingers crossed for me!
Practice: Commonwealth Place May 5, 2009
Posted by Leonard Low in Available Light, Contains Images, Gear, Night, Outdoor.Tags: 58mm, commonwealth place, diffusion, filter, glow, Night, Outdoor
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After class on Thursday night, I went out for my usual night shoot, this time at Commonweath Place. I wanted to try out a 58mm diffusion filter with light sources, and a classmate showed me some photos a friend of his had taken at Commonwealth Place that looked really very cool. The diffusion filter spreads out highlights in an image; the stronger the highlight, the more spread out it becomes.
The effect can be seen in this pair of images – the image on the left is unfiltered, and the image on the right is taken through the diffusion filter. Each light source in the diffused image seems to “glow” – this might be a useful effect for my “Shedding Illumination” photos, to create a “halo” effect on some of the subjects. However, the diffused image is also less sharp than the non-diffused one, so I’ll have to be careful using it or I’ll just end up with fuzzy pictures.
Reading: “Moments: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Photographs” (Hal BUELL, 4th Ed. 2007) May 4, 2009
Posted by Leonard Low in Contains Images, Influence, documentary.Tags: book, documentary, journalism, news, photojournalism, prize, pulitzer, Reading
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I picked up a bargain today at the Co-Op bookshop! They’re having a sale, and this hardcover, coffee-table sized photo book was marked down to AU$9.10. “Moments” provides a pictorial history of the Pulitzer Prize from 1942 to 2007, featuring every photo that has won the Pulitzer Prize, the most prestigious of photographic journalism awards.
There are 242 photographs in the book, which are all individually arresting, and collectively document some of the most significant events of the last 65 years. There are explanations of each news story depicted in the images, and technical capture details of many of the prize-winning images are also included – camera, film type, shutter speed, aperture, and lens.
Should keep me out of trouble for a few days hours…
Reading: Photographing Dancers April 30, 2009
Posted by Leonard Low in Dance, Influence, Reading.Tags: Dance, dancers, dancing, photocritic, photography, technique
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There’s a good article on photographing dancers on the Photocritic site! It’s good to know that even the pros find it damn hard to do:
“Ballroom dancing is the hardest photographic challenge I have personally come across. It seems everything is set up to make it hard, and nothing makes it easy. Everyone moves too fast, the lighting is horrible, and getting a spot to stand can be a challenge in itself.” –Laurie Young
Gearing Up… April 24, 2009
Posted by Leonard Low in Contains Images, Gear.Tags: backpack, bag, Gear, vest, vestpack
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So um, I’ve heard that photography is a bit of an expensive hobby to get into seriously, and it certainly looks like turning out that way. I keep finding cool stuff and thinking “oh wow I just have to get that, it would be so great for photography”. Sigh. Case in point: my new Vestpack.
This product includes a standard pocket-vest with lots of front pockets where I can put filters, spare memory cards, and batteries for fast and easy access; and also comes with a nice-looking urban-design backpack.
The front panels of the vest detach and can be clipped to the straps of the backpack so that they’re a single unit, with heavier items in the bag section (tripod, lenses, speedlite, and camera body) and fast-access items on the front. The backpack section is spacious enough for me to just drop my existing camera bag into it for some extra padding and protection.
I’ve had a chance to try it out on a climb up a local hill to take pictures for a friend’s website project, and the backpack makes it so much easier to carry and use my gear.
Positive feedback! April 13, 2009
Posted by Leonard Low in General Comments, Portraiture, Strobist.Tags: advice, butterfly, discussion, forum, hollywood, lighting, on-axis, photo.net
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I posted my first few images to my Photo.net discussion thread and it elicited this response:
Mark Chartrand
, Apr 12, 2009; 12:40 p.m.
Leonard,
I think your lighting is very nice on these subjects.
FYI: Direct lighting (just above the nose – or “on the axis”) has often been referred to “Hollywood” or “Butterfly” lighting as it was quite popular with “stars” in the 40’s and creates a “butterfly” shaped shadow just under the nose. It is really quite a flattering lighting setup, especially when used with soft focus on females.
Mark
Yaay!
Let there be light… March 29, 2009
Posted by Leonard Low in Gear, General Comments, Speedlite.Tags: canon, Flash, Gear, Speedlite
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And there was light: specifically, the Canon Speedlite 580 EX II. It’s specifically designed for Canon EOS cameras, and has through-the-lens metering and enormous light output: a Guide Number of 58m at ISO 100.
I kinda left it to the last minute to buy it, but I decided I should get it in case I needed it to shoot pictures of Earth Hour happening. More on that in the next post…
Expand Your Word Power: “Bokeh” March 21, 2009
Posted by Leonard Low in General Comments.Tags: aperture, blur, bokeh, depth-of-field, f-stop, terminology
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I have no idea how it’s supposed to be pronounced, but I learned a new word today.
“Bokeh” is the term used to describe the blur that occurs in the out-of-focus areas of a photograph outside the image’s depth-of-field range. More specifically, it describes the aesthetic qualities of the blur.
A “good” bokeh is generally a smooth and soft blurriness, without jagged edges on highlights that distract from the photograph’s subject. Better bokeh can result from having many blades on the lens aperture, as the resulting aperture has smoother, more rounded edges than an equivalent lens with fewer blades on the aperture. The Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 Mark II lens has only 5 blades: its out of focus highlights tend to resemble pentagons, and out of focus areas have a rougher texture that distracts from the subject. My Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 lens has 9 blades, and its out of focus highlights resemble smooth circles, with better bokeh lacking as many distracting artifacts. Here’s a comparison of the two – the f/1.8 on the left, the f/1.4 on the right:
For a more extensive comparison, check out this page (the source of both images above) which has plenty of images that show the difference in results between the lenses: http://photo.net/equipment/canon/ef50/.
Finding inspiration March 15, 2009
Posted by Leonard Low in Assignment, Contains Images, Influence, Portraiture, Practice.Tags: 50mm, afghan girl, depth-of-field, lens, Portraiture, steve mccurry
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I spent part of the weekend studying the work of Steve McCurry, one of my favourite photographers, whose portraiture of culturally diverse subjects has brought him international recognition. Of particular note is “Afghan Girl”.
According to Wikipedia this image was
named as “the most recognized photograph” in the history of the National Geographic magazine and her face became famous as the cover photograph on the June 1985 issue. The photo has also been widely used on Amnesty International brochures, posters, and calendars.
Many of his other portraits are equally profound, and while “Afghan Girl” was taken using a 105mm prime, a large proportion of his portraits are achieved using a 50mm f/1.4 prime – a very similar lens to the one I’ll be using for this assignment. Here’s one example, “Girl with Green Shawl,” taken in 2002 when McCurry returned to Pakistan (where he had photographed the “Afghan Girl” in a refugee camp over a decade before):
One of the features of this image is the shallow depth of field which has caused the shawl around the girl’s face to become blurred, with her face – and those penetrating eyes – in sharp focus. I’m hoping to use depth-of-field to good effect in my own portraits, to put the focus on the subject of each image while retaining a recognisable background. I’m confident I can replicate a similar look if I want to – I happened to take a picture of my cat a couple of weeks ago that has a similar depth-of-field effect with piercing eyes sharply in focus. 
Here it is!
