White Out

I recently organized a photo-shoot at Faith Blackwell’s studio in the Stutz Building with model Olivia Ogden. Shooting with me were local Indianapolis photographers Faith Blackwell & Laura Poland. The theme for this shoot was High Key. This is a technique that I wanted to try, for no other reason than I hadn’t tried it and it looked kind of cool. After reviewing multiple High Key images, reading up and organizing the location and model, I gave it a go.

Photographer Faith Blackwell & Laura Poland with Model Olivia Ogden

The effect to be achieved in high key is to overexpose the background so it’s completely white. There are several ways to get this effect but I planned to accomplish this effect using multiple studio and speedlights to throw as much light as I needed on a white background to over-expose it to the point of where there were no pixels at all.

Faith’s studio has one wall completely white. Since there is a dark grey floor I simply taped with white tape a 6 foot piece of background paper against the lower part of the wall and swept it out over the floor about 4 feet. I then used 2 Nikon SB-600 speedlights on light stands with a white umbrella. The setup faced the wall set back about 3 feet. Both speedlights were triggered with Elinchrom Skyport universal triggers. Speedlights were set at ¼ power. The goal was to use the umbrellas to broadly throw a diffused light against the white wall.

Model Olivia Ogden

I then set up 2 Elinchrom D-Lite 4 strobes with softboxes set at approximately 1/3 power 45 degrees both sides of the background approximately 6 feet back. The D-Lite 4’s were triggered with internal Elinchrom Skyports.

During the shoot I varied the power of the softboxes mainly to backoff the fill lighting. The goal of these lights was to provide an even focused light to be thrown on Olivia. I was thinking originally using just ambient light or just one softbox to get move shadow, but I went with the wrap-around lighting. In hindsight I should have used less light on my model. We also used a hand held diffuser in several shots to eliminate glare from the ambient light coming from the window.

All shots were taken with a Nikon D300s in manual mode. White balance was set to flash although I was shooting in RAW. Initial settings were shutter speed at 1/200, aperture set at f/5.6, and ISO at 400. I varied all settings throughout the shoot. All shots were with a Nikkor AF-S 24-70mm f/2.8 G. I varied the aperture throughout the shoot.

I had asked Olivia to bring several changes of tight fitting clothes one with a dark top and one with a light top. Minimal makeup. The 3 of us then took turns shooting away for about 1 ½ hours. As always Olivia made our work simple by easily transitioning from pose to pose.

Near the end just to switch things up we asked Olivia to run a series of poses infront of a large south facing window. This provided sufficient ambient light as the sun had moved well overhead. We added fill light with one Elinchrom D-Lite 4 set as ¼ power and bounced some sunlight using a piece of white foamcore board.

Overall, it was a fun shoot doing both full body and headshots. We easily achieved the desired high key effect with minimal issues. The speedlights did the trick providing a very even exposure against the white background. Personally, I like the full body shots the best. However, if I do this effect again I would definitely back down the light being thrown on the model or vary the power of the light on one side so I can get shadowing and therefore more depth to the model’s face. Of course I could do the shadowing post processing, but it’s not the same.

Tip and after-thoughts:

• Build the light. For my shoot I set up all 4 lights in addition to the ambient light in advance and did test shots using all 4 lights. Next time I would start with the lights on the background, shoot some test shots of the model, add 1 strobe for the key light, take test shots, and then add a second strobe for fill light. I would then vary the power of the strobes to get different shadowing.

• For high key your histogram is important but a bit misleading. Because you have the background overexposed you will have a large peak on the right side of the histogram. Therefore, about ½ way through the shoot I switched the “blinkies” on and this gave me better visibility if I was blowing out the models face which I didn’t want to do.

• If possible shoot tethered. I think I could have locked down my setting much quicker if I had a bigger visual image as soon as I shot. I’ve shot tethered before, but didn’t think about it during this shoot.

Dark Side of Dance

I had the opportunity to shoot the  Gregory Hancock Dance Theatre with the Indianapolis Photo Venture Camera Club.  This evening was dress rehearsal for “Happily Ever After”, themed around Hansel & Gretel, Once Upon a Time, and a very dark version of Pinocchio.  Since this was dress rehearsal we had freedom to go anywhere except on stage.  Great images here we come. The posted images are from Pinocchio.

As always this is a challenging shoot because of the extremely dark conditions coupled with mixed and varied colored stage lighting.  This called for my fastest glass, high ISO & the highest shutter speeds possible with low light.

This time at the theatre I did something different.  I did my normal hand held thing, but also mounted a Nikon in the balcony with a Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 prime.  This is my fastest lens and from the balcony the 50mm focal length covered the entire stage.  I simply set the Nikon on a tripod secured to the balcony railing.  I used a Promaster ® SystemPRO Professional Wireless Remote Shutter Release to trigger the camera from about 50 feet away.   I set the Nikon to manual mode, with aperture at f/2.8, shutter speed at 1/80 second and ISO at 1600. WB was set at 5400 kelvin.  Before things started I focused the camera on the center of the stage and then set the focus to manual.  This setup worked great.

I then used my trusty AF-S Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8G ED on a Nikon D300s hand held.  Setting was manual mode, speed between 1/50 to 1/100 of a second, ISO between 1250 & 1600 and aperture either wide open to stopped down to f/5.6 to get reasonable DOF.  Also, I set the white balance at 5400 kelvin. 

In almost all shots I needed to increase exposure and used the noise reduction slider in Adobe Lightroom 3.  Not much additional processing was required except for the occasional tweaking of lighting using curves in Adobe Photoshop CS5.

I’ve shot this venue about 4-5 times and have always come away with great shots, but at the same time many shots are not as tack sharp as I would like.  It’s extremely difficult with a crop sensor camera even if you have solid high ISO range like the Nikon D300s in such a dark setting without flash when hand held.  You need to balance noise in the shadows (which often is most the photo) with shutter speed and DOF.  Oh, the problems us photographers face.

Overall, a fun night with good friends shooting a great venue.

As always a few tips:

·         Crank ISO up as high as you can get even sacrificing a clean image so you can get your photo as tack sharp as possible.  You can often fix noise in Lightroom, but you can’t save an out of focus image

·         Use your fastest glass when shooting in a dark setting.  Tonight I brought no lens slower than f/2.8

·         I found with both the 24-70mm f/2.8 & the 50mm f/1.4 a speed of 1/80 was about as slow as I could go and still get tack sharp images with the speed of the dancers.

·         Bring a small flashlight.  For some strange reason I didn’t and I really could have used one.

Commercial Printing Services - Kind of a "Hit or Miss" Thing

I decided a few years ago that commercial printers have a cost advantage over printing on my own high end printer.  I now use 3rd party printing services whenever I have a photograph for a contest, want to frame a photo, or if I'm selling one of my photos.  Really, it's hard to beat the price of places like MPix or similar services versus the cost of photo paper and high end ink.  Even your local Costco or CVS can provide reasonable printing services.

Here's the rub, the quality is often "Hit or Miss".  My computer screen is calibrated, but I would estimate that 50% of the prints come back too dark or "muddy".  The colors never have the pop that II envision.  I've tried multiple options, i.e. allowing the service to do color correction, having it turned off, matching paper profiles whenever possible, brightning my images for printing, etc.  Again, Hit or Miss.

In today's digital life for photographers, the absolute need of having your art printed is not as important as in the film days, but you still have that need. 

My recommendation:

• Experiment with several services, stick with the one that you like,
• If you have a big job or running multiple prints, do a test print.  Instead of ordering 10 copies of an image, get just 1 done and see how it turns out.  If it's aces then go with it.
• Brighten your image.  I normally increase the exposures in the shadows and dark areas .25 to .50 of a stop.
• Use a commercial service that's local and you can visit & chat with face-to-face.  This has the advantage of showing them what may concern you about the output.  I don't think you can do this with a place like CVS, because the guy behind the counter normally has no clue about photography
• Get your own printer, and suck it up

Bottomline, if you are using a commercial printing service you need to bring to the table a healthy amount of caution.  Note, if you have suggestions or recommedations, pass them along.

Zombies and Beauties Were Everywhere

Playing around today with my camera.  Went to the annual 4-day gamer fest in Indianapolis called Gencon.  Gencon is billed as the largest "gaming" convention in the United States.  It takes over the Indiana Convention Center, and all the hotels, bars and restaurants in downtown Indianapolis.  It's 4 days of non-stop gaming, role playing and dressing up.  It's 24/7 game time.

This year I went to shoot everything in site. Not to worry, zombies, the only weapon I was carrying was my camera.  The good thing about this type of shoot is that it's just for fun.  No thinking, just put your camera to P, mount an on camera flash and shoot away.  I simply wanted to capture the sites of the fun-fest.  Now if only I could get some of these characters to participate in a real photo session...

Enjoy