The next time you blow yourself up with a barbecue you might require a good aloe vera gel to help sooth and cool those burns.  But today we’ll be discussing how to cool off using a different type of gel.

The above photo was taken in the middle of a bright sunny day.  Yes, shooting in the middle of the day under harsh sunlight is typically a photo “no-no” due to the inevitable washed out and colorless photos which result.  Check out the photo below which I made by setting the camera to aperture priority and daylight white balance.

Okay, so this is a fine photo in terms of composition and exposure.  But what if I have the hair-brained idea of creating a moody portrait against dark blue skies involving an unhappy guy who just blew himself up using a barbecue?  One approach (probably the easier) is to wait until evening and shoot it then.  However, if you don’t have the luxury of waiting to shoot until dusk you can use a single piece of orange acetate to turn the entire environment a deep shade of blue, even at high noon on a sunny day.

This is a CTO gel.  I bought this one from Amazon.com here.  The most common use for these gels is to balance the color temperature of your flash (already daylight balanced) with the much warmer incandescent/tungsten light found in most indoor locations.  In a typical indoor environment lit by incandescent bulbs I would simply gel my flash(s) with CTO filters, set my camera’s white balance to tungsten and shoot away.  However, today we’re using these gels to accomplish something slightly different (and more fun).

Okay, have you ever taken a picture outdoors while your camera’s white balance was accidentally left on ‘tungsten’?  What did the resulting image look like?  Chances are it looked a bit like this next test shot, because that’s exactly what I did here.  Although this time it wasn’t an accident. 

Nope, I didn’t just join Blueman Group.  All I did was tell a little white lie to my camera.  Well actually I guess it was a blue lie.  Regardless, I told my camera that the environment was lit by warm incandescent bulbs when in fact it was lit by cooler daylight.  As a result I gave myself and the environment “the blues”.

I’m actually happy with the fact that the environment looks blue.  But I certainly don’t want my subject to be blue.  He’s about to be blown up after all, so his day is bad enough without looking like a piece of fruit.  So how can I make my subject look normal in this uber-blue world?  By using a CTO gel on my strobe!

Now things are looking much better!  I’ve almost got the image looking the way I want.  I just have a few final adjustments to make.  I can also hear the voice of one of my virtual photo mentors Zack Arias in my head yelling “Always light the eyes Christian!”.  So I know that my model (who happens to be me) needs to turn his char-broiled head a bit more toward the strobe in the next shot.

A little lighter fluid and some Photoshop “burning” later and we have the final image.

Here are some pull-back shots of my lighting setup.

Camera Settings:
50mm 1.4 lens
f11
1/250th sec
ISO 100

Makeup/Prop Stuff:
- I used dark makeup and dirt from my garden all over my face, chest and shirt.
- I actually lit my shirt on fire (thankfully while off my body) to get the burned holes
- I squirted lighter fluid on a burning piece of kindling on the BBQ to get the huge flames

Photoshop Stuff:
- Cropped the distracting tree from the right side of the photo.
- I did some sharpening, primarily on the face and body using Nik sharpener pro
- I did some selective dodging (on the fire) and burning (on the face/body)
- To get an extra dark/gritty look I added a duplicate layer set to ‘multiply’ with an opacity of around 70%. I then desaturated the layer a bit, added a layer mask and selectively painted back in certain highlights with the paintbrush set to black.

Thanks so much for reading!

Happy cooking,

Christian

It’s true, some of us just weren’t born pretty.  Exibit A: the doofis in the photo.  But in this case I’m not talking about my mug, but rather the walls in my house.  My house was built by it’s original owner in 1942 using scrap wood from a local ship yard at the time.  In fact it was a homestead and was the first built on our hill here in Redmond.  So yes, there are many charming aspects to the house and there’s a lot of history here which I love!  However, one thing I don’t love about this house are the old, gnarly, striped panel boards on the walls.  Ugh…they’re hideous!  In fact, every time I take a photo in my living room or kitchen I deliberately try to avoid getting the ugly walls in the shot.  But they’re everywhere!  They’re surrounding me!  I…just…can’t…ESCAPE!

So what is one to do when surrounded by hideous, soul-sucking walls from the 1940s?  Well, if you can’t escape them…join them!  Use them to add interest to a portrait.  Here is how I embraced the inner beauty of my ugly walls in this week’s photo assignment.

This was a two light setup.  I started by getting my key light (with reflector & 20 degree grid) positioned high over the subject.  As always, I took several test shots with just this light.  While doing so I made sure that 1) the shadow under the nose didn’t hit the lip and look weird and 2) there was a catch-light in the eyes.  I also tried to minimize how much of this light fell on the wall.

Once I had the key light set, I positioned the “hat light”.  This was just a second light with a reflector and 10 degree grid placed at almost a 90 degree angle to the wall and hat.  Positioning this light proved to be more daunting than I originally thought.  Seriously, how hard can it be to light a hat on a freakin’ wall?  Well, as I found out it can be HARD!  The hat light would either be a bit too low, spilling onto the subject and causing weird shadows or it would illuminate too much of the wall around the hat resulting in general ugliness.  I was finally able to achieve the look I wanted by feathering the light off the hat and wall just a bit.  In effect “skimming” the hat and missing most of the wall altogether.

So why the 90 degree angle with the hat light?  Well, as I’ve learned from shooting many stock photo textures in the past the best way to accentuate texture detail is to place a small light source far off to the side.  This placement results in deep shadows and bright highlights which really add a 3-dimensional sense to the texture/object being lit.  So in this case the striped grooves in the wall become very visible and the hat takes on a dramatic, 3-D look.

This is one of those portrait concepts which I thought would be fairly easy when I first imagined it.  But in reality it was really tricky and occasionally frustrating.  However, I was very happy with the end result. 

Photoshop/Lightroom Stuff: Okay, as you can see in the above pictures my walls are not blue as seen in the final picture.  I made them blue by 1) shooting in RAW and 2) adjusting the white balance slider over to the cooler side in Lightroom.  That’s it!  RAW is awesome!  I also boosted the vibrance/saturation of the blue & red tones a bit and desaturated my skin tones.  The final step was some selective dodging and burning in Photoshop to add drama and bring out detail.

Note:  It’s really hard to look bad-ass while wearing a tiny red hat.

Thanks for reading!

Christian

Look deeply into my eyes…you’re getting sleepy….sleepy…sleeeeeeeepy.  Okay, maybe not.  But if you’re looking into my eyes you might see catch-lights which kinda resemble a ring flash.  But is it a ring flash?  Well the answer is both yes and no.  The truth is that I don’t own a ring flash (although I REALLY want one).  But when I was brainstorming concepts for my weekly portrait assignment yesterday I decided that I really wanted that specific look.  Being a big fan of both David Hobby and Zack Arias, I pulled on a few creative ideas which I’ve learned from their fantastic blogs in the past.  Here’s what I did…

I used a semi-collapsed small umbrella (learned from Zack) placed directly behind the camera for on-axis fill (learned from David).

Okay, first of all…pardon the mess!  My photo assignment this week was to create a portrait in a very cluttered environment without using a backdrop.  Well, my small house fits the “cluttered” bill perfectly!  Anyway, this setup with the umbrella actually worked quite well.  It didn’t produce the perfect circle like a ring flash typically does, but rather it looked a bit more like a small star in the eyes.

This particular lighting setup is ideal if you ever want to make your subject look like a thieving hoodlum. Here I am posing for America’s Most Wanted.

In addition to the “ring flash” catch-light I wanted a portrait which would look edgy & dramatic.  To accomplish this look I set up my lights like this…

The “Why”: I had a concept in my head for this portrait before I ever set up any of my lights.  I wanted to create a head/shoulders portrait that was foreboding, dark, edgy and just a bit on the scary side.  Why?  Well, I’m a big horror/action movie fan for starters.  And in my opinion, the “bad guy” always makes or breaks a story.   So here I set out to create a portrait of a villain.  More specifically I wanted my villain to have piercing sinister eyes, which seemed to peer out through a veil of darkness.  The “peering out” would be accomplished using the fill (MacGyvered ring flash).  The veil of darkness would be accomplished using the key.  So that brings us to the “How”.

The “How”:  Here’s how I went about setting all this up.  First I set up the key light.  I knew that I wanted it to just skim the face from the top down, without lighting the eyes directly.  This meant a really high angle for the light which would cast dark shadows under the eyebrows, the nose and the chin.   Normally I’m very careful to “light the eyes” with my key light.  But in this specific case I deliberately tried to avoid lighting the eyes.  I took a few test shots with just the key light and fiddled with it in between until the shadows on the face looked the way I wanted.  Next I added the fill light (collapsed umbrella) just behind the camera and started taking a few test shots.  I judged the brightness of the fill light entirely by looking at how it affected the image on the back of my camera.  I eventually found that it provided just enough fill in the dark shadow areas (and added that cool catch light) at around f2.  This was entirely a matter of artistic preference on my part.  Lastly I added the skim lights. As with the fill, the angle and brightness of these lights was entirely a matter of artistic preference on my part.  I liked how the sides of the face looked when the lights were around f9, so I went with that.  So that’s it.  I just built my lighting layer by layer, taking test shots along the way until things looked they way I liked.  Ain’t digital photography grand?

In hindsight: I think I would have tried having the skim lights a bit brighter (maybe f10 – f11), to increase the light intensity on the side of the face even more.  Also, I used a 50mm 1.4 lens for these shots.  That lens worked fine until I tried a few portraits with it in closer.  The result was distortion which made my already large nose look even larger.  Ideally I should have used an 85mm lens, but that’s another item which is currently on my wish list.  Alternately I could have used my 70-200 2.8 here.  However that lens requires a lot more distance between lens/subject in order to focus and my living room wasn’t large enough.

Photoshop Stuff: This post processing was pretty straight forward.  1) I desaturated the images quite a bit and then 2) I sharpened them with Filter->Sharpen->Unsharp mask until they looked sufficiently gnarly.

See ya next time!

Christian

Ah Zombies.  Who doesn’t love the sweet n’ cuddly little guys?  This particular self-portrait shoot was something I had been wanting to do as a personal project for quite some time.  Personal work is a really important thing to me as a photographer for two main reasons.  1) It serves as a constant reminder of why I got into photography in the first place, it’s incredibly fun!  2) It helps show potential clients the direction which I’m heading as an artist.  It gives them a glimpse into my (sometimes slightly twisted) imagination and helps them understand what drives me.

You may ask, “Okay Chirstian, so are you saying that turning your bathroom into a portal to Hell is the artistic direction you’re heading in?“  Hmmm…well kinda…yea!  I have always been a huge fan of horror movies, I have always dreamed of being a cinematographer, and I absolutely love the Halloween holiday.  Bunny Trail Alert: In fact, Amber and I through a HUGE Halloween party at our place each year, which despite the 3 months of setup and tear-down is always a highlight of our year.  Anyway, this photo shoot was super fun, super messy, very challenging, and is an example of the type of thing I’d love to be doing more of in the future.

Okay, in the interest of full disclosure I should admit that the idea for this shoot was inspired by an album cover I once saw.  The album art pictures a man looking at a mirror reflection of himself where only the reflection is standing in the midst of a flaming forest.  Since that time I’ve wanted to do an homage to that concept, but with a zombie twist.

So here are the details behind how I shot this messy beast (and why my camera strap and Pocket Wizards still have blood stains on them).

I knew that I wanted to shoot this image in my (super tiny) bathroom.  I also knew that I wanted the walls in the reflection to be covered in blood stains and to look ultra grungy.  Christian’s Romance Preservation Tip of the Day: In the interest of preserving my relationship with Amber I decided against covering the actual bathroom walls with blood and muck and decided instead to create false walls.  I also worked on this project while Amber was out of the house and cleaned everything up before she got home. Remember, artist which sleepeth in doghouse maketh bad (and funny smelling) art.

So after taking a few measurements of the bathroom walls I paid a visit to my garage/studio and pulled out a spare piece of thrifty white tileboard which had become too scuffed up to be used in any future studio portraits.  The plan was to cut the board to size and then paint/grungify the backside.

After getting the board cut I painted it, scratched it up, flung red concrete stain all over it (it’s the only red thing I had in the garage), hit it with just a little black spray paint, and then went over it with several coats of paint stripper.

Oh yea, I also dipped my hand in the red concrete stain and created a bunch of bloody hand prints.  As it turns out, this wasn’t the best idea.  Concrete stain is true to it’s name.  Who knew?

Once the false walls were dry I moved them into the bathroom and got them in place.

Okay, now it was time to set up the lights.  By it’s very nature the final shot was going to have to be a Photoshop composite of two completely different images shot from the exact same angle.  Those two images being 1) A “normal looking” shot of me standing in front of the mirror wearing a clean suit and 2) An “evil looking” shot of me standing in front of the mirror wearing a dirty/bloody suit.  The lighting for each image would need to be completely different in order to convey two very different moods.

It made sense to start with the normal/clean image, so I began setting up my lighting for that.  Since this was the “normal” shot I knew that I wanted to go with soft, pleasant lighting.  Soft light = a large light source.  However, my bathroom is super tiny, so this presented a challenge.  There was no way I was going to get my 60″ umbrella or even my 50″ softbox into the bathroom.  So here’s what I did.

I brought a big piece of R-TECH Insulfoam (purchased at Home Depot) into the bathroom and placed it against the far wall.  I then placed my Nikon SB-900 flash across the room and fired it into the Insulfoam.  This turned the insulfoam into a big ol’ reflector (and a very soft primary light source).

After metering for my light I got my camera set up on the tripod, donned my suit jacket, $3 thrift store shirt and took the first picture using a wireless remote.

You might be thinking, “But Christian…ya bozo…the grunge wall is visible in this shot!”.  And yes, you would be absolutely correct.  There it is in all of it’s ugliness.  However, I’m planning on completely replacing everything you see in the mirror with what I’m about to shoot in the “Evil image”.  Speaking of the evil image, it was now time to set up for it!

The evil image needed to be creepy and ominous.  So right away I knew that I wanted hard/small light sources.  I also wanted to do some type of “spook” lighting from underneath my face.  So first I set up the primary light.

Next I set up a 2nd light with a grid to illuminate the larger grunge wall and a “spook” light with a red gel hidden just under the mirror.

Lastly, I covered my face, shirt and tie with makeup, Canola oil, water and fake blood.  The canola oil + water does a great job of making skin look sweaty and gross.

Once again I metered for all my lights, got them dialed in and took the 2nd “evil” image.  Here is what it looked like.

So now I had the two images ready for Photoshoping.  Here they are side by side.

A little Photoshop magic later and the final image was complete.

Photoshop stuff: To make the evil image a bit more dark and grungy I desaturated it a bit, added a multiply layer (a trick I learned from Joey L), did a bunch of selective dodging, and then sharpened it quite a bit.

So that’s it for this project!  As always feel free to comment and ask questions about anything you wish (well, related to this blog post…hehe).  Also, if you know of other tips and ideas which might have been useful here, feel free to share!

Christian

This will be the first in a series of articles where I post photos from a recent project along with several “pull back” shots in which I’ll do my best to explain how I set things up and why.

I’m currently participating in a facebook photography group which has weekly photo assignments for one year.  I joined the group because I wanted to push myself technically and creatively during the year of 2011.  Plus, it’s given me a great outlet to post some really hair-brained stuff which I’ve been wanting to shoot for quite a while! More on that in later blog posts.    This week is my 10th week of participation and the assignment was, “Shoot an everyday item from a unique perspective that you wouldn’t ordinarily see“.  After quite a bit of thought (and a few completely inappropriate ideas which I ultimately vetoed) I arrived at using a martini glass as a subject for this shoot.

After selecting the martini glass I immediately had the idea of shooting it from directly underneath (an angle that I wouldn’t normally see unless I fell underneath a glass table at a bar..not that this has ever happened).  I then decided that I would shoot both a wide-angle shot and a more abstract macro shot.  I’ll start with the wide angle shot.  Here it is.

And now for the “how” photos.  One of the caveats in this particular photography group is that I’m not allowed to shoot in a studio or use photography backdrops.  Therefore I found myself shooting this in my uber-tiny kitchen and using the ceiling as the backdrop.

The first thing I did was to grab a square piece of glass that I bought at Home Depot a couple years ago.  I suspended the piece of glass using a table, the kitchen counter (currently being remodeled), books and a few storage boxes that I found laying around the house.  I then mounted my camera on a tripod directly underneath the glass.  I used a Nikkor 14-24 wide-angle lens to ensure that I got the entire Martini glass in the shot.  I also wanted just a bit of distortion to make the glass look a little surreal.

Once I got the camera situated I mixed up some food coloring and water to look like a mixed drink (no really…<hic>…it was jusht water) and poured it in the glass.  Okay, I know that the water color in this shot isn’t green like in the final image.  I actually went through a couple color variations until settling on green as the one I liked the best.

Next I placed dark colored foam boards (actually one was a box top) on either side of the martini glass.  I did this because I’ve shot clear glass objects against white backgrounds before and I’m familiar with the hair loss and painful stomach acid which results as you attempt to get any definition in the edges.  So in order to avoid hair loss and possible ulcers I place dark colored surfaces in close proximity to the glass object.  Doing this causes the glass to reflect the dark surfaces just enough to add definition to the it’s edges.  Placement is important here so if you’re ever doing a shoot like this you’ll probably have to fiddle quite a bit until things look just right.  I did quite a bit of fiddling here.

The final step was to place my light.  I mounted an Alienbee B800 on a short stand down near the floor and pointed it directly up at the ceiling above the glass.  When fired at full power it metered at f18 on the ceiling.  So based on my experience with lighting white seamless backdrops in the studio, I knew that I could blow the ceiling to pure white (255, 255, 255) at around 1.5 stops under f18.  So I set my camera’s aperture to f11 and fired a test shot.  Bingo, it worked!  The ceiling blew out to pure white and effectively became a giant light source directly above the Martini glass.  I had to fiddle just a bit with the light placement to get even coverage on the ceiling, but after that things were groovy and I started shooting away with my remote trigger.

After I finished with the wide angle shots I mounted my 105mm macro lens on the camera and started setting up for the more abstract shot.  Here it is.

Here are the setup shots.

See that pillow sitting on the ground?  Can you guess the very technical reason for why it’s there?  Here are the possible answers in multiple choice format:  a) Christian is old  b) Christian is really old  c) Christian is really really old.

So other than the lens only a few things changed in the setup between the wide angle shot and this one.  I knew that I wanted a dark background for this particular shot, so I grabbed the black foamcore board and held it against the ceiling with my left hand just above the martini glass.  I also added a 40 degree grid to my light because I didn’t want it spilling directly onto the glass itself.  You can see in the above picture that the glass still reflects some of the white ceiling around the foamcore board, which is a good thing.  The black board serves to 1) add a background and 2) add a lot of dark details in the glass itself.  Again, I had to fiddle quite a bit with the position of the black board to get things looking just right.

And lastly, here is a picture combining a bit of both looks just for fun. 

So that about wraps it up.   If you have any questions feel free to comment and ask away!

Bottoms up…<hic>…

Christian