The Visual Science Lab : 02 November 2014

11.13.2014

Color, Texture and Glow. Things you can find in Marathon, Texas.

Eve's Organic Bed and Breakfast.

Into every life a little bit of architectural photography is bound to fall....

It was a freezing, arctic day in Puskin, Russia. It was in February of 1995. I was hauling around a view camera case filled with tungsten lights, cables and plug adapters. I had a big bag of Hasselblad cameras and lenses over my shoulder. I was about to enter the Alexander Palace for the first time. But first we had to convince the head of security that everything would be okay. We were some of the first Americans to enter the historic building in a long, long time as it had been repurposed from "palace of the czars" to "headquarters of naval intelligence" sometime after the revolution.

The first thing I saw was this ceiling. I thought it looked wonderful. I loved the details and the colors. So I grabbed the battered and scarred Gitzo tripod and assembled a Hasselblad Superwide camera on top of it. The Superwide was legendary among architectural shooters. The 38mm Zeiss Biogon lens permanently grafted to the front was supposed to be absolutely rectilinear and used at f5.6 and slower the sharpness could be breathtaking.

Once I had the camera set up and position and roughly sighted in via the wonky optical finder that came with the camera I grabbed a Polaroid back and made a test frame on the black and white instant film we used at the time. My brain did some subconscious adjustments based on the Polaroid and then I loaded a back with 12 frames of Fuji Provia 100 in it onto the camera. As was the custom at the time I shot three frames. One at the exact setting which I presumed was the optimum exposure and then one frame about 2/3rds of a stop under that exposure and one that was about 2/3rds of a stop over that exposure. I took one last look at the ceiling and then pulled the camera off the tripod and caught up with my translator, our restoration architect and our armed, military escort.

I am pretty sure the last czar didn't have a strip of electrical conduit running along the wall next to the ceiling in his day but I am happy that I was able to see some of the glory and design of the time.

A trip to Pushkin rewards one with a chance to tour the (very fabulous) Catherine Palace and to also see the exterior of the Alexander Palace. If I could though I would give the traveler a couple pieces of advice: First, don't plan to go in February. It's cold, snow-covered and cold. Unimaginably cold for a Texan. Second, don't take 500 pounds of lights unless you are going on assignment (we were...) they'll just slow you down. And third, be sure to listen to your military escorts when they tell you that a certain view is forbidden. They really mean it.

11.12.2014

I know what the tests say but what is my high ISO limit with APS-C? Oh golly, another "real world" look.

When I photographed by friend, Fadya, last month I was captivated with the idea of using HMI lights to do the lighting. In retrospect it was well founded excitement. I am very happy with the way the lights work, their color balance is pleasing and the continuous light source leverages portrait shooting with EVF cameras in a very satisfying way. But the shot above wasn't done with an EVF camera, it was done with a traditional DSLR, the Nikon D7100. I wanted to use the camera to see how it compared with the Olympus and Panasonic cameras I had been using. According to the folks at DXO (DXOmark.com) who test camera sensors the APS-C sensor in the 7100 is the highest rated sensor in it's class and, according to their scale, is a good ten points ahead of the OMD EM-1 or Panasonic GH4 sensors in the various parameters that DXO uses for their evaluations.

This image was shot at ISO 3200 with the camera set at 1/640th of a second and the 85mm 1.8 G lens set at f2.8. I zoomed into 100% and did some pixel peeping and I was pretty impressed by the low noise and the high amount of detail present. It's a bit ahead of both the GH4 and the Samsung NX30 cameras (which I also own and use) but the difference in noise only shows up at 3200 and above so it's hardly a deal killer unless you only shoot in low light.

Here is a "100%" crop from the image with noise reduction in Lightroom set to zero. You can see some noise in the shadow areas but it's also important to know that the original file is 24 megapixels...

I'm always curious how this stuff all works but I'm pretty sure that if you expose well you can get away with a lot of craziness at high ISOs. I am also interested in how this sensor does so I have a baseline of comparison when evaluating the Samsung NX-1. It should be an interesting comparison of sensor with two very different design technologies...

More to come.

Photographic ADHD. Why I light everything I shoot in a different way than the last time.

Noellia with Ring Light.

On monday I shot eight portraits outside. It was fun because it was challenging. There was a brisk wind and some gusts. The client really wanted the images to be outside and we already had rescheduled due to weather so we went for it. I discussed the packing in a post over the weekend but to review I used a medium (3x4ft.) soft box with an Elinchrom Ranger RX AS powered flash head. I set up the gear and positioned the camera so I could include out of focus trees in the background, behind the subjects. The main light came from the right. On the other side I needed to block the direct sun but when I put up a solid, opaque 4x4 foot flag the wind kept pushing the frame over. The stands didn't go anywhere. I was using high rise C-stands that each weigh about 25 pounds and I draped sixty pounds of sandbags over the "turtle base" of each C-stand (C-stand is short for Century Stand, a standard of movie sets the world over...and much more durable and stable than most photographic oriented light stands).

I solved the issue of the windblown frame by replacing the opaque and sail like flag with net material instead. I use a two stop net and a one stop net to drop the sunlight down into irrelevance but the secret is that the nets let wind come through so they don't act as "sail-like" and they stay in position.

At any rate, that was the lighting configuration for the day. Big ass electronic flash through a traditional soft box with some light cutters and the aid of a neutral density filter.

Yesterday I found myself on another location. I was in a medical practice making portraits for the practice's website. We set up to do 12 people but this time I used four fluorescent light banks instead of flash. I wanted to create a look and feel similar to a ring light which pushes down unflattering skin details and lines. I used one of the fixtures on the background, one over the subject's head, just above camera and one each on the sides. Totally different than I usually light stuff but it gave me just the right look for images that will be attached to a dermatology practice! The fixtures are the Fotodiox Day-Flo-Pro models. I find them to be easy to color balance, provide good output and to be reliable. (and cheap). Since they are heavier than electronic flash heads I did bring along bigger light stands and a sand bag for each. I used diffusion right on the lights which made for smaller sources that I usually shoot but the three different fixtures used together gave me a nice, soft images which will stand up to some contrast boost after quick retouch.

Two days, two shoots and two totally different lighting set ups along with very different lighting tools. What next? Well, I had a portrait of an attorney on the schedule for this morning so after I unpacked the gear yesterday evening and ingested all the files from the medical practice shoot I started mulling over how I would shoot the next day. What lights and what modifiers?

I decided to go with one of my favorite looks and use a 6x6 foot diffuser over to one side. But what to light it with? I went for two K5600 Lighting 200 watt HMIs. One was the open face and the other a fresnel unit that they call an Alpha. The light was perfect and the multiple fixtures let me move the lights a bit further back from the rear surface of the diffusion to elongate the fall off a bit more.

I used a white bounce modifier to the opposite side and finished the whole thing off with a Fiilex P360 LED light fixture as a background light. Both the LED and the HMIs color matched perfectly and since they were all daylight balanced I didn't have to worry about ambient light leaking in the windows of my studio and causing a color cast.

Funny that the Elinchrom electronic flash mono lights that seem to be a type of standard working tool of photographers everywhere were not even on my radar.

Why all the different lights? Why all the different looks?

I guess I should confess that I get bored easily and using different lights makes every shoot more interesting to me. It's just my prejudice but I think shooting things the same way, with the same tools, over and over again is just mind numbing. The theories of lighting are the same no matter which tools you end up reaching for. You aren't really creating new paradigms of lighting but you are taking advantage of the various strengths each tool conveys.

I had to use flash on Monday in order to compete with the ambient sunlight. I wanted to use the fluorescents on Tues. because they could be used in close, in multiples and not drive the room temperature up. They were the perfect tools to create a ring light effect with tight control. And I used the HMIs today because they make me feel as though I am on a movie set and I can see every little change I make to the lighting as I'm shooting. Couple HMIs with EVFs and you may have the single best combination for shooting portraits in the studio. So it's not just boredom, there is some method in my madness.

I'll go so far as to say using the same tools every day, over and over again is akin to making a uniform product. That puts the whole photographic endeavor into the realm of being strictly for the money. The desire to play with all the tools means to me that I'm still engaged in the actual creation of photographs, separate from the commerce side, and that keeps me interested, engaged and constantly learning. You can do it either way. But to my mind it doesn't make sense to be a photographer if you aren't a little scared and excited every time you walk in the door to start a project.

Stay tuned as I finally circle back for a revised review of the new LED panel.

Please buy a copy of my book.

Thank you!

11.11.2014

I seem destined to learn the same photographic lessons over and over again. And subsequently forget them.

Taken and enormous number of years ago

with a Canon TX and an ancient

Vivitar 135mm f2.8 lens.

I owned one light at the time.....

I had another re-satori exercise happen to me this week. By that I mean I re-learned something that I already knew but the knowledge of which had been pushed down by my rampant consumerism. I've been very busy lately and that usually means there's a higher than usual cash flow which, sadly, generally means an increase in overall gear lust.

I was about to embark on yet another wonderful and well paying job and I headed to my favorite consumer electronics "candy shop", Precision Camera, to buy a needed three stop neutral density filter. Of course, while I was there I just had to take a look at the used equipment (which seems to be flying into their door quickly and in bulk). Knowing I was in the middle of a lukewarm flirtation with Nikon gear my sales associate put two interesting, low mileage, cameras on the counter in front of me. One was a Nikon D800 and the other a Nikon D610. Both were in amazing shape and both were priced at almost half their original selling prices. Overwhelming temptation! I had the store put one on hold for me while I sorted out my feelings overnight.

That's one part of the universe speaking to me through gear. But here's the other half....

I was asked by Craftsy.com and a website called, Pixoto, to judge a portrait photography contest. All I had to do was pick the grand prize winner and to write short few paragraphs about why I had selected the winner. I looked through about 5,000 images over the course of a day or two. One image kept jumping out at me, over and over again. It was well seen. It wasn't processed to death. The expression of the subject was perfect and riveting. I went through the exercise of narrowing down images into a folder of selects but every time I opened the computer up and started looking again the same image drew me in. It was an easy choice. And writing the "whys" of selection helped me understand (again) what was important in a portrait.

So here we mix the two events....

Once the judging was done I went back to my weightier problem: trying to convince myself that a D610 or D800 full frame camera with a spiffy-ass sensor would hugely improve my portraits or, conversely, talking myself out of spending yet more money on yet another placebo camera.

Since the portrait of the contest winner was fresh in my mind I decided to go back to the site and see what marvelous camera and what spectacular (certainly German) lens had be used to channel that image into existence. I did. I went back and looked at the camera info (and I'm a bit ashamed that with my age and experience that I would still do that). Well, the universe seems to enjoy balancing stuff.

The camera used was an EOS 600D. In U.S. parlance that's a Canon Rebel T3i. And the focal length is listed as a 90mm which I assume is the actual focal length on a zoom. Not a prime (although he could have used a 90mm tilt/shift....). So, here I am thinking this is a wonderful image: http://www.pixoto.com/images-photography/babies-and-children/child-portraits/raphael-5592685093060608 and I have to also understand that it was done with mundane tools and a total regards for, or an appreciation of, the subject. Not the camera.

Yes, yes, I abandoned any thought of getting the new camera(s). It's amazing in this situation just how quickly the universe came back around to correct my thinking.

Now....I am packing for another daylong portrait shooting assignment/adventure and I noticed that a certain big name fashion shooter does a really nice job with Broncolor strobes. Maybe I should look at picking up a set of those lights. It might really help my work. Right. Not.

To bring it all the way around I love the image I posted of Belinda at the top of this blog post. I did it back in the late 1970's with a camera that only had shutter speeds to 1/500th, sync'd at 1/60th and had a creaky, used lens on the front. I owned one particularly nasty Novatron electronic flash and a photographic umbrella that I found in the trash behind an old studio in downtown (don't ask!). But I love everything about that portrait. Could it be that our skills become inversely proportional to our abilities to buy gear? I'm beginning to think so....