My wife I mean. This is actually a lighting test shot from my blog post earlier this week, but has now become my latest in my 52 week project (that just so happened to be on hold for about a month!). So Melissa was holding our second son, Damien, while I got everything set up as I needed. So she wasn’t really paying much attention to me, though Damien was very fascinated with everything I did. So, I liked how this looked at the beginning, but then somehow, I think it was the background, it reminded me of a renaissance chiaroscuro painting. So I cropped to a square orientation, did some color adjustments and other stuff to further create this look. For some reason or other I also gave a slight burnt edge appearance. I think this turned out quite well for what I was going for. What are your thoughts?
Renaissance Portrait
Tags: 52 week project, chiaroscuro, lighting, portrait, Renaissance, strobe
Posted in Art, photography, Retouched | 4 Comments »
Back in the summer of 2010, I picked myself up a Optek 5-in-1 light reflector
on amazon. It was probably the cheapest I could find in the size I wanted with as many modifiers in one piece as possible. It has a diffuser as the innermost circle, with different types of covers for different modifiers. The cover that zips over the diffuser is gold on one side and white on the other side. Then if the cover is flipped it has black on one side and silver on the other. At full size it is 43″ in diameter, but handily it folds down to be 1/3rd that size. Here I have a photo showing all the different modifiers in one. Most of them are self-explanatory as to what they are, but I will say that the diffuser is the one on the floor and the white cover reflector is the one behind my head.
The great thing about these are they can be used for so many different purposes. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: light modifier, lighting, portrait, reflector, strobe
Posted in hardware, photography, Training | No Comments »
Who doesn’t like a good cookie? But when marketing cookies, there are good ways and bad ways of doing it. Quality photography can do wonders in selling more of your product, whether it be food, such as this case, or real estate, or furniture, or anything else. Certain ways of taking a photograph can lead to making the cookies more (or less) appetizing. Lighting, composition, depth of field, as in all photography, can affect the appearance of the food.
I all too often see businesses just taking snapshots with a point-and-shoot from a bad angle and direct flash. It makes the cookies much less appetizing. And if the white balance is off, the cookies can look downright bad. Here is an example of a typical picture you might see at your local unaware baker.
As you can see in this picture, even if the product is arranged in a decent way, the bad lighting can just put the whole thing off. This photo doesn’t make me want to immediately buy and enjoy these cookies. Which is a shame because the cookies still might be just as delicious. Restaurants that are members of national chains often have bad local photos against professional photos in the menu. When viewed together, the professionally photographed product will far outsell the poorly photographed product.
Now take a look at this photo of the exact same batch of cookies.
Which cookie would you honestly want to buy? Good lighting and composition go a long way to a sale. Background elements can help as well, as I placed the glass of milk behind the plate. This can just make the photo that much more appetizing. Good photographs often lead to impulse buys and if used in advertising can bring many more customers into the stores.
Let good photography and design work for you and your business. It is well worth the time, energy, and money invested as the return will be much greater in the end.
If run a restaurant and you have some food you would like photographed, or any other product for that matter, send me a message and we can talk about getting your product sold faster and easier. If you have anything to add on this subject, please do so in the comments below.
Tags: composition, cookies, food, lighting, photo, product, selling
Posted in photography | 5 Comments »
The shutter is what really makes a camera. In essence a camera is just a box that holds some film or a sensor with a hole in the end that opens and closes to let in light. This is evident from as far back as the camera obscura which helped artists essentially trace a picture of a person to resemble their likeness. Similar to that is the pin-hole camera, where a piece of film or printing paper is placed inside a camera and literally a pin-hole is punched in the other end which can be uncovered to take some surprisingly phenomenal photographs. Only slightly more complex from this is a typical 35mm camera. This can introduce aperture, which is actually dependent on the lens. It also gives the ability to adjust mechanically the time the shutter is open. The size of the opening through the lens dramatically decreases the amount of time that the shutter need be open in comparison to pin-hole cameras. Then with DSLRs (Digital Single Lens Reflex) cameras, the only thing that is really changed is instead of the shutter opening to a silver halide film plane, it opens to a light sensor of some kind. Today the typical is the CMOS sensor, which is beyond the scope of this post to explain.
Shutter speed generally adjusts from 1/8000 of a second to as long as you want it open, Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: aperture, camera, DSLR, f/, ISO, light, lighting, photo, photography, shutter, SLR
Posted in Camera parts, photography | 2 Comments »
Lighting is really what makes a photograph. And as a subset of lighting in general is directional lighting. The direction your light source comes from makes a big difference, especially in the tone of a photo. So here for you I have a multi-directional example of how light can look. I also did a couple from further and further behind the head to see how the light wraps around to the face.
These are shot with a single strobe in a variety of directions, but a consistent distance from the face. There is also a Canon 580EX II Flash
on camera pointed to the side with the catchlight panel pulled out, just to add some sparkle in the reflection of the eyes. And yes, that’s me making faces for the camera. I removed the color just to put more emphasis on how the light itself is working. Below I will go into a little more detail.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: chiaroscuro, darkness, direction, flash, lighting, shadow, strobe, tone
Posted in photography | 3 Comments »
