From a regular snapshot to a decent one

Recently I was enjoying a party together with a group of friends. And there was a moment when they asked for the photos. It was evening, in a quite dark room, so there was not much options for lighting: I had to use flash or I had to crank the ISO up to 6400. So I have chosen for flash.

I started with one flash with omnibouncer, placed on the camera, directed 45 degrees towards the ceiling. iTTL mode did the job well, the only thing I had to do was to reduce the flash power by 1,5 stop, to balance a little bit with the background lighting. The result was, well, as expected:

The faces are well exposed, but the effect is rather disappointing: the scene is flat, shadows on the faces rather uniteresting.
But then I saw the possibilities to redo the scene with another lighting setup. Since I had 2 flash lights I decided to place them in the room according to the scheme shown below:

The light sources were SB-900 and SB-910 speedlight flashes, with omnibouncers, directed 45 degrees towards the ceiling, slightly above the model, both in the iTTL remote mode. They were triggered by the built-in flash of my camera. As previously, I adjusted the power of the flash by -1,5 stops - to show a little bit more background. I knew that the photo would be slightly underexposed, but I would be able to easily correct it in the post processing. The result was (in my opinion) much better:

Now I have separated the model from the background (look at the left shoulder of her and the top of the hair). Next to that, thanks to the light source on the left side of the camera I got the interesting shadow on her face, giving much more shape to it than on the first photo.
Of course, there is still a dozen of things to be improved (composition, background, white balance of the flash, just to mention some) - it is still a snapshot, after all.
But the learning is that it is always worth trying something else than on the camera flash. The setup cost me about 5 minutes but opened plenty of new possibilities of exposing the scene.

Make your own Easter greeting card

Easter is coming and it is a good habit to send the greetings to the friends or relatives on a greeting card. Since couple of years I make such cards by myself, which is a lot of fun and gives the cards uniqueness and personal touch.
Last year I described some techniques useful for this kind of photography. In this post I am going to describe the whole process of making such card, from the basic concept, to the publication.

Easter theme

All starts by selecting the basic theme. The symbolic of Eastern is focused on the symbols of new life: eggs, chickens, green and yellow colors, hare. So it is almost unavoidable to have at least some of them on the card. In my first attempt I have chosen for eggs and chickens. 

The composition

I like postcards that have a 3D-look. So I wanted to compose a picture that would give strong impression of depth. To achieve that I set up the scene in three planes: foreground, with the eggs, middle part with the chickens, and the background with the hanging eggs:

The perceived depth of field can be manipulated by different aperture settings.

The light

The above picture was taken in the ambient light, coming from the window located right to the scene. I wanted to give the chickens some warm punch as key light. To do so, I have used two speedlights with the CTO filter placed left and right to the chickens:

To avoid light spilling both strobes were equipped with a snoot to focus the light beam. Both strobes were controlled from the camera build-in flash via the iTTL system of Nikon. First attempt:

The chickens are warmly lit, but the rest of the scene is dark. Too dark. Time to put the fill light. Fill light was been created by third flash and a golden reflector bouncing the light from the flash on the scene. After applying fill light the scene looked like that:

That is better. The scene still have a warm look and all elements on the foreground are properly lit. Last step is to improve the light in the background. To do so another flash was used, equipped with the yellow filter. I have experimented with several positions of the background flash:

Manipulating the background light was easy, I just held the flash light in my hand during shooting in the different places of the scene.
Finally I have chosen the middle image for further processing.

Post processing

For post processing I have used combination of Lightroom, Nik software suite and Photoshop.

In Lightroom I have applied lens profile and camera corrections.

In Nik software I have pre-sharpened the image (with RAW sharpener), applied the golden reflector filter, blur vignette (in Efex Pro), added some local brightness to the eggs in the background (with Viveza)

In Photoshop I have removed some distracting spots. There is the final picture:

Some technicalities

Reuse the setup

The whole 'production' took me about 3 hours. Since a lot of effort has been put in the light setup once the chickens were ready I decided to create another card, with a hare in the main role:

As one can see, the scene is very similar to those with chickens, yet different. Taking this picture took me just couple of minutes thanks to reuse of the existing setup.

Try different gels

When I was done with my basic setup I have tried to light the scene with flashes without gels:

It hasn't been chosen eventually but it is always worth experimenting with different settings and sometimes it can result in a new, inspiring scene.

Hanging eggs

To hang the eggs I have used a combination of the flash light stand and a piece of other pipe mounted on the light stand:

Playing with the rim light

During this year's portrait session I was using a rim light for the first time. I have used a self-made rectangular softbox equipped with the flashlight as a light source. My idea was to create a contour line along one side of the face and the shoulders of the model.
To make the finetuning easier other light sources were switched off. So I could see the result of this particular light only.
It turned out that proper placement of the softbox relative to a model was the most challenging task. First attempt was to just put a light source right to the model (picture left):

The effect is not fully as I wanted. Obviously, the right part of the model's body is lit, but the contour line along her body is actually not visible. The next attempt was to move the light source a little behind the model, projecting the light slightly from her back:

This is much more satisfactory. The line along model's right arm and head is more visible. Sure I lost some light on her face, but it would be compensated by the other light sources.

The final position of the rim light source became eventually like that:

Shooting a stage event (or boost the light conditions if you can)

Today's post is about photographing a dancing performance conducted by children on a school stage.

The event I was shooting was a local celebration of the Polish Presidency of the European Union Council and the show was prepared by the dance group "Children of Europe". 

Taking photo of such event is quite challenging because of a combination of factors: there is a lot of movement on the stage (dancing), the lighting on the stage is limited, the required depth of field is relatively wide (because there is a group of 10-20 dancers, moving all over the stage and you want to capture all of them). The photo below illustrates my point.

Dancing on stage requiring wide depth of field

Ideally I wanted to have the persons on a first plane captured with the same quality as the ones in the background. So the aperture shouldn't be opened too wide (in the above case it was f/5.6, which worked quite well). Then the lighting. The typical options that I started with didn't offer enough:

• Don't use flash. With the available stage lighting to be able to capture children during movement  and having reasonable shutter speeds, I'd need to use ISO of 3200. Not an option, since my D80 produces way too much noise with such high ISO values
• Use the on-camera flash. It would work for the first plane, sure. But even with the powerful SB-900 it is impossible to cover the whole stage with light of good quality. The children on the background wouldn't be properly exposed.

So I needed some "lighting boost". And in this case I had some luck (yes, sometimes one needs just that). The ceiling above the stage was white and it was not too high. The photo from the rehearsal illustrates it:

Relatively low, white ceiling above the stage gave some lighting opportunities

Having the white ceiling opened a great opportunity to me: I was able to create a huge light source (nearly as big as the ceiling above the stage) projecting the light on the whole staging area. And taking photos like this one:

The lighting setup used for creating these light conditions is shown on the sketch below (view from the top):

The speedlights pointing the to the ceiling were put on the Lastolite all-in-oneumbrella stands. I had to put them quite high (about 220 cm) for two reasons: first, you don't want the flashes to be disturbing for the audience and the artists. And the second, I wanted to reduce the distance between the light source and the ceiling as much as possible to reduce light power loss. 

The primary purpose of SB-900 on the camera was to be used as a master flash of the created iTTL setup. I could use the built-in flash for this purpose as well, but I wanted to be on a safe side and use the power (and the coverage) of the SB-900 to trigger the remote flashes. And I wanted to have the decent light source with me while moving around the stage during the concert just in case the setup would not work.

Fine tuning of the setup took me about 20 minutes. A few consideration points:

• The speedlights on the stand should be pointed and zoomed to cover as much of the ceiling as possible. This is a bit trial and error process: I made a setup by imaging a way will travel, take a photo, check the result, adapt the setup. For example I started with the diffuser domes, but took it off since they didn't contribute to the light quality, but were reducing the light power slightly
• Decide where I would be shooting most during the performance and point the iTTL sensors of the remote speedlights in this direction. It increases stability of the setup tremendously.
• I needed to crank up the power of the remote flashes to the maximum values. Which in turn drained the batteries quite quickly. So remember to have the spare set in your pocket when working with such setup.
• The photos were slightly underexposed (in most cases by 1 EV). even with the maximum power of the speedlight flashes. This however was easy to correct in the post processing.

If one asks why one of the remote speedlights was SB-600 while another SB-900, the answer is simple: this is the equipment that I had with me.

As one can guess the described setup is not universal: there is not always a white ceiling above the stage, not every time one would have the opportunity to put his own equipment in the stage neighbourhood, the performance director will not always allow to take the photos. But if one has the freedom I had this approach is worth trying.