Ron’s Photo World

10-19-2008

Technology gives us the ability to work anywhere, anytime. All we need now is the desire.

This image illustrates how we can work from any location. The light on Laura’s face comes from a small strobe placed on the keyboard of the laptop. The strobe is pointed at a piece of white printer paper that is taped to the screen (the laptop was turned off for this photo). The strobe was set to 1/8 power and the light bounces off the paper and casts a soft glow on her face.

The camera white balance was set to tungsten, to match the very warm ambient light in the coffee shop. I placed a CTO gel on the flash to match the tungsten WB setting. I set the ambient exposure to make the room darker, so that the dark contrasts with the glow on Laura’s face.

The camera was on a tripod to steady it during the 1/2 second exposure. I waited until the coffee shop employee was moving around behind the counter, knowing he would be blurred. Again, this blurring provides a little more contrast with the sharp detail of the laptop and Laura’s face.

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10-15-2008

It seems like you should at least make sure you spell your employer’s name correctly, especially when it’s right in front of you.

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10-12-2008

It’s getting easier to get around town on a bike. With more cyclists hitting the road to beat the gas prices, auto drivers are getting used to bicycles maneuvering through traffic. This photo is meant to give the viewer the sense of relative movement between cars and bikes. Even in a bike lane, it’s a little un-nerving when a car whizzes past my shoulder with a speed difference of 25-30 MPH.

This photo was taken with a remote setup. My Canon Digital Rebel XT was mounted on a bracket attached to the rear axle of the bike. The camera was remotely triggered with a radio trigger in my right hand. The bracket was made from a shelf bracket I picked up at Home Depot. I drilled out the holes so I could attach one end of the bracket to the bike axle and the other end holds a ball-head for adjusting the camera. (You can click on the photos to see a larger image.)

I set the camera to manual exposure with a slow shutter speed (1/30 sec.) in order to gain some motion blur from the moving car and roadway.

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10-06-2008

This still life depicts a soft moody setting, with the viewfinder lit much more brightly than the rest of the scene. Naturally, your eye will go the brightest part of an image, so make sure that the brightest part of the image is the most important part.

This image was taken in a very dark room with a 20 second exposure; the lens was set on f/22. Using a technique called Light Painting, the entire scene was “painted” with a small LED flashlight. I kept moving it around the center of the scene to give a brighter center and darkened, vignetted edges. I also held the light on the glass viewfinder for a couple of seconds to make sure it glowed brightly.

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10-04-2008

Lighting glass objects can be tricky. It seems like the glass wants to reflect everything around it, in fact, that’s exactly how glass reacts to light. So the trick is not to light the glass itself, but rather you need to light the surfaces that the glass reflects.

In this example of dark field lighting, the wine glass is sitting on a sheet of tinted glass, the background is black foam core board attached to a white wall. In a darkened room, there is very little for the glass to reflect. Two speedlights illuminate the sections of the white wall on either side of the black board, this illumination is what the glass reflects, giving it a clear shape.

Check out the lighting diagram below for basic dark field lighting. (You can click on the image to see a larger version.)

Once I had this lit correctly, I added the Goofy Pez dispenser. I had a friend hold a speedlight with a gridspot a little behind Goofy’s head to give him a rim light, and I held a white card to the right of the camera to reflect some light back into his face.

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