Sunday, June 14, 2009

Flame


One candle (and one LED - I cheated, to give it a specular high light)
I'm not sure, if I'm done with the candle experiment, as I like the self illumination of the wax of the candle.
This is shot with the 50mm, and I experimented with the various aperture settings to get the right depth of field.
1.8 was way to shallow and basically nothing was in focus. Too much Bokeh can be a bad thing.
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Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Caustic


This was the hardest, and least satifying Mr Wooden so far.
I wanted to capture light bouncing off rippling water - how hard can that be (don't answer).
Well instead of being your friends, time and light are your enemies here.
You'll need a long exposure if you don't have a ton of light, and that of course will mess up the caustics, as time smears them all over the place. If you have a ton of light, you need to control it, otherwise it blows out the caustics, on the backdrop.
In the end, I should've brought out the 1500W light, but I was lazy.
I opened it up as much as the 50mm prime would go, dialed up the ISO, and 80 shots later, only had this to show for it :(
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Saturday, May 30, 2009

Fly


The speed blur in this shot is all done in camera.
I wanted the lighting to be natural, dropping a fake background on the shot will not match the lighting on Mr Wooden.
To get this effect I attached Mr Wooden to the camera, and moved the camera, with a slowish shutter speed.
I think this shot could be made better with a neutral density filter to make the shot even slower.
There is a fair bit of light outside, and even with the aperture closed right down, and the slowest ISO, it was still faster than I wanted.
To finish up a little bit of Lightroom to tweak the contrast, and vignetted the frame.
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Monday, May 18, 2009

Fall


In this piece, I'm playing with several themes. I like the light being an abstract, but motivated source.
I like the Depth Of Field giving a sense of movement - whereas in reality it's dead still (1/2 sec).
This is actually a lamp I own, which has autumn leaves embedded into the paper surface of the lamp - given really cool translucency. (IMHO). This is shot with a 50mm prime lens, which enabled me to get the fat bokeh, which simulates the depth of field you might get if these were 6 foot tall people, compared to their actual size of 1 foot. The contrast has been tweaked slightly in PS LightRoom.
The lamp is a 8Watt Compact flouro with 2700K color temperature - and this is pretty much the color the camera delivered.
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Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Don't open it


I'm trialing Adobe LightRoom here. CraigD recently gave me a hands on demo, and it looks like I should take the leap, as this software is the business. You can download a free trial from Adobe.com.

Light and smoke - I've always been fascinated by the way light passes through smoke, but in trying to tame the light source, and get the camera in a position to see these light beams is quite a trick.

Obviously I'm working with a miniature set here, with Mr Woodman - and so you need to work with small lights. Here I'm using a small can with a halogen bulb, and the light you see is actually escaping from the rear of the housing. I had gelled the light at the base with red, but it came out very monochrome, so using LightRoom, I tweaked the highlights towards green, and backed off the overall saturation.
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Sunday, April 26, 2009

Get out


I've always liked the way a shadow play can imply much more than is actually there.
For this shot I've used a frame with a large sheet a tracing paper, and placed the figures as close to it as I can.
Getting the lighting right here is very tricky, as I didn't want to confuse the image, with the figures and their shadows.
In hindsight I think the tracing paper screen used here is actually not translucent enough - maybe a plastic screen, or a lightly frosted glass would be easier to set up.
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Behind you


A single Halogen bulb is lighting this set, with a red color gel over half of it, which gives the two color tones.
Also the small bulb works well with these small models.
The point of this test was to work with some color lighting, which as you can see I've chosen to use the "over the top" technique.
I tried this shot with a black background, but it was too hard to read the figures - which are already hard to read, being wood, so it actually a white card, about 15cms behind the figures..
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Monday, April 13, 2009

Stop with the light


It's amazing what you can do, with one light, and a black backdrop.
This is taken with a wide aperture F5.7, exposure 1sec, quite close.
The other thing to play with is the "dutch tilt".
The wooden Mannequin is always standing vertically, so tilting the camera gives a more dynamic shot - dare I say, less wooden!
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Sunday, February 22, 2009

Heavy Landing


There's only one way to get a great photo like this, visit a butterfly house at a zoo - in this case Melbourne Zoo.
You may want to swap lenses, because sometimes the butterflies are up real close, and other times you may want 300mm. This was taken with my wide angle zoom, at 85mm.
I had wanted to photograph the Tarantulas next door, but I think I'd need a tripod (as it's dark in there), and pick at time when there are no squealing kids.
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Sunday, February 1, 2009

Gotta be fast














Luckily this little beasty landed in the back yard, and was there for long enough for me to rush inside and grab the 40D, and test out the new 300mm.

My hindsight says I should always take more shots with various aperture settings, to cover the Bokeh you actually want. (IMHO this could be a little less bokeh)
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