Motorbike Photography

I went out with a friend yesterday to get some photos of his bike, a Kawasaki something or other, I don't do a great deal of car/bike photos but we wanted to do some top gear type shots which is basically a photo with an odd coloured gradient (usually purple) over layering the sky. It is actually a cool effect, I'll put my effort up, this had a cyan coloured sky to compliment the red of the bike (colour theory). Anyway as soon as we pulled up to take photos the heavens opened and we had to sit in the car while everything else got soaked, in the end it wasn't too bad because the rain drops added to the overall picture I thought. I metered for the sky and used flash on the bike. I've just looked at the exif data and it turns out I was at ISO 50, no wonder I had to crank my flash up, I had been on a commercial shoot earlier that day and must have forgot to change it back. Anyway these were taken at about 24mm at f/8 for 1/6 sec. I think the cyan sky one might be a touch too dark but there is plenty of space at the side for text, in say a magazine article which is useful to remember. I quite like high contrast one with the yellow tinge to the left, low, dynamic angles are a key ingredient to this type of photography.

Eyes & Irides

Irides are the plural or Iris, so if you only learn one thing today thats it, you never know it may save your life, although you would have to be quizzed by an ocularly obsessed madman. Anyway after possibly the oddest introduction to a post I'm posting this one as it's the first shot I had rated on my stock site as a 9 (there is no 10 for some reason) only 0.25% of submitted photos get this rating, I thought it was pretty average really but it might have some value to someone. The stock photography site I use is photographersdirect.com if you have any decent pics, submit them, you might make a couple of quid, especially if you snap Elvis riding the lochness monster. The eye is also an easy picture to take if you have a macro lens.

Old Passion Flower

In an attempt to keep my post rate up I had to scrounge the back catalogue again, this was taken a while back when the passion flowers were in bloom, there's nothing remarkable about it, I think it just caught my eye as I had processed it in sepia, which I have to stop doing really. Depth of field is very important with macro subjects, this was taken at f/8 as I knew I would be working close but I still wanted the eye to be drawn to the stamens (the male bit of the flower for all you botanists) so I needed a reasonable amount of DOF. I was going to do a bunch of smoke photographs today but I have lost all my incense sticks but I'll hopefully do some of them soon.

More Flash and Water

I quite like working with water so I putting a couple of recent ones from a recent set I did in the shower. This also demonstrates a principal it took me a while to understand about freezing motion, normally if you want to freeze a stream or a fast moving car you up your shutter speed to say 1/1000, this is fine if you are out side but a bit different indoors as most cameras can only synchronise their shutter with the flash to speeds of about 1/250 (this is the cameras x-sync speed). This always panicked me as 1/250 isn't really fast enough to freeze the water BUT as a scene like this is lit with flash only, ie no ambient light the duration of the flash is a lot quicker than 1/250 so you could actually leave your shutter open for say 1/30 which is nowhere near fast enough to freeze water but as long as there is no (or little) ambient light the flash will be enough to stop the motion of the water. These two were taken at f6.3 for 1/200 at 170mm ISO 100. It was lit with a single speedlite to the camera left and I had a piece of orange card behind the shower. The levels were tweaked in Lightroom after, another rainy day project.

Octuplets

This bunch came in for a shoot the other day but the studio wasn't big enough so we had to improvise and get some informal shots. I have no idea why they were all dressed the same.

This is another rainy day project that you can do if you have nothing else on. It's a simple enough technique if you have a tripod. All you have to do is take each image without changing any exposure or focus settings, in fact leave everything on manual. Use a good size aperture, this was f/11 so everything stays reasonably sharp. Then in photoshop put each photo on it's own layer and just add a mask to the top layer so the next layer shows through, then join the top two layers and repeat until everyone is on the same layer. I added some effects in lightroom as the colour version was a bit plain. I'm not overly enthusiastic about this but its great for all the narcissists out there, Robbie Williams (remember him?) loves the effect, sing when you're winning album cover.

Photo Restoration

I was given a CD with a bunch of super old slides that had been scanned, by super old I mean sort of 1900's. Anyway they were in a fairly poor condition and they were still negative images. I will post before and after images. I opened them in Lightroom but this can be done in Camera RAW (photoshops RAW processor) even though the images were jpegs they can still be processed to a certain extent using RAW converters. Anyway the first step was to remove any colour as this was due to age, the photos will have been in Black and White or sepia. Then, in Lightroom, I dragged directly on the histogram to make the tonal width as wide as possible this meant dragging the exposure to the right and the Blacks to the left (It's a strange system but this boosts both the blacks and the exposure) as I did this the picture started to come out, I then increased the clarity (boosting midtones) and added a little more contrast.

The image was then opened in photoshop and a simple invert adjustment layer was added, this converted the negative image and then I added a B&W layer and tinted it sepia. It was really interesting to see some of these old images as a lot of them were composed really well, I guess it was because you only had a camera then if you knew how to use it! Surprisingly there wasn't a great deal of metadata attached to the image, I doubt the glass was as high tech by today's standards and I imagine the camera was moved by crane!

Still Life

I've been doing a few portraits recently and it's quite nice to get back to some still life stuff, and it's easier because you don't have to make them laugh. I was after everyday objects so I got some trainers and put them on a wooden floor. It is just lit with a single speedlight to camera right, there was no diffuser fitted so this made the shadows quite harsh, normally a bad thing but it was the effect I was after at the time. I was going to go for black and white but I quite liked the over saturated reds. I also liked the sepia version as it reminded me of the old time athletes who wore these as they were cutting edge in the day (they had holes in the side for ventilation! not just to let water in when it rains). Taken at 5.6, ISO 100 at 1/200 sec between 100-200 mm. My flash's auto power off was driving me insane but this can be disabled.

Off camera Flash

I'm just putting up this photo as it was my first shots with my new pocket wizards, I can now trigger my flash from 1600 feet. In this instance the flash was only a few feet away and could probably have been taken using a regular off camera cord but I was only testing it out.

For anyone who is interested I was at f/11 for 1/200 sec at 200mm ISO 200 and my flash was on manual at 1/16 power, f/11 to get a decent amount of DOF (depth of field) because as we all know this decreases as focal length increases! A really good site for off camera flash is Strobist, this guy really knows what he's talking about and it's a great learning resource. Hopefully I'll be posting with a bit more regularity now, but I've said that before!

Back Catalog

I was looking at a friends photos on a certain social networking site and decided to play with some older photos as it's been far too cold to go out for landscapes recently, although I'll be out pretty quick if any snow settles. Anyway these two have been fairly heavily processed to get their full dynamic range (HDR photography) you can make it look a little more realistic but I was experimenting today. CS2 & 3 has HDR facilities and also photomatix is a popular bit of software, if you are into this sort of thing. It basically relies on you capturing multiple exposures of a scene to capture all the detail in the sky and also the relative dark land and then the software joins the images and you tweak the results. This is done by setting your exposure compensation to (typically) +2, 0 & -2 for each image. It's handy if you don't have time to fool around with graduated filters and the like. Anyway hope everyone had a good new year.