For those interested in the technical elements, here you go.  The lighting basically amounted to a three-light setup.  The first was a flash, gelled with a 1/4 CTO to help warm it up, mounted on a light stand with a shoot through umbrella.  The second was the sun coming from back camera left, serving as a separation light.  And finally, I used a large reflector front camera right to kick some of that sunlight back up to fill in the shadows on their faces.   This is the kind of lighting setup that I would never have thought to try until making my way through David Hobby’s Strobist blog, but it’s amazing how easy and effective this kind of thing is.  This kind of extra effort helps turn simple snapshots into portraits worth framing.

One of the things I’d been telling myself I had to get out and do was to go out and shoot some light trails pictures.  So, tonight, while the kids were off at choir practice, I set out.  The pictures below are from Westerville, Ohio (home, sweet, home) and of downtown Columbus.  The Columbus shot includes the statehouse and the iconic Columbus Dispatch sign.  The Westerville shot is of the building that houses the newish Old Bag of Nails pub (home of the best fish and chips in the city).

Westerville, Ohio

Columbus, Ohio

A Halloween Nightmare

In the process of learning to be a good photographer, there are several conceptual hurdles you have to pass.  The first one is how to properly control the three key elements of exposure (ISO, shutter speed, aperture) and make trade-offs between image quality, motion control, and depth of field.  Another, more difficult, hurdle is learning how to control light.

The strobist blog is a great resource for learning this stuff, and I was going back and reviewing one of the posts in David’s Lighting 102 series on the importance of position and distance.  A formal education in photography involves learning things like the Inverse Square Law, but the general idea is this.  The closer your light source is to your subject and the farther away the background, the less background you get in the picture.  And furthermore, this effect isn’t linear (this is where the “square” part comes in).  The effect gets more and more pronounced as you move the light source in.

Your initial thought at seeing the picture of the skeleton might be that it was taken in a dark room.  In fact, it was taken in our well-lit living room in the middle of the day as you can see here.

Photo setup

  As you can see, the light source is very close (a couple of feet) away from the subject.  To avoid blasting the subject and to emit as little light as possible, I have the flash dialed down to 1/16th power.  That’s more then enough light to illuminate the skeleton, but it won’t do much beyond that.  Also note that the flash is direct (i.e. not diffused with something like a shoot-through umbrella or a stofen cap).  The goal here is to make this thing look scary, and harsh light is good at that.  Finally, the flash is off-camera and triggered with a Pocket Wizard (a little radio transmitter).

Once the flash is set, the next set of decisions are around the exposure controls.  The thing to know here though is that you’ll need to shoot in Manual exposure mode.  The effect being done requires virtually no light to be collected at the sensor except that which comes from the flash.  If you used one of the auto-exposure modes, it would try to go for a balanced exposure that captured the background.  But, we don’t want the background – so we need to take control and ignore the camera as it yells at us and tells us we’re grossly under-exposing the image.  For those who care, I ended up shooting at my camera’s maximum sync speed (shutter speed of 1/250th of a second) at ISO 100 and an aperture of f/20.  Without the flash, that combination of exposure controls would have resulted in a near-black picture.  But the flash lights the subject and we’re good to go.

The final step was to make a slight adjustment in the image on the computer.  As shot, the background isn’t completely black – but it’s pretty darn close.  So, the adjustment I made on the computer was to use the Levels control (almost any photo editing program has one of these) and force anything that was close to black down to black.

• 1 part sunny day
• 1 part first day of summer vacation
• 2 parts kids
• 2 parts water cannons

Serves: family of four

This is Nate Arbabi. Born October 9, 2006 at 8:32pm (PDT) and weighing in at 6 pounds and 8 ounces. My new nephew. I’m so happy for Deb and Amir.

This is a picture of some coins I did this evening. I’m thinking of using it for this month’s Digital Story photo assignment submission contest. The topic for September is “circle” and I thought a close up of some coins might work. To make the shot, I put a plain white shee on my desk, setup a couple of coins on it, and mounted my camera (with flash) on a tripod. To accentuate the lighting and try to remove shadows, I had lights on the side and on top of the subject. Although I don’t have a true macro lens, I was able to use the 24-105 lens at maximum focal length for this. It’s capable of focusing fairly closely, though I couldn’t get closer than this without getting into trouble.

Today, Matthew and Julie were off doing DreamDinners together. This is a place where you prepare meals ahead of time, freeze them, and then use them for a decent meal without much preparation on the day you eat. While they were doing that, Cassady and I headed to Inniswood Metro Gardens. I had never been there before, despite having lived less than a mile away. It’s a pretty place with lots of beautiful flowers to see. This picture was taken with my 24-105mm lens set to maximum aperture in aperture priority mode with maximum focal length. The end result is a very nice diffuse background.

This picture was taken back in July during our camping trip (we go every year with a bunch of families from Church). As is apparent from this picture, the excursion was not withou precipitation and in fact we all ended up cutting the trip short by a day due to all the heavy rain. Nonetheless, one of the most enjoyable things for me over this past summer was watching the kids on their bikes. Cassady is still on training wheels, but I suspect that’s not true for long.