Canon 40D @ 10mm, f8, 1/30sec, ISO 200 with Tiffen HD polarizer

Once again I have used the jetty pillars to block the sun directly entering my lens, but still get a very warm feeling to the shot. To capture the details in the shadows in the underside of the jetty I have exposed the image for a little longer than usual at 1/30sec. At this slow shutter speed it is imperative to use a tripod. A Tiffen HD circular polarising filter has also been used in this shot to reduce the glare of the ocean.

Shots like these can look great when used as page backgrounds for coffee table books that document things like holidays or your portfolio. Just drop the opacity and slightly de-saturate them. Textures like concrete or grass can also look great as backgrounds.

So next time your on location and you’ve captured the sunrise stick around for another 30 minutes and snap the finer details to help tell the story. The warm morning light can really lift some subjects. Who knows you may prefer one of these shots to your sunrise image.

]]> http://www.thephotojourney.com/2011/11/28/shoot-the-finer-details/feed/ 0 http://www.thephotojourney.com/2010/12/27/inspired-by-sound-bts-video/ http://www.thephotojourney.com/2010/12/27/inspired-by-sound-bts-video/#comments Sun, 26 Dec 2010 21:20:00 +0000 Scott http://www.thephotojourney.com/?p=1411 Here is the last video in the series of videos of how I took my photos for this years Canon Photo5 Competition. Check out the other photo5 blog posts here.

Brief 5 was to listen to a sound clip from the Canon website and use it as inspiration for the final image.

The sound reminded me of my grandfather snoring so I had the inspiration and now I just needed to come up with how to setup the lights and camera to match my minds eye.

Once again it was recorded and edited all on my iPhone 4. Interesting exercise. Love to hear your comments.

Brief 3 was to incorporate confetti in motion. This was going to be 1 messy shoot

I wanted to capture the cleanup after the party. I put together a short video of the setup explaining the lights used and the way I rigged up the vacuum cleaner. Over a month after the shoot I have still managed to find confetti all around the house.

Once again it was recorded and edited all on my iPhone 4. Interesting exercise. Love to hear your comments.

]]> http://www.thephotojourney.com/2010/12/09/confetti-cleanup-bts-video/feed/ 1 http://www.thephotojourney.com/2010/10/18/bubble-gum-brief-video-tutorial/ http://www.thephotojourney.com/2010/10/18/bubble-gum-brief-video-tutorial/#comments Mon, 18 Oct 2010 05:27:23 +0000 Scott http://www.thephotojourney.com/?p=1022 So this is the first in a series of videos on how I took my photos for this years Canon Photo5 Competition. The way the free competition works is Canon send out a couple of thousand brown boxes with 5 random briefs for the entrant to complete. This year Canon announced a portfolio category that got me really excited to complete all 5 briefs. For more information on the competition check out the website.

Brief 2 was a portrait that had to include some bubble gum that they had supplied. I hated the stuff as a kid and I still do. I was very depressed to see it in the box at first. I wanted to capture something that showed the bubble gum inflated and then popped. My initial idea had been done by numerous other competitors so I wanted something totally different and eye catching. Then it hit me a double exposure would capture both states of the balloon, but first I had to work out how the heck to do it on a digital camera. I did some research and came across an article about an international fashion photographer called Joe Oppedisano. He took some amazing double exposures on film back in the 80/90′s in a series titles “Inner Self”. They were amazing and instantly I pictured my shot. Now I just had to work out how to do it in camera. There was to be no Photoshop here.

I was wrapped with how the final image turned out. I couldn’t have pulled it off without my wife Anna who put up with my directions of moving an inch this way and an inch that way. She managed to blow some great bubbles. Especially considering we were up till midnight shooting.

Check out the BTS video on how I did it. It was recorded and edited all on my iPhone 4. Interesting exercise. Love to hear your comments.

I setup my garage with my multipurpose ladder draped in Christmas lights and I clamped on a black sheet to hide the lights reflection on the garage door.

I tried my 50mm f1.8 lens but found it didn’t give me enough sharp focus on my face and still blow out the back Christmas lights. So I tried my 17-85mm, but wide angle lenses don’t work well at all with the bokeh hood. It just makes a star biscuit cutter shape on all the images. So out came my 70-200mm f2.8. This lens being a telephoto allows me to easily throw out focus on background highlights.

Once I got some decent bokeh results with this lens it was time to introduce my reflective umbrella slightly closed up to light up my face. I chose the reflective umbrella so I had more control over the lights direction. I didn’t want  light spilling onto my backdrop. I used my new Cactus KF36 @ 1/16th power. triggered by Cactus V2s remotes.

My brother came over for dinner so I asked him something I never expected to ever ask him “Can you punch me in the head please?” He happily lent a hand or is that a fist. It took us a couple of timer shots but it worked out relatively well.

As far as post processing goes all edits were made in Photoshop CS4. I applied sharpening and contrast boosts. And after following a video on creating blood I added bruising marks to my eye and nose. Here is a link to that video.

Now I will be working on my mostly black brief and cardboard cutout glasses portrait shot. I will be certain to blog about all of the briefs so please stay tuned. I’d love to hear what you think of my entries.

Its been a month of late nights for me watching the Tour De France. So I wanted to pay tribute to the great race. Bike in the pictures is actually my brothers GT single speed that we are looking after currently. Its not a light bike I would like to add.

Canon 40D,17-85mm, ISO 800, 17mm, f5, 1/200th

For the above shot I basically used my garage as a massive light tent. Its actually much easier then it at first looks.

After a nice new coat of white paint to the brick wall we were ready to go. The wall will now allow me to make it a brillient white or what ever colour I gel my flash for.

To get the whole wall and roof illuminated I setup my Canon 430ex and set it to full power for the bike shots, and 1/4 power for my profile shots. I had it resting about 2 foot up on my esky as i don’t yet have a light stand let alone an umbrella. (Its my birthday in like 5 days so that will be rectified soon).

Attached was my DIY Yogurt Diffuser. I went for this as it will spread the light in all directions like a gary fong. However this mod is alot cheaper and tastes better too. If I had just used the flash without the mod only the back wall would get a proper covering of light. Flash was fired with my Cactus remotes. All shots were on a 10sec timer. Trust me 10 seconds flys when you are trying to pop-a-mono.

The below shot was the portrait version of the leading photo on this post. Not sure which one I like the most.

Canon 40D,17-85mm, ISO 800, 17mm, f5, 1/200th

Below are 2 shots taken with my nifty fifty. I didn’t need as much illumination as by background was much smaller. Flash was set yo around 1/4 power.

Canon 40D,50mm, ISO 800, 50mm, f3.2, 1/250th

Canon 40D,50mm, ISO 800, 50mm, f3.2, 1/250th

After a few edits in Lightroom 2.0 and adjusting to the white space like removing a few objects in the side of the frame I recon its come out ok for a first attempt. Next time I think I would snoot a 2nd lighton my tyre tread.

Next upgrades to the studio setup will be some sort of white flooring and a curved board where the wall meets the floor. Then I can do head to feet shots.  I can also do a shoot longways down the garage once I clean it up a little more.

Viva Le Tour & DIYPhotography.net.

The first assignment for this year was to take a nice headshot of someone unemployed or similar that they could use on their resumé so as to stand out from other applicants.

So my subject for the shoot was my wife Anna who is just about to finish a Masters of Environment – Education for Sustainability. She has been applying for relevant jobs like crazy and has had a few interviews of late that she has finished up 2nd best even though the relevant HR Departments couldn’t give her a decent reason why she was just overlooked for the position considering she fulfilled all requirements well. I nice headshot on her resumé may be just what she needs.

So I had my subject but now I had to decide on how I wanted to shoot her and where. Considering Anna is in the environmental field I wanted to give her a natural and warm look. The assignment also happened to begin while we were preparing to go on holidays to the bottom of Australia. At first i was worried the holiday would stop me from getting the assignment done but then it dawned on me. We are going to a massive national park with prehistoric ferns. What better environment to shoot in to convey my subjects passion.

It was getting late into the afternoon and we came across this perfect location for the shoot. I wanted to have Anna backed up against the tree and have the ferns in the background.

Gear for the shoot was:

• Canon 40D
• Canon 50mm f1.8 mk2
• Remote shutter control
• Canon 430ex
• Home made light mod(shown below)
• Cactus remotes
  
• Tripod for camera
• Voice activated light stand

With the camera in manual mode I set my exposure to 1/200th and an aperture of f1.8. My ISO was set to 400. I setup the camera on my tripod right next to the ferns trunk seen in the location shot. I then used myself as a voice activated light stand to camera left shooting the flash (1/32th power) with my mod through the ferns branches.

I don’t own a light stand or umbrella yet and there was no way I was going to bring one with me to the other side of Australia on holidays. So it was now time to test my newest flash mod.

Yep that’s one massive yogurt container converted into a diffuser sort of thingy. I have been keeping a keen eye on the container ever since my wife bought the yogurt. After a nice clean and removal of the label all I needed to do was make a nice X cut to the lid and BAM.

After a few test shots I had something i was liking and it was Anna turn behind the camera. I made sure she set the focal point to my leading eye and using the shutter remote she held the flash in a similar area to where I had it and lets just say us photographers are not great at smiling of que. Anna did get a few laughs out of me and she has done very well considering the complexity of the situation.

Next time I may use an aperture of around 4 or 5.6 so as not to blur as much of the background ferns. Also the addition of a 2nd light would be a luxury so as I could have a rim light for our heads to stand out more from the tree. Anna’s blonde hair was a savior here. But overall I’m very happy with my first ever headshot and my first proper go at a on location shoot. This is what Strobist boot camp is all about, pushing our boundaries and exploring the awesome world of off camera lighting. Bring on assignment 2.

]]> http://www.thephotojourney.com/2009/06/22/headshot-boot-camp-ii/feed/ 3 http://www.thephotojourney.com/2009/04/23/star-wars-r2-d2-shoot/ http://www.thephotojourney.com/2009/04/23/star-wars-r2-d2-shoot/#comments Thu, 23 Apr 2009 08:27:06 +0000 Scott http://www.thephotojourney.com/?p=337 One of my favorite photography forums Ausphotography is currently running a Star Wars themed competition in the lead up to Star Wars Day. Obviously held on May the 4th (May the force). Being the massive Star Wars fan that I am I just had to try a few things.

I’m an R2-D2 fan and though it would be great to create a shot of R2 escaping from the Skywalker’s moisture farmer in search of Obi-Wan Kenobi. I had some old R2-D2, C-3Po, & Chewbacca figurines that I got as a kid from Pizza Hut. They had been sitting in a box for 10 or so years.

In the cover of darkness grabbed a handful of sand from the spare block up the street from us. It was very weathered and almost like concrete in some spots. Much like the planet Tatooine’s surface.

I then  folded out m trusty multi-purpose ladder and placed 3 wooden boards salvaged from a crate across it. Poured a fair bit of sand onto the middle board in a mound formation and began brushing the sand around my little R2 unit with an old tooth brush.  The base of the R2 figurine is bright yellow so I needed to cover this up.

Then it was time to setup the camera and tripod. Lens for this shot was the Canon 17-85mm f4-5.6 IS. Reason for this choice was that I could try closer up and wider shots without the need of changing my lens. Tripod was setup so that the camera was in a portrait position at about the same height as the boards.

I then placed my Vivitar 285 flash at the back left of the sand mound at 1/16th power. I placed an orange gel that I had picked up from reverse garbage shop a couple of months ago. The flash was directed at the white brick wall in the garage, and positioned so that the hotspot of the flash would be to the left of the composed image.

To light up R2 and give him a shadow I used 2 LED lights that I have for our mountain bikes. One was aimed at the sand and the other was held above left pointing at R2′s head and gave a nice shadow behind him.

Camera settings were

• Exposure: 1/250
• Aperture: f/6.3
• Focal Length: 85 mm
• ISO Speed: 400
• Vivitar 285 set at 1/16th power with orange gel

Post Processing in Photoshop CS 2

• Cropped image a little to place R2 on a vertical and horozontal 3rd
• Auto Contrast
• Saturated the blues a little and decreased the light level for blues by just a little
• Added curve layer, small S bend
• Sharpened image
• Added a small border by adding some guide lines and then using the paint brush with a soft edge I painted a white thin line around the edge except where the text will be
• I then added the Text R2-D2 and centered it

This weekend I plan on doing another Star Wars themed shoot once I find which box my model Tie Fighter is in. I have a few ideas for it that I have drawn up on some paper. I might scan that and upload it too.

For all things Star Wars check <a href=”http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/R2-D2″>Wookieepedia</a>

Any questions please ask in the comments or contact me via the Contacts page.

The setup for this shot was rather easy.

• Lens choice was my Canon 50mm f1.8 mkII.
• Tripod for stability during manual focus
• Vivitar 285 flash -1/16th power
• 2 White foam core boards for fill light
• Table with black fabric draped over it
• Clear plastic board under Coke can
• Coke can (obvious I guess)
• Remote trigger
• Spray bottle

Camera was set to Manual with an aperture of  f3.2 and a shutter speed of 1/400sec.  I set the lens to manual and aimed for the sharpest focus on the words “Uplifting Refreshment”.

White foam core boards were used to bounce some of the light back onto the can to define the sides of the can.

Flash was set at 1/16th power with a home made snoot and grid. Flash was hand held during the shoot for 2 reasons. The main reason being I don’t have a light stand, and the other being I was wanting to try a few different angles.

Tripod was set so that the camera was slightly looking down at the can.

Can was placed on a clear plastic board and sprayed with a fine water mist. This will give the Coke can to a cool and refreshing look.

Here is a straight out of camera photo of using the above setup only without the water mist on the can or the clear plastic board.

Once I had the images captured it was time for the post processing in Adobe Photoshop CS2. After sorting through the hundred or so photos I had decided on one particular shot that had a good reflection on the plastic and no major over highlights from the flash.

Here is the post processing for this image.

• Crop out the white foam core boards
• Clone stamp tooled the clear plastic boards slight reflections in the background of the image and the other foreground reflections
• Increased the Canvas size and stretched out the black on the sides of the can to fill in this area
• Increased the saturation of the reds in the image
• Increased the contrast
• Adjusted the levels
• Unsharpen Mask to around 102% @ 2.5 pixels radius

Then for the final Warhol image,

• Duplicated the layer 4 times with the blend style on each layer set to Screen
• Increased the Canvas size by 400% Width
• Created a background layer with a black fill
• Aligned the 4 Can layers vertically and distributed evenly
• Then on each layer using the Image –> Adjustments –> Replace Color tool I made the individual colours
• Flatten the image
• Then to finish off the image I adjusted the Levels by moving the blacks down a little and then the greys down a little. This cleans up the background and gives the cans more attitude.

Any questions on the image please ask in the comments section below.

]]> http://www.thephotojourney.com/2009/03/29/warhol-coke-cans/feed/ 2 http://www.thephotojourney.com/2009/03/27/my-first-self-portrait/ http://www.thephotojourney.com/2009/03/27/my-first-self-portrait/#comments Fri, 27 Mar 2009 01:16:52 +0000 Scott http://www.thephotojourney.com/?p=287 Well I have seen plenty of self portraits of people in their bathrooms (Clothed thankfully) on flickr in the past. Mainly used for Avatars but also a way of finally getting their mug out there. So I decided to give it a go after doing some product photography the other night.

I wanted to have a photo that displayed the camera as the core subject and me as merely the driver. So a nice amount of DOF was required. The lens choice was easy, as for a greater DOF I needed a larger aperture setting. So out came my Canon 50mm f1.8 II.

As you can see from the photo I was using my Cactus wireless remote to fire my Vivitar 285 flash with my small homemade snoot with grid (I’ll blog about this soon). It was to the camera’s right and about as high as a toilet. Why the interesting height well that’s where it was sitting. I had angled the flash towards the back right-hand corner of the small room. By bouncing the flash off the wall and roof the light will spill over the camera and not leave a massive flare in the mirror. You will notice plenty of people on Facebook and Myspace have self portraits with massive flares in the mirror. This is from on camera flash. It looks crap.

So the lighting was sorted. It was time to throw the camera in to Manual and set the Vivitar 285 to 1/16th power the lowest setting possible. I set the camera to a shutter speed of 250 and the aperture at f1.8.

I positioned myself outside of the bathroom perfectly head on to the small 40cm wide mirror, but I had the camera body inside the bathroom.

For the Autofocus points I selected the centre focus point only. This made the camera the focal point not me. If I wanted to set myself as the focal point I would have selected the left corner focal point.

As you can see in this photo the door frame is intersecting my hand so its no good. Its actually not a bad photo otherwise. I needed to shift myself left. Now I had positioned myself correctly and just needed the correct relaxed look on my face.

Because the photo was taken in a mirror I needed to flip the image in Photoshop. I also gave boosted the sharpness and saturated certain colours like the blue in my shirt. Using the burn tool I tried to patch up the brightness on my arm. I still have a lot to learn about post processing but hey its a start.

Next time I do the shoot I would probably check my background wall, as the framed photo kind of annoys me. Also the brightness on my arm is something I would be carefull of. Otherwise I’m very happy for a first time attempt.

My laptop is still down and out so these edits have been made on the wife’s machine only using Photoshop. I prefer to use Adobe Lightroom2.0 for my edits as it allow for a better work flow and is much easier to do a bulk bunch of similar images.

Once again any athletes wishing to get digital copies of the images please contact me via the contacts page and supply me with your race number. I have uploaded more to my Flickr Page and will keep on uploading of the next 2 weeks.

This was my first ever attempt at a panning shot. Running athletes are not the easiest  to track while panning as their running action is rather accross yet they move up and down. Something you wouldn’t get with cars and bikes. I hope to have a tutorial on panning up over the next few weeks.

With this shot I was trying for a technique called balance. There are 2 main concept for a balanced photography. The balance in this shot is that the foreground runner is in his set position and the background athletes are also in a similar position. This photo is actually my weekly entry in a favorite site of mines competition. Digital-photography-school.com has a weekly competition and this weeks theme was balance. Check the other entries here.

I would have preferred that i got the athlete looking up but mst of these guys keep their heads down till well out of the blocks. I also would have prefered to have his back foot in the image.

Australian Olympic Silver medilist Sally McLellan who actually won the women’s 100, 200 and 100 hurdles. I have quite a nice set of her start in the 200m sprint and will upload a time lapse soon. Some people have remarked that a crop on this shot would be nice so once my laptop is back in order I’ll give it a go.

Matt Davies the  100 and 200 Qld State Champion. The backgroup is rather annoying but I quite like the body shape and determination on his face.

This was the event I was hanging for. Its one of my track favorites, the steeplechase. I swapped my 70-200m lens for my kit lens the 17-85mm f4-5.6 IS. I got some interesting shots but due to the lack of a larger aperture my backgrounds are a little sharp. I’ll upload a series of steeple hots soon.

Both these girls meant business in the 200m final.

More uploads and some time lapse photo’s latter this weekend.

Have a good one and keep shooting.