Our friends Jayne and Simon are expecting the birth of their first child this Friday, September 11th 2009.  And before its a little too late we headed out for a maternity shoot.  Not only was it my first maternity shoot but it was also my first non family shoot and well my first ever outdoor strobist attempt.

Zack Arias has challenged us to Serve someone with our cameras, in such a way that we as photographers will break free from our self criticism of “ I’m not good enough yet.”

So after a little research online at flickr looking at maternity photos and sending links to Jayne to gauge the style she was after, I needed a location. My wife and I had spent the previous weekend scoping out general landscape photography locations at the Brisbane Botanic Gardens at Mount Cootha. Turns out its also a great free and very diverse location for such a shoot.

I decided to go with a 1 light setup. A Vivitar 285 with a 43 inch shoot through umbrella setup on my monopod. Anna my wife helped out as a voice activated light-stand and more importantly she continued to encourage me throughout the whole process. I doubt I could have pulled it all off without her support.

We had 6 distinct locations selected at the gardens and we started in the Japanese Gardens. It had great natural light that I wanted to make good use of first. To tell you the truth I was absolutely terrified and didn’t know where to start. once we reached the gardens. Where should I sit them? Should they sit? What angle will I shoot from? How do I make them feel comfortable? So I just sat them on some open grass and just began shooting. I just asked them to sit and talk and ignore me. About 30 frames latter my brain clicked, I was checking my backgrounds, composing frames with the rule of 3rds in mind, making sure they didn’t have trees or other objects jutting out their heads. The months of reading about what to look out for while shooting just became 2nd nature. Then I found myself conversing with them encouraging them and hopefully making them feel comfortable. I guess its just like Joe McNally says “The Moment it Clicks”. That book has been a great resource of mine since August. Well recommended no matter what your level of ability.

Here is a small slide-show of shots from the afternoon. I ended up presenting them with just over 100 processed image. All post processing done in Adobe Lightroom and a few minor edits in Photoshop.

Stay tuned for a blog on my voice activated light-stand monopod rig.

This is the International Award Winning Wattle Toffee Liqueur. The bottle is hand painted by the owner of the  Tamborine Mountain Distillery Alla.

Setup Details

For the shoot I wanted the bottles on a seamless white background with as much detail of the bottle as possible, and considering for my birthday in July I got a light stand and umbrella it it was time to put them to good use.

Using white foam core boards as the base and backdrop I could nuke the setup giving me a nice white environment.

As you can see the flash was setup at a 45deg angle to the bottle and slightly above. The Vivitar 285 was set @ 1/4 power and triggered with my Cactus wireless remotes. Lens used for the shots was my Canon 70-200mm f2.8. Reason I went with this was that my 17-55mm f4-5.6 wasn’t offering the DOF or sharpness I wanted.  I wanted a little more pop, and you just cant beat the sharpness the Canon 70-200mm f2.8 lens offers. Only thing was that I was shooting from the lounge room.

So what did I learn from this shoot? Firstly I have to ask myself why I hadn’t opened the packet of Jatz biscuits at the end of the table during the shoot(Man those things are addictive). And secondly  a larger white backdrop would have helpded limit post processing time, as each image required cropping and adding of white space. Think I will invest in larger foam core boards this week.

I’ll be doing more product photography based shots this weekend as I will be visiting my parents and Mum needs some of her Silk art and products shot for the launch of her new website. More info on that soon.

Here is a shot of the Lemon Myrtle Vodka that is certainly the best vodka I think I have ever had. I wouldn’t mind re-shooting this but on a black or dark gray backdrop.

Firstly I will explain my setup.

• Canon 40D
• 17-85mm f4-5.6 lens
• Snooted Vivitar 285 flash @ 1/2 power
• Poverty Wizards for flash
• Cable remote shutter
• Black sheet for a backdrop
• Chair to prop setup up
• Tripod in Portrait position
• Incense sticks on plate
• Matches

The Vivitar 285 has to be snooted so that the light does not spill onto the black backdrop and so that we don’t have any light hitting the lens. In the past I have used a Pringles chips tube and that worked well. However I have destroyed it so this weekend it was spare paper and foam core wrapped around flash head. I have angled the flash below at about 45° to capture the most smoke possible.

Manual focus is the only way to go as we are working in a dark environment. Place the box of matches or something on the plate as a marker to focus on. Let the Autofocus do its bit. Then you want to switch the lens to MF (Manual Focus).

In manual mode set your exposure to 1/250th and your aperture to around say f9. ISO of something around 400. Connect you remote shutter button and light one incense stick. Using your remote shutter button start firing away.

Lightly blow on the smoke or intersect the smoke path with different objects like a spoon to get different patterns.

Also try different apertures and see what works best for you. You are looking for something like this straight out of camera.

So once you have a few nice shots its time for the fun bit, the post processing. Below is a video tutorial by me about how I process my smoke shots in Photoshop CS2. If you use CS3 or higher there should be no issue in replicating the steps.

So whats everyone think of the video? I plan on doing more of them on other post processing I do and any input would be great.

Here are a couple more smoke images from the weekends shoot.

]]> http://www.thephotojourney.com/2009/05/18/smokintutorial/feed/ 10 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.