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Archive for the ‘Photo of the day’ Category

Picture of the day. The new iPad III pictures

Posted in Photo of the day, Photo tips, Still Photography, tagged , , , , , , on July 6, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

For Christmas 2011 My dear wife got me an iPad that I have been enjoying  a lot. Now that her birthday it’s coming, it is time to get even and I got the new iPad for her.

The  original lighting setting for this pictures was done with one Travelite 750 set to 1 o clock with a 11″ reflector and a 30Deg grid. I used a flag beneath the reflector to block the light a bit on the white background behind the box. At 7  o clock I position a white bounce card to open up the shadow on the front left side of the box. After a few shots I decided to add a second light to color the background and that was done with a Canon 580 EXII with two cuts of blue gel. All the lights were triggered with a Pocket Wizard Mini TT1 and Flex TT5.

The Camera I used is a Canon 5D Mark III with a Canon EF 24-70 f2.8 L. White balance I think it was set at 6000K,  iso 100  F14  speed 200th.

Here is the original shot I took

Click on it to enlarge.

I kind of like the first picture but I wanted to incorporate the actual iPad to the image.

 Click on it to enlarge.

Then I decided to be creative and start playing with colors and that is when the Canon 580EXII came in. Also I turned on the iPad so it would look cool with a picture on the screen.

Click on it to enlarge

When saw that third image I did not care for it.  The exposure was not nearly enough to record the screen (IT WAS ON FOR THIS PICTURE)  and I think the crop did not look right at all, it was like a black square in front of the box. Then I recomposed the image and started trying to light the display with a third light in such way that it would show the image. Needless to say it did not matter what I did or where I positioned the light, the darn display was too dark or I ended up reflecting light into it or got a bunch of glare on a black screen. That is when I did something I don’t do often… Think. The answer pop right into my head.

The exposure for everything but the screen was already done with the flash, the camera was steady on a tripod. The flash duration is quite fast, therefore it did not mater the shutter speed being at 200 when nothing is moving. Now are you thinking what I’m thinking? You’re right. Turn of the ambient light and work on total darkness, take a picture for 30″ and see what happens. Bingo, the box and background are exposed by the flash and the screen it exposed using it’s own light. (I had to play with the exposure time to get it right, it ended up being 5″or 10″) and that is it.

Click on it to enlarge.

By the way, the picture on the display is my wife reading my iPad. I took that picture a few months ago and I thought it was going to be cool to use that image for this one.

If you have any comments or thoughts I would certainly appreciate if you leave some feed back.

Regards to all.

PS: If you made it all the way to the end here is a bonus picture of the settings.

Click on it to enlarge.

iPad setting

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Pandora’s Box. Portrait and lighting technique

Posted in Photo of the day, Photo tips, Portraits, tagged , , , , on February 9, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Lately I have being playing with light a bit more than usual. After spending some time reading the Strobist blog http://strobist.blogspot.com/  I came up with the urge to make a different kind of photo using some found knowledge and an old idea I had running on my head for a while.

I wanted to have the light to come from an unusual place like in this picture here

http://photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=7397779&size=lg

but I wanted a bit more of ambient light around like in this image here

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=357015547658606&set=a.354782741215220.105477.296162363743925&type=1&theater

keeping up with the concept and making some lighting modifications I came up with this image here.

Click on image to enlarge

Pandora's box

On this picture, I got just enough ambient light to show around the room but not so much to detract from the the main idea of a mystery box. It took a bit of playing around with the position and power of the lights (3 of them) and some reflections  until I got what I considered a decent balance of ambient light and flash light. So this is how I created this picture.

The camera was a Canon 7D with a 24-70mm f2.8L set at 30mm and f5.6, Speed 60th, ISO 125. The flashes were triggered with Pocket Wizard Mini TT1 and the AC3 controller and 3 Pocket wizards Flex TT5 one on each zone A,B,C for fine control.

The first test picture I took was with the accent lampt by itself to determine the ambient light, color temp and exposure I needed for that side of the frame. Then I set up a Canon 580 EX @ 1/64 power with a snoot to shoot a controlled beam of light over the boxes on the side table ( I ended up gelling the flash with 3/4 CTO to compensate with the existing light from the lamp) and then set the camera withe balance to 4600K. The next step was to power Pandora’s box. There I put a Canon 430EXII @ 1/16 of its power with a 1/2 cut CTO and covered it with a paper towel to diffuse the light, also I lined the back of the lid box with foil to reflect light into her face from the front since the single light coming from the box was giving me some weird spooky shadows that I did not care for. With those two lights I ended up getting something like this picture bellow and that was the look I was trying to avoid. To dark around her.

Click on image to enlarge.

That is when the third light comes in to the rescue and made all the difference. Another Canon 580EXII at 1/16 power, set at 50mm and gelled with a 3/4 CTO cut . The placement of this light is the trickiest one since is the one that is doing a double duty (I learned this one at the strobist site on the lighting 102 files) this is the light that opened up the shadows on the left side to the frame (primary function) but it also created the reflection (specular light) on the headboard that defined and separated her head from an otherwise black background. The tricky part about this light is that it has to hit the headboard to create the reflection behind your models head and  that reflection is what creates the separation we are looking for.  Therefore the angle of the light and the one from the camera have to coincide in the right place and that is when the fine tuning part comes in. I will write a post about that but make sure you check the strobist site to get more details about it.

The one last thing that helped me wrap this image was the reflection of the lamp on the lid (I really like that) I have a few without it and  I did not liked them as much, the lid looked to dark and flat. Small details like that make a big difference at the end.

Here is a quick image that shows up the set up I used to get this image done.

Click on image to enlarge.

Thanks for stooping by and as usual I’d appreciate any comments or questions. I also welcome ideas for new topics.

Regards

Alex Elias

PS: A bigger and special thanks to my wife that put up with my ideas when coming tired from work.

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Photo of the day. Portraits inside of a picture frame.

Posted in Photo of the day, Photo tips, Portraits, tagged , , , , on January 28, 2012 | 2 Comments »

Nothing new that hasn’t been done before but always fun to try. In a effort to organize my garage I stumbled into this frame and decided to use it for some fun portrait session.

The set up was not complicate it at all just a backdrop and a picture frame that I hung with a wire to the necessary eight. The light source was a Travelite 750 with a Photoflex 36″x48″  softbox place to camera left and a White reflector to the right to fill in the shadows. The Camera was a Canon 7D and the lens a Canon EfS 10-22 set a the 10mm end (to make it more cartoon looking, since I wasn’t going for the glamour look) set the lens at f 5.6. Iso was 100  speed 250 and custom white balance. The flash was triggered with a Pocket Wizard Mini TT1 and a Flex TT5.

The one thing I would recommend to make the post work simpler is to try to keep the frame as square as possible to the camera’s sensor plane to avoid to much distortions, specially working with such wide angle lens. Once in Photoshop I corrected the perspective to make the frame square before I did anything else. once the frame was square enough I made a selection of the subject put it on it’s on layer, created a new background  and added a drop shadow the the bottom right side of the frame.

Thanks for looking and as always do not hesitate to comment or ask any questions, I do appreciate both.

Regards

Alex

 

Click on image to see larger.

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Picture of the day. Painting with light II

Posted in Photo of the day, Photo tips, Still Photography, tagged , , , , , on November 23, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

Here are a few more images done with an LED flashlight. The basic idea an camera settings are the same as in my previous post http://alexephotos.com/2011/11/08/photo-of-the-day-painting-with-light/

Again thanks for looking and following the blog.

Make sure to ask any questions you might have, or if you have any comments or ideas feel free to post them.

Regards,

Alex Elias

Click on  image to enlarge.

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Photo of the day. Painting with light.

Posted in Photo of the day, Photo tips, Still Photography, tagged , , , , , on November 8, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

Today I wanted to light a simple set up with a very simple light source… an LED flash light. The basic idea is that the LED will be the only source of light, therefore a tripod is a must (unless you can hold the camera for 30″ with one hand and use the flash light with the other)

One of the many benefits of lighting something in this manner is that the light can be place exactly where you want it, allowing for great freedom and creativity, also there is no expenses to do this kind of photography aside from the tripod and LED flashlight. The one drawback and quite frankly not a big deal, is that each picture is unique and there is no way to recreate it.

The camera was a Canon 7D and the lens a Canon EF 27-70 f2.8L. I set the camera to manual everything (including focus) ISO 100, F10, 30″ exposure manual,  color temp to 10000K . Focus on your subject while you have light and then turn off the autofocus, that way the camera will not go crazy trying to focus in the dark. Make sure that whatever available light you might have on the room does not record on the sensor (do a test shot and make sure the image must be black) after that, get ready to shoot a lot of frames and make the necessary changes as you go.

Here is one picture I just did. If you like to know more details about the LED and how to use it so it does not appear in the frame while lighting, let me know and I’ll make another post with different images and a few more details on how to light the scene.

Thanks for looking.

Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Alex Elias

Click on image to see full size.

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Photo of the day. Carved pumpkin picture.

Posted in Photo of the day, Photo tips, Still Photography, tagged , , , , , on October 30, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

Tonight when I walked into the house I noticed the carved pumpkin glowing on the table. I like the low light mood and decided to grave the camera and try to capture the scene the way I was looking at it. After trying a few different approaches, this is how I ended up doing it.

Canon 7D and Canon Ef 24-70 F2.8L on tripod. ISO 100 F5.6 and 1 second of exposure, and the color balance was set to tungsten.  To camera left I used a Canon 580EX with a full cut of CTO with a Pocket Wizard Flex TT5 on a 2′x2′ Lastolite Ezy box, that was triggered with a Pocket Wizard Mini TT1 and a an AC3 Pocket wizard module in manual mode dialed down to minus 3. The idea was to capture the overall scene with the ambient light and use the flash to show a bit around it.

Thanks for stopping by.

Alex Elias.

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Photo of the day. Pumpkin patch family pictures.

Posted in Family pictures, Photo of the day, tagged , , , , , on October 24, 2011 | 2 Comments »

We just went to a fantastic pumpkin patch. Lombardi ranch, located in the Santa Clarita CA area. The place is huge and full of activities for the kids and parents with cameras like me.

My only problem was getting there late by about one hour. As I was parking the car I was seeing the beautiful sun rays hiding behind the hills, my golden hour was disappearing right before my eyes before I was ready. I did carry a few lights and a stand, although not remotely close to the real deal I put 1/2 cut CTO on the flash  (orange color gel) plus set my withe balance to cloudy to help warm up the ambient a bit.

The equipment I took with me was a Canon 7D  with a Canon EF-S 10-22 and Canon EF 24-70 f2.8L 2 Canon 580EX flashes with Pocket wizards Flex TT5 and Mini TT1 with the AC3 zone controller, one stand, my tripod for the family portrait (don’t trust people any more not crop my head or feet any more) and a remote shutter release.

Thanks for stopping by.

Regards

Alex Elias

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Newborn. Baby girl Pictures.

Posted in Kids, Photo of the day, Photo tips, Portraits, tagged , , , , , , , on October 21, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

I just finished doing a shoot for a newborn baby girl. The session went great since the little one literately slept like a baby.

The set up was quite simple, I used a photography posing table to set the basket with the baby, that made it easy for moving and positioning. The lighting was done with 2 Travelites 750 one with a 11″ reflector set with a 30Deg grid  for the background and the other one with a larger Photoflex softbox that was placed very close to the baby on camera’s right. On the left side of the camera as a fill light I used a Canon 580EXII with a 2×2 Lastolite softbox . All lights were triggered with Pocket Wizards Flex TT5 and a Pocket Wizard mini TT1 with the AC3 controller on the camera as the master. The camera was a Canon 7D and the two lenses for this shoot were a Canon Ef 100 macro F2.8 and as Canon Ef 24-70 f2.8L. I used the 100 macro 90% of the time for the session. I set it at  f5.6 since I was looking for a rather shallower DOP.

For the post work I used Adobe Bridge to organize and tag the files with colors and stars. From there I migrated the raw files to ACR to do some  adjustments and then open in Photoshop CS5 to do the last part. Here I did a few different styles in terms of post work from color, to black and white, duo tones and playing with vibrance  and saturation tools.

Thanks for looking.

I welcome questions and suggestions.

Alex Elias

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Las Vegas Trip. Photo tips. Part two

Posted in Photo of the day, Photo tips, tagged , , on October 12, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

On the first post I mainly talked about the equipment that I took with me and a little bit about exposure compensation. Here I will go over a bit more about some of the setting I normally use.

As I mentioned on the first part, in my opinion the only three settings worthwhile using are the ones that gives me full or most control over the creative process and those are.

Aperture priority. AV for Canon and A for Nikon shutters. When shooting in this mode one can choose the f stop and the camera will select the correct speed for the aperture you selected. This setting will let the shooter decide how much from foreground to background is sharp. The higher the number, the greater the portion that will be within acceptable focus. Having a large area in focus might be what you are after if you are shooting landscapes, on the other hand, shooting outdoors portraits normally benefits from a shallower focus (narrow depth of field) therefore selecting a lower number and blurring the background might be the way to go.

Speed priority. TV for Canon and S for Nikon shutters.This setting does the exact opposite. It let you choose the speed needed while the camera choose the correct aperture for selected speed. When taking pictures of kids playing in the park, sports etc, one wants to set the camera to a speed that can stop the action. If you are shooting landscapes and there is a river with a beautiful waterfall for example, then you might prefer to have a low speed to capture the movement on the water.

Manual. M for Canon and Nikon shooters (one of the few things they agree on) This is the one setting most people fear to even touch and is the one that let’s do take full control over your camera. Here you select the right combination of both speed and depth of field.

With that in mind, depending on what I’m photographing is which of the three settings I will use. If I’m dealing with architectural things like city buildings and other stationary things, most likely I’ll be shooting in manual mode, if I’m just walking around waiting for something to happen or just jutting away to nothing in particular chances are the camera is set to AV.

White balance. Cameras now days have quite a few predetermined setting for different  kinds of lightning. Automatic white balance is the most common if one is going to be walking around. Unless you are in a place where the color temperature is constant Auto is the way to go.  The cloudy setting is pretty useful also when shooting portraits outdoors, even if it isn’t cloudy since it will warm up the scene a bit but the skin tones on people will look a bit better as well.

Focusing points. Majority of modern cameras will come with a cluster of focusing points on the screen. Many people select all an let the camera set focus on either one of them (big mistake) many times the camera will choose to focus on the part of the frame that wasn’t what you wanted. At the end of the day you’ll be asking yourself why so many pictures are out of focus. If you can select a specific one do yourself a favor and select just a single one, every time you aim at your subject with that point you know that that the camera will lock the focus right on that spot.

Raw or J peg. Why not both? If you already spends hundreds on equipment, spend a few more dollars and  get more memory cards if space is your concern. I always set the camera to shoot the largest RAW and small J peg’s. I rarely use the J peg files  but if I want to share the pictures quickly with someone I can download those pretty fast.

Hands down the RAW files will beat J pegs every time when it comes to amount of info, plus the camera presets such as sharpening, contrast, saturation ETC are no embedded on the file. You will be surprised the amount of data contained in the RAW files, also iIf you have over/underexposed files, wrong color balance and some other errors RAW is the best way to recover.

Here are some more images from Vegas.

As always, thanks for stopping by, and I welcome comments, questions or ideas.

Alex Elias

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Las Vegas trip. Photo tips and equipment selection. Part one.

Posted in Photo of the day, Photo tips, tagged , , , , , , , on October 6, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

I recently went to las Vegas with the family. We spent most of the Saturday walking around the strip and visiting some casinos. For that Saturday I loaded a Lowepro slingshot 300AW with a Canon 7D, Canon BG-E7 battery grip and 3 lenses. Canon Ef-s 10-22  Canon Ef 24-70 f 2.8 L and Canon 70-200 f 2.8 is L I also took a Canon 580 EXII for fill light, a Manfrotto 2021 tripod with a Manfrotto 498RC4 ball head. Last but not least a circular polarizer, spare batteries and memory cards.

Lens selection

There is always two sides of a story. If you are looking for the best image quality you will take primes with you. If you don’t want to be changing lenses too often or don’t like zooming in and out via your legs then a zoom will be the ticket. I had coverage from 10 to 200mm between the three lenses I took. If you wonder what one or two lenses are most suitable/ useful for a day like this the answer of course will be;  it depends on your style. The Canon ef-s 10-22mm is a very good and fun lens to have but too short to be the primary lens. The Canon ef 70-200 f 2.8 is L is a fantastic lens, the one thing though, is that after hours of holding that rig around it becomes pretty heavy. The image quality is fantastic, it gives nice images from the distance and some great close ups and tight portraits. The Canon ef 24-70 f2.8 L  had the most useful range for a walk around lens.

From that day kept 370 pictures and here is some data I pulled from those images.

Out of the 370 pictures 324 were taken with the Canon ef 24-70 f2.8 L 26 pictures with the Canon Ef-s 10-22  and 20 pictures with the Canon ef 70-200 f2.8 is L. The one thing to note is that some times I get lazy and I don’t swap lenses when I think I should. To help prove my point here is a bit more data. From the 324 images I got from the Canon ef 24-70 f2.8 L 89 of them were at 24mm and 57 at 70mm, nearly half the pictures taken with that lens were taken at either end. Based on my experience, if I can only carry one lens (from what I own), the Canon ef 24-70 f 2.8L would be the one. One other lens to consider, is the Canon ef 24-105 f4 is L but it seems like that would be a fantastic lens to own for something like this. Now If you are going to shoot prime lenses only, my first choice would be a 24mm second choice a 35mm and third choice a 50mm.

Shooting Mode

Shooting in manual mode always gives you the most control and creativity, at the expense of loosing great pictures along the way while playing with the settings. I enjoy shooting in manual mode as much as possible, but when walking around  in a place that exposures changes every step of the way I rather switch to a mode like AV, or TV and let the camera do the heavy lifting for me. In this case AV was my choice for 80% of the day; whenever it made sense to choose manual I did.

Exposure compensation

This is a feature of the camera a lot of people either don’t know what it is, or do know why they should use it to begin with. To me, this is the one function of the camera that let the user set an automatic mode such AV or TV and still be creative and have control over what the camera is doing.

The main reason reason why this should be use more often, is due to how the camera’s meter is design to work. Without getting into lengthy explanations of a meter system, cameras are set to see the world as neutral grey, AKA 18% gray. Therefore if you take a picture of a white wall, the camera will assume that the wall is meant to be gray and will shorten the exposure “underexpose” to make the wall grey. The exact opposite will occur if you take a picture of a black wall. The camera will give you a longer than needed exposure (overexpose) to make the black wall gray.

Once this concept is grasp, that is when one begins to use exposure compensation all the time, to complete the creative process. Go out there and set the camera to AV , choose an f stop that suits your subject; Do you want a nice portrait with a blurry background? Open up the lens all the way. Is it the place a bit dark because your subject is on the shade? Use a higher ISO. Once the camera have 2 of the 3 variables “in this case an f stop and ISO” the third value is chosen by the camera, in this case the shutter speed.But… What would happen to your portrait if a good portion of the frame is going to be a bright blue sky? Well, chances are the camera will expose that sky properly leaving you with the portrait of a lovely black silhouette. If that is what one was looking for, then great, but if you were not going for the silhouette effect that was when you needed to overexpose via exposure compensation to have a proper reading of your main subject. In a nutshell this is how you can use some semiautomatic setting but still have control over what is going on as supposed of the camera doing all the thinking for you.

Thanks for stopping by.

I welcome, questions, comment and critiques.

Here are some random images I got from that day.

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