There comes a time in every wannabe-photographer’s life when he has to rest his camera and ask himself, ‘what the fuck do I shoot now?!’

I went through one such existential crisis last weekend. Which is when my good friend Pradeep called. ‘So, what are you doing over the weekend?’, he asked.

‘Uhh, nothing much.’

‘So are you up for a shoot?’

‘Sure,’ I said. I am always happy when I am offered the opportunity to outsource certain parts of the photography process, like say, zeroing in on a subject, and emotionally blackmailing them into posing for me. I’d some very pleasant photo-sessions with Pradeep, and the opportunity was too well-timed to be ignored.

Which is until he turned up over the weekend, and revealed what he exactly had in mind. He wanted to shoot me. Gulp.

‘Ideally, I would do a ROFL right now, but the maid hasn’t swept the floor yet,’ said the Missus, as she passed by the living room. ‘Try not to break too many things.’

For the next couple of hours, I sat in front of all the lighting equipment, following instructions like ‘look to the left, now look at me, don’t slouch, intense expression, how about a smile…’ Surprisingly, these words sound simple enough when you’re behind the camera. But when you feel like scratching your balls and throwing up at the same time, and the photographer tells you to ‘hold that intense expression’, you know you’re having a bad day.

Mid way through the shoot, I realized that I needed some leverage to convince Pradeep not to make these images public. So, I suggested that he too pose for me. He agreed. Alas, he turned out to be a natural.

The above image is one from the shoot. Pradeep seemed to be following my instructions, but now that I think about it, he was probably just recalling my intense expression. He has a mean streak.

The lighting setup is one of my favorites. A beauty dish was used as the main light – this is basically a fancy way of saying that a flash was thrust into a steel bowl so that the entire inner side of the bowl acted as a light source. This makes the the light larger than a bare flash, resulting in soft, even light, since it falls on the subject from more directions. This, however, is not as soft as when you use a softbox (which is even larger, and hence softer). The result is a gritty lighting effect. The lights reflected off the subject’s eyes (called catch-lights) also come out as big circular disks – this adds a bit of punch to the image. A couple of portable flashes were placed on either side of the subject, lighting up the contours of the face. These lights were a little brighter than the main light, which is why you see the white patches on the forehead and cheeks.

In terms of post-processing, I followed the same method as detailed here.

In retrospect, the shoot was enjoyable, except for the times when the missus decided to peep in and say things like, ‘are you sure you don’t want a Digene?. So, we have decided to do this more often, but preferably with a third person as a subject. I only have so many intense expressions.

©2012 rollon. All Rights Reserved.

Review: Focus on Lighting Photos

I have blogged about the awesome Mr. Fil Hunter before. His much-acclaimed book, Light: Science and Magic, is probably the first to be picked by every amateur who’s trying to get a little more serious about photography. But as with most scholarly work, this book too is not without a flaw. In fact, it was such a glaring omission, that I occasionally found it embarrassing to recommend this book to others. What is it, you ask? This book, and I am not making this up, didn’t have a single contribution from yours truly! Fallen of your chair yet? No? Damn you.

But the good Mr. Fil Hunter is a decent chap, and he has the humility to own up to his errors in judgment. And he did just that with his new book, Lighting Photos. It involved a lot of convincing, whining and groveling of course, but I don’t want to get into all that. Suffice to say that the matter has now been resolved and everything is finally alright with the world.

Lighting Photos is the new title by Fil Hunter and Robin Reid. As with the rest of the Focus On series, this book picks up a specific area of photography (in this case, Lighting) and aims to equip the reader with a working knowledge of the craft to enable her to start taking photographs instantly. Lighting Photos breaks down the intimidating subject of lighting setups into bite sized doses, and illustrates, through detailed examples, on how to get specific results. It’s ideal for people starting off in photography as the recommended equipment is fairly basic, and doesn’t require you to sell your kidneys for that fancy stadium-sized soft-box or over-engineered beauty dish. It is full of tips from Pros and inspiring photographs from contributors across the world. And once you’ve mastered these, you graduate to L:S&M

Amazon UK is still running a Free Shipping Scheme for India, methinks. So, you might want to hurry up. Go and click this link already!

I spent a lot of time mulling over what excerpts of the book I would like to include in this blog. And going by pure merit, here are the 2 pages that I think clearly stand out. And oh, the fact that both the pages have contributions from yours truly is entirely coincidental. I am very fair that way. Ahem. Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge.

Applause. Bow. Thanks!

©2012 rollon. All Rights Reserved.

Magic of Books

Having explored all the mm’s from 18mm to 55mm, I finally decided it was time to venture out into the unknown and buy myself a new lens; a kit lens can only get you through, like, 10 blog posts. So, off I went to the nearest Canon showroom. And promptly came back. Empty handed. Depressed. Sulking. Confused. Suicidal (well, not quite – but you get my drift).

Investing in a DSLR is a big decision. It’s expensive, and unless one is very serious about photography, it doesn’t make much sense either – having a 10MP of your pet licking her tummy simply doesn’t have as much of universal appeal as you might hope for. But let’s say you are serious about it. A decent DSLR costs anywhere upwards of INR 30K. But that’s just the beginning of your spiral into bankruptcy. Before the DSLR, your images used to look amateurish, grainy, plain, stupid and lacking a single strand of creativity. Post purchase, you’ll realize that you now have the power to create images that are still amateurish, grainy, plain, stupid and lacking any strand of creativity, albeit in super-high resolution. For a moment, you’ll start questioning yourself, and play around with the idea of taking your day-job a little seriously. But soon, your efficient survival system will kick in and you’ll decide your "equipment is to blame; if I could just get my hands on a decent lens…" From then on, there’s no looking back.

I’m awesomely proud of this image. I’ve wanted to take this image since quite sometime, but the bokeh just wasn’t possible with my kit lens. So, I decided to make this my first image with the refreshingly cheap canon 50mm 1.8 prime lens. The setup is fairly simple. The books have been lit with a bare Vivitar 285HV at 1/4th power about 3 ft away. Another Vivitar to camera right lights the army of drinking glasses placed at a distance of around 2.5 ft behind the stack of books. This flash is gelled a shade of blue, that is reflected by the glasses. Since the 50mm lens allows for a wider aperture, the depth of field (the range of the image that remains in focus) is limited, reducing the reflections from the glass into a beautiful blur. Voila!

©2012 rollon. All Rights Reserved.

‘Look,’ I said, proudly waving around the bundle at the missus. Inspired by strobist.com, I’d ordered myself a sample book of Lee’s color correction filters on the net, and completely forgotten about it. So, after a couple of weeks, when it was delivered to me, it was an awesomely pleasant experience and I felt like sharing my delight.

The missus immediately snatched the bundle from my hands, and gave it a thorough inspection, mentally scanning the repository of sarcastic comments she reserved for ‘look what my husband dragged in‘ kind of situations. But there couldn’t possibly have been much she could have said on this occasion. First, she had no idea what it was. Second, I’d not destroyed any of her ornaments or other stuff to make it (the incident involving my now defunct DIY soft-box using translucent cloth, held together with earrings still comes up every once in a while). I hadn’t been so proud of myself since quite sometime.

‘Wow, you must be very proud,’ she said, tossing the bundle back to me. ‘I don’t know of many people who have a collection of 1"x4" colored, semi-transparent paper.’ I felt like pointing out to her that the sample book had come completely free of charge, and all that I had to pay was INR 800 for the delivery, but I wasn’t certain that this too wouldn’t be twisted and turned into something that made me look bad. If ever I ended up murdering cute puppies, I would hire my wife as my lawyer. Am sure she’d have a way of making me look like the victim.

Here’s the thing. Apparently light has a temperature. ‘Hah!,’ you say. ‘Why on earth should I be bothered!’ Well yes, you shouldn’t. You see, this temperature bit is just a con, not unlike all the technical jargon that photographers keep blabbering about to make themselves feel important and purposeful. Everyone knows light has color, right? You switch on a tube-light – WHITE color. A bulb gives us YELLOW color. That concept is just too simple. Any idiot would understand that. So, instead of calling it color, why not just go around talking about temperature instead. And just to confuse the shit out of newbies like me, call it color temperature! Anyways, mercifully, we can get along pretty well without the jargon, thank you. All we need to know is this: Light has color. And, if there is a semi-transparent medium between the light source and the subject, the light would take on the color of the medium. Neat. But what is this medium? Well, it could really be anything that’s semi-transparent. A transparent plastic bottle of water, for example (as was the case with Charsi’s image on the left. Or a piece of colored glass. Or if you are friends with anyone from the United National Progressive Alliance of India, you could try placing his head in between (Caution: Vacuum is colorless). But there will come a time when you’ll run out of colored-semi-transparent stuff. That’s when you go here and order yourself a sample-book. What you get is a bundle of 1"x4" colored, translucent paper. They are called samples because that’s what they are supposed to be. They are like a shade card from a paint shop that you use to decide what shade of pink would go on the walls of your bedroom to go with the hot-pink curtains that your missus brought home. Only, in this case, you can actually use them. The size of the samples are just about enough for you to be able to cover the head of your flash. From thereon, you are only bound by your imagination. You can use them for some really nice effects. Coloring backgrounds, for example. Or adding a nice warm glow to your images.

But the primary use for gels is color correction. There are gels called CTO (which is a secret code for Color temperature Orange, but it’s much more intuitive to just pretend it stands for Change to Orange) and CTB (Change to Blue) that apparently every photographer should have inserted in tiny little capsules inside their mouth lest they get captured by the enemy. These gels help manipulate the light emitted by your flash to better match the ambient light, giving a more natural looking output. In most situations, you would want all your light sources (including ambient) to be of the same color, unless of course you are assisting Anurag Kashyap and going for the psychedelic-doped-out-of-body experience kind of mood lighting. If, for instance, you are shooting indoors, and your primary light is daylight through a window, while you are using a flash for filling the shadows, you would want your flash to have a CTB gel. Why? Because daylight is primarily blue, while the light being emitted by your flash is not. So, Change to Blue! If you are shooting with tungsten ambient light, you need to change the flash color to tungsten, or orange. So, you CTO. You get my drift.

As you can see, not only is this gel thingy pretty handy, it also comes pretty cheap. And having invested in all those fancy lighting equipment, you really need to ease your conscience, don’t you? So, go ahead and treat yourself to some cheap fun instead. The Canon EF 50-200mm lens can wait another couple of months.

Enjoy!

©2012 rollon. All Rights Reserved.