I saw a very interesting blog posting on how to shoot flowers using a light box. I took a different approach since I did not want to build a cardboard box so anything else. I took my large softbox and flipped it upside down. I could do this because I use C stands with boom arms and it becomes very easy to change the orientation of a modifier. I just made sure that the legs were in the right position to take up the low weight and added a few sand bags for good measure.
I then put a piece of clear plexiglass on top of the softbox or now light table and put my subject on top of that. I have a Photogenics 1250 strobe but now I would pull it and put in the 600 instead. The 1250 is too strong even turned down as low as it can go. I plan to try it with white plexiglass whereas I’m shooting with clear right now. The white should be worth a couple of stops.
I had a second mini softbox using an SB800 in SU mode on a monopod that I held over the subject. I manually set the SB800 to something around 1/8 power and about 3 feet high. I tried straight on, sideways and all kinds of angles. The best results seemed to be feathering the small soft box slightly to pick up some edge shadows.
I used a pair of Atlas pocket wizard clones on this shoot only because they were handy and my real PWs were packed away. I shot with:
- Nikon D300
- 50mm 1.4 at F16
- ISO 100
- Shutter at 1/250
Next time I will put the small light box on a second C stand instead of holding it. That was just too much trouble but I was in a real hurry to try this and get back to the family outside. The ladder was the only way I could get enough hight to shoot down on my subject, anywhere else and I was shooting across it and it did not work nearly as well.
Related articles
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- DIY Photography Softbox from a Styrofoam Cooler [Video] (lifehacker.com)
- DIY lightbox repurposes useless scanner (hackaday.com)
- DIY softboxes light your photos on the cheap (hackaday.com)
A friend asked if I would shoot their daughter’s first communion at Saint Norbert which is a local Catholic church here in the city of Orange, and of course, my answer was I’d be happy to. It was a smaller church and no flash allowed during the ceremony. Also, a local photographer had been hired by the church so I had to be careful not to step on toes and cause problems. But my F2.8 70-200mm zoom made short work of being in the back. I also shot some family pictures at the house when we were done at the church. The trick was to treat this much like I would a wedding with formal shots before the church service, shooting during the service like wedding and taking detail shots, fill shots and more while getting the family shots.
In the end I delivered two dozen images plus a slide show to my friend. The side show was first shown using a Epson projector so the images were about 7 feet wide!! Impressive to say the least. I did a second showing using my iPad which works very well for this sort of thing.
Here is the slide show I produced for the family.
Here are some of the stills that I used in the slide show and showed to the family.
Brides are beautiful and because of that, the bride puts a temendous amount of effort and money into this one day. One of the jobs of the wedding photographer is to see that beauty in the bride regardless of circumstances or environment. It also means that at times you need to shoot knowing full well you will be doing something specific in post to make the vision a reality. This bridal shot which I took at Serra Plaza was one of those moments that I knew I had to shoot with postprocessing in mind and adjust accordingly.
When I reviewed the image in Lightroom, the raw image had some basic qualities that I thought would make a really good solid image in Black and White. At the time, the key issue to me was that the quality of light was shall we say, less than optimal. It was very late in the day and we were in the shadow side on top of everything else. There was a mix of daylight on her face and some type of sodium light behind her and over her head. There also was the same fact that hall lead to a bank ATM and it had a massive concrete trash can off to one side. But I knew with some cropping, I could clean it up quite a bit. And I also felt that I could clean up the image best in Black and White and dump the mixed colors.
Basic Bridal Color Portrait
In the image below, you can see the results of the cropping and the initial Black and White conversion. At this point, I had not removed the trash can or done any major retouching. But you can already see how the black and white treatment really brought the image to life in spite of the lousy lighting. I used Nik’s SilverEfex Pro 2.0 for the conversion and as always, it just works really well to get a clean black and white image.
In the final image here, I used the content aware fill tool in CS5 to remove the trashcan on the left side. Back in Lightroom 3, I also applied a sepia like tone preset called “Silver Dust Hue” from Gavin Seim’s workflow presets. to the image to give a very light vintage look to it. And I darkened the corners a touch. I paid very close attention to my bride to make sure I did not ruin the skin tones or the details on the dress. Remember, along with the look of the bride, its ALL about the dress. Ruining the details on the dress will ruin the image for the bride, she paid a lot of money for the dress so you had better show it off to the best of your ability.
Now we have a keeper of an image and it took about 40 minutes start to finish. I put one version into a digital frame and it looks spectacular.
Related articles
- Portrait Retouching / Shaping Bodies With Liquify (pixiq.com)
- Easy Retouching With The Spot Healing Brush In Photoshop (blogs.sitepoint.com)
- 2011 Wedding Hair Trends (joyofspa.com)
- Beautiful Vintage Gowns For the June Bride or Mother of the Bride (thebestinvintage.wordpress.com)
- Book Review: Skin: The Complete Guide to Digitally Lighting, Photographing, and Retouching Faces And Bodies 2nd Edition by Lee Varis (blogcritics.org)
