x100_and_natural_light

Long time no post. I set my sites on a new camera, and my old one became a neglected orphan on the shelf till I got the new one. It was stupid, but I kept thinking of ideas and how I wanted to do them with the new camera, not the old. But, that time is past, I have the new camera and have been shooting a lot. Mostly non portraiture with no lighting, but if you are curious, check it out here. Low on commentary, big on photos.

A friend of mine who I'd shot before, but never one on one, emailed me asking to do a shoot. I had a free Sunday and started thinking of ideas so I said yes. Immediately I thought of how I wanted to shoot in the cemetery near my house again. I had two images start to coalesce in my head. The first was in black, and something to do with mourning. I wasn't sure the pose, but in my head it seemed it would be standing and looking wistfully at a gravestone. We tried that early and it was so painfully cliche we moved on quickly. I saw this moss covered wall and knew it would work well.

For the lighting, it was a very overcast day. No flashes used. I wanted to find an area where we had a bit heavier tree coverage overhead, with a more open space further out. This would give some shadows in the front, and a rim-light type soft light coming from the background. This would also give a high-key background so the foreground could anchor with a bit more shadows.

I let the camera meter everything, which fit all the values in. Her skin is slightly over exposed, but I like the look it gives next to the dark dress. The post work was simple. I cloned out a small strap on the skin, removed a blueish cast from the dress and used curves to darken it a little. The wall she is laying on had the contrast bumped, it was sharpened an extra amount so her skin would look extra soft in contrast to it, and the green moss under the small of her back I bumped a little with a curve so it emphasized the line of her body. On her face I did a small amount of blemish removal, and evening of the makeup color around the forehead. Very little body touchup in comparison to many of my images. I also made a selection along the silhouette of her body, and darkened the background using an exposure layer, so that she would pop a bit more, light against dark.

After the first half of the shoot we walked back to my house to warm up, change outfits, and I wanted to get a wooden chair as a prop. I had envisioned something like this shot in mind, though her outfit was of her choosing, it fit what I wanted as a timeless sort of feel. I wanted a setting with a bit of framing. Something on both sides, and a branch at the top anchoring downwards, so I could go really wide while still having her stay the focal point. The focus was actually missed on this, it was far forward, but I loved what it did for her skin and hair, very glowy and soft. I used photoshop's lens blur function to hide this fact by blurring the front so it feels like the focus is where it should be.

For post work, I added an exposure layer that darkened and roughly outlined her hair, as the line between hair and glowy background wasn't as strong as it needed to be. I added a yellow layer set to screen, and adjusted it's clipping properties to only affect the lightest areas of the image, and masked it away from her body so it didn't affect the skin. This warmed the image slightly. I then did the same thing with a purple layer to cool the shadows so the image would have a balance.

photo_book

Finland and Helsinki 2008 Tampere and Helsinki, Finland - Kiev and Odessa, Ukraine by Ben Mathis | Make Your Own Book

This is a bit old, from 2008, but I have ordered several copies for myself and family, and the quality of the prints are really nice. All the photos are full page, no text to distract, left side is from Finland, right side from the Ukraine. I have enabled the full preview, so what you see is what you get. It's easy to share, so I figure why not?

This one is new, from just before Christmas.

Vienna and Copenhagen by Ben Mathis | Make Your Own Book

Feel free to order one or both!

svavar_shoot

Settings: Ambient is underexposed by 1/2 stop, and face is properly exposed using a small gridded softbox just outside frame left.

I saw this location when walking back to work from a coffee shop and knew I had to do a shoot. Their are boulders embedded in the wall, and ivy growing along the side. many of the boulders are high enough I knew I could crop out the ground and remove the sense of how high it was. I asked a friend to sit for me, and asked him to wear a suit. He told me he only had an older ill-fitting suit, but knowing his look, I thought it might work. He showed up in these ratty shoes, and at first I was a bit disappointed, but I think they work with the look. Newer shoes would have shown how disheveled the suit is.

Lighting was simple. I set my camera on a tripod and got the framing I wanted. At first I was using my 85mm lens to flatten everything, but I wanted to see a bit more of the wall, so I switched to my 50mm, which let me go closer and keep him larger in the frame while still showing a lot of the wall. Once I had that setup, I underexposed by 1/2 stop, set my small gridded softbox to the full 3 meter height of my light stand, and aimed it at his head height. I used the light meter to power the flash so it was properly exposing the face. This would give me a bit of focus on the face, without too much of a light intensity difference.

Once that was set, it was just a matter of getting a pose and expression I was interested in.

This image shows the before and after of the post work. I found the image overall was a bit too bright, and the wall lacked volume because the day was fairly overcast. I used the adjustment brushes in lightroom to make the top edges of the boulders pop, and another to deepen some of the undersides of ivy and boulders. Then I took it into photoshop, gave a bit of white sleeve to his left hand so it would look more balanced, then underexposed the whole image another small amount while leaving the face untouched. I cloned out the few small imperfections on the face not visible at this resolution, and went through my normal sharpening procedures to give more micro contrast.

camera_and_light_gear_advice

Too long since a post, so I'm going to do a quick one based on some thoughts I've had this week from speaking about gear in a few forums. I have a shoot coming up this week I will post more real photography on, so never fear.

As photographers we can really get caught up in gear. It's so easy to believe our inability to improve is related to the equipment we own, when in reality the cheapest digital camera is in many ways better than high end cameras of yesteryear. We are limited only by our skills. I have lately forced myself, whenever I get bitten by the gear-bug, to instead of researching or pouring over online catalogs and reviews, to plan a photo shoot idea, and go out and shoot instead. Practice, a photo trip, or a new book (be it instructional, or inspirational) will do far more for our skills than a new piece of equipment.

That said, I want to lay out what I think the basics are, in case you don't have a kit yet at all, or in case you are wondering if there truly is a limiting factor on your current gear. This is assuming you shoot in a similar vein as this blog, mostly portraiture where you control the model placement and can zoom with your feet. None of this will apply to bird photographers or sports journalists.

A camera with wide, normal, and tele lens options.

A light source of some type with at least one constraining option (like a snoot) and one softening option (like an umbrella or softbox) and a way to trigger it.

Wide for me is 35mm, but some people like 24/28mm.

Normal is between 45-60

Tele is over 70, and for me is 85

The reasons for this is your composition. You can keep your subject the same size between wide/normal/tele and totally change what you see in the background. When you want a sense of location, you use wide or normal, and when you want isolation, or a very specific chunk of background, you use the tele, which will also enable closeup portraits without distorting the face.

The light is so that you can brighten portions of your subject, or bring a more pleasing light pattern for it. It's not necessary all the time, but having even a cheap LED panel can really open options.

If I were building a kit today from scratch with my current knowledge and preferences, here is what I would buy.

Perfect kit without waisting money:

Canon 5D I or II

35mm 1.4, or f/2

50mm 1.8

85mm 1.8

Elinchrom Quadra with silver umbrella large/small, softlighter II 60", and XXS softbox and grids, large reflector with 8 degree gridspot insert.

A more budget option would be to go with any decent crop body of any manufacturer with the tamron 17-50mm 2.8 (giving you from wide to tele of good quality and decent lens speed) with a shoe mount flash, or an alienbee setup with vagabond.

The cheapest route would be a Canon s90, and a cheap shoemount flash on a stand, with a white umbrella, and an optical trigger (set off by the s90's flash, just turn flash compensation down so it's as dim as possible)

Remember, we are in this to make photos. Gear can be a hobby on it's own, but then you're not in the business of making images to communicate, you're a collector. Focus on shooting more, pursuing ideas, and use the gear-bug to refocus your efforts on shooting.

Noise Reduction

I wanted to share my noise reduction techniques. I don't personally like a lot of noise reduction, because noise can imply sharpness, but there are a few times it's necessary because of how extreme and attention drawing it can be. Above is the final image after denoising. Here is the original:

In order to really show the steps, I've cropped in to the center area so I can show you the results at 100% 1:1 pixel ratio. Here is the original image with no luminance noise reduction. I like Lightrooms color noise reduction, and leave it on 7 for up to ISO 800, and up it to 12 for ISO 1600 (your camera will require different settings, slide till the color noise becomes un noticeable).

Next, I duplicate the entire layer, and use Filter > noise > reduce noise and slide it to maximum affect, with sharpening at zero. The image is a bit mushy but has a lot less noise.

Next, I use the layer itself to mask it's visibility. Complicated, but I will try to break it down:

1. I copy that de-noised layer into the clipboard. (ctrl+a for select all, then ctrl+c for copy).
2. Then, I add a layer mask, see here for more, and alt+click on the mask so I am "inside" the mask, it will be all white.
3. I use paste (ctrl+v) to paste the image into the mask. Now you have a black and white version of the layer in the mask. Masks work by showing the rgb of the layer when the mask pixels are white, and hiding when black, with opacity varying by the shade of grey. The problem is that when you paste, it will show the dark areas and hide the light areas, and we want the reverse.
4. Hit ctrl+i to invert the mask.

What this does, is it reveals the denoised layer in the shadows, and hides it in the highlights. The image itself controls the masking. The reason this works is that properly exposed areas (the light areas) tend to show detail better and noise is less offensive. De-noising these areas kills details. However at high-ISOs shadow areas tend to lack detail and have lots of noise, so denoising these areas tends not to have as much of a blurring affect. By using the image itself to mask the noise, you get a perfect light to dark transition of full noise reduction in the shadows, to none in the highlights. You can even paint further into the mask with a brush, or use curve/adjustments for fine tuning the cutoff of noise reduction.

Better, but the dark areas still have too much noise, it's especially evident in the background blurry areas from using a large aperture lens. A normal gaussian blur destroys too much detail, so I use a smart blur. This will vary per image the values you need, but you want to blur to the point all the noise in the smooth pools of solid color disappear, and adjust the other settings to that the details and hard lines of the actual sharp areas remain.

Smart blur however leaves too hard of edges for what we want, so then I do a gaussian blur with a small enough value to just smooth those hard edges created by the smart blur. This results in an image completely devoid of noise, but much less blurry than using plain gaussian blurring to obscure it.

Next, I use the "blend-if" layer blending option to reveal this noise-free layer only in the darkest areas. I covered blend if earlier on the blog. The settings I used are below, but you can easily adjust to taste.

I duplicate the noise free layer a second time, and remove the blend if options so everything is showing, add a mask, and invert so that nothing is showing. Then using my judgement, I use a 40% opaque brush, and remove noise in areas that are glaring in the image. Just look at the whole thing and see where your eyes go to noise wise, and paint into the mask on those areas until it's acceptable. Most of the times it's the areas that are large areas of solid color.

Next, I proceed with my standard sharpening procedures to get the final result.

blend_if_blending_options_in_photoshop

blend-if layer blending options in Photoshop from Ben Mathis on Vimeo.

Photoshop has some very powerful blending options available. One often overlooked part is the "blend-if" feature, to control what is shown or affected based on the brightness of each pixel either of the current layer, or of the layers below. This video walks you though using the blend-if feature.

The video explains it clearly, but as a visual aid, double click any layer, and this Layer Style dialog box will pop up. The blend-if function is at the bottom where I've surrounded it in a pink box in this image. You can blend-if using the current layer's (the one you double clicked) brightness values, or those of the underlying layer.

Click and drag on the arrow you want to affect, (yellow box) Black arrow adjusts from the dark end, and white from the light end. To separate, which gives you a smoother transition, alt+click and drag on one side of the arrow to separate them. (orange box) This starts the affect at the inner most arrow, and slowly fades to full affect till the value reaches the outer most arrow. If you drag it till they meet, they snap together again and you'll have to alt+click to separate them again.

band_promo_cover_video_tutorial

Settings: In each individual shot, ambient is underexposed almost completely. There is one flash in a 1.5 meter softlighter over head, it's set to expose properly at head height, and then falls off down the body. There is also a giant 1x2 meter silver reflector angled up, on the ground in front of them, this provides the fill from below. The background plate was taken properly exposed with regular room lighting.

band promo cover compositing tutorial from Ben Mathis on Vimeo.

I said I was going to make a video of my compositing workflow for this shot, and I finally did. (I needed a microphone). I used audacity to noise reduce and normalize the volume, so it should be easy to listen to. The movement through the process is rather quick, so any areas that are unclear, please post a comment and I can do a follow up in-depth video on one of those aspects.

More advanced topics used in the video are covered here: Masks

The background plate was taken with a tripod so I could use f/8 (the sharpest aperture on my camera body and this lens) at iso 100 (for maximum dynamic range). I think the exposure time was 1/10 of a second, far too slow to hand hold.