Light camera action!

Posted on February 26, 2012 | Leave a comment

Pocket Wizard recently announced their newest trigger system – Pocket Wizard III. Pocket Wizard has long been the photography industry standard when it comes to radio triggers. There are a lot of triggers out there nowadays but when it comes to availability to rent, warranty, durability, and range, no other triggers out there can really beat Pocket Wizard. Pocket Wizards are expensive so there may be better options out there depending on what you are using the triggers for. Personally I use Paul Buff’s Cybersync trigger system. If I decide to upgrade my light setup one of these days, I might change the radio trigger system to either Pocket Wizard or Elinchrom Skyport, simply because they offer more features such as remote power adjustment and ETTL. Speaking of radio triggers I wouldn’t recommend buying those cheap Chinese triggers. Chances are the cheap triggers will misfire when you’re on a job, causing extra headaches. You’re better off buying reliable triggers.

Going back to the topic, David Hobby at Strobist recently wrote an excellent review on Pocket Wizard III. If you’re on the market for a new radio trigger system you might want to read the review.

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Posted in lighting

Let the speculations begin

Posted on February 19, 2012 | 1 Comment

There have been lots rumors on the next Canon full frame camera. Would it be called the 5DIII? Or would it be called the 5DX? Lots questions and lots speculations. It’s interesting to see Nikon D800′s spec and noticing that Nikon went with the megapixel route. Don’t get me wrong, D800 looks like an awesome camera with a lot of features. But at 36 MP it’s almost a guarantee that you’ll need to upgrade your computer as well… unless you already have a top of the line computer. Can you image working on a 36 MP TIFF file? Or trying to stitch multiple 36 MP files in Photoshop? That is going to take A LOT of computing power!

Looking at the 5DIII/5DX rumors I really hope the next Canon camera would have the following features:

-Better latitude performance. If they can get anywhere close to medium format cameras that’d be awesome. Zack Arias wrote a blog post about why he moved to medium format and it literally blew my mind off!

-Film like quality.

-Better focus system. The 5D/5DII focus system only has cross type focus at center point. This is a bit of pain when you’re using a fast lens. If Canon decides to keep the 9 point focus system on the new camera, at least give all 9 points cross type focusing.

-Around 25 MP. No more, no less. I don’t want to have to force to upgrade my computer.

I think the above is my wish list for the new Canon full frame camera. Yes not a lot of items but any more features are simply gimmicks.

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Posted in gear

Cinematography

Posted on February 10, 2012 | Leave a comment

I did a studio photoshoot the other day. The set up was an elaborate 3 light setup and the picture turned out as if it was from a movie. Cecilia was awesome as a model. The main light used was so bright I seriously don’t know how she could keep her eyes open the whole time!…

I didn’t do a whole lot in post, mainly just adjusted the WB and desaturated the picture a little bit. It’s amazing how little you need to do in post when you have desired lighting setup and an amazing makeup artist.

Chicago Chicago!

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Posted in lighting, photo shoot

I have a case of the Monday blue

Posted on February 5, 2012 | Leave a comment

Did a shoot yesterday which turned out very well. I’m very pleased. :) In this shoot I utilized 2 Kino Flos and a strobe. The strobe was shot through a white seamless toward the model. This created a nice halo glow in the background. The blue eye shadow showed up really well in this pose. I shot in tungsten WB which further enhanced the overall blue tone.

The Monday Blue

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Posted in lighting, photo shoot

Lightroom tutorial – Miyajima Japan

Posted on January 29, 2012 | Leave a comment

Do you ever wonder why your landscape pictures don’t turn out the way you wanted? You followed all the right photography techniques but your pictures just don’t pop. After a few times you get frustrated about taking landscape pictures and decided to give up on landscape photography completely. The solution, most of the time, is editing. Even Ansel Adams, one of the most famous landscape photographers, is known for spending hours in the darkroom burning and dodging his pictures.

Today I will go over what I did in terms of post editing for this picture below:

When I took this picture it was already getting dark. I managed to capture the moody sky but knew I’d need to do quite a bit of editing to bring to details in the sky. I’d say the original picture is pretty damn boring. It’s not a picture I’d be too proud to show off to friends and clients.

The very first thing I did in Lightroom was using the Spot Removal tool to get rid of the sensor dusts that showed up in the sky. I wouldn’t need to do this if my sensor was clean. If you often shoot with small aperture numbers (i.e. F8 and up) you should clean your sensor quite regularly.

Next I used the crop tool to straightened the horizon. You should always make sure the horizon in your landscape picture is straight.

I then adjusted Exposure, Recovery, Fill Light, and Blacks to make the picture a bit brighter while maintaining the shadows. I also adjusted brightness and contrast to bring out a bit more pop to the picture. As usual I increased clarity to +26 for sharpness.

Next I adjusted the tone curve to really bring out the Highlight and Shadows while decreasing the Darks to make the picture moody.

To make the sky as dramatic as possible I used several Graduated Filters to burn and dodge the sky in many different directions. As you can see from the screen shot I used a total of 9 different Graduated Filters to achieve the desired look.

To further enhance the highlights and the shadows I utilized Split Toning panel. Personally I think this is one of the most useful panels in Lightroom that everyone should learn how to use. I also brought down Saturation in the Red and the Orange channels.

All the pulling and pushing on the digital file increased the noise a little bit so I applied a small amount of noise reduction in Lightroom. I also applied a small amount of Sharpening to the picture.

Lastly I went back to Saturation and de-saturated the picture by a small amount of get the final look I wanted.

I hope this tutorial showed you some of the possible edits that you could easily do to improve your landscape photography.

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Posted in landscape, lightroom, tutorial

Miyajima Japan

Posted on January 20, 2012 | Leave a comment

This past summer I had the chance to go to Japan for work. Afterward I managed to travel around for a few days. I took the Shinkansen (bullet train) from Tokyo and went down to Hiroshima. After visited the A-bomb museum I had the chance to head over to Miyajima to see the world-famous torii gate. As luck had it, it was low tide when I arrived so I managed to walk underneath the torii gate and snapped a few pictures.

My favourite picture from Miyajima has to be the one below. The picture was all edited in Lightroom and next time I will go over what I did.

Miyajima

Looking back I should have carried a tripod so I could do a long exposure shot. Well there’s always next time. :)

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Posted in landscape, travel

Lightroom tutorial

Posted on January 12, 2012 | Leave a comment

When I first started shooting a few years ago I was shooting JPEG and didn’t bothered to edit my pictures. Over time I learned that ALL digital pictures require some sort of editing. Shooting JPEG was fine but would you trust your camera, designed by some Japanese engineers, to do all the thinking & editing for you? This is one of the many reasons why you should shoot RAW and edit the pictures yourself.

In today’s post I will run through quickly how I edited this picture below.

As you can see, the picture certainly didn’t look that good straight out from the camera. The White Balance was clearly off.

The first thing when I imported the file into Lightroom was to adjust the Clarity from 0 to 25 to sharpen the picture a tiny bit. I generally like to leave Clarity to 25 for all my picture. I then used the WB dropper and clicked on her white shirt.

Next I quickly apply a Soften Skin Mask on her face by clicking on the Mask button in Lightroom. Make sure you have Auto Mask checked to make your life a bit easier.

I then adjusted Fill Light and Black to increase contrast. I also increased Brightness from default 50 to 64 and increased Contrast from default 25 to 30. I really wanted the picture to pop so I increased Vibrance 0 to 6.

I knew I wanted to further adjust the contrast of the picture so I went into Tone Curve and played around with the sliders. After a bit of trial and error I ended up increasing Hightlights, Lights, and Darks, and decreasing the Shadows.

All these adjustments really made the colours in the picture pop with one minor drawback – the adjustments also made the highlights to clip a bit. To bring back the details in the highlight area I increased Recovery to 11 and decreased the exposure by 0.3 of a stop.

I knew I wanted a bit of exposure difference in the sky. This could be done very easily in Lightroom by applying a Graduated Filter. I used an exposure of -0.5 so the exposure difference was very subtle.

I was still not pleased withhow the picture looked. I wanted the sky to pop a bit, so I went into HSL and adjusted the Saturation in Aqua and Blue channels slightly to give the sky this deep blue look.

I knew I was very close to finish the editing process but I knew something looked off, so I went into Split Toning and adjusted the Highlights and Shadow colours. I set the Highlights to be slightly blue and Shadows to be slightly purple. After this adjustment I was finally happy with the picture. I then went back to Saturation and moved the slide to -16 to yield the desaturated look I wanted. As my last step I went into Detail and adjusted the Sharpening slides. Since this picture was sharp already I only increased the Amount from 25 to 45. I applied a Masking of 60 to make sure only the edges are sharpened.

That was all I did to this picture. I hope this tutorial will help you in your future post editing work.

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Posted in editing, lightroom, tutorial

This is brilliant

Posted on January 11, 2012 | Leave a comment

Yes I do touch up all my portraits and from time to time use Photoshop for more extensive touch up. But I never use tools like liquify to make someone look completely fake. People need to look like themselves, not some plastic fake mannequins.

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Posted in photoshop, video

Hello 2012

Posted on January 2, 2012 | Leave a comment

I haven’t updated this blog in a while which makes me a bad blogger. I will change this in 2012. One of my new year’s resolutions is to update this blog regularly. I will focus on writing tutorials on how I light my models, how I edit my pictures, and various tips and tricks. If you have any questions, feel free to ask on here or on the facebook fan page.

Today’s post will go over the technical details of the picture below.

Welcome to beautiful Vancouver [Explored]

After posting this picture on Flickr and facebook fan page I received a few emails asking me to share how I set up to capture this picture. To be more specific, how did I metered the scene and model, if I used a hand-held light meter, and what did I do to set my flash power level.

When shooting off-camera-flash (OCF for short) with a modifier I usually only use a light meter for evaluating flash. I don’t use the hand held meter for evaluating ambient. For metering ambient, I use either the camera meter to evaluate ambient or the sunny 16 rule.

For the particular picture above I shot it with 1/200 shutter speed, 50 ISO, and F2.2 aperture. The picture was shot around 5 PM and it was very sunny outside, not a lot of clouds in the sky. I didn’t meter the ambient, but in my mind I immediately calculated the ambient exposure using sunny 16 rule. I knew I was fighting against the ambient light so I immediately dropped the ISO to 50 to reduce the ambient as much as possible.

Sunny 16 rule is a method to estimate correct daylight exposure without a light meter. The basic rule is: “On a sunny day set aperture to f/16 and shutter speed to the [reciprocal of the] ISO film speed [or ISO setting] for a subject in direct sunlight.”

This meant I’d start my shutter speed at 1/50 and F16 aperture. I wanted to shoot at 1/200 to reduce ambient as much as possible, so my flash wouldn’t have to work as hard. Since I reduced the shutter speed by 2 stops (1/50 to 1/200), this meant opening the aperture by 2 stops from F16 to F8. To shoot at a wider aperture range, I utilized a 3 stop ND filter on my lens, knocking all the light hitting the sensor by 3 stops. To compensate this I had to open up my aperture by more 3 stops, dropping my aperture setting to F2.8.

When I shot this picture, the sun was directly in front of the model. I placed a 43″ shoot through umbrella in front of her to block the sun so she can open her eyes (you can see the shade in the pic on the bottom right corner). I used the light meter to check for my flash exposure and adjusted the flash power until I got F8 (remember I had to open up the aperture by 3 stops because I had a 3 stop ND filter on). Having a good knowledge about my camera I knew the camera usually underexposes by about 1/3 to 2/3 stop so I opened up my aperture even more to F2.2 and took the pic. Because I placed the model under the shade and opened up my aperture by 2/3 stop I effectively key-shifted up. This gives a vibrant look in the background.

Next time I’ll go over what I did for editing this picture. Happy shooting!

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Posted in lighting, tutorial

12x12YVR Photo Marathon

Posted on August 9, 2011 | 3 Comments

Ayoe and I participated in my 3rd (Ayoe’s 2nd as an assistant) Vancouver Photo Marathon this past weekend. You’d think after 3 years it’d be a breeze but it wasn’t. We were exhausted by the end of it!

Photo Marathon? Do you run? What is it about?

Well basically each participant is handed a roll of film with only 12 exposures at the beginning of the day. In the course of 12 hours a total of 12 different themes are announced at the top of every new hour. The photographer then have to interpret the theme and take a pic. The pictures have to be taken in order or else the photographer gets disqualified. All participants have to hand in their film before the end of the 12th hour.

12x12 YVR Photo Marathon

You can only use a 35mm film camera rather than digital camera. This means you really need to know your camera, your exposure, and have good photography knowledge. No photoshop to rescue a crappy image. No post editing. Everything is RAW! The themes are announced at the home base and not broadcasted over social media. This means everyone has to check in the home base multiple times of the day. Some people check in every hour, some check in less often. This is where strategy comes in and part of the fun.

12x12 YVR Photo Marathon

This year’s themes are:
1. My entry number + different angle
2. The usual suspects
3. Human natural
4. Reliable
5. My greatest wish
6. Odour
7. Echo
8. Trapped
9. Take it to the grave
10. Second chance
11. Not for sale
12 Expectation

I have to say some of these themes we had no clue what to take. We ended up walking around trying to find ideas. A few times we were behind on 2 to 3 themes. It was not a good feeling to see the time ticking down, knowing that you are 3 themes behind, and another new theme will get drawn in less than 5 minutes!

Last year we won the Audience’s Choice Best Series. So this year the pressure is on! Ayoe and I actually practiced our “secret technique” on couple rolls of film just to make sure we can pull the technique off. I think we did pretty good on interpreting the themes and taking 12 pictures. When I handed in the roll of film at end of the night I was happy and relieved. Whether the pictures turned out like how I wanted we’ll have to wait till the photo exhibit on September 25!

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Posted in event