Flash… Don’t leave home without it

Went to the City Docks in Annapolis this past Sunday to enjoy a great afternoon of music from our friend Mary accompanied by her band mates Brian and Neal.  More on Brian, Mary and Neal later. 

Anyway…

We get down to the Dock just in time for a big black rain clouds to roll in.  Bummer!!!  I was looking forward to a beautiful blue sky with a few white fluffy clouds as a backdrop for for some nice photos of the girls and the harbor.  Instead I have dark ominous clouds…  What to do… What to do… 

Whip out the flash and go dramatic. 

Canon 1D Mark III, 1/2500, F/4, ISO 400, FEC +1 2/3

This is super easy to do with a flash and off camera shoe cord.  In manual mode set your exposure for the desired background effect. In this case, I’m at least a stop or two under exposed.  Now work you flash power until you get the desired affect.  Despite the clouds, it was still fairly bright outside so the flash was set at +1 2/3  EV to over power the ambient light ensuring the flash is the primary light in the photo.  Now with the flash set, hold it out for the desired angle and shadows and then shoot away.  Note that the color cast is created with a 1/4 CTO gel on the flash;  give sort of a sun set cast of color. 

Canon 1D Mark III, 1/2500, F/4, ISO 400, FEC +1 2/3

Here’s a couple of examples but after the storm had past.   Note the skies are now blue with white clouds but we’re able to really make them more dramatic using the exact same technique.    

Canon 1D Mark III, 1/400, F/4, ISO 100, FEC +1/3

Canon 1D Mark III, 1/8000, F/4, ISO 250, FEC +3

Pretty cool!!!!  I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have my flash with me and I seem to use it more and more all the time. 

Nocturne

So  when I got back into photography, I made a deal with myself that if I got good enough I wouldn’t turn this hobby into a profession like I did computers many years ago.  For the most part I’ve been pretty good at sticking to that pact.  Most of the “work” I’ve done for other has been strictly on a volunteer basis and because I wanted the experience or fun.    I guess you can say I did this job for the same reasons but, admittedly, I was paid cold hard cash for the work too.

 My personal favorite

Pretty much your average everyday product shoot; capture images of a new line of show and club laser units, add a bit of mood lighting, some accent lighting, make sure the logo stands out etc, etc.  The final images were to be used in advertising literature and website media.  

Front View

 Rear View 

 A look at the setup

We used a three flash setup for the shoot.  The light you see up high was blue gelled and created the blue background off a piece of white illustrator board behind the laser.   The gold/orange accent was added by directing a light at a low angle so it would catch just the edges of the laser.  We used an orange gel to achieve the color.  Lastly we used a pure white snooted light to concentrate its light only on the logo of the laser.  Frankly, I don’t remember all the individual settings now but all the lights were set to manual and adjusted according to the look we wanted to achieve.   As Ansell Adams would say, “We used the right settings.” 

Please also note my two helpers in the background.  Amanda seems enamored with the pretty blue light.  :-) 

 

The result of all that work can be seen here in this one minute video.  The still images are the two you see above. 

Video courtesy of X-Laser

Shooting in the Theater… White Balance revisited

So it’s been a long time since I’ve discussed anything regarding theater photography but I happened to run into an interesting situation when shooting Alice.

First lets review our last conversation on this subject of WB in the theater.  In short we determined that setting the camera’s WB to around 3200K best matched the traditional tungsten theater lights.   This setting will best represent all the different colors used to accent the set and actors. 

Lets also briefly clear up a common misconception I hear from other photographers when discussing WB.  The particular gel color on theater lights should NOT determine your WB settings.  As a mater of fact, quite the opposite.  Setting the WB to that of a gelled light will do nothing but obliterate that color and throw everything else off.  If we are to represent the colors correctly we must set the camera to the WB of an un-gelled (white) light. 

Now with the house keeping expended, enter a new challenge…

Halloween Ghosts

So the image in this post are a couple years old but I thought it was appropriate and I haven’t done a How To post in a while. 

First the image.. 

1D Mark III w/ EF17-40"L F/4 @17mm, F/8, 6sec, ISO 100

The ghosting technique is really quite simple. 

The camera is set on a tripod and exposure is set for the ambient light.  In this case I used and aperture of F/8 for a pretty deep depth of field and  to help slow the shutter speed.  An aperture of F/8 dictated a 6 second exposure.  Now, to achieve a translucent Caroline I held my flash off camera left and dialed it down just enough to light up her face.  It was fired first curtain and then a second or so into the exposure I had Caroline step out of frame.  The initial blast of the flash sets her image and because she’s not in the shot for the full 6 seconds she appears translucent.   

The fun part about this technique is you can play around with just how translucent the subject is by varying the length of time they remain in frame during the exposure.  You can also govern how much blur is exposed as the move out of frame by varying the shutter speed and/or the speed by which they leave the frame.  The faster the subject steps out of the frame or the longer the exposure time, the less movement is captured and the more translucent they appear.  

Riding Along the Canal

Grabbed this one while walking along the tow path along the C&O canal. 

Canon EOS 20D w/ 17 – 40L F/4 @ 1/50 s, f/4, 17 mm, iso 100

Its really a pretty easy shot.  I simply cradled the camera in my left arm much like a baby with the lens pointing out towards the path.  Had it set in TV mode with a slowish shutter speed, then I fired off a 5 shot burst while twisting my torso to track him as he road by.   Of the 5 frames this one was best but it was all I was really looking for anyway. 

Mixed Blessings

Last weekend was a jam packed Caroline weekend ending with her schools annual Father Daughter Dance.  Although I’m not really into shooting my “subjects” as Terry is, sometimes cool opportunities present the chance to work on technique.  The Father Daughter Dance was perfect for some slow shutter off camera flash work.

The technique, dragging the shutter, is pretty simple.  Open up your aperture to allow as much light in as possible keeping in mind the DoF.  Dial your shutter speed in sloooowww, say 1/8 or 1/6; play with this a bit to adjust just how much of the ambient light you want to expose.  Next, dial in your flash to provide enough light to expose your subjects properly and set it to fire at the end of the exposure.

Canon 1d Mark III, 1/8s, f/4, ISO 100, FEC –1 2/3 2nd-curtain sync

The trick now is to balance your shutter and flash to achieve the desired look.  In the case above, I under exposed the background and let the flash do most of the work.  I held the flash low and to the right to add the drama. Lastly I added a 1/4 CTO gel to help warm things up a bit.  Pretty cool results if you as me… 

A few more examples with different settings for different results.

Canon 1d Mark III, 1/8s, f/4, ISO 400, FEC –1 2/3 2nd-curtain sync

Canon 1d Mark III, 1/8s, f/4, ISO 100, FEC –1 2/3 2nd-curtain sync

Canon 1d Mark III, 1/8s, f/4, ISO 100, FEC –2 1/3 2nd-curtain sync

Canon 1d Mark III, 1/8s, f/4, ISO 100, FEC –1 2/3 2nd-curtain sync

 

Add a little twist to the camera and this is what you get.

Canon 1d Mark III, .5 s, f/4, ISO 100, FEC –1 2/3 2nd-curtain sync

Canon 1d Mark III, .3 s, f/4, ISO 100, FEC –1 2/3 2nd-curtain sync

So there you have it.  Lots of fun and some pretty cool images to show for it.  I still have no clue what I’m doing but sometimes you just hit upon something that works and go with it.  ;-) 

All the rest of the images.

Enjoy. 

Windows Live Writer

So you thought creating posts for your blog using Word was cool (at least some of you did) well that pales in comparison to using Microsoft's Windows Live Writer.  What an awesome tool.  

This tool is a real time WYSIWYG editor which downloads you blogs styles and displays you posts, as you create them, just how they’re going to look to your readers.  Background color, text color, text styles, hyperlink styles all displayed exactly how they will look on your finished blog. 

In addition, it provides much easier access to items like hyperlink creation, insertion of images (note the fancy image reflection added by Writer.  There are several options like this), photo albums, tables, maps, tags and video clips plus a bunch more add-in available on the internet.   Particularly interesting is the hyperlink feature.  It provides an easy to use dialog box with options to force the linked page into  new window and a cool feature  allows easy creation of links back to previous blog entries.  It also has the ability to remember hyperlinks and automatically apply them the next time you type the key word.  So for example if I often hyperlink to a site like NASCAR I can have Writer remember that and the next time I type NASCAR  the hyperlink is automatically applied.  Or, as I have it set here, automatically apply the hyperlink the first time the word is used in the entry.   

Another cool feature is the ability to show a preview of you new entry in your full blog without actually posting it.  I have often posted an entry and then gone back to edit things like text alignment or add/remove extra lines etc because I didn’t like how it looked when posted.  Well now all I have to is click preview and there it is as if it was posted.  Don’t like something then its back to edit change and preview again. 

I’ve only begun to scratch the surface on the power of this tool.  It has a full HTML editor so anything not provided by a click of the mouse can be added by hand.  Text sizing, coloring and effects are a snap.  Saving local drafts is very convenient and I can open previous posts and edit them as needed.   The only draw back to this tool like the other set of tools in the Live suite is you need to have a windows live account to use them; this includes a Hotmail email account if you have one.  

Despite the need to have a Live account the tool is worth the download and try.  I think you’ll like it.  I know Writer will now be my go to tool for authoring blog entries. 

Blogging with Office 2007

A couple of weeks ago I posted a test post from Microsoft Word 2007. Pretty cool integration between Word and blogger. Since then I've also discovered that I can check blogs that I frequent with Outlook much like you would check your email. Soooo cool. Well today I thought I'd blog about how it works and how to set things up so other can enjoy the integration.

Note that you must have the latest version of Word and Outlook for any of this to work.

Posting with MS Word 2007

If you click the round button in the top left corner of Word you'll find the usual list of file options such has Open, Save, Print etc. There is one new option, however, called Publish. This button unlocks the ability to use Word as you blog entry editor.

When clicked you'll see three options one of which is Blog. Click it and you will be asked to setup a connection to your favorite blogging site. Choose you blog service, supply you username and password, choose the source and destination locations of images you will use in your entries and you're all set.

Now it's just a matter of typing in you blog entry and then clicking the Publish button when done. Note that you can choose Publish or Publish to Draft. Publishing will actually post you entry to the public blog space; Publish to Draft will save you entry to you blog but not post it for everyone to see.

You'll also notice in the ribbon bar along with the Publish button there are 4 other options in the Blog tab. Home Page lets you view your blog in its entirety. Open Existing lets you open draft and previously posted blog entries. Manage Accounts brings up a listing of you blogs and allows you to add new blogs.

 
 

Reading with Outlook 2007

If you think publishing with Word is cool lets discus what I personally think is much cooler and that's reading with Outlook.

First some background about how this works.

RSS is a standard method of posting information on a website usually used on site that disseminate information such as new sites or support sites. You may have noticed on these sites a small orange RSS icon or a link titled "Subscribe To" indicating that the site is indeed RSS compliant. Well if you look carefully at the Mail Folders list in the lower left corner of Outlook, you will see a new folder called RSS.

 
 

Within Outlooks RRS folder you can add any RSS competent sites and as Outlook polls the sites every x number of minutes, depending on your send/receive settings, it notifies you when new items are posted. In other words, it pretty much works exactly as with new email.

Guess what… Almost all blogging sites are RSS compliant. That's right you can add your favorite blogs to Outlooks RSS folder and then let outlook do all the work. No more launching a browser and navigating from blog to blog looking for updates. Way cool.

Setting this up is quite simple in Outlook 2007.

Navigate to the RSS folder, right click, choose Add New Feed and then enter the address provided to you from the blog site. How do you get this address? Simply click on the orange icon or the link marked Subscribe To. Copy the URL provided and paste it into the New RSS Feed dialog. Note that the Feed URL is not always the same as the actual website URL. For example the web URL for this blog is http://blog.rrkphotos.com/ whereas the Feed or RSS URL is http://blog.rrkphotos.com/feeds/posts/default.

Once setup you will notice a new folder under the RSS folder with the name of your blog. This folder is where updated entries are placed along with previous entries in the blog. Treat this folder just like you would any email folder. Click on an entry to read it in the reading pain or double click to open it in a new window. Notice that much of the web formatting is stripped but the content and photos are still there. If you need to see the post in its entirety you can click the View Article link at the bottom and launch the actual blog page itself.

One last tip/trick to make keeping track of all your blogs easy. Because the RSS folder is buried deep within the folder structure I suggest you add your blog folders to your Favorite Folders list. To do this, right click on the blog folder and choose Add to Favorite Folder list. This will place the folder in the list at the top right of Outlook just under you Inbox folder. Add all your important blogs and as new items are posted the folder name will turn bold and you can click on it to see the listing of new entries.

 
 

Enjoy.

Facebook

Robert R Kircher Jr's Profile Create Your Badge

So first it was a blog and now its Facebook. Gaaaaaack…

First impressions… Not impressed. Great idea with lots of potential but poorly organized. Of course to all those who have been using it for a while think its fine but trust me it was clearly designed by the programmers who developed it. Nothing about it is all that intuitive.

I did figure out how to attach this blog to my Facebook page which is pretty cool. At least that way I don't have to keep up two sites. Just post here in the blog and it automatically updates my face book. Now that's how computers are suppose to work. ;-) I'm sure as I play with it I'll find other cool things but to be honest its all just a bit too much computer and communication for me.

That said Terry is having a blast finding all her old child hood friends. I think she's found just about her entire Mount Rainer gang. That pretty cool. I, on the other hand, have no desire to find old friends and those old friends who I do keep in touch with I do the old fashioned way… EMAIL!!!! ;-)

The Enabler

I've always heard that family can be the worst enablers and I found out today that its very true.

Thanks Mike... I really appreciate it...

Mike was gracious enough today to let me play with his latest photography toy a Cokin filter system. That's right it doesn't take much to excite us but the results of this filtering system are absolutely wonderful.

To explain maybe I should back up a little.

I've been complaining lately that the only free time, as little as there is, I have to get out and shoot seems to be from mid morning to mid afternoon and most times on days just like today, gray and cloudy. This doesn't make for the best light for photographs. You almost always wind up with near white skies and harsh shadows and colors. Well the other day Mike sent me a couple of photos shot on a cloudy day and I was intrigued at how cool they looked. None of that blown out sky or harsh color.

Well today mike and I meet out at Great Falls MD and I got my chance to try out the filter.

Wow!!! So very cool.

Mike attached the holder and slipped in a 2 stop graduated Neutral Density filter. This filter basically gradually darkens from clear at the bottom to 2 stops of grey at the top. The idea is if I adjust the filter properly I can reduce the exposure of the sky by 2 stops while maintaining the proper exosure for the lower part of the image and thereby avoiding that white blown out affect you'd have with out the filter.

Lets see how it works.
This image was taken without the filter. Notice the completely white sky. No cloud detail whatsoever.

1D Mark III w/ 17-40L f/4 1/200s, f/7.1, iso 200, 22mm

Now with the filter in place. Check out the cloud detail. Yes that's actualy the sun behind the clouds. Couldn't even see the sun in the first image.

1D Mark III w/ 17-40L f/4 1/200s, f/7.1, iso 200, 22mm

And an even more dramatic example. In this case I shot, at Mikes advice, in portrait mode to capture more of the sky. Lowering the exposure just a bit realy darken up the sky for a really dramatic look.

1D Mark III w/ 17-40L f/4 1/400s, f/7.1, iso 200, 21mm

Pretty damn cool if you ask me. Makes shooting on a cloudy day worth it.

The other very cool thing about this system is it allows you to stack up to 3 filters for varying effects. Imagine stacking a graduated orange filter with the same graduated ND filter. If adjust properly from a fairly boring sky you could create an interesting sunset.

Of course, although new to me, none of this is really new. This filter system has been around for ages use long before computers and Photoshop.

But the fact is, I find it sooo much more rewarding to create a cool image by using the filters than taking that image into Photoshop and doing it in the computer. As Mike said today, this most likely comes from our pre Photoshop roots in photography. He may very well be right; I just find it much more rewarding to do the upfront thinking and creating the image in camera than manipulating the image in post.

Here are a couple more images done with the filter..

1D Mark III w/ 17-40L f/4 1/80s, f/8, iso 200, 20mm

1D Mark III w/ 17-40L f/4 1/250s, f/4.5, iso 200, 24mm

In any event, I have to thank Mike for turning me on to this cool set of filters and more importantly showing me that I now have to go out and spend yet more money so I can be as cool as he is. ;-)

For more on the filter system visit Cokin Standard and Pro Holders

A little Java..... script can go a long way

Yes this is a post that only the geeks will appreciate. Sorry.


So I was bored this morning and while looking over my photo website I decided to add some code that would handle keyboard navigation with in the galleries. Added one function to handle the keyboard message and a line of code to each page and walla you can now navigate the galleries with out touching the mouse.

Move forward with the right arrow key, space bar, or the enter key
Move backwards with the left arrow key
Move to the first image with the up arrow or the home key
Move to the last image with the down arrow or the end key.


Fun, fun, fun. ;-)

A Foote in the door of the Civil War…

Who doesn’t like to curl up on the couch with a good book and a good drink and relax? Well those of you who know me know it sure the heck isn’t ME… Reading is not one of my favorite things short of a few trade rags and Google news.

“Wait a minute…” you say, “What the heck does this have to do with the civil war and do you know you misspelled foot?”

1D Mark III w/ 17-40 f/4L 1/320 s, f/5.6, 23 mm, iso 400

Well let me tell you. I’m actually in the process of “reading” Shelby Foote’s (see I didn’t spell it wrong) book, The Civil War a Narrative. I say “reading” because I’m actually listing to it on my iPod. Wow what an concept, audible books that fit in my pocket and I can listen to in the car while I’m driving all over town every day.

Foote’s book… well actually books…. Ahhh more like volumes… are fantastic. I’m about ¾ the way though book one, Fort Sumter to Perryville, and all I’m hooked. I can’t put it down. Shelby takes you every step of the way though the war from the economy and politics before the war to the characters involved in the war to regions and battles and even the little skirmishes that went on as hordes of troops were moving from one location to the next. This has to be the most complete works on the Civil War published.

More importantly it doesn’t read like a history book. Shelby has a way of writing that helps you see what’s going on in your mind’s eye. His descriptions of the locations and peoples activities are fantastic. Short of having to switch from the western region to the eastern region from time to time it’s very easy to follow without getting mired or lost in details.

If you are at all interested in the Civil War I strongly recommend you read these books. But be warned all three volumes are HUGE.

1D Mark III w/ 17-40 f/4L 1/25 s, f/4, 17 mm, iso 3200

Now for the photo. This time I used a three flash setup as you can see in the photo above. On the stand to the right was my 550EX attached to my 1D Mark III with a flash cord. I used this flash as the master to fire the other two flashes and as you can see its snooted to shine its un-gelled white light straight onto the iPod. To the left is my 580EX gelled with a heavy yellow/orange gel. Behind the box of books is my 430EX gelled with a dark purple gel and pointed at white illustrators board setup behind the table. All the flashes were set to manual mode with the 550EX (left) set to 1/32, the 580EX (right) set to 1/16 and the 430EX (back) set to 1/8.

The image was shot with my 1D Mark III with 17-40 f/4L lens. Shutter speed was 1/320 and the aperture was set to f/5.6.

War

Again inspired by a challenge on DPReview I set out to tell a large story with the most minimalist image I could. Wanting to do something different then most, I thought about what I could photograph that the other participants wouldn't.

What to photograph?? Hmmmmm...

A Grenade!!! Who on earth would photograph a grenade. But wait what's the story? Destruction!!!!

Where on earth are you going to find a grenade?
Why the the local army surplus store of course. Didn't know you could buy a grenade? Whelp you sure can!!! No, not a real grenade; a hollowed out pineapple that used to be a real grenade.

While I was there I also picked up 2 50cal cartages thinking it may add some interest to my photo.

Now how to shoot these items. I need something dark, something that makes the objects stand out. My original idea was the idea of destruction so I was going to add some broken glass to the photo but as I positioned the grenade and 50cals on my black illustrator board I realized that adding more to the image would move it away from the minimalist idea so I nixed the glass and took a few test shots. Well I liked what I got and I sent the test out to a couple of family member who both remarked that to them the image said War. Right about the same time I had one of those eureka moments maybe even close to an epiphany and thought... War.... Yeah... Yeah that's the ticket... What larger a subject to represent than WAR.

So with that in mind I set up the shot one more time making a few changes from the original test shot and came up with this.

1D Mark III w/ EF 50mm f/1.8, 1/2000 s, f/2.8, 50 mm, iso 50


I like it!!!

But the composition leans so heavily to the right... Of course it does because after all we all know its the right wing who are the war mongers in our country don't we. ;-) Kidding aside, I did heavily load the composition to the right in an effort to depict, somehow, the current political atmosphere that is prevalent in this election season.

The setup was actually quite simple. Once again, following Mike's mantra that any place can be a studio, I set thing up right on my coffee table in the family room (see photo below). Placing a black illustration board down on the table, I positions the grenade and 50cals the way I wanted and then looked at the items to figure out the lighting. The first attempt used only one flash but this time I wanted to add just a hint of color so I went to a 2 flash setup. My key light is a 550EX flash down low and to the right. To cast a bit of red I used a secondary light, a 430ex with red gel, from above, behind and to the left. Both lights are set manually to 1/1 and fired with my 580ex on camera with the flash off. The line of lights in the background is actually the reflection of the key light off a brass fire place door behind the setup. At first this was a "mistake" but I liked how the reflection stopped the eye at the top of the frame and brings the focus toward the grenade so I left it in. To black out all the ambient light I cranked the shutter speed way up to 1/2000 and the ISO down to 50. This way anything not lit by the flashes would be black. Once set, I simply laid down on my couch and fired away.

Who says you can't lie down on the job. ;-) Sorry I just couldn't resist.

Abandoned

An interesting word but how do you represent the concept in a photograph? Well its obvious isn’t it? Just go out and take a picture of an old dilapidated building… Yeah that says abandoned doesn’t it? Sure but isn’t that sort of the easy way out? Well not necessarily, I’ve view some pretty powerful images of abandoned buildings but the problem is I’ve viewed A LOT of great photos of abandon buildings. So when faced with representing this concept I wanted to do something different. What else says Abandoned? Something emotional. Something dramatic.

How about this...






I like it!!!!


The photo idea actually grew from its original concept of just a kid’s stuffed animal to what you see above. As usual here in the Kircher house hold, it quickly became a complete family affair. Terry suggested using Caroline as the model. Of course, ham that she is, Caroline was thrilled with the idea. Amanda, although not too enthusiastic about the project at first, really came through with making my lighting ideas work. And I’m the one who had to lay down on the dirty ground to shoot the photos.




As you can see from the photo above, we shot at night in the alley behind the house. The blue wash lighting was provided by a Source Four Jr with blue gel. We added the spider web gobo to break up the light and cast the shadow lines you see in the photo. The red accent light was provided by a Par can with a red gel. I angled it down toward the ground to help accent the debris on the ground and add some red highlights.

Exposure setting were made in manual mode and according to the theater lighting. I opened my 17-40 all the way up to f/4 which gave me a shutter speed of 1/3 second. A few test shots to make sure that looked the way I wanted and then onto the face.

The white face was done with my 430ex flash in ETTL and snooted so that the light was cast only on Caroline’s face. It was fired remotely with my ST-E2. Because of the slow shutter speeds, the FEC was adjusted way down to about -2 2/3. Once the flash was set and located properly, I used the A-B ratio control on the ST-E2 to fine tune the light give less or more power to channel B used by the flash.

The orange cast on the house in the background was provided by the underexposed light from a street light behind the setup. We couldn’t have been luckier with this because I think it really help set the mood of the photo.

All that was left was for me to lay down in the ground right next to the flash stand, frame, and press the shutter.

It was a fun project and I’m very happy with the results.

It's just like a gel dad!!!

So we were at a restaurant in Williamsburg several days ago and while waiting for our food I was playing with my camera and flash. Well every one knows that the flash light by itself in a bar is just way too harsh and makes for a lousy photo so I thought to myself, hmmm lets try this. I placed the flash behind my full glass of Coke and fired it remotely with my ST-E2 and wala I got these photos.





Pretty cool I thought. Well Amanda wasn’t all that impressed and all she had to say was, “It’s just like a gel dad…” That maybe true but I’d like to see Amanda gel one of her theater lights with a glass of Coke.

Shooting in the Theater... White Balance and Color Correction

(Technical assistance provided by Amanda Kircher)

Finally a new post. This time we’ll go back to the theater and examine color and white balance.

I know I said my next theater entry was going to be about working with directors and managers but this subject came up again on DPR so I thought I’d review my feelings about it now.

First let’s get the technical side of this conversation out of the way. Standard stage lighting runs around 3200K for pure, uncolored light. With this knowledge you could just set you camera’s white balance manually to 3200K and shoot away. Another option is to use a grey card and take a few sample shots of the card under the differing lighting conditions. Then use the gray card images to set the WB in camera or as a reference during post processing. Yet another option is to simply use Auto White Balance (AWB) and let the camera work it out. I can hear from the peanut gallery it now … AWB? Aaackkkk. Yes, yes, I know but shooting raw makes correcting AWB, when needed, a snap. In addition, if you shoot a few frames of a gray card you can use those images as a reference during you post processing. For my last show, I shot the first night in AWB then noted the correct WB setting during post. With that information I set that WB value, 3300K, into the camera for subsequent nights of shooting. It worked like a charm.



Regardless of the method you choose the most important thing to remember is to represent what the lighting director intended which often is not what, to the eye, looks perfectly balanced. You must remember that the color and intensity of the lighting have a direct impact on the appearance of costumes, sets and actors. Lighting designers develop and design a lighting concept that is central to the entire project… For example, an LD may choose a series of gels that will help accentuate the Yellow in Belle’s dress or in combination with the set designer help present certain color illusions that under normal “balanced” light would look strange or out of place. If an actress is washed in heavy amber light her skin tones are going to lean heavily towards orange. Usually the tone of the actor’s skin is very much a part of the concept and holds some type of significance. Knowing this, it is not our place as photographers to make “corrections” just because we have a need to have our whites balanced. Within reason, it’s our job to capture exactly look of a show and not what we think it should have looked like.



The art is to balance what is "right" and what the LD wanted to achieve and when in doubt ALWAYS lean towards the lighting director. I usually tend towards warm side when processing my theater work because more often than not the general wash is a warm tone of light. I can assure you, having a budding LD in my family; she would kill me if I misrepresented her designs by over correcting the color temps.

Shooting in the Theater... Rehearsals

My first post on this subject concluded with just how important rehearsals are for getting the best out of your theater photography. So I thought I’d expand upon that point with this post.

First I have to give credit here where credit is due. It was my wife, Terry, who first used rehearsals as her main shooting time. I must admit, I was skeptical because the show isn’t polished, the sets aren’t always in place (mostly because I hadn’t finished them yet) and the costumes aren’t always complete. However, all it took for me to realize how right she was to watch her shoot one show. The freedom she had to move around the theater and even up onto the stage was simply liberating. And what struck me the most was the perspective she was able to capture especially when up on the stage with the actors.

The other distinct advantage is the simple fact that scenes are often rehearsed several times providing multiple opportunities to “get the shot.” Missed it the first time? No problem, just wait, you’ll have another opportunity.

Well needless to say I was sold on the idea and have followed her lead ever since.

The point here is exploring your freedom… Get right up on stage… Shoot from the wings… Move around the theater snapping away with the freedom of knowing you’re not interfering with the enjoyment of a real audience.

One word to the wise. Before you go running around the stage among the actors merrily shooting away, make sure it’s ok with the director, he/she may not take to kindly to you making yourself part of the show. We’ll talk more about working with directors, stage managers, and technical directors in my next entry.

Mother and Daughter

It’s not often that we get a picture of Terry with either of the girls since she’s the one usually behind the camera instead of in front of it. So as we were walking along a wooded path this past Saturday at Mount Vernon we happened upon a nice bench where I sat Terry and Caroline down and snapped a few photos.

1D Mark III, 17-40L f/4.0, 580EX Flash

Taking the shot was an interesting exercise in exposure and fill flash. It was early afternoon and the sun was high casting shadows down from the tree’s and branches. Not the ideal place or time to take a portrait but what the hell, I don’t get a chance to have two of them together all that often.

Had I just pointed the camera and pressed the shutter button I would have had the typical white blown out sky for a background and heavy shadows from the trees running across both their faces. So, while in AV mode, I pointed the camera up towards the sky behind them and locked my exposure. This would insure that I captured the nice blue color of the sky. To help enhance the color, I used my Circular Polarizing filter rotating it until the sky was deep blue. Then, with my flash in fill mode, I dialed down the flash exposure to - 2/3 stop so it wouldn’t blast too much light and blow out their faces. Finally, to achieve the nice warm color of their skin, I used a CTO gel on the flash to splash a nice orange cast of color on their faces; helps give a bit of that golden hour look to the photo when the sun begins to set.

1D Mark III, 17-40L f/4.0, 580EX Flash

Shooting in the Theater… No not like John Wilkes Booth

Prelude:
I think it was Ansell Adams who, when asked once by a student the settings he used to take a particular landscape, replied… “The right ones.” Of course he was correct but this answer was not as helpful as the student wanted.

Well often times we are asked this very question and the answer really is “the right ones.” But settings alone do not make the photograph. Each shooting environment presents its own set challenges which go way beyond the setting used. So I thought I’d start a series of post that describe how I handled certain shooting conditions. As I learn and refine new techniques I’ll post them here along with some photos.

Remember while reading these posts that there are many ways to skin a cat so my methods certainly are not he be all to end all. Also remember that much of this will be written as I’m learning and discovering so certainly don’t think of me as an all knowing authority.

To organize these posts I’ll add labels to each new post so you can then filter by label and read only the post dealing with condition of interest. To filter the post simple click on the label listed to the right or click on the label at the bottom of any post.

So let’s get started.

As the title of this post suggests I thought I’d start this series discussing a little bit about Theater photography. Terry and I have been shooting theater at Visitation for 5 years now. We do it for the love of the craft, support of the program, and of course because we get great photos of the kids as they perform in the shows.

In that time I’ve learned three basic things that aren’t directly related to the physical camera settings.

1) Know the show!!! To get the best shots you have to be able to predict the timing of those shots. Knowing the show will help you see scene evolve and help you predict the action in time to shoot it. There’s nothing worse than missing that all important kiss because you just didn’t know it was coming. Also remember that just knowing the show may not be enough. Just because you’ve seen different production of the same show doesn’t mean that this production will be blocked and/or acted the same way. To resolve this issue make sure you hit a rehearsal or two of the production you are planning to shoot.

2) Mind the audience. Camera’s make noise and if you were sitting in an audience watching a show you sure wouldn’t want to hear kerchunk every few minutes from around the theater. By far best solution to this problem is to shoot when the audience isn’t present; during dress rehearsals. Besides not disturbing the audience, there are huge advantages to shooting during dress and well discuss them in a later entry.

3) A theater is DARK; or is it? Certainly from the seats a theater is dark but you’re not photographing the audience now are you.
You are shooting the action on the stage which low and behold is lit, many times very well lit. Problem is depending on your proximity to the stage your camera doesn’t always understand this so you need to keep it in mind throughout your shoot. You need to expose for the light on the stage not the ambient light around you. This really means that it’s equally as important to know the lighting design as it is to know the show itself. How best to learn lighting design? Go to the rehearsals!!! Noticing a theme here?

The real lesson here is, rehearsals are you best friend. You’ll do yourself a big favor if you forget about shooting the actual performance and shoot during dress. Use the actual performance to get those last few shots that you missed during dress.

Building a Photo Website

My photo website started well over a year ago with a thought and a concept. The thought? Well that came about as I was helping my cousin Mike with some issues on his site. As I was going over his images I thought, “It might be cool to build my own website for some of my photography.” The concept? Well that would evolve over time but basically I wanted a simple site, easy to navigate, and most of all a clean looking site that wasn’t cluttered with what you see on many sites today, animation (Flash), music, fancy typefaces, etc. The task was to create an attractive, well functioning site that would showcase the photography and not my abilities to create fancy websites.

The first thing to work out was a color scheme… Hmmm… what colors would help complement my work? I find that most images seem to pop when places on darker backgrounds so I picked a darker shade of gray to use as my background color. Then keeping in mind the goals, I decided a more monochromatic look would be best. It’s simple and won’t detract from the images.

Now design. Simple... It has to be simple. I don’t want the viewer distracted by design elements on the web page so I decided to use single line rules to separate the major sections of the page and to keep the header of the page as plain as possible. The same holds true for the font style used. I needed something easy to read but plain enough to keep the viewer interested in the photos and not the text. In my opinion, nothing says simple and plain, yet sophisticated then a Helvetica style font.

The other very important design item for me was that page movement, meaning the changing of height and width, had to be kept to an absolute minimum. Nothing is more distracting then when I click on a link and the next page is completely different than the page I just left. To this, my images must be the same size and display in the same place as the images before and after. If done properly the only thing that should look like it changed, as the viewer navigates, is the image itself.

Now to the photographs. How to organize them. How to display them. Again here the overall driving factor was simplicity. Too many categories or nested categories and the viewer will quickly get lost. Too few and the viewer will get bogged down in a single gallery that seem endless with images. So I settled on the simple. People, Places, and Things and then added Theater, Sports, and Wildlife. These 6 categories pretty much cover everything I shoot.

How many images per gallery was something of another matter altogether. My hope was to keep it down to 10 or 15 at most but when it came down to actually picking the photos I just couldn’t do it. So as it turns out each gallery has around 25 images. A few more then I intended but not too many assuming the images are interesting.

Ok so the goals and idea were set forth and it was time to create an actual design. I’ve found that Microsoft Publisher is an excellent tool to create design mockups. So using Publisher I created my first pass at the graphical design of the page. One particular reason why I like to use Publisher, and there are other tools that will do the same types of thing, is it’s very easy to work with color schemes and pull the hex values from those colors when it comes time to actually build the site in HTML. I can also create graphical elements such as rules and buttons and then export then to gif or jpg to be used in the HTML of a given page.

Now to translate the graphic design into an actual web page. I use Microsoft Front Page as my basic HTML editor. Again there are many other tools one could use but I find FrontPage more than sufficient for the type of website I build.

The first thing to do is break up the mockup into table and cell layout that represent the major sections of the page. Header, Body, Footer, Menu area, Image area, navigation area and so on. Using this basic table design I created a template page that each and every other page would be derived. This way I’m certain that all the pages are the same. I then created shared components such as menus and in this case the gallery HTML which are embedded into the template page, again assuring that every page is exactly the same. Making a change to the component is immediately reflected in every page using that component.

Next item to create was the code that drives the actual image galleries. I needed something simple that wouldn’t require major rewrites each time I added an image. The solution was quite simple. Create an array of images making sure the names of the images were simple, e.g. places-001.jpg and then write code that would cycle though that array within the gallery page, displaying each image. This way, to change an image all I need to do is replace an existing image with a new image making sure the new image has the same name as the old. Adding addition images is as simple as adding a line to the array code. Couldn’t be any simpler.

Formatting; let’s not forget about formatting. Font type, size, color, spacing, mouse over behavior and all other style behavior is defined in style sheets. By using styles there’s no reason to repeat formatting on each and every element, just assign the proper style and it looks and behaves just as it’s supposed to and constantly throughout the site. More importantly a simple change to a given style is applied to the entire site without the need to manually change the formatting throughout. This makes tweaking the appearance of the site a breeze; just edit the style sheet. Want to change a color? Change it in the style sheet. Want to change a typeface? Change it in the style sheet. Paragraph spacing? Style sheet. Border size and color? Style sheet. As long as you were diligent enough to use the styles throughout your entire site, the changes are applied as you tweak the style sheet.

Now assembly. With the template now containing all the functioning components, menu, gallery etc, and all the proper style defined and assigned, all that was required to create a specific gallery was to copy the template, renaming it appropriately, and then create the companion image array file. That’s it; a fully functioning gallery page that displays the images defined in its associated array file. Of course the images needed to be chosen and copied to the site but that’s another issue altogether.

Well now the pages are in place and working as prescribed but there aren’t any images. Uuuuggghhh. Now I have to go though all my images and pick out the best 25 of each category. Well it turns out that this process was more difficult than the creation of the site itself. So difficult in fact that I put it off for weeks, then months until I finally decided that I just needed to get it done. So over the past several days I sifted though about 4 years of images slowly but surely quelling them down to 6 categories of 25. Once each set was defined they needed to be resized, renamed, and copied to the website location, along with creating 6 array files reflecting the exact number of images per category.

Once all this was done the gallery page was ready to go and once all the galleries were done the website was finally completed.

So there you have it; how I created my new photography website. Of course I’ve left out a lot of detail such as the time and effort put into finding, writing and testing the actual code that drives everything but I hope after reading this you will have a better appreciation for what goes into designing and creating a well functioning and pleasing website. To which, I hope I’ve accomplished the goals set forth at the beginning of the project and indeed did create a well functioning, and simple site that is pleasing in design, function and forum.


Well here it is: RRK Photos

Enjoy.