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March 30, 2011
photo session – Jess B – various 85mm lenses
A fast 85mm lens is an essential addition to any camera bag, whether an f1.8 or f1.4 or even an f1.2 aperture. With their shallow depth of field, and the pleasant perspective for portraits (when not used with a super-tight composition), these lenses will have your subject just pop from the background.
Jessica and I are busy with a new project – testing various 85mm lenses – specifically for how their bokeh appears in comparison. It is proving a tad more difficult than I had hoped for to show when poor bokeh is truly distracting, and when a lens with great bokeh is immediately superior. But then, the deep-freeze temperatures here recently hasn’t helped us either in scouting for locations. But we’ll still get there. (So this is not the comparative review yet.)
In the meantime, I wanted to show a few images off. They were all shot at wide apertures, using only the available light wherever we were.
The photograph above was taken on the steps inside a train station, using only the available light streaming in. In posing Jessica, I made sure that the direction of light made sense in creating open light on her face.
1/250 @ f1.4 @ 800 ISO
Canon 5D mk II (B&H); Canon 85mm f1.2 II (B&H)
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March 28, 2011
using video light as fill-light for the romantic wedding portraits
Having just photographed my first wedding of 2011, I’m back in the groove of things. Keeping to the recent theme of showing how video lights are used for photography, I’d like to show a small selection of images of Cherryl and Jim’s wedding where I used a video light to enhance the existing incandescent lighting at the reception venue …
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March 25, 2011
comparative review: Lowel ID-light & Litepanels MicroPro LED light & Dedo Ledzilla
The use of video light for stills photography has become ever more popular in recent years, as high-ISO capable cameras made it possible to shoot in lower light without having to resort to flash. The immediacy of video light – the ‘wysiwyg’ nature of video light – makes it an interesting light source to play with and experiment with on a shoot. The dramatic quality of the light is also quite appealing.
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of video light out there:
- the traditional Tungsten / Incandescent lamps,
- video lights with an array of LEDs providing the light.
The LED video lights have several advantages over the “proper” video lights:
- they don’t become too hot to touch,
- they run for much longer, and most use AA batteries,
- they are balanced for Daylight, and can be gelled for Incandescent,
- they are more compact.
So to see just how this all stack up in actual use, I decided to compare three video lights:
- the Lowel ID-light
- MicroPro LED video light
- Dedo Ledzilla video light
We’re going to specifically look at how bright they are and how their light spread is, and what their quality of light is like …
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March 21, 2011
high-key lighting with maternity photo session
Part of what makes wedding photography so rewarding, is keeping contact with clients over the years as life continues past the wedding date. Maternity photo sessions .. babies .. kiddos .. it’s all part of how couples’ lives unfold. If we’re fortunate as photographers, we remain part of it.
So it was with great pleasure that I had a maternity photo session with Renee and David. As usual with a photo session, I like to mix things up in terms of the lighting … all with the intent of getting more diversity in the selection of images …
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March 20, 2011
on-location headshots that work (w/ Meagan Lee)
This image is from the recent photo session with Meagan Lee, getting headshots for her portfolio. While this specific photograph is perhaps not useable as a headshot, I loved the way the wind whipped her hair around.
An uncomplicated portrait made stronger with a few things working in its favor:
- effective off-camera lighting via a softbox,
- a complimentary but non-intrusive background,
- strong diagonal lines created by Meagan’s pose.
With that, this photograph again shows a simple and effective method for great portraits on-location:
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March 15, 2011
wedding photography – how to work with the videographer’s light
With wedding receptions, we’re most often working within a very warm spectrum. There are tungsten (incandescent) lights all around. (**) There is candle light. There might be twinkling lights as decoration … and there is the videographer’s light. The videographer’s light will be Tungsten balanced, even if it is an LED video light that they are using. (***)
So while a wedding photographer might be using a lot of flash to dominate the lighting .. and settle for Cloudy or Flash WB, there is often a conflict of interest when the videographer joins in with his video light. The video light obviously has a much warmer white balance than flash. So how do we best deal with this?
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March 13, 2011
Auto FP setting for Nikon D300s & D700 – high speed flash sync
The Nikon D300s and Nikon D700 have a custom setting to enable high-speed flash sync – custom fucntion e1. However, you have the option of setting it to either 1/250 Auto FP, or 1/320 Auto FP. I’ve often been asked which is the preferable setting … and you know, I never quite knew either.
So it was time then to systematically check this out and see what actually happens at either setting – 1/250 Auto FP and 1/320 Auto FP – for both the Nikon D300s and D700 …
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March 11, 2011
audio interview: Song Freedom
A few weeks ago at WPPI in Las vegas, I met up with Matt Thompson of the company, Song Freedom. Over drinks the one evening … as all meetings happen in Vegas … he told me more about this company, and I was intrigued by what they offered … licensing of a variety of popular music for photographers to use. Of course there is a fee involved for this, since the musicians and artists need to be paid. Just like we, as professional photographers, prefer to be paid for our work.
Until now, photographers really only had the option of using royalty-free music if they wanted to use music without infringing on the intellectual property rights of the musicians. This meant we had to forego using some of the cool tunes we hear on the radio … or alternately, illegally use the music on our websites or slideshows. This however, brings us to very shaky ground, not only legally, but also in that we as photographers who don’t like to see our photographs misappropriated, we have the same obligation towards musicians’ work. We have to extend the same courtesy and get permission for the music we use to accentuate our photography.
This has been a big problem until now, since there just wasn’t a mechanism in place for photographers to get licensing to use popular music on our websites or slideshows and such. This is where Song Freedom steps in …
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Filed under: news — Neil vN @ 10:33 pm
March 10, 2011
I am super-thrilled to have Frank Doorhof as a guest writer on Tangents. Frank is a highly regarded Fashion photographer based in The Netherlands, whom I had the pleasure of meeting last year. We hung out the one afternoon, photographing a model in Coney Island. What I found particularly interesting, is how our approach to using flash and ambient light differ. Distinct styles and techniques. Quite an inspiring afternoon.
Please note: with this blog post, the images aren’t illustrative of any particular part of the writing, but are there to showcase some of Frank’s work.
And with that, here’s Frank …
on learning the essentials of photography
by Frank Doorhof
I met Neil during my trip to New York where I was going to teach a 3 days workshop. Before the workshops I was having a lot of fun with Neil during an impromptu photo-shoot that was arranged by a mutual friend of ours – thank you Richard! – and found Neil to be a lot of fun although he did scare the living you know what out of me when he stopped his car in the middle of the road to remove a piece of paper from the windshield, however I though he was getting out of the car to get into a fight with a very obnoxious driver behind us…. Yeah Neil I still wake up at night screaming about that one!
When I was asked to write a guest post for Neil’s blog, I was thinking very hard about the subject. Neil already has some nice tips and articles on lighting online so adding to that would be just adding something that’s probably already there, so I decided to do it little bit differently …
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March 8, 2011
video clip – using the black foamie thing
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Flagging your on-camera speedlight is a simple way of controlling the direction of light from your flash .. and hence, controlling the quality of light from the on-camera flash. I use a simple piece of black foam – the infamous black foamie thing, to achieve this. To help explain the use of the Black Foamie Thing (BFT), I met up with Anelisa to create a short video clip.
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