A lot of fun setting this one up this week. I present… The Purple Duck!
So this week I got a wireless flash trigger for my camera (from the helpful folks out at Image Melbourne) – unfortunately it doesn’t support TTL (through the lens) metering, so it’s all manual here.
In this picture, the flash is set up off to the left hand side set at 1/64 power (due to the flash being so close to the duck), 35mm (slightly wide, but not too wide) and pointed at the wall behind the duck.
Camera itself was set up on a tripod with my home-made wired trigger attached to it. Lens at a nice safe f/8 and zoomed out to 70mm.
A couple of drops of soap were put in the water to break surface tension to help me position the duck (not sure if this actually helped or not), from there, I used 4 skewers on the glass to centralise the duck, then another skewer to rotate it to face forwards. Once the duck settled, the skewers were removed (this was quite annoying as one bump on the duck and the whole thing had to be set up again).
Finally while I was using the wired trigger I held a reflector above the duck to fill in the shadow on the right hand side of the face. This didn’t really help too much as I pretty much brought most of the detail back in via Lightroom (using the fill light slider).
Overall I’m really happy with this picture. Originally I wasn’t going to do it in a “high key” style, but the flash wouldn’t go any darker (would have to move it further away to get it any darker), and after looking at the resulting image, I liked how it looked.
As for criticisms, would have been nice to get the duck facing directly forwards, but my hands weren’t steady enough to quite get it there. A seamless background would have been nice too, but I don’t have a large enough piece of paper to do that with. Also, the bubbles under the duck would have been nice to remove, but it’s probably the smallest issue here (farting duck maybe?).
Didn’t think much of Week 7’s photo (kind of boring), so no write up. I’ll chuck a link in for you though:- Flower.
So, on to week 8. A bit of fun this week. A nice photo of some champers!
One thing I really have to work on is paying attention to my backgrounds. That damn fork drawing the eye. I could clone it out, but it would be a fair amount of work, and may look dodgy around the edge of the glass. That said, I have cloned out a napkin that was at the bottom of the image (you can probably tell if you look at a full size version of the picture). Patch tool was failing me, so had to jump to the clone tool, which on this background, it seemed to work “ok”.
I don’t know what it is, but I’m loving Vignetting at the moment (dark borders, traditionally caused by the lens, but I’m artificially adding it here). It’s something I never really used to like, but when done fairly subtly, I think it adds a lot to the image to draw the eye to the main subject. It’s quite easy to go overboard though, and I may come back to this image later on and find it’s slightly high still.
As for other things, I think the shadow is a bit sharp here, I really need to buy/make a diffuser for my flash. Surprising thing was that the photographer at the wedding this was shot at, didn’t use one at all, and wasn’t bouncing the flash either (had the same flash as me, which doesn’t actually come with one, but can be bought). Maybe he knows something I don’t, but I think it’s a sign of a photographer that doesn’t really know how to do nice indoor shots – will be interesting to see the quality of the photos. That said, I HATE shooting inside churches. I wasn’t using flash myself, just a high ISO (640-1000) and a wide aperture (f/2 – f/4), but the lighting is horrible. Something I may need to work on, learning the best way to do it.
My photo of the week will be delayed this weekend (photos will still be taken, just not processed and uploaded).
So as a consolation prize, I’ve uploaded quite a few new photos to my gallery.
So enjoy the new shots, and I should have an update early next week.
Similar in theme to last week’s photo. More rust.
I’m actually enjoying simplifying my photos a bit. In this case, rather than taking a photo of the whole boat, I’ve taken a photo of a specific part. Once again, a very wide aperture (well, as wide as I can go on my 200mm lens) to blur the background to remove it as a distraction.
I like the whole old vs. new in this photo as well. The old being the levers, and the new being the pipes. I think the wooden pole makes a good frame for the image too (along with the metal poles).
As for criticisms, composition could have been a little better (I’ve cropped it to get it to this stage), maybe a bit more processing (Lightroom has done a bit of a bad job at the noise reduction, so I can’t bring out the texture of the rust as much as I’d like), the white (sign?) in the background is a distraction, but overall, I think it’s fairly sound.
Funny story with this photoshoot though. I was walking along the Geelong waterfront taking photos and due to it being on sunset, I was using the tripod fairly often (didn’t with the above picture though). As I was taking a photo of one of the bollards that has been painted up (the one painted as a footy player), a hens party walked past. Due to me having my 55-200mm lens on my camera, at full length with the hood on it, my camera, to the layman, looked like a fairly pro camera. So as the hens party walked past, one of the girls (who was dressed like Jasmine from Aladdin) asked me what I was taking a photo of and then proceded to ask which publication I shot for! Ha ha, I look like a pro!
On another note, as I walked along, I wasn’t replacing the lens cap on the camera. Worried about dust/scratches? This has convinced me otherwise (along with the fact that I have a UV filter on my lenses for protection) – http://www.lensrentals.com/news/2008.10.30/front-element-scratches
No write up last week as I wasn’t really a big fan of the photo. A bit of a learning lesson. Funny thing was originally I went to Williamstown to take a panorama but then got a photo of the sunset as a bit of a backup shot. Wasn’t really happy with the panorama at first, so went with the backup. In the mean time, I’ve played around with the panorama a bit, and have actually got it looking quite nice (still needs more work), but I may end up putting it up anyway.
Anyway this week was a bit of a surprise (make sure you view it in full size as the thumbnail really loses a lot of the impact of the image).
I was going to make a black and white photo of the dilapidated chook shed in our backyard. I took a couple of photos but wasn’t really happy with them (I was trying to do it quickly too as it was raining slightly), then I took a nice close up off the door and was really happy with the result. I guess this really proves the point of when going out to take photos, make sure you take lots, and lots from different angles to what you had planned – often you will surprise yourself with which photos end up being the strongest.
I think in this case, the main reason why it works, is that it’s cropping out all of the useless information, and filling the frame will all of the interesting part of the shed.
As for post processing, like normal, first thing was adjusting the levels. After that, I actually tried it in black and white, but saw that it worked much better in colour, so from there, I just started playing. I ended up duplicating the image on a second layer and set that to “overlay” which gave a really high contrast effect that I liked. So the way this photo ended up, I guess you could call it “grunge” and a little “artsy” at the same time.
I did consider cropping the grass and paint out of the bottom of the image, but I think ultimately it added to the photo as a bit of subject contrast (old rusty wood and nails compared with nice fresh green grass).
I may end up playing with this photo a bit more in the future to see what I can come up with.
