Colouring the world

OK, I can tell you're all getting bored waiting for my reappearance! Woah, it's been a mad month and a half. So much happening!

Anyhow, I've spoken about using gels on your subject in order to control the colour balance of ambient light before (Summer's day shoot, on a dull late evening). The most common version of this sort of adjustment you'll see is a warm gel used on the subject and when you shoot tungsten balanced, you make the world very blue. It's an interesting look and understandably popular.

The post I did before was doing the opposite - using blue gels on the subject to make the background look warmer when it was already rather dark and blue looking.

The image up at the top is slightly different but exactly the same principle. Anyone who's played with the tint (green <-> purple) colour balance settings in an image editor or raw editor will know that you can get a funky green or purple look to your images if you drag the slider one way or the other.

But in lighting terms, if you fire a green gelled (plusgreen or fluorescent) flash at a subject, then white balance for the gelled flash, you'll find that daylight balanced light sources will go a purple colour. And vice versa...fire a purple gelled flash at the subject, white balance for it and you'll get a green ambient wherever daylight balanced light sources are present.

The image up at the top there was lit with three flashes. It's a while back so I can't remember settings or precise gels used, but there was a flash gun off to high camera left about a foot in front of the model with a shoot thru brolly. It had either a half or full minusgreen gel on it and the camera was white balanced for this gel. The second flash was at low camera right without any modifiers, and had either a quarter or half minusgreen gel (either a quarter or half less purple than the main light), so resulted in a more green tinge to the left of the model's face. Lastly there was a similarly gelled flash in behind the model which gave her a highlight round her hair and also showed up the falling rain. This of course made the rain stand out as whiter than the very green ambient lit background.

And I can confirm that no models or photographers were injured by damp flashguns in the process of making these images!

Winter Scene

I had an interesting theme for a shoot recently, which involved creating a winter scene for the shoot. I used a combination of fallen branches I collected from near my house, fake snow from a snow machine and fog from a fog machine to create the look.

I used two 550EX (equivalent to the Canon 580EX II) flashguns with CTB (cooling) gels from behind the setup in order to light the fog a cool blue. I had one on each side of the setup.

I then used three lights to light the model. I used two Bowens monolights with softboxes on either side (Esprit Gemini 750+/750+ Kit). The power of these lights means that I was able to back them well away, and give a good even spread of light across the image, with some nice light down the sides of the model. The softboxes meant that even though the lights were a few metres back, they still weren't giving overly harsh shadows. Softboxes also tend to make the light a touch more directional, so I was able to turn the softboxes towards the camera a touch, in order to reduce the white light hitting the fog, which would reduce the blue effect significantly.

Lastly I had a 550EX (equivalent to the Canon 580EX II) firing into an umbrellabox on a boom arm. This means I get a nice overhead (or just to the right) light filling the dark spot that would otherwise be left down the middle of the model when lit by the two softboxes. You can see what I mean in this image where the flash hadn't quite recharged, and only the monolights fired.



Here's a few views of the overall setup, so you can visualise what was happening.

Product Photo: Battery Striplights

I've had some serious lackings going on in the blogging front the last month and a bit! But hey, I'm back. Haven't had much in the way of product photography going on for a while, so I figured I'd put up this entry.

Well, you've seen the final shot above, so let's look at the thinking which got me there. Firstly, I wanted to show a few things about these products in one shot. The first is that they're battery (or mains) powered, so I wanted them lit with no wires going to them. The second thing I wanted to show is the different ways they can be positioned (either flat or propped up with a fold out stand). They're actually surprisingly stable despite how they look. The battery has been positioned at the bottom so they have a better centre of gravity than you'd expect. That said, if you bump them, they'll probably knock over, and more than likely damage themselves, so I'd say they're probably better laid flat!

So first things first, I had to show them lit. So I fired them both up with both tubes lit (you can light one or the other independently or both). I then set an aperture with a reasonable exposure (f/8), a reasonable shutter speed of 1/200s and settled on ISO 400 for a good combination of noise and sensitivity. This gave me the following shot.



However, the light coming from the tubes themselves isn't really doing very much for the product, so I added in a silver reflector lit by a flash for a nice soft fill evenly across the products.





To give the image a little extra pop I thought I'd put some light on the background. My first thought was a plain flash snooted, with the generally vague idea that it might look a bit like the lights were lighting the background themselves.





I then tried a different angle, with a wide angle lens to try and give a bit more impact to the shot. It also showed in more detail the method by which the stand works, which was quite good.



However, there was no getting away from it...the image was looking pretty dull, and I'm not known for dull images - I love really saturated vivid images. So I headed to the box the lights came in, and looked at colours. The logo of the company was blue, but was very small. The box was predominately black (goes with my background), with a large red stripe down the side and a big yellow star behind the product. So back to the setup, and two snooted and gelled flashes later, I had the final image.

Three looks - Two backgrounds - One setup

Sometimes you've got plenty of setup time, but not so much time for shooting. Perhaps, for example, the model is only available for a certain time, and a significant period of that time is taken up by complicated makeup/hair work, or you have a lot of clothing changes to get through, but want a variety of looks for each.

In this particular case, makeup/hair (wig) was pretty long for this shoot, and there were a couple of clothing styles to get through in limited time. So to make sure I could get a variety of looks, I used two half width background rolls slid onto the one full width background support. This meant that I had, in this case, a black and white roll side by side.



So, just by quickly moving lights about, I was able to go from one background to another with little time taken up. And yes, my black roll got some pretty rough treatment getting pulled out...don't ask! Of course, it didn't matter too much. You can see that the black roll is actually used for a blue background.



So by alternating between the white background, black background for a blue gelled look, and shooting across the rolls out into the blackness of the rest of the building, I was able to quickly get three distinct looks.







The only thing I'd say about this method is it puts a fair strain on the background support. Normally a full width roll has its own stiffness, so doesn't want to bend the background support. As you can see though, the two rolls tend to want to put a lot of pressure on the centre of the support bar, because they're split in the middle. Didn't do any long term harm though!

Pantone Huey Pro

Most of the stuff I talk about on this blog tends to be very much based around the point of capture. Lighting and cameras are a huge part of what I do - I'm very much a believer in getting things right before clicking the shutter button, rather than spending hours fixing hundreds of images in post processing. However, like all photographers, post processing is equally a very time consuming part of the deal.

For a long time I worked happily with monitors I'd calibrated by eye so that they showed something roughly approximating what they should, but I started to work more critically on certain jobs and that was a turning point for me. I needed to know that what I was seeing on my monitor was accurate. Some of the calibration tools out there are unbelievably expensive, so they were ruled out quickly for me. At the other end was the relatively cheap Pantone Huey. Having had a chat with my local camera store, I quickly ruled it out because it only supported a single monitor. No use for calibrating my dual monitor setup.

The next model up was the Pantone Huey Pro, which did offer multiple monitor support, which was the major selling point for myself. In addition, like the Huey, it offers ambient compensation where it controls the screen brightness based on your surroundings. Useful if you have a window nearby which makes the room brighter or darker depending on the time of day.

So, having purchased the Huey Pro, plugged it in and installed the software from the supplied CD, the installed application came up and gave clear instructions throughout. There is one word of warning though: During your first calibration, the software checks to see you can see certain graduations of tone, in order to check that your brightness and contrast are fine. I personally opted to say I couldn't see them properly (even though I could), so that I was given further options to fine tune my brightness and contrast. This gave a much more critical black/white point accuracy.

Other than that, everything is totally self explanatory. When asked you stick the Huey Pro to the monitor with its small suction cups, and the monitor then displays test colours for the Huey Pro to check. My only slight problem is that the first time I hadn't stuck it well enough and it fell off, even though I'd done as suggested and cleaned the screen first. Just to be safe, I then just gently held it against the screen, being careful not to press too hard or the LCD screen can show discolouration. Holding it up against the monitor for the <2 mins the calibration takes really isn't a big hassle.

Having calibrated the screen, you'll likely feel it looks very warm compared to a manually calibrated screen. This is fine, and you get used to it very quickly as your eyes adjust. Try it for a day, and then switch back to the uncorrected colours, and it'll look very blue! It's just a matter of changing what you're used to.

Having done this, you should start to see things very much more clearly. No missing badly cloned areas in the black or white areas, and you have a greater confidence that what you're seeing is right.

Another thing I love about the Huey Pro is the simplicity with which it makes multi-monitor calibration straight forward. Many products would make you pick the monitor in a screen which lists them, but the Huey Pro does the obvious thing - you drag the software to the screen you want to calibrate, and then press the button to start the process. Brilliantly simple!

Since I bought this product, I've noticed a couple of things. The main one is that when you set the screen to update based on ambient light (you can set from 10 secs upwards - I opted for every minute), you'll see the Huey Pro flash its red LEDs and then if the ambient light has changed significantly, you'll see the screen brightness change. On occasion though, the ambient hasn't changed, but you get a small flicker for a fraction of a second where the Huey Pro software seems to remove its colour correction then reapply it very quickly. This may annoy some people, but it's not something that happens all that regularly, and I can't say it worries me much.

It's a well designed product, and unlike many products nowadays, has matching well designed software. I've often said that the best products are ones you use every day, and hardly even think about the fact they exist. The Pantone Huey Pro is a prime example of such a product, and at a very competitive price as well.