The Incredible Lightness of Shooting Beauty

Today I was lucky that I had such a spectacular beauty sitting in as my subject. This young lady's name is Meryem....here she is in various light setup. I worked with one SB-600 today, mounted on a reflective umbrella. I also thank to my lighting assistant for this shoot....the beautiful mother of Meryem, Sibel.

Sigmund

Today's subject is Sigmund. Here are a few various light setup trials...We thank the Master for his modeling of various minds.

Poker Face

Scared

Self-Analysis Session

Hollywood Style

Sigmund Hitchcock

...and guess what!?

Freud was a Gator too!

The Witch

I want to shoot 20,000 frames this year. In the first 44 days, I took 3043 frames. If I continue at this rate, I'll be bagging 25K frames by the end of the year. So some days, I simply have to take what's available. And today I was lucky with my precious neighbor's toys...the kind I can share...

Meet The Witch

A softbox at 7ft high, 4ft away from the subject, bounced off the ceiling, about 30deg to the camera right. Camera hand-held at ISO100, 1/250 (sync speed) at f/5.6 with a 60mm 2.8 macro.
















The puppet is hanging from the ceiling. I gave it a little turning move to the right to get some action effect.

Here's another one. I took this with a 20mm f/2.8 and then cropped it to frame it properly. Again this series is shot without control of the frame, as the camera was hand-held up high, without the live view or the view finder. Lighting is the same for all the shots in the series.

This is how I ended the session....with a calm, deep feeling of this....

Alice and Klaus

This is Klaus

I didn't know it would be so difficult to shoot a goldfish. I put the camera on continuous focus, at ISO400. Still not crystal clear...

Here's Klaus swimming :)

And this is the good, old Ms. Alice. She is 10 years old. The most gracious lady on the block.

and she is obsessed with basketball

I put an SB-600 flash about 45deg to the camera left, bouncing off the ceiling.

Post-processing: Matters When Picture is Dull

I took this picture from a high window of Hagia Sophia, holding the camera up high, lens touching the window and without properly seeing what I was shooting. The only smart move I made that day was to keep the remote trigger cable attached to the camera, independent of the exposure value (i.e. long exposure). It becomes very handy, when you are trying to shoot in awkward positions.

Although some birds decorate the composition (after like 3-4 sets of bracketing) and the sun behind the clouds make it more meaningful, it is nonetheless a dull picture unfortunately. Wrong light, too many walls, etc...Well, you can't do much with that kind of a picture, except playing with it for fun :)

So I did:

I first gave it a medieval look by adding sepia-tone.

Then converted it to HDR, so that the dark colors come alive. It will also help the clouds to be more distinguished.

Now we are almost done with it. However the walls are still there. So, we crop a little, so that the wall edges point the main subject...the domes. And added a touch of contrast to it...and here you have the final image:

The moral of the story is obviously NOT 'post-processing rocks', the moral of the story is 'the skill is to take the picture right, so that you spend minimum time with minimum alteration at post-processing.' Otherwise, all you do is to create some sort of a (maybe) art, but it is not an exercise of good photography....as seen in this example :)

Capturing The Moment

Photography is like cooking. You not only need quality ingredients and the right mix and cooking time, but you also need to present it in an appealing way.

This is the original photo:

The ingredients of this photo are

- The setting...people are in their own domain and they don't feel the studio intimidation on their faces. Awareness of their position relative to their surrounding is mixing smoothly.

- Happy bunch...photographs, with people as the main subject, are always about an emotional state. Rarely you have all day to capture it, but often a very short moment.



Pretty much like this one:

The right mix and the cooking time are the lighting of the scene and the reflection of the the emotions to the picture respectively.

If the light is wrong and the subject(s) are bored, then you may end up with something like this:

Well, here we have the right ingredients, but a lousy meal :)

Post-processing is the food on the plate. I wanted it to be as colorful as the emotions of these people on the picture. So, I converted it to black & white :) Bu I wanted to add something more fun, more dramatic to it. So, I tone-mapped the image. And ended up with something, where the people are separated in an exaggerated way from the background to make the picture a one big laugh. Here's the final image:

First Blog - Aya Sophia

I take pictures...and I like sharing them with my friends. So here I am, welcome to my first blog. I have no idea which direction this blogging thing will lead us to, but it will be strictly photography related. I don't know if you will see only pictures, or other activities like projects, workshops, tests, discussions, etc...up to you, really.


Today's subject is Aya Sophia...once - uuh, once for thousand years, the largest cathedral in the world. Here you can get thorough info.


And here are some pictures from today's shoot....


It was nice seeing you...come back again :)

Here's the b&w version...both are HDRed....

The famous dome....

..and some earthly figures...

Strobist Info: An SB-600 from 45deg left of the camera, 60deg high at 3ft with 1/64 power.