How to do a Backflip

Backflip, originally uploaded by photogeek21.

As much as I think my son is awesome at everything he does, he can't do a backflip on his bike - but that's not going to stop me from making an over-the-top portrait of him doing one. With some imagination, careful planning and two scoops of Photoshop thrown in for good measure, almost anyone can look like an 'X'games gold medal winner. So here's my deconstruction of the shot.

First, I started with a visit to the local skate park to get some shots I could use for the background. 15mm fisheye used for the shot, I stood in the same position I would if he were actually doing a backflip over my head. the 180 degree coverage of the lens gets the ramp and the late afternoon sun in the same frame.

Next, for the second shot of the composite, we strapped his bike down in the garage so that he could do all the moves he wanted and not have to worry about falling. For lighting I used two photogenic 600s to 'sandwich' him in light ( I like the shadow it forms down his neck) and placed one 580exII at full power right behind him to act as the Sun that was captured at the park. Using the same lens, I place him in roughly area of the frame I want him in the final shot so that the fisheye distortion will match in the final composite, and since he's on the ground that meant I had to have the camera in the air over him - thus the ladder.

With both the shots complete, I pulled the background shot into Photoshop. Since the sun was a little too high for my liking, I cloned it out.

Putting Ryan on another layer, I did some masking to get him out of the garage. I used the trial version of CS5 for this because of the really great edge detection demos I saw all over the web but it turns out they aren't as magical as some of the demos made it out to be - so this was still pretty tedious.

Turn both layers on, and BAM, kid floating in the air.

Throw the Sun back in there -- I really liked this behind the ear placement which would be hell to try and get in a real-life shot, but hey, I was going for 'over-the-top' for this shot.

Draw in a couple polygons on a new layer in screen mode for some artificial lens flare and run a high pass filter on the playground to give it a little HDR glow effect.... Finally, I brought it back into Lightroom for final cropping and toning which I think is a little easier to do in.

I really liked the way this one came out, it's rare for me to have the final image come out so close to what I envisioned in my pre-production sketches. What's funny is I was sorta in a slump about what to shoot lately, but the idea for this whole shoot was sparked by, of all things, my son wanting to get a mohawk for the last day of school. Maybe I go see if my youngest will shave his head for some inspiration....

Using a Reflector

In the weeds, originally uploaded by photogeek21.

Every photog knows the about the 'golden hour' for the gorgeous quality of light that is produced just after sunrise and just before sunset each day, but what most don't do (including me 'til now) is get enough fill on the subject to balance out the extreme side lighting that a low sun will create. I've usually been using a flash for this work but that can cause some variations in color temperature across the frame unless you gel your flash. A reflector is a easy (and cheap) way of doing roughly the same thing.
Above is a picture of Ryan where I placed the 5pm sun behind him to act as a hair light, then used the reflector to bounce the sun and create the main light for his face. I placed him in the edge of a shadow created by a near by house to throw the background tone into a lower exposure value and let his face stand out against it but kept the foreground lit to keep the interesting shape of the weeds. And, my favorite part of a portrait, catch lights in the eyes. With the sun behind him the reflector is the only way short of a fill flash to get those eyes to sparkle.
Contrast that with the following with out the reflector.

While I still get a nice side light, but the catch lights are gone, his face is flat without any shadows, his face falls into the same exposure levels as the background and even if I bump the exposure a bit, the side light would probably clip and his face would still blend with the background.

I'm pretty convinced that a reflector is a 'must have' item for any portrait photog - they don't break the bank either, but if you're really cheap like I am you can use a Car Sunshade, I got mine at target for $5.99 and its even silver on one side and gold on the other - almost like it was designed to double as a photo reflector!

Step away from the delete key...

Was doing a shoot this afternoon experimenting with fill flash and when I was back at the computer culling the images I came across this one were the flash didn't fire leaving the subject under exposed. Usually I'd hit the old 'x' on lightroom to mark for deletion but I really liked the lines created by the headband. When I started to play with some levels, I got struck with some inspiration (or copycatitus) and pulled the image into photoshop for some channel work, masking and....

bam! instant poster. Moral of the story is it doesn't always have to be a great photograph to be a keeper - with a little creativity you can save those bits from the delete key...

Taw:#8 - Cheap Smoke

Okay, I'm cheating by doing two techniques from one shoot, but I trying to prevent renaming all these posts 'Technique a Month'!
- So How did I get that smoke in the Flash in the Can Entry? Well I don't have a smoke machine and you can only really find them around here during Halloween (and I'm too cheap to buy one) so with small objects like this, I used my ultrasonic humidifier which produces a good thick white vapor into my 'Set'.

That's it!

Taw:#7 - Flash in a Can

Here's a little how to on my latest CSLR entry entitled Just a flash in the can. It's basically, well, a flash placed in a can.
First I took a can of coke, cut the back off of it and used a thumb tack to poke holes along the lines I wanted the lights to show through.
A piece of Aluminum foil was used as a baffle so that I wouldn't have a 'hot spot' right in the center of the can where the flash would have a direct path out the holes - This diffused the light and evened out the 'power' of each hole.
Put the can on the flash and 'Wa-La' you have instant Las Vegas effect on your can!

TaW: #6 Correcting Blooming in CS3

Here's one I learned from Antonie_K on the Canon SLR Group on Flickr.

Here's a shot with the worst case of blooming I've ever taken. Blooming is basically a problem only found in digital photography and occurs when very bright areas are adjacent to dark ones I has to do with the way the image sensor elements get 'overloaded' with too much light and basically 'bleed' onto adjacent elements. If the situation is right it can happen on almost any digital camera. This shot was taken with the Canon 85 1.2L on an MkII so it's definately not a lens quality issue.

Anyway, to rid ourselves of this nasty purple mess - Open the image in CS3 and apply a HSL layer to the image, change its mode from Master to Blue, using the color picker tool select the offending color (magenta in this case) then turn down the saturation to taste (about -80 worked for this image). Thats it! No muss, no fuss. I imagine that if there was a lot of Magenta color in other areas of the image, that this technique could effect them but it would be nothing a little Layer Mask couldn't fix.

Better description of CA and Blooming can be found here.

Taw:#5 - '300' Effect

Well after making the composite in TaW#4, I thought there just wasn't enough punch in it. So I applied the '300' look (from the movie 300) that I learned over on Matt Kloskowski's blog.
I did end up pumping up the blacks a bit and using the recovery slider to bring back some of the highlights - and of course I made one last stop to photoshop for some strong vignetting and burning in the shadows deeper.
Here are the resluts and my entry to the CSLR Challenge:

TaW:#4 - Composite

This week's Taw is a composite, I know everybody does corny composites of themselves and it's one of the first thing a noob tries in photoshop. Well I've never done one before and I was working on an image for this week's CSLR challenge which was a 'Free Study', So I thought I'd give it a try.
Here are the beginning images:






I thought to make the composite more interesting, I'd make Matthew interact with 'himself' in the photo. I drew a picture of what I wanted in the final shot and had Aly fill in the interacting positions so that mathew would have something to grab or a shirt to pull etc. She would be masked out in the final image.
CS3 has a cool new function that makes compositing a breeze now - 'photomerge' which automatically loads each image on a new layer then anaylzes each image and perfectly aligns them with one another. I did use a tripod so the alignment was already done but just the automation of putting each image on a separate layer and putting a mask on each layer is a big time saver.
After that it's just a matter of using the mask of each layer to reveal what you want to show on the final image - so here's the final composite:
I used my big studio strobes bounced off the back wall to create ALOT of diffused lighting but more importantly to have even lighting across the whole area - Lately I've been taking the 'Strobist' approach and using my 580exII but this called for a bit more power.

TaW:#3 - Dramatic Light

Here's a shot I did of Aly for a recent Pink Floyd assignment - wanted to do something inspired by the albumn 'The Wall', you know, "hey teachers - leave them kids alone"...

Canon 1dsmkii 17-40 F4L 200s@F4 ISO 200

It just didn't have any drama to the pic so I thought this would be a good one to work on some dramatic lighting effects. Basically all Dodging and burning. This is really like painting on the picutre with light. The trick is to set the exposure at a very low setting (I was using 10%) you'll barely notice any change, but with each successive stroke you'll slowly add the definition your looking for. This technique is only needed when doing the subtle work on the face and some of the light areas. For a lot of the major burning on towards the edges of the photo, I used a non-distructive technique by creating a new layer with a blend mode of Multiply and anywhere I painted black would be burned in on the composite. The only draw back to this mode is you don't have the control over what tones you burn (shadows, Midtones, or highligts) like you do with the dodge and burn tools.

Results:

Obviously, I composited in some tile in the background for effect (also heavily burned)
All in all a pretty dramatic effect on the picture

TaW:#2 - Moonshot Split tone.

Before Canon 1dmkII 300mm2.8L w/1.4x (500s @ F8 ISO200)

Okay, heres what I started with, a basic moon shot. I started this out as an exercise on using my camera's spot meter to properly expose a small moon against a dark sky as well as trying every trick I knew to get a sharp picture - Tripod, Mirror lockup, fast shutter speed, and since I didn't have my remote cord, I used the camera's ten second timer to make sure any vibrations from my finger hitting the shutter had a chance to settle out before the image was taken.

Well after getting the image into the computer it was pretty boring. So a little magic in Lightroom playing with Clarity, tone curves and finally a bit of split toning thrown in at the end just for fun got me this.

After:

It looks much better at full resolution. But tone curves is the magic tool to use for bringing out the texture in the moon's surface. Using the tone curve, I repositioned the shadow and highlight markers to the edges of the histogram, Then I set the shadow slider to -100 and the Highlight slider to +100 and adjusted the lights and darks to get as much texture out of the midtones as possible. This really let the sharpness tool get some extra detail when cranked up. Finally a little spilt toning to turn the shadows blue and there you go, quite a bit of difference from where we started. And no trips to CS3 - all Lightroom, I love it. :-)

Technique a week (TaW): #1 Soft Focus.

Here's one of learned from Chris Orweg, a Photoshop guru. It's a way to simulate the classic soft focus effect typically done through filters or special lenses in the past. It's pretty simple:

1. duplicate your main image layer
2. apply a Gaussian blur
3. the use either a 'lighten' or 'darken' blend mode to the layer
4. This will typically be way to harsh an effect so adjust opacity to taste.
   

This example I used the 'Lighten' Blend mode

Origninal Image (Click to Enlarge)

After (Click to Enlarge)

The effect should be suttle I may have applied a little too much in this photo - notice the soft focus on the highlights of Aly's hair and the flowers in the background. (tough to see on the thumbnail above, click to see a higher rez version where the effect is more apparent) I like it, I've learned it, I'll promise not to abuse it!

Technique a week.

This year I got a subscription to Lynda.com which, for those of you that don't know is a online video training site. My intention was to learn as much as I could about coding 10framesasecond.com. They have a lot of video training courses on webdesign but also photoshop and all things adobe - I started to plunge into there large library of courses. But it didn't take much time for the material to go in one ear and out the other. As it is I don't use this stuff everyday so how am I going to remember it? I'd often want to do something weeks after learning only to find out I'd forgotten all the steps.
So to put an end to all that forgetting and to hopefully ingrain anything I've learned into my thick skull, I've decided to do 'a technique a week' where I take technique I've learned - no matter how small and apply it to one of my images and post them here. Just like the CSLR challenge, this will force me to apply new concepts and to my photography and hopefully as I continue to practice these techniques, they'll become part of my workflow and hopefully become the inspiration for the creation of new techniques all my own and maybe even one day help to develop a signature style of my own.

Watch for the posts I hope I can keep it up for at least a year....