Had a chance to visit with Tom Taback (sitting in for Mike) on my monthly Tech Talk appearance at KAZM Radio station in Sedona, Arizona.
Taback & Coates recording Tech Talk – Photo by Josh using the Lumix FZ2500
Tom and I chat about new Lumix cameras and some of the features that help get well exposed images. We also chat about advanced features, creating art and where I’ll be traveling to share info on photography and the Lumix line of cameras.
Yours in Creative Photography, Bob
PS – In the program I refer to the Lumix FZ1000 (which is a fine camera too!) as the camera I have with me. It is actually the newer model Lumix FZ2500
The other day I showed you the set for photographing items in the studio with a beautiful radiating feathered edge glow around the subject..(check that post here) The images from that post were cameras which were larger than today products.
Jewelry is a different subject with different needs but can be on the same basic set. The difference is that the scrim is much closer to the subject than it was for the cameras.
Jewelry is well served in this setting.
In the image above the transitions from light to shadow make the color of the beads and turquoise and out from the background, but still have quite a bit of interest overall.
This is a piece of my wife’s jewelry. She noted that it actually could have used a bit of polishing.
When photographing product you need to know what the subject should look like. Since this was a lesson session, I am the final client and think it looks great. If this were a paying customer, I would have noted more information as to the handling of the piece. Also, sets and product must be kept sanitary and dust free. Being very careful while prepping for shooting can save an enormous amount of time in post production. On the job, I will even use a magnifying glass to ensure there is as little schumda in the photo as possible.
Rose gold and diamonds. Care with chains and their layout is critical. Here also a shallow depth of field takes some attention away from the chain.
Jewelry with facets such as diamonds need a bit of extra thought, care and maybe a few additional exposures. Facets of stones are highlighted by light striking different surfaces. If the light is hitting one surface, it won’t necessarily be showing off another surface. One way to sculpt the stone to best effect in to make multiple images with the light in different positions. Then by layering the exposures, it is possible using masks to show off exactly the stone as you wish.
Getting good, solid lighting is the best thing you can do to highlight the features of products. Today’s post is how I set up to photograph some jewelry and a couple of my cameras. I will suggest you practice lighting techniques long before you need to use them. It allows you to refine the look rather than trying to tweak on set.
This set-up is relatively straightforward yet gives a compelling and professional look to your product photography.
Gear in use. Two Paul C Buff X3200 flash heads. One Paul C Buff Ultra Zap1600 flash head. Paul C Buff Octobox (35 inch) Snoot. Strobes are fired with Buff Trigger. A sheet of Non-glare glass. Scrims with diffusion material. Sekonic L478D light meter. Lumix GH5 camera with various lenses depending on the subject to be photographed. Light stands, one with Boom to suspend light over the set.
The power of the lights is not germane to lighting on set. If you work with lights at less power or varied, you will want to put the most powerful one above the set. It will be going through the snoot and the scrim both of which suck up some of your light. With this set, you have the ability to change the size of you lighting circle. If the light from the snoot is closer to the scrim, it will be tighter as shown in this view. If you move the snoot higher, you’ll see the light spread more and feather to a larger circle. The height of the scrim above the product will also have an effect on the light pattern.
The glass (make sure it is non-glare) is suspended above a sheet of black paper. Depending on how much light you pump into the scene and the direction of that light you can create a background for your product that can be gray or black.
You don’t necessarily need an Octobox as a modifier for your main light. I use it because it is quick to set up and break down and gives a solid direction of light. At the very least, you will need to have a softbox. If you use an umbrella, the light is harder to control on the set, and the bounce of light from the walls and ceiling can infect the set. Control is essential.
Let’s look at a couple of camera photos.Lumix LX100 camera. I call this the ‘professional’s point and shoot’. This is an example of going black with very little light from above. Solid but stark image. It will always depend on what look your client is trying to achieve.
Photo of Lumix GX85 with Leica DG Vario-Elmarit 100-400mm f4.0-6.3 lens made with the down light to give some more depth and dimension to the final image the gradient is made with the snoot and the scrim as shown above at the top of the page in the BTS shot but not as close to the scrim.
Let’s pause here until the next installment where the images will be of jewelry using the same set and adjusted accordingly. Part three of this will show before/afters and talk about post processing.
Here’s one more use of panoramic photography that I haven’t mentioned in previous posts. Change the number of Mega-Pixels in your camera.
“Say what?” You ask? “And once you explain, tell me why I want to try that?”
Ok, here goes.
You can expand the number of pixels in an image in order to be able to make a larger print by making multiple images and overlapping the capture. After you get back to the studio move those images into your favorite photo stitching programs like Adobe’s Photoshop or AutopanoPro and put the images together. Photoshop has gotten very good at merging images together including a new feature called Content-Aware Fill that can automatically clean up the blank space that can sometimes surround your image.
This morning I had my Lumix LX100 with me. I call this the professional’s point and shoot because it has fast glass and is quite versatile with all important controls on dials just like the old days. No need to move into electronic menus to access your settings. All of this is in a quite small package. But the camera is only 12.1MP which yields a 36-megabyte file. In today’s example, I shot five exposures overlapping each by 30-40 percent. After merging the photos I ended up with a 97-megabite file. 97 divided by 3 equals a 32MP capture.
Here is a screen capture of the five images when highlighted in Adobe Bridge.
After the images above were assembled in Photoshop and massaged with Luminarfrom MacPhun.*
With this technique, you can get file sizes you have only dreamed about with a little extra work. Remember if you want to really make a huge file you can use a long lens and do row after row of images and blend them all together. Make sure you capture each row the same way. I always go left to right and top to bottom during my captures.
Yours in creative Photography, Bob
PS – * Luminar software is currently only available for the MAC platform but from what I understand they will be releasing a PC version later this year. Luminar can be used as a stand-alone processing program or as a Plug-in. There’s a sale on ’til the end of the year the link above will take you there.
PPS – The MacPhun software Aurora 2017 HDR is also on special until the end of the year. I’m enjoying the creative processing from MacPhun products.
I met Arika when she was on a road trip creating images for her pet photography business. She was passing through Sedona, and I had the pleasure to make her acquaintance and discovered her pet art painting. I love the expression of her pet portraits and the feel of her art. I think you will too!
Here’s Arika.
“I got into digital pet paintings using Corel Painterafter I sold my pet photography studio in Las Vegas, Nevada. I had my studio for nine years and always wanted to offer my clients the option to have their portraits enhanced to a painting, but I never had the time to devote to learning the art. Specializing in painting pets was a natural decision for me since working with domestic animals, and their awesome owners had been my niche for my entire photography and teaching career.
Lola before. Arica is often working from cell phone images supplied by her clients
Getting started I reached out to two well-known pet painters whose work I admired and I had the opportunity to train with them one-on-one. Their process of turning a photo into a painting is completely opposite of each other, and I quickly realized that, like any other art form, there is no right or wrong way to do things. Working one-on-one with artists you admire, along with online tutorials, is what I recommend to anyone wanting to learn Corel Painter. Painter is much like Photoshop in the sense that they are both incredibly powerful programs but not something the average person could sit down and use with ease without some training and understanding of how the software functions. If you are a Photoshop user, I’m sure you can recall your beginning stages of learning and how you wanted to throw your computer out the window because you couldn’t accomplish what should have been a very simple task. Or maybe you accidentally hit something on your keyboard, and now nothing is working properly. I’ve been there too. So save yourself aheadache and invest in training and tutorials when learning Corel Painter and getting started will be fun!
As portrait photographers, we make decisions every day regarding lighting and how we want the light to fall on our subjects. But when I started painting I realized that shadows were something to which I never gave much thought. I would just light my subjects the way I wanted, and the shadows were naturally just wherever they were. Well, when you hand paint a background in like I do for most of my paintings (as opposed to enhancing the current background in the portrait) your full-length subjects would be floating on the background if you didn’t anchor them with a shadow. Such a simple concept, but not something I ever gave much thought to until I had to create my shadows.
Painting also forced me to pay more attention to the direction of where light was coming from, which is useful when creating dimension and depth in your backgrounds. Notice how most of my backgrounds have a lighter area near the animals face, this lighter area always coincides from which the direction the light is coming. The opposite side of the painting is always a darker shade which represents the natural fall off of light.
Pets eyes are my favorite part of every painting (okay wispy stray hairs might be an equal favorite), but the eyes are what makes the paintings come to life. When doing digital paintings, I often use the existing photo and just enhance it with detailed brush strokes. But not with eyes, I always paint in the eyes freehand. Step 1: Paint in the eye color. Step 2: Paint in the black pupil. Step 3: Paint in the white catchlight – make sure it’s on the same side of the eye where the light is coming from! Step 4: Paint in the counter catch light area with lighter highlights to bring the eyes to life.
Since I’ve done some teaching in the pet photography world, I’ve had a lot of people asking me to train them on digital pet paintings. I currently offer one-on-one screen sharing training sessions, and I’m working on putting together a downloadable video tutorial. For the photographers who don’t have the time or desire to learn to paint, I offer a wholesale option where I send them the digital artwork for them to brand and print for their clients (as opposed to my retail customers who I present with canvas gallery wraps).
Digital Pet Paintings have been an awesome way for me to stay connected with the pet photography community, pet owners who I love to create cherished art for, and I get to do it all while hanging out with my pup and working from home!”
PS – If you are someone who is creating Painterly Art with photography as a base, or know someone who is, and would like to be featured here on Successful-Photographer get in touch.
I’ve always wanted to attempt water droplet photography.
And now I have!
It’s kinda like photographing fireworks in that you never are quite sure what you are going to capture when the shutter is fired, but you don’t have to wait for the Fourth of July either. This is something that could consume me as there are endless variables to throw into the mix. What can change the look of any image? Type of liquid, the color of the fluid, the temperature of the liquid, the size of the drop(s), flash duration, add another flash, and another, change the background color, add color gels on the flash…
Arrghh! It’s fun if a little frustrating at times when you think you have done everything exactly the same but get an entirely different result. I now understand where someone had said that making these images is part science, part art and lots of luck. As Thomas Jefferson said, “The harder I work the luckier I get.” That might not be an exact quote, but you get the idea.
Here’s are some examples from my first couple of days.
This is from day one of playing in the water with splash photography
This from day two shooting. Playing with lights and droplet timing.
Day Three
Day Four with thickened water and new timings for dropping the drops.
As I said, the photographing of the drops is part science and part luck. You can increase your luck by adding to the science in your arsenal. I purchased some help in the form of the Pluto Trigger and the Pluto Valve. The Pluto Trigger is a pretty amazing controller for your camera. In this case, the trigger releases the waterdrops and times the firing of the flash. Even with that control, there are still a lot of variables in play.
And I like it.
In the next couple of days, I’ll share my set-up and some things I learned as I have started this new photography genre.
Yours in Creative Photography, Bob
PS – I’ve just bought the Pluto Trigger, and like it so much I’ve signed on as an affiliate
For infrared conversion of my cameras I use LifePixel. Infrared allows you to put an older camera to use and opens up a new time time of day for productive image creation.
Fotopro tripods are well worth checking out. You can learn about the ones I use and recommend by clicking on the Fotopro Tripods link at the top of this page. If you want to see what other tripods might fit your needs check out the Fotopro.com website. Check back with me before you buy as a Fotopro Ambassador I’m able to get you discounted pricing including complementary continental USA shipping for my followers that you won’t find through retail outlets.
Learn Photoshop in a fun environment. Aaron Nace applies the right amount of fun with easy to understand and follow tutorials. Actions and brushes are included with lessons!
Lightning, waterdroplets, sound, time-lapse, HDR sequences, smiles and much more control for your camera!
Cameras Get Smarter -
A High Speed Smart Camera Remote
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Platypod has become a great resource for being creative in getting your camera gear easily into unusual places. As an Platypod Pro I get to work/play with the gear even before it comes out. Head over to Platypod, subscribe to the newsletter and you will get special discounts reserved only for subscribers.
