Canon 5D self timer and mirror lock up.

Back in the old days when I was shooting flim, both my EOS-3 and the T90 before it had two self timer modes: a 10 second mode for when you wanted to be in the picture and a 2 second mode for tripod shooting. When I got the 5D, I was very disappointed to discover the lack of a 2 second timer mode. Ten seconds is a long time to wait, so mostly I have used my TC-80N cable release instead of the self timer when the camera is on a tripod.

So then a few weeks ago I was shooting in Fort Point, San Francisco and I discovered that I left the cable release in my other camera bag. Oh, well, I guess a 10 second wait it is. So I turn on mirror lockup and the self timer and hit the shutter. Up goes the mirror, two second wait, and snap goes the picture all automatically. What's that? I try it again. Sure enough, not only does MLU automatically reduce the self timer to 2 seconds, the self timer automatically lifts the mirror, waits two seconds and takes the picture. Halleluia! The perfect tripod mode. I'd swear I've read the entire 5D manual and never found this, but suddenly a year after I got the camera it has become standard operating procedure.

Lighting Glass Bottles

My friend Nikolai who runs the Technique Assignments on the Digital Grin forums asked me to write up a brief technique discussion of how to light glass bottles. Well, I have always said "everything worth doing is worth overdoing," so over time I plan to turn this post into and expanded discussion on lighting glass. Note that much of the material I am discussing here starts from the book Light, Science and Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting by Fil Hunter, Steven Biver and Paul Fuqua. I am not going to assume you have read this book, but if you are interested in this topic, you should read it.

Preliminaries

First things first: this is an essay about studio lighting. If you are not used to studio work, be prepared for a change in mindset. You are not capturing a scene, you are creating it. Studio photography means taking full control of everything the camera sees and particularly in the case of glass photography this will require 360 degree control of the space you are shooting in.

Generally the way I work is this: the camera goes on a tripod with a cable release and then I set up the camera to frame my working space. Next I set up my background. Then build my scene by placing my subjects in the scene. After that I try to determine the proper aperture and focus point to get my entire scene sharp. Almost always this means using manual focus to pick the focus distance which allows the widest possible aperture; the shutter speed is set to the fastest sync speed the camera allows and the ISO is set to 100. At this point, the camera work is done; the remaining work is done entirely with the lights. In particular, I usually adjust for proper exposure by changing the flash power rather than with settings on the camera; this is always done by chimping the histogram with the flash set in manual mode. I never use any form of auto exposure for studio work and flash meters work extremely poorly for glass and other reflective objects; it is possible to get the exposure right with a spot meter but in this day and age its not worth the effort. In the circumstances where the flash is not powerful enough, to get the exposure I want I will set the flash on full power and bump the ISO for proper exposure.

Light and Glass

Diffuse reflection is the most common form of light we photograph. It is an idealization, but for many materials a good one; incident light meters are calibrated to it, much of lighting theory is based on it, and we often use circular polarizers eliminate other forms of light. In a nutshell what makes glass challenging it the complete lack of diffuse reflections. Because of that we have to completely rethink our instincts both for exposure and lighting. If your goal is to show the three dimensional form of the glass there are really to major approaches: refraction and reflection. In a nutshell, glass usually behaves both as a mirror and as a lens. Of course flat glass is a rather boring lens and the lenses in your camera are coated to make them poor mirrors. None-the-less, most pieces of glass you are likely to be interested in photographing are like to exhibit both properties to some degree. The true key to lighting glass is to really look at the lens-like and mirror-like properties of your subject and decide how to exploit them to create the image you want.

Refractive Lighting
What I mean by Refractive Lighting is lighting the subject in a way that reveals its form because of how the light passing through it is refracted. Curved glass is refractive which means it bends light and distorts any image which passes through it. As the glass gets thicker and more curved this effect gets stronger. The general strategy for using refraction to show the form of glass is to light the glass from behind with a high contrast pattern. The most common approaches for mildly refractive subjects are either to use a white backdrop with a black border or a black backdrop with a white border. In either case the border is placed just outside the camera's direct view so that is is only visible via refraction in the glass subject. With some highly refractive objects (like dewdrops and full wine glasses) it possible to actually use the subject as a lens to reveal a secondary subject in the background.

Reflective Lighting
By Reflective Lighting I mean revealing the form of the subject through specular reflection off of its surface. Glass usually has a polished surface which makes it reflective. It is possible then to show the form of the glass in how it reflects its environment. If the glass is clear, it is best to make sure that the background is black so that the transmitted light doesn't compete with the reflections. Specular reflections from point light sources are very bright and will blow out so you should use large diffuse light sources. If you don't have a soft box use either a bounce card or a white diffuser sheet. Umbrellas aren't a good choice for reflective subjects because the ribs will show.

There are many other ways to light specific glass subjects. For instance tinted subjects can reveal form through density and dirty, impure or frosted glass can reveal form through scattered light. However, for this article we are going to stick to just two, reflection and refraction, because they are quite commonly useful for solving some difficult lighting problems.

Before you start lighting your subject, it is best to decide up front whether you are going to use reflection or refraction for your lighting strategy. Generally, if the subject highly refractive (i.e. behaving like a fish eye lens it is best to use a white field refractive approach (with white directly behind the subject and black outside the camera's field of view) because otherwise you will have a hard time controlling reflections off the subject. If the subject is not refractive enough you may have to put your border too close to your subject to get the framing you would like which would indicate using a reflective strategy. If your subject is darkly tinted or translucent in a way that will obscure light transmission you should again choose reflection. While many subjects will force your hand to pick one strategy or the other, there are also some subjects where either will work and the choice is personal taste.

Lighting Bottles

Now for a few samples just to get you thinking about it.

Empty Clear Bottle

Empty bottles typically bend the light passing through their edges enough that you can create an outline around the bottle using refractive light. The effect gives you a two dimensional look as the center of the bottle is not curved enough to pick up the contrasting border. Reflective lighting is possible on a clear empty bottle but it takes extremely careful background control to provide a sufficiently dark background for good contrast.

Empty Tinted Bottle

If you want to show the color of the glass, you must shine light through it. With light colored glass it is probably best to use refractive lighting. With dark colored glass it is possible to show the color with a back light and still have sufficient contrast to use reflections to show form.

Clear (or lightly colored) Full Bottle

The strong refractions of a full bottle make refractive lighting a better choice here and controlling reflections will put the emphasis on the contents of the bottle.

Dark Full Bottle

A dark full bottle is similar to a darkly tinted bottle. To show form it is usually best to use reflections. Again a back light can sometimes be used to show the color of the bottle contents.

The Making of On Edge

Yet another entry in the Making Of series.

On Edge was my submission for the fifth qualifying round of the Last Photographer Standing competition which had themes of Translucent or Silhouette. The theme I had in mind for this shot was translucent and when I was planning it I had in mind to show the translucence of the pepper by using a strong enough back light to make the pepper apparently glow from inside. However, many people who saw the shot picked up first on the silhouette of the knife.

The set up for this shot was really quite simple. I used two sheets of white foam core and a couple sticks of scrap wood I had sitting around the shop. The sheet of foam core I used for the floor had a hole cut in it (it is black on the other side and its normal use it to hang over the lens when I want to hide the reflection of the camera in glass or metal subjects). I then slid the flash under the floor so it fired up through the hole. Normally I trigger the flash with and ST-E2, but in this case I had it shoved down where the IR don't shine so I ended up using a cable trigger instead.

The one flash is the only source of light in the shot. The gradient in the background is scatter off the knife and the pepper; the glow of the pepper is light transmitted through its flesh from behind; the light on the stem comes directly from the flash. Yep, some people use tupperware as a lighting modifier, I used vegetables. The knife, along with being a player in the scene is also serving as a gobo to hide the flash from the camera.

The Making Of series.

The posts Making Of series are thoughts about, lessons learned from, or technique discussion of the process of creating some of my more difficult photographs. Many of these were shot for the Digital Grin Last Photographer Standing competition.

The Making of On Edge

Lessons Learned from Strut

The Making of Incandescent

The Making of Lemonscape

Lighting for On the Rocks

Lessons learned from Strut

Yet another entry in the Making Of series.

Stut was my submission for the second qualifying round of the Last Photographer Standing competition. The themes for this round were Stately or Humble up to that point none of my ideas had panned out. With about 30 hours left before the deadline I had given up on entering the round when I saw the turkey. He was strutting his stuff around the yard and he sure seemed to think of himself as stately. It tickled my funny bone so I started shooting.

Now, there was nothing fancy about the setup here. Just my camera, a turkey in a pen, and spotty afternoon sun. However, the shooting conditions were atrocious: the direct sun was harsh, the lighting contrast as much as 6 stops in places and I was forced to shoot over a wire fence which significantly limited the available camera angles. The (I believe now incorrect) approach I took at the time was to follow the turkey with the lens as he strutted around pen, continually adjusting the camera for the changing light conditions. Getting the camera set for an accurate exposure was difficult in the high contrast light and several times I missed a good shot while I was fiddling with the camera. The net result was I captured 60+ bad pictures of a turkey and one good one; and the good one was my last shot because I knew I had what I wanted.

So then, what is the lesson learned? Realistically, there was only one good place in the pen to shoot the turkey. Right in front of that door was right for many reasons. Among other things, it was as far away as the turkey could get giving be the best possible camera angle and the direct sun with the shaded background provided the best isolation of my subject from his background. Rather than spending a lot of taking shots that had no chance of being good, I should have set the camera up for my chosen location and waited for the turkey to arrive. That would easily have saved me half an hour of shooting, half a gig of card space and given me a better shot when I was done.

In a nutshell, even in a situation where you have no control over the players the right answer is often imagine the shot you want, plan for it and wait for it to happen. Shooting in an unplanned way can mean you are not ready when that perfect moment hits so you either miss it or screw it up.

Note: Strut did not make the top 10 in that competition which was no surprise to me. It tickled my funny bone to enter a turkey when "stately" was the theme, but I know I have something of a warped sense of humor.

The making of Incandescent

Incandescent was my submission for the fourth qualifying round of the Last Photographer Standing competition. The theme for this shot was Artificial and when I conceived of this shot I was thinking about using artificial light to mimic the sun.

This shot, ironically, uses no artificial light. When I went to shoot it, I brought a flash with me in case I needed it to bring out the stem of the bulb, but (as I hoped it would) it turned out to be unnecessary. The key concept behind this shot was realizing how the bulb would look in front of the sunrise. Where it is below the horizon, the stem stands out because reflects the sky which is brighter than the horizon. Where it is above the horizon the edges of the bulb (most noticeable at the top) appear dark because they refract in the darker parts of the sky. There were two effects I didn't plan on. The first is that the glass the bulb is made from is very thin so I got less refraction that I was hoping for. The second is that the glass of the bulb is no where near optical quality so I got a lot of scatter from scratched and such creating a bunch of unanticipated highlights. Luckily the scatter prevented the glass from vanishing in places where the refraction was insufficient.

The set up for this shot was a combination of planning and luck. To figure out where and when to shoot I determined the time and location of sunrise by looking first at the USNO website and SunPosition.net. The SunPosition.net site has a somewhat strange list of possible locations to choose from, but the results are somewhat simpler to use because they can be adjusted for DST and magnetic north. On a side note, a compass has now earned a permanent location in my main camera bag. Knowing where sunrise is going to be in advance helps a great deal when scouting possible shooting locations and I would much rather scout in midday rather than at 5:30AM. The major bit of luck in this shot was that the first morning I set the alarm clock for 5:00AM I got a reasonable sunrise for the shot.

The actual setup was pretty simple. I used hot melt glue to attach some 10 gauge electrical wire to the thread on the bulb. The wire was attached to a light stand which made it easy to raise and lower the bulb. The glue attachment point was placed behind the bulb and the small bit of wire showing in the shot was barely noticeable to begin with and trivial to remove in Photoshop. The other bit of prep for this shot meant studying a depth of field chart to figure out how to set up and where to focus (this shot is a classic example of hyperfocal focusing). I find it is best to use the DoF chart as a starting point and directly test the lens to determine the closest focus point where infinity is acceptably sharp. Before I set out on my expedition, I knew exactly where I was going to place the focus ring and how far away to place the light bulb from the camera.

The final subtlety about this shot is that the scene has enormous dynamic range. I knew I wanted the reflected light on the threads to show up without severely blowing out the sun. I figured in advance that this was going to require an HDR and it did; the final shot was a blend of 4 exposures using the Photoshop HDR action. In the end I deliberately let the sun blow out a little bit because it made it look brighter and better set the tone for an otherwise very dark shot.

The making of Lemonscape

Lemonscape was my submission for the third qualifying round of the Last Photographer Standing competition. The theme for this shot was Irregular so I decided to reveal the irregular surface of a lemon. To really highlight the texture of the surface I knew I was going to need a very hard light source. The plan I put together was to use extreme contrast as well and try to make the lemon look like a crescent moon.

The first problem to solve was how to get a hard enough source of light. When shooting near macro size, even a bare normal flash head covers too large of an angle to reveal small textural details in a monochromatic surface. To make the apparent size of the light even smaller I took a small block of MDF and drilled a 3/8" hole in it. Placing that in front of the flash gave me a quite small but still bright enough light source to support the aperture I was going to need.

The next problem to solve is to prevent the light from falling on the lens and causing flare. I was going to be shooting with lens only a few inches from lemon so I needed very good light control. The solution to this was a long box (originally used for shipping a light stand). I put the flash head in one end and the lemon near the other end. I was getting a lot from this box: it prevented both lens flare and light scatter around the room which might spill on the background. It also put some distance between the light and the lemon which further reduced the apparent size of the light and hardened the shadows even more.

The final setup was lemon and backdrop at one end of the box:

and flash and mask at the other end of the box:

When I was actually shooting the flash was pushed a little way inside the box giving me excellent light control. All in all it was very simple once I figured out what I needed to do. The flash was triggered using Canon's optical remote system with an ST-E2 trigger on the camera.

There were a couple of other hiccoughs along the road. The first was depth of field. The portion of the lemon that needed to be in focus was the lit section which was not perpendicular to the axis of the lens. To get sharp focus on all the visible areas of the lens I needed to use a tilt lens and a small aperture. The other issue was the specular reflection off the lemon was extremely bright. So you can see what I was dealing with I have included a copy of the shot exposed for the highlights.

Believe it or not even in this shot the highlights are blown in small areas despite the fact that I have underexposed for the diffuse reflections by more than 4 stops. The final image is actually a Photoshop blend of two exposures: one for the specular reflections and the other for the diffuse reflections.

In the end this shot did not fare very well in the competition. As a result of one of the comments I received after the competition was over I decided to crop it a bit tighter to give it a slightly more lively composition. While I hoped to evoke both a sense of seeing a lemon in space and also emphasize a face-like feature in the lemon, in the end I don't think this idea had a chance of rating more and more than "kinda cool" so it was not the best choice of entries. In retrospect, I might have been better off submitting an alternative shot, Out of Water, which I took before I started working with lemons.

Adding a nav bar to the blog.

In this chapter about customizing the blog I'll walk through the process of adding a navigation bar below the banner. Building the navigation bar is considerably more complicated then adding to this site. I'll try to cover how my navigation bar works at the same time, but in practice I just copied the bulk of that code over from my Smugmug customizations.

Where I last left the blog template I had co-opted the original header-wrapper element to display my own custom banner JPEG. Since a single div element is no longer sufficient for my new goal, I'll need to remove the background from tag and put it elsewhere; the header-wrapper div will return to being a wrapper which contains both the banner and the navbar. Here I have commented out the reference to the background and also bumped the height up to 200px to make room for the 50px high navigation bar.

#header-wrapper {
width:750px;
height:200px;
margin:0 auto 10px;
/* border:1px solid $bordercolor; */
/* background-image: url(http://gallery.liquidairphoto.com/photos/122915663-O.jpg); */
}

Next we define a div class for the banner.

/* banner class */
div.la_banner
{
background-image:url(http://gallery.liquidairphoto.com/photos/122915663-O.jpg);
background-repeat:no-repeat;
border: 0px;
height: 150px;
width: 750px;
margin: 0 auto;
display: block;
}

I dropped this class and all of the navigation bar CSS in the template just ahead of the header-wrapper tag. Note that la_banner is a class (using a .) rather than an id (using a #). I use a class because id are required to be unique and I have several different version of the banner and navbar for different parts of the site. Technically, for the blog CSS that distinction is not important, but this keeps my CSS consistent with the rest of my code.

Next comes the navbar CSS. There are four basic pieces to this. The la_navbar div class and then a definition of a table style and a table element style and an anchor style within the la_navbar context. Of course I want the navbar to link somewhere so I want to define the style for the a tags. Most of this is boilerplate so that all the elements pack tight against each other with no space between. I have added a default background to the td element which is just a simple black to gray gradient used for inactive positions in the bar. The table elements are 125px wide so 6 items will fit across the 750px of the full column.

/* navbar class */
div.la_navbar
{
border: 0px;
height: 50px;
width: 750px;
margin: 0 auto;
display: block;
}
div.la_navbar table
{
width: 750px;
height: 50px;
padding: 0px;
border-width: 0px;
border-style: none;
margin: 0px;
}
div.la_navbar td
{
width: 125px;
height: 50px;
padding: 0px;
border-width: 0px;
border-style: none;
margin: 0px;
background-image: url(http://gallery.liquidairphoto.com/photos/123621150-O.jpg);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
}
div.la_navbar a
{
padding: 0px;
border-width: 0px;
border-style: none;
margin: 0px;
text-decoration: none;
text-align: center;
display: block;
width: 125px;
height: 50px;
}


Now we provide bunch of special case td backgrounds for specific buttons.

div.la_navbar .atHome {background-image: url(http://gallery.liquidairphoto.com/photos/123621770-O.jpg); }
div.la_navbar .goHome {background-image: url(http://gallery.liquidairphoto.com/photos/123621165-O.jpg); }
div.la_navbar .atGallery {background-image: url(http://gallery.liquidairphoto.com/photos/123621764-O.jpg); }
div.la_navbar .goGallery {background-image: url(http://gallery.liquidairphoto.com/photos/123621158-O.jpg); }
div.la_navbar .atSearch {background-image: url(http://gallery.liquidairphoto.com/photos/123621780-O.jpg); }
div.la_navbar .goSearch {background-image: url(http://gallery.liquidairphoto.com/photos/123621176-O.jpg); }
div.la_navbar .atInfo {background-image: url(http://gallery.liquidairphoto.com/photos/123621775-O.jpg); }
div.la_navbar .goInfo {background-image: url(http://gallery.liquidairphoto.com/photos/123621171-O.jpg); }
div.la_navbar .atBlog {background-image: url(http://gallery.liquidairphoto.com/photos/125345752-O.jpg); }
div.la_navbar .goBlog {background-image: url(http://gallery.liquidairphoto.com/photos/125345754-O.jpg); }
div.la_navbar .contact {background-image: url(http://gallery.liquidairphoto.com/photos/129014901-O.jpg); }

These are all the images I have. We will only actually use a few of them here. The "go" buttons are blue; the "at" buttons are red so that the user can always look at the navbar to see where they are. Since we are doing the blog navbar here, we'll use the "atBlog"; all the other buttons will use the "go" flavor.

Finally, now that all the CSS is ready to go, it is time to add a little HTML. This is what the HTML for the header looked like before the edits.

<div id='header-wrapper'>
<b:section class='header' id='header' maxwidgets='1' showaddelement='no'>
<b:widget id='Header1' locked='true' title='Liquid Air Photography (Header)' type='Header'/>
</b:section>
</div>


We have already disabled the section in the CSS so we can leave it there and just add the new HTML for the banner and navbar.

<div id='header-wrapper'>
<div class="la_banner" id="blog_banner"></div>
<div class="la_navbar" id="blog_navbar">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" ID="Table1">
<tr>
<td class="goHome"><a href="http://www.liquidairphoto.com" target="_top"></a></td>
<td class="goGallery"><a href="http://gallery.liquidairphoto.com" target="_top"></a></td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
<td class="atBlog"><a href="http://blog.liquidairphoto.com" target="_top"></a></td>
<td class="goSearch"><a href="http://gallery.liquidairphoto.com/photo_search" target="_top"></a></td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<b:section class='header' id='header' maxwidgets='1' showaddelement='no'>
<b:widget id='Header1' locked='true' title='Liquid Air Photography (Header)' type='Header'/>
</b:section>
</div>

It looks a little messy, but all we have done here is added a div tag for the banner followed by a div tag for navbar. Inside the navbar div there is a table with 6 td elements. The class of the td element calls out a specific background image. The td elements of the navbar which have links include an <a> to specify the destination.

Note that this particular implementation of a navbar does not use any image tags despite the fact that all the buttons and the banner are JPEGs. I tried to adhere as much as possible to keeping the format in the CSS and the content in the HTML. Done this way, it is possible to completely change the look of the banner and navbar without touching the HTML. For a Blogger template that doesn't mean much because it all goes in one file, but on my main web site that will come in handy as I write many web pages which all share the same banner and navbar.

Lighting for On the Rocks

This is the first post in my Making Of series.

On the Rocks along with Cheesy Horror, my two recent submissions to Digital Grin challenges are far and away the two most elaborate lighting setups I have done to date. The basic inspiration the lighting I used in On the Rocks came from Light: Science and Magic, Second Edition: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting by Fil Hunter and Paul Fuqua. However their description of how to achieve this light involves a large soft box. Given that my gear is currently limited to 2 shoe mount flashes (a 430EX and a 580EX) I had to find another way.

Beyond that, I had a particularly ambitious goal for this shot--to have the entire background black including the surface the glass was sitting on. Many people who take shots like this go for a black acrylic surface which is reflective. The reflective surface has a number of advantages over flat black when it comes to light control. I decided to start with flat black and fall back to acrylic if I couldn't a achieve my goal. Of course that distinction ended up irrelevant in my submitted photo, but you can see it some of the draft shots I took.

Aside from the flat black problem I had to solve, there was another issue I needed solve. The method described in Light: Science and Magic involves pointing the soft box directly at the camera. My early experiments showed that this causes enough lens flare to be obvious over a black backdrop so quickly their simple setup starts getting complicated with gobos when you start working on the details. After little playing with setups and some non-linear thinking I came up with this solution.

Here is the setup: two sheets of white/black foam core on each side of the glass (clamped to the top of my table saw) with a backdrop of black felt down the middle. The foam core sheet serve double duty. The white on the interior serves as a bounce surface for the flashes--each one acts like a small soft box lighting the glass from the side. Second, black side of the foam core acts as a gobo blocking the direct light from the flash hitting either the lens or the glass.

So, lets get this straight. The light from the flash on the left bounces off the white foam core on the right before it gets to the cup (and vice versa). The foam core on the right blocks the direct light from the flash from hitting either the cup or the camera lens. For this picture I backed the camera up a bit so you can see both flashes. When I was shooting for real, the camera was on the tripod.

Here is the view from the point of view of the flash (you can see the blurry 580EX at the bottom of the frame). The light from the flash goes through the triangular gap between the black foam core and the backdrop to it the white foam core surface on the other side. That is the light which illuminates the glass. The flash was carefully placed just behind the backdrop and just below the surface of the table to avoid spilling light on either surface which is what keeps the background dead black. What about the triangular shape of the gap? Look at the light on the stem of the glass. You can see the point on that triangle where the stem fades into the background. A nice aspect of this particular setup is that it can be very simply tuned by moving the flashes around. Moving the each flash changes the effective light source direction by changing the illuminated area of the white foam core.

On a final note, I found I need to add a black lid to the setup to control reflections of the ceiling in the glass. Unlike the foam core, my ceiling is white.

FEC with the 5D, ETTL-2 and off camera bounced flash.

So there had been some more water under the bridge since my last post on flash technique. I am still shooting event candids with the ST-E2 on camera and using a variety of techniques to bounce the flash. This shot was taken with the flash sitting on a table behind me pointed at a white ceiling. I mentioned in that prior post that I was typically seeing around a stop of underexposure. Over a number of shoots that has proven to be consistent enough that I now use +1 FEC as my default starting point and work from there. Its annoying because for some pictures with lots of white +2 FEC (the limit on the 5D) is not enough and I have to live with an underexposed shot.

JPEG Banner for Minima Black

Here's how I replaced the standard banner on the Minima Black template with my own graphic. The whole page header is wrapped in a div element with ID #header-wrapper. The strategy is to use the JPEG as a background for the page header wrapper. I have done this by adding the background-image property with the URL of my banner image and setting the width and height properties to match the dimensions of my banner:

#header-wrapper {
width:750px;
height:150px;
margin:0 auto 10px;
/* border:1px solid $bordercolor; */
background-image: url(http://www.thornton-oetzel.com/ken/liquidair/assets/images/LA_Banner.jpg);
}

I also commented out the border property. This puts the banner image behind the original banner text. The next step is to turn off the banner text because my banner is self contained. That is simply achieved by adding a display:none property to the header:

#header {
margin: 5px;
border: 1px solid $bordercolor;
text-align: center;
color:$pagetitlecolor;
display: none;
}

That's all there is to it.

Changing the width of Minima Black

Minima Black is one of the basic Blogspot templates. Its default width is 660 pixels. Personally I wanted to change the width to 750 pixels but using this process you can make it anything you want.

First, go to the "Template" section and click on "Edit HTML". Edit HTML is a bit of a misnomer here, what we are going to be editing is CSS. You don't need to expand the widgets for this so make your life simpler and leave that unchecked. Personally I use select all (control-A on a PC) to select the entire text box into a text editor. And perform my edits there.

The base width appears in three places in the template. I am only showing the essential elements here, these lines are actually scattered in the source so find them using the search in your editor.

#header-wrapper {
width:660px;
}
#outer-wrapper {
width: 660px;
}
#footer {
width:660px;
}

I edited each of these to 750px:

#header-wrapper {
width:750px;
}
#outer-wrapper {
width: 750px;
}
#footer {
width:750px;
}

This leaves a big hole between the two columns of the page. To fill that gap I increased the width of the posts. The two column widths are specified like so:

#main-wrapper {
width: 410px;
}
#sidebar-wrapper {
width: 220px;
}

410 + 220 = 630 which leaves 30 pixels for the gutter between the columns. Going from 660px to 750px, I am increasing the with by 90px so I add that to the main wrapper to bump the post width to 500px and keep the gutter the same width:

#main-wrapper {
width: 500px;
}
#sidebar-wrapper {
width: 220px;
}

That's all there is to it. You can adjust these numbers at will as long as your two columns together are no wider than your page.

Play Dough and the Left Hand Flash

5 pounds of flour, a couple pounds of salt, food coloring, water and 7 kids under 5. Sounds like a recipe for disaster but we survived.

I took about 110 shots edited down to 26 shooting with the left hand flash technique. It took a while to process that shoot because on the whole it between 0.5 and 1.5 stops underexposed and with the all the flash bouncing the color temperature was all over the map. I've got in the can now, so lets look at a couple shots.

First up a sample of a problem with the classic ceiling bounce. We have fairly high vaulted ceiling in our kitchen and I was taking pictures of short people so the bounce was necessarily coming from a rather high angle. The net result is the eyes are in shadow (sometimes called "raccoon eyes"). This is the problem bounce cards are supposed to solve. Personally I much prefer the look of putting the bounce point further back to lower the angle incident angle but a bounce card makes "good enough" much easier. For my taste the light with a fill card it often too flat so I try to avoid it when I can. Control over the bounce location is the primary reason I had the flash in my left hand but it didn't help me here. I don't remember why I chose a ceiling bounce for this shot (probably something blocking the curtain behind me).

Here is a similar shot where I did a better job directing the flash. I would have liked the light even lower, but the bounced light is coming in at a low enough angle that there is some light in the eyes--no bounce card needed.

The first two shots in this collection could have been done easily with the flash in the hot shoe and rotating the head. This one, with a wall bounce coming in from camera right, would be tricker. In portrait orientation I usually hold the camera from above which puts a shoe mounted flash on the left. Holding the camera from below would get you this shot but it is on the awkward side. One tool for solving this problem is a rotating flash bracket. The camera rotates while the flash sits still so you can always take full advantage of the flexibility of the flash head. The left hand flash technique solves this same problem with much less fiddling.

Finally, a shot that was only going to work with a left hand flash. Blocked on all sides, I saw that a wall bounce wasn't going to happen and a ceiling bounce certainly wasn't going to give me any useful light. Then I looked down--the table was white! The light coming from below gives this shot something of a surreal look but I like it better than the other option: direct flash.

Hand holding a flash gives a lot of flexibility in lighting and better yet it is quick. I can adjust the light position while I am framing the shot. The biggest downside I see to it for candid photography is having to handle the camera with one hand. That is doable with a small prime lens but would likely get unwieldy with a bigger zoom. In the long term I intend to pick up a flash bracket (probably from RSS) and hopefully with practice that will similar results and let me handle the camera with both hands. In the interim I'll be working more on my left hand flash.

Why a blog?

At the beginning of July 2006 I switched from 35mm film (Canon EOS-3, before that a Canon T90, and waaay back in antiquity a Nikon Nikkormat and a ancient Contax body) to Digital (Canon EOS 5D). Shortly after that switch I began to realize how much the new camera has been teaching me about Photography. The extremely low per shot cost and the very rapid turnaround has prompted me to try things with the camera that I would have never attempted with film. Combine that with a extremely challenging and yet very available subject (my 2-year-old son Miles) and I have an excellent test bed for improving my skills. Over the last 6 months I have shot around 4000 frames on the 5D. Small change for a working pro, but quite a few for a hobbyist. More to the point, in a significant fraction of those shot I have been deliberately pushing (and sometimes exceeding) the bounds of my abilities. That may actually be less common among working pros because they have take a large number of more conservative money shots to earn their living.

Somewhere along the line I decided that I should start writing down what I am learning. Both just to organize my own thoughts, but also as a resource for anyone else going through the same process. As I started to follow the online photo forums I found many people with the same questions and problems as I have faced. For a little while I was fairly ambitious about responding to these posts when I felt I had something useful to day, but watching that thread get buried and then the same question resurface 2 weeks later gave me the feeling I was spitting into the wind. Not that I really expect to be heard here either but at least this way I can find the post again.

At various times I have entertained the idea of writing a book as a way of getting my ideas written down in a way that will last. I still think I might go there, but organizing something of that scope is daunting and I never seem to get started. A blog, however, seems much less intimidating. The nature of a blog as a living and breathing document makes it much easier for me to get started. Every post has sort of an implied ellipsis not only at the end, but also at the beginning. These are my thoughts right now. I'll fill you in on the background later and I'll let you know if anything more on this topic comes up.

Someday as I get the topics better fleshed out I may yet turn it all into a book. I have a working title and an outline. All I need is a text...

The Left Hand Flash

I tried a new (to me anyhow) flash technique over the weekend. I was shooting candids quickly in a fairly tight space and getting the flash pointed at an appropriate surface for each shot was challenging. After some fiddling with other approaches, I finally just picked up the 430EX and held it in my left hand, so I was shooting one handed with ST-E2 IR flash trigger mounted in the hot shoe leaving me free to direct the flash with my left hand.

So, how well did it work?

Handling the camera one handed worked reasonably well. I was mostly shooting at f/2.8 and still getting excellent focus. The only real problem I had focusing was occasionally firing the camera with the half press of the shutter button I was capturing the focus point. The biggest issue with camera handling was keeping the camera level. I had a lot of shots where the horizon was significantly out of level.I was shooting with the the 35/1.4 and 50/1.4, both of which are reasonably lightweight and lightweight lenses. As it was I noticed my right hand was getting tired; a bigger zoom might have been a problem. Of course a zoom is less useful in this scenario because the left hand is busy with the flash and can't ride the zoom ring anyhow.

The flash was somewhat more problematic. I lost around 10% of my shots because the flash didn't fire. Usually this was due to holding the flash with my hand covering the IR transceiver. That said, it was definitely a boon to be able to pick my bounce location quickly on a shot by shot basis.

The biggest problem I had was that the bulk of that the majority of my shots were between 1/2 and 1 stop underexposed. I had the camera on manual (IS0 400, f/2.8, 1/100ish) and was relying on ETTL-2 to set the flash power for proper exposure. I have a few theories that I need to test as possible reasons for the consistent underexposure:

There were a lot of white surfaces in the scenes and a brightly lit curtain in the the background of many shots. The metering may have been underexposing because of the backgrounds. If that is the problem then I just need to get better at riding the flash exposure compensation. My most successful metered flash shots have been when the background was 1-2 stops underexposed. I wonder if ETTL-2 is calibrated with that in mind and tends to underexpose when the background is bright. Certainly if I had dialed in +2/3 EV exposure compensation for the whole shoot I would have been much happier with the end results.

I have seen warnings about focus and recompose with flash exposure metering. The way I had the camera set up it was metering when I focused rather than when I took the shot. That is SOP for Canon Evaluative metering, but I have read (but never understood) warnings that it is problematic when using a flash. I am going to try using the * button for AF-lock, changing the metering mode, and fiddling with the AF-lock custom function to see if I can improve the flash metering.

It is possible that many of my bounce surface choices were costing me so much light that I was exceeding the power of the flash. That seems unlikely--I wasn't noticing long recharge times on the flash and some of my bounce locations were very close to my subject and the shots were still underexposed. Still, it is a theory worth exploring. I wish Canon would put the flash power in the EXIF; it would make diagnosing flash exposure issues much easier.

The whole experiment was successful enough to give me some good shots after some exposure tweaks in Lightroom. Hopefully I can work out the kinks and turn it into a reasonably reliable technique in my toolbox. On the whole though given the reasonably bright light levels I was working with I am not completely convinced I was better off using a flash. Clearly there were some cases where I could get light on to a shadowed face, but other shots would have had quite nice window light without the flash. While the results with the bounce flash are clearly superior to direct flash as a group they still (at least to my eyes) had that artificial flash light feel. Another flash technique I need to work on at some point is turning the darn thing off when it isn't helping me. Possibly that is a good use for the custom setup feature on the mode dial. That, hopefully, will be the subject of another blog entry.

Up and running.

Woo hoo! The blog seem to be up and running with my custom domain name. Some poking around in the Google documentation and one quick support call to Easy DNS where they told me that an Alias on their configuration page generates a CNAME record and I have a working blog. Much kudos to both services that it doesn't require a Ph.D. in Physics to get this up and running.

I thought about installing Blog software on my Gate server, but so far the Google service is looking reasonably good and is without question less effort to maintain. And, of course, the price is right. We'll see how well it works out. I always have the option of moving if I find a good reason to.

Now that that is taken care of, a big hello to anyone out there reading this. This Blog is part of the web presence of my proto photography business, Liquid Air Photography. My main home page, hosted by Gate is still very much under construction. My gallery pages, hosted by Smugmug are in better shape but still being refined. This is still a hobby for me so all work on my web presence has to fit in the cracks of my life. None-the-less I have been happy that progress has been fairly steady, albeit slow.