Peanut Butter & Chocolate

You know you wanna take a bite...

So the second assignment for the Strobist Boot Camp II has been handed out and this time it was food (lit with off camera flash of course). The goal was to produce a shot taken of food (or drink) that looked professional and could appear as an advertisement.

It was suggested that you should/could approach your favorite restaurant or chef and volunteer to take photos of their prepared dishes. That way, you have subject matter and get to help someone out too. However, due to the time constraints, and me being busy at my job and preparing to move to a new house, I decided to find something around the house I could shoot.

The first thing I considered was to think of something that everybody likes, that nobody can resist and something easy to setup and light.

BINGO ....who doesn't like chocolate AND PEANUT BUTTER???

So I went to the store and picked up a few Hershey bars (I grabbed two just in case I destroyed one somehow) and picked up an extra jar of Jif Creamy Peanut Butter ...you just can't have enough of this stuff around! Then I set about my lighting.

I decided to use a DIY macro box to light the Hershey Bar and PB since this would give me easy control of my light and not spill all over the place. The macro box is simply an empty copy paper box I swiped borrowed from work, cut holes out of the front and back and one out of the top. Over the top hole I placed two pieces of white copy paper which diffused the light.

My key light was a Nikon SB-800 camera left with a white paper snoot (again to prevent spill) aimed at the top of the box. This light was set to TTL and worked like a charm every single time. Normally I set my flash settings manually, but I thought this time around I would let my camera and flash do the math stuff.

For the background, I setup my Botero collapsible background with the darker side showing (this is just like the one David Hobby uses in the Strobist DVDs) and lit that with another snooted SB-800 camera right with a full CTO gel. I wanted sort of a brownish hue to go with the subject and this combination worked perfectly. This flash was also set to TTL. The reason I used the snoot is because I wanted more of a spot of light behind my subject to draw the eye in more. I had to position this several times before I got one that looked the way I wanted. Both flashes were triggered using the pop-up flash in commander mode on my D300.

The last thing I had to do was get my subject matter situated. I wanted the candy bar standing up and slightly angled with a big glob of peanut butter on it, so I used an A Clamp to hold the candy bar upright. This worked like a charm and acted sorta like a little tripod. I will definitely keep this mind for other small projects.

I took a few test shots, now that I had my lighting and subject matter set, and just positioned the candy bar until I had the light hitting it the way I wanted. Specifically I wanted just a few highlights on the edges of the candy bar and peanut butter and nice shadows so that you could see the texture.

I set my ISO to 200, my shutter speed to my fastest flash sync speed - 1/250 of a second and my aperture to f/5.6. I wanted a reasonable depth of field but wanted the background to be nice and soft and the focus to fall off as it reached the candy bar wrapper.

This was a fun and pretty quick setup. I think I spent about 45 mins setting everything up, taking the shots and then tearing back down. The other nice thing was this was done with small, portable lighting and could have been done anywhere.

I don't know if my shot will win the contest, but I sure had fun doing it, and learned a few things in the process.

For more info on Assignment #2 of the Strobist Boot Camp II, click HERE

Strobist Boot Camp II

David Hobby of the Strobist blog has fired up the Strobist Boot Camp II. Since I was a late discoverer of the Strobist blog and didn't get to participate in the first Boot Camp, I was chomping at the bit to participate in this one.

For the first assignment you were required to shoot a headshot (using off camera lighting of course) of someone, then have them take a headshot of you. Ideally, the headshot you take would help someone else out and also give you a chance to hone your off camera lighting skills.

I've been Strobist nutz over the last few years learning how to maneuver my Nikon speedlights and now I find myself looking for shots that would require a little off camera lighting love. When I first started shooting, many moons ago, I hated on camera flash and would get the fastest lens I could so I could get enough light to do the shots I wanted. Now that I've got a pretty good handle on off camera lighting, I've learned that I don't necessarily need the latest and greatest, fastest lenses to get good shots ...although they certainly don't hurt.

I digress..

For this assignment, I asked a friend of mine and his wife to pose for me as they were needing new headshots for their business. This was a double bonus for me as it gave me subjects for the assignment and I got to work with friends ...so if the photos turned out like poo, they'd still like me. =)

All of these shots were taken with a three Nikon speedlights and a Botero #23 Collapsible background. The key light was an SB-800 camera left in a 36" shoot thru umbrella in close. For the hair light I used an SB-600 in a Lumiquest SBIII about a stop or two lower than the key and for the background, I used another SB-800 at the same power as the hair light and sometimes used a blue gel.


In this shot my friend took of me, you can sorta see the setup. This setup works great in close quarters and in my opinion gives you just as nice of light as if you were using big monoblocs. Plus, this setup tears down in minutes and you can carry it over your shoulder.

I'm a fairly creative guy, but I like the Strobist assignments because they usually give you a specific set of parameters to follow which for me is a bit more of a challenge. I'm definitely looking forward to the next one.

RESOURCES:

As many of you know, I am a resource hound! The more information I can get my hands on, the better, especially when it comes to photography related information.

Since I haven't posted some new links for a while, the vault has been piling up so I thought I would fire off some of the most interesting things I have ran across lately.

First and most importantly:

1. Strobist Boot Camp II is kicking off on the Strobist blog. David Hobby of the Strobist blog did this a while back and it was a fun exercise. He basically gives out four lighting assignments over the course of the summer, you do your homework, complete the assignments, post to Flickr ..and this time, you can win prizes!!!

That is cool. Just PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE read the entire post and the assignments closely as everything you will need to know is laid out in those posts. There are a lot of people posting questions in the Flickr forums that could have gotten the answer by reading the post.

2. One of my favorite photographers, Joe McNally, has updated his website/blog and it is definitely worth the look!

3. For Nikon shooters, if you're not watching D Town TV, then you are missing out! Its a weekly video show by Scott Kelby and Matt Kloskowski that covers EVERYTHING Nikon. The clips usually run around 10-15 mins and are chocked full of useful information from lighting to lens choices.

4. Discovered a new photographer who's work I really dig, Greg Sims, check him out!

5. Dustin Diaz is a professional photographer who is not only doing a Project 365, but he is doing it the Strobist way, by lighting every one of his shots for the Project. So you're not just seeing namby-pamby-couldn't-think-of-anything-else-better-to-shoot style shots. He's cranking out some seriously cool stuff. You can also get him on Flickr.

That's all I have for now, more to come...

David Ziser's Digital WakeUp Call 2009

Jenn and I went to see David Ziser's Digital WakeUp Call last night in Louisville, Kentucky and I have to say, this was the single most informative photography seminar I have been too yet, and I've been to a few!

In four hours (maybe just a tad over) he packed in information on shooting & composition, lighting tips, marketing, business management, software and workflows. He also gave out a ton of prizes! ...of course of which I won nothing. =) I'm a lucky guy, its all bad luck.

David is a prolific blogger and an excellent teacher and has been one for many, many years. He makes you feel at home, cracks a few jokes and shares information with you that years ago, you would have to threaten a pro photographer to part with this kind of information.

If you're a wedding photographer, a portrait photographer or ANY kind of photographer, do yourself a favor and try to attend this tour. Its definitely worth the money and if you are a more financially successful photographer than I am, you can afford to attend one of his Digital Master Classes. I haven't been to one of these, but I suspect its even more informative and inspirational than his Digital WakeUp Call tour.

Also, David was gracious enough to pose for a few portraits with Jenn and myself and had time to answer one-on-one questions with us. What a very cool guy!

David A. Ziser
Digital Pro Talk
Digital WakeUp Call 2009

Be FLEXIBLE!

f/13 at 1/15 sec ISO 200
Sometimes you have an upcoming shoot already planned out in your head. You know what your model will be wearing, how she looks and what light would look best on her. You've already scouted your location, checked to see where the best light will be at what time of day, and have found a few perfect spots for your session.

BUT, what if something unexpected happens?

That was the case with my last shoot, with fellow photographer Nina. We knew where we wanted to shoot, and I had already come up with a few cool lighting setups that would totally rock.

We picked this abandoned train station that had every square inch of it covered in graffiti. It had windows on both sides of the main building, tracks on either side running East/West and many cool rooms full of urban decay.

So we get there and I immediately start setting up a few lights. I always do this on a shoot because I know I will be using at least one light (if not more) so it just makes since and saves time to go ahead and set one up. I had my friend Nina standing roughly where I wanted her, and then off in the distance I hear...

WHOO-WHOO! ....holy crap, here comes a train! I had no idea that the train still ran through this station! It was moving fairly slowly so I turned around, dialed my shutter speed down to around 1/15 sec. composed and took a few frames. I tried to keep the building in focus but still show the train as moving blur.

I liked this look so well, that I asked Nina to quickly jump next to the train, I turned my Nikon SB-800 around, zoomed the head to 50mm, pointed it at her, set my flash setting to Commander Mode TTL and banged away. That's how I got the image above.

I normally will manually select my flash power and use either my Nikon's D300 built in Commander Mode to trigger my flashes or use my CyberSyncs. However in a situation like this, I needed to work fast so I relied on my camera and flash to do the heavy lifting for me. At close range, this is something the Nikon Creative Lighting System absolutely excels at, with no other devices used.

So remember as a photographer, it always pays to be prepared and have everything planned ahead as much as possible, but what separates the pros from the amateurs is the ability to respond to a given situation, take the bull by the horns and go with it!

I liked the photo above so well, that I never even did my "planned shots". ....although I did squeak one or two more different ones in ....before the cops ran us off. We were trespassing. :)

Pocket Wizard MiniTT1 for Nikons!

The new and highly anticipated PocketWizard MiniTT1 radio transmitter for Nikon dSLRs and flashes is available for pre-order on Amazon!

These are just like the PocketWizard Flex TT5 and MiniTT1 transmitter/receiver combos that PocketWizard introduced for the Canon systems.

If you are in to using the TTL features with your camera and flash (and are a Nikon user) and are totally rocking the off-camera flash, then this will definitely be something you're interested in. As soon as someone does a full review of these, I'll post an update.

More to come

Iced Tea Product Shot

as always, click on any photo for a bigger view..

I've had a few friends express interest in how I shot this so I thought I would blog about it to try to answer a few questions.

I really enjoy doing commercial type photography and this setup is pretty simple even though it may look difficult. The first thing I did was to find a cardboard box that I could use as my "light box". The reason I use this is to keep light from spilling all over my base that the glass of tea is setting on. Also, by using this box, the light comes from the top and leaves a small amount of shadow on either side of the glass giving it more of a defining edge.


After I cut my box up and added the piece of copy paper to the hole in the top for diffusion (you can see this in the photo above) I placed a piece of white foam core down as my base for the glass to rest on. I would have preferred white acrylic but I didn't have any so I used what was available.

Then I set up my lights. I knew I wanted a white "blown out" background and didn't want that light to spill on my glass of tea, so I set up a piece of white foam core on a chair behind the table about 2 feet away. Ideally I would have liked to have gotten the background further away but my place is small so I had to work with the space I have. To light the background, I placed an SB-800 (set in remote mode) under the table and placed the dome diffuser on it because I wanted an even coverage on the background.

Then, to light the glass of tea, I place another SB-800 (in remote mode) on a stand to the left and added a Honl snoot to the flash. The reason I used the snoot was I didn't want that light spilling all over my base and accidentally adding light to my subject. So now I have complete control over the light on my background and the light on my subject, controlled independently. The snoot does a good job of restricting the spread of light. Its hitting the diffusion material on top of the box pretty evenly.

Next its time to take a few test shots. The first thing I did was to make sure my background light looked the way I wanted it to. I set my camera to its fastest native flash sync speed at 1/250 of a second, my ISO to its lowest setting 100 (for the best quality) and guessed at an aperture of f/8. I had my power on the background light set to 1/8 power and when I took the first shot, I noticed it was just a tad too dark for my taste. So rather than opening up my aperture, I decided to increase the flash power. I didn't open up my aperture anymore because I wanted to retain the most focus and detail on the glass of tea as I could. So changing the flash power to 1/4 did the trick. Background light, check.

Then I took a test shot with my key light (the snooted SB-800). Since I already had a good working aperture and shutter speed, I now only needed to dial in the right amount of power on this flash to light my subject, which just also happened to be 1/4 power.

Both of these flashes were set to remote and I triggered them with my D300's built in CLS system using the pop-up flash as a commander for the speedlights. I also set the power settings on each flash from the camera. I could've used TTL settings on the flashes and dialed compensation to suit, but I find that dialing the power in manually on my flashes gives me a more repeatable result and I've been doing this long enough now that I usually get my lights right the first time within one stop.

I shot this hand held since I knew that shooting at 1/250 sec and using flash, I would have no problems in getting a clear shot. However, the detail may have been a tad bit better had I used a tripod. I was working quickly though and didn't want to take the time to setup the tripod.

This shot is straight off the camera, I didn't need any levels, curves or contrast adjustments (even though I checked to be certain). I just re-sized it for the web and added my digital signature.

This setup works great for small product photography and if this is something you're interested in, I encourage you to try it. This is a low cost setup too provided that you have two lights that you can work with.

If anyone has any questions about this, please feel free to drop me a line.

::How to build your own DIY macro box::