Enter the Lightroom

I've been a committed RAW user for nearly as long as I've had my DSLR. Back in college I spent more than my fair share of time in the dark room and loved the creative options processing my own B&W photos gave me. For me RAW is the digital negative and the opions for digital postprocessing far exceed those available to me in the chemical days. I got Canon's Digital Photo Professional with my DSLR (a 20D) and it has been my raw converter of choice ever since. The updates to it over recent years have added many great features and when I tried the Lightroom beta this time last year, although I was impressed there were enough bits missing that I didn't buy in. A year on I figured it was time to look at LR again, as just for good measure I got the latest update of DPP to see how it was keeping pace. Long story short Lightroom 1.3 has come on in leaps and bounds wereas DPP 3.2 simply moves some features (in good way) around and adds some new stuff that sounds great but doesn' support my 20D. Sadly this is not enough and as of now I'm switching. LR simply has more sliders, more options - just more creative options! Its workflow is different from DPP and I'm getting used to that, soon I think I will be quicker, stronger, better in Lightroom. I often have several hundred shots to process from a day's shooting at a conference or whatever so workflow is really important but I'm sure LR can deliver. Below are 3 version of the same photo:

above: Unchanged

above: DPP - just couldn't get what I was looking for

above: LR - yay!

Food for thought

Inspired by this yummy article on strobist I decided to have a go myself. Oreos are my wife's favourite biscuit so we often have them in the house despite their relative rarity in the UK so I tried to reproduce my own take on the strobist Oreo shot. This was my first time with all 4 flashes in action and the first real life outing of the foam snoots.




Then I used roughly the same set up to take this shot of something slightly healthier, a bit of bread.


So far in my off camera flash adventure I've only really focussed on getting good results with soft light so it was interesting to use hard light here. Hard light gives hard shadows and is suited to subjects where you want to emphasize texture.

Set up

The set up was two snooted flashes from behind (one each side), a background light (with a deep blue filter) and a bare strobe high and in front of the subject. I also used 2 mirrors to reflect the snooted flashes back at the bottom and sides of the cookie these basically lit the cream. Originally I had a white background about 50cm behind the biscuit and lit it with the blue flash but in later shots I wanted a more subtle blue so I used a piece of white paper and back lit it with the blue strobe. For the bread I moved the front flash lower and to the other side of the camera and I took out the mirrors. Also for the bread I didn't use the background light and used a held held, crumpled, peice of blue cloth as the background.


Post process

I cloned out any sign of the pin that held up the cookie/bread then I applied a few passes of the increased local contract trick in photoshop. In some shots I dropped the overall saturation and lightened the cyan channel to bleach the background.

Keep it simple (stupid)

Looking back on the photos in the last few posts I was unhappy with the lighting. These photos were just showing photos of various bits of kit I have made or modified and were not supposed to be amazing photos themselves. However if I'm going to improve I need to take every opportunity to make great photos and not settle for anything less.

I had wanted something quick and only involving one flash (the others would be involved in the photos themselves) so originally I just put a flash in a shoot through brolly above and left of camera to get a fairly large light source to keep the shadows soft (this set up is equivalent to experiment 2 below). However I didn't pay any attention to were the shadow was falling.

Today I tried a number of experiments to see if I could improve on the lighting. See the results below - each row has the shot and a version of the shot with the black point shifted to emphasise the shadow (I moved the black point to the same value for all the experiments) and the set up of the shot.

Experiment 1: I just used a bare flash, in the same position the brolly had been to show the effect without the brolly. The light is hard and the shadow very well defined.

Experiment 2: I recreated the original lighting. Shadow is soft but could look better if placed under the subject.

Experiment 3: I moved the umbrella so it was more above the subject to move the shadow. Unfortunately this also put some of the body of the flash in the shadow of the head.


Experiment 4: I brought the brolly down closer to the subject. This makes the light source bigger relative to the subject and hence produces softer shadows. Results are good but the front of the body of the flash still needs some fill and the shadow although softer is still to once side.

Experiment 5: I put a large white thing right of the subject to reflect some fill. This does a nice job of making the front lens of the flash head white and filling in some of the shadows on the front of the flash body.

Experiment 6: Flash on camera bounced off white ceiling above. Much bigger light source than the brolly. Shadow perfectly soft and under the subject. Much less kit, slightly more brain - the best light of the lot!

It is so easy to overcomplicate things. Often when going to make a picture I reach first for the new bit of kit or just get out loads of stuff and work out how I'll use it all. In this case all I needed was the flash on the camera pointed at and the ceiling (If I'd wanted to move or rotate the camera I'd have been better with the flash off camera, on a stand, but still pointed at the ceiling)

Off camera TTL cord

Sometimes its handy to use one of the more advanced features of a flash, for example the AF assist lamp, high speed sync or modelling light when lighting off camera. Obviously these features aren't available over PC cord so you need the full TTL connection. Long TTL cords aren't cheap so I bought a 1m cord from a major UK high street retailer and modified it to make it as long as I want.


I cut out the springy coiled lead that it came with and soldered in a pair of male and female PS2 mouse/keyboard connectors. The reason I chose these connectors was because they had enough pins and I already had a few spare extension leads knocking around. I have 2 mouse extension leads that are each 2m long so I can go up to 4 m with them or I have also made a lead from 13 metres (approx) of cat5 network cable with mouse connectors soldered on each end. I've not found a need for such a long cable yet but I wanted to see if it would work which it did.



Set up

I used the same 1 brolly set up as I used in the snoots post.

Snoots

It seems that cereal boxes are the beginning and end of most snoot designs however I saw the advert for http://www.honlphoto.com in the strobist side bar and thought I'd like some more permanent snoots. I liked the design but wanted a cheaper and more flexible solution. I figured that if I had to carry different lengths around then I could be in a situation where I hadn't brought enough of the right ones. I also wanted them to be robust, portable and not to take up much space. Here is what I came up with:


A sheet of foam (Foamies etc.) and a velcro strap! Simple hey - but, look, I can fold the foam in half, long ways, and wrap it around the flash for a 10cm snoot:


Or just wrap it around for a 20cm snoot:


Or wrap it around the other way for a 30cm snoot:


On the last snoot I employed a second velcro strap to keep the front end in order - this strap could be tightened to restrict the light further. Obviously these 3 lengths are only some of the countless possibilities available. I also intend to get some white foam sheets too and see what difference that makes to the light cast by the snoot.

Here are some test shots to demonstrate the snoots in action:

10cm

20cm

30cm

Set up

For the shots of the snoots I used one shoot through brolly positioned above and camera left.


And for the light size tests I used a snooted flash (obviously) left of and in front of the camera, about 80cm from the wall.