white on white

Shot white on white last week. Usually people choose static objects, like plates and such. The reasons for this are two-fold. One, once you get the object in place you have to determine how to modify the lighting. For example, you would see that you need a reflector to open up the shadows here, or you'd need a gobo (short for "go between" which basically blocks portions of light) there. Maybe your object is casting a strange shadow on the backdrop or catching an unflattering glare from one of the softboxes. Shooting an object that is not moving helps to set-up correct lighting that will not change.

The second reason that it is wise to use a static object is because we are shooting 4x5 film. Imagine a negative that 4"x5" that is inserted in a large-format camera, complete with bellows and frosted glass that you must look into whilst beneath a black cloth, and that is what you would find us doing. The film is expensive to buy and to process so we generally only use 4 sheets per shoot. This means that we spend over 60 minutes setting up everything and then we take 4 shots of it on film and hope they came out correctly. All that said, I did not choose a static object.


Milk!

Half and half, to be exact, as that is all they had at the gas station near class. It was very yellow and as the day wore on, became very rank. This assignment, though shot on color film has to be converted to BW in order to take out yellow color casts (lucky me!). I haven't got the film back yet, but these are some shots that I took with my digital just to make sure I had the lighting ratios correct.


The set-up. Stephen (my assistant in class) cut the bottom out of the milk carton so that we could mount the carton on a stand in order to preserve the focal plane. Then he poured the stuff through.


And we had to clean up after every test-shot and every shot and then do the whole thing over again. Imagine warm half and half and the aroma it was creating.


This was the actual shot. I'm behind the large-format camera and another classmate is taking this digital shot. Notice the large softbox over head.


Another shot of the set-up. That's me behind the camera!

Summer school

Summer is here! Maybe not technically "here," but it's the time of year when its 100 degrees outside everyday of the week, and the sun doesn't go down until after 9pm. In other words: my favorite time of year!

I'm blessed that I am not committed to a 40-hour/week job, so I have more time for playing Rev and enjoying the sunshine... well, almost. This summer I have committed to 9 weeks of summer school. While meeting 3 consecutive days a week from 8-5 doesn't seem like fun, it has it's perks. For one thing, I have access to a versatile photo studio space. I'll be posting my class assignments for all to enjoy.

As a review, lets look at how my previous experience with lighting.

Semester 1 in Photo classes, barely learning about lighting patterns and the small studio set-up only had tungsten lights (eek), hence the yellow color cast.


Family event, first use of strobes (outside of the classroom). As you can see, I had no idea what I was doing with the background light... it's very "hot." Other than that, not too bad considering I didn't know how to use a light meter back then.


Semester 1 in Photo classes had just ended. I had to do some company portraits for a Christmas card using available light (in this case fluorescent lighting) and my limited knowledge of using reflectors. Of course, as I had no assistants, I had to use myself to check lighting and set-up the shots.


Semester 2 in Photo classes had just commenced. Again, company portraits. This time for the company website. By this time, I had a little more understanding of lighting patterns, but still no grasp of how to control the background light (see hotspot under my left arm). And again, I had to use myself to check the lighting. Love the haircut!



Semester 3-Summer school. My first assignment was "Basic Portrait" and we basically did portraits of eachother in class, just to familiarize ourselves with the basic lighting patterns. Here's my classmate, Stephen, lit using a "short loop" lighting pattern.

Father's Day

It's been a while since I've posted thanks to the start of summer school and the assault of various work deadlines. Now that I have a moment to breathe, I'm making two posts in one day. Here are some "Father's Day" pictures. These were taken as part of our "Advanced Portrait" assignment. I've very grateful to my two models. I was warned ahead of time that children will only cooperate for 5-10 minutes, and thus you must have everything set-up perfectly beforehand. Well, Rev was in good spirits for the entire 90 minutes that I had them in the studio. Hard to believe.





This was taken in the same shoot. I was trying to emulate a photo of JFK I had come across. Last time I will do this shot... the lighting set-up took about 45 minutes. Think several lights and several gobo's.


It didn't help that my assistant was a different height than my model, so when we set-up the lights on the assistant, it was all thrown out the window when the model sat in. Luckily, we all tried to stay light-hearted. Here's my assistant (i.e. my classmate) helping me set-up lighting. Another helpful classmate jumped in at the last minute. Hah.

Sam's Graduation

My cousin Samantha graduated from UT this weekend. You'll find some of the highlights below. Clicking on any of the images will take you to a slideshow.

You'll notice that her regalia includes red tassles and chords. This is only an indication of which academic discipline from which she received a degree. In this case, it was UT's College of Communication. I feel very lucky that the College of Engineering's color was orange (not quite "burnt orange" but much closer than red)!





And then there was the party...complete with customized candy bars, large amounts of tamales, and a pinata. Unlike most Hispanic families, ours is very large, heh. Clicking on these will take you to a different slideshow.

Information R/evolution

While looking up ways to catalog my ever-growing photograph collection, I stumbled upon this video. Mind you, I wasn't looking for a video, rather I was searching a topic called "Digital Asset Management" or DAM.

As budding-photographers-to-be, we are supposed to implement this protocol when cataloging our photos in order to aid in later photo-retrieval. For example, my photo catalog shows that I've taken 6,500 pictures in the last several months. Today, I need a picture of an oak tree for use in a project. Rather than searching through all those images, I can look up keywords that I have already assigned to each of the pictures. I can look up "tree" or "oak tree" or "forest" or "outdoors" in hopes of finding a picture that would work perfectly for such a project. Of course, I can also search using other metadata, such as Date, or Captions that I may have given the picture, or even by Camera Lens ... but today I'm only concerned about the keywords.

It's a wonderful system of organization, but it requires that you stay on top of your cataloging so that when you need an oak tree (or a child crying, or a red balloon flying out of an open window) you can quickly find it.

The problem that I run into is finding the most efficient and universally-recognized system of cataloging, which is what led me to do a quick search on "DAM."

This movie is not exactly related to my search for efficient keywording, but I found it very dramatic and thought-provoking.