Glass Award Photo

Earlier this week one of my coworkers showed me this cool award the department received. An all glass plate engraved with this cool design. I couldn't help myself...I needed to take a picture of this thing. So here it is!

The setup - First I got a big piece of white paper roughly 3ft x 4ft long and taped it to the wall next to my desk at work. I placed the award around a foot away from the backdrop. Unfortunately I didn't have my tripod that day, but there were some big boxes around the office...ghetto tripod :). I needed to keep the camera still because I knew I couldn't light the award with just one pic (if someone knows how to do it in one pic, please let me know)...This picture is actually made from 3 different pics stitched together. Here they are:


...My bud Vasilis suggested that I use my flash really close to the glass. This worked, but it still didn't light the whole award properly. So I experimented with different flash angles and positions. In the end I chose three pics; one lighting the bottom, one for the leaves and one for the top. I used a single bare Nikon SB-28 (only $90 bucks at Samy's used) zoomed to 24mm triggered with my Skyport. I used the timer function on the camera so I could be away from the it to position the light by hand. The actual shoot was fairly easy, but the layers are what took some time...

Photoshop - Adobe Bridge CS4 makes it easy to layer multiple photos. Select the photos you want to layer and choose Tools ->Photoshop->Load Files into Photoshop Layers. In the past I would open each file individually into Photoshop and then use the move tool to stack all the files into one image. This is very tedious, but Adobe fixed this problem in the new version of Bridge CS4. Once imported, I used masks to hide the areas of each layer that I didn't want displayed...aka my arm :). DON'T DELETE stuff from your original layers, use masks...They're way better because they're non-descructive. If you masked too much, you can always bring back the content later, you can't if you use the eraser tool.

I hope this helps and if anyone knows better ways to get these results, please let me know. I'm completely self taught, so it would be good to get some advise from pros.

Santa Barbara Mission - Flashes and Layers

Last weekend I took this pic of the Santa Barbara Mission with the help of my friend Tuan. The day was perfect for a picture; a storm had just rolled through town and it cleared just around sunset...nice recipe for some moody light.

But there's a catch here... see the building? Grass? Cross? Well that stuff was lit with my flash...there were no lights on the building. Don't believe me? Well here's how I did it...

First things first:

So here's the shot with no modifications. There is no way I could get a good exposure for both the sky and the ground. I thought to myself, "why does this picture suck?"...

1)sky is too bright...no color
2)grass sucks...too dark..
3)building...dull

So how do I fix these problems?

Filters and flashes to the rescue! Forget HDR!
First, I put a Neutral Density Graduated Filter on my lens. If you have a camera, this is one of the best investments you can make if you want to shoot landscapes. Easy to use, balances the exposure and makes the colors in the sky come alive. But it's still not enough to bring out the detail in the building and the cross.

Time for flashes...With my camera on a tripod, I used two flashes with CTO filters (it's just orange plastic) on full power and this is the result I got. Wait wait, I know, the rest of the building is still dark and the grass too. So I took multiple exposures while my bud Tuan moved the flash to different positions on the building. This is one of about 7 shots to make the final image. The building, the cross and the grass in front were all lit independently...

Thank you photoshop... - With layers in Photoshop you can just take all those exposures and make them one by deleting the stuff you don't need. Also, as you can image, there are lots of people walking around considering the mission is a big tourist attraction. By taking multiple exposures I was able to take out all the people. Finally, I also boosted the contrast and made it a little brighter.

Hope this helps and this goes to show that you can use flashes for landscapes/architecture and get good results.