p.57 #1 · Portrait and People Image Thread using Sony
Joshua, Fuzzykeys, and GabrielPhoto, I am just in awe. INCREDIBLE photos, and I really admire how you guys also share your approach and BTS setups. Really inspiring.
I try my best NOT to shoot people, as they tend to have "opinions" about how they should look, and mountains and flowers tend not to. Much less pressure for me. . However, the pandemic has made it tough for people with occasions to find photographers who they can be confident have been careful about the virus and such. Enter these two seniors and me, the work-from-home photographer. I tried to do my best, but since this is REALLY not my forte, hopefully it was good enough.
p.57 #3 · Portrait and People Image Thread using Sony
Grenache wrote:
Joshua, Fuzzykeys, and GabrielPhoto, I am just in awe. INCREDIBLE photos, and I really admire how you guys also share your approach and BTS setups. Really inspiring.
I try my best NOT to shoot people, as they tend to have "opinions" about how they should look, and mountains and flowers tend not to. Much less pressure for me. . However, the pandemic has made it tough for people with occasions to find photographers who they can be confident have been careful about the virus and such. Enter these two seniors and me, the work-from-home photographer. I tried to do my best, but since this is REALLY not my forte, hopefully it was good enough.
Jim, the first image ticks a lot of boxes. I really like that a lot. It seems to me that you put in more effort from the get go in that more so than in the second image. You may not have done it that way but that is my impression from looking at the two images.
The images from the guy in the second batch are definitely better. The second image of the second batch of him is a tad too loosely composed for my taste. Maybe a tighter crop and in vertical format would work better. I also like the image of the girl in the second batch. The bokeh generated by the lens is wonderful. The vertical composition is great there. And lastly, the backlit image of them together is gorgeous.
Keep up the good work, Jim! I hope you don’t mind my pointing certain aspects out to you. And I am looking forward to seeing more of your posts here.
p.57 #4 · Portrait and People Image Thread using Sony
AGeoJO wrote:
Jim, the first image ticks a lot of boxes. I really like that a lot. It seems to me that you put in more effort from the get go in that more so than in the second image. You may not have done it that way but that is my impression from looking at the two images.
The images from the guy in the second batch are definitely better. The second image of the second batch of him is a tad too loosely composed for my taste. Maybe a tighter crop and in vertical format would work better. I also like the image of the girl in the second batch. The bokeh generated by the lens is wonderful. The vertical composition is great there. And lastly, the backlit image of them together is gorgeous.
Keep up the good work, Jim! I hope you don’t mind my pointing certain aspects out to you. And I am looking forward to seeing more of your posts here. ...Show more →
Joshua, thank you for taking the time. Opinions certainly welcome. The guy was much less into the idea of a photo shoot than she was. Combination of his lack of interest and my lack of experience trying to convince made the first part tough. As we were losing light and in the more open area, he got more interested.
Parents were interested in non-standard looking images, so I shot a fair amount with vintage glass. I missed focus by a bit on a few of those during the session. Both the Meyer and the Biotar have fairly steep curvature, so that made it a little tougher.
p.57 #5 · Portrait and People Image Thread using Sony
Definitely take a whack at it! If you are trying to light the sword and face 100% separately, it might get tricky. You could flag off the continuous light or use a grid and feather it onto the sword, but you might have an awkward amount of light hitting the hand. We tried something similar and I learned that the hard way.
Anyway, the sharpness will get taken care of by the flash so if that is what your are primarily concerned about, I would probably try to embrace the chaos a bit, think about how the continuous is hitting the face, and of course get the key flash situated in a good place. I think your son will get pretty pumped up about the shoot if you show him how awesome and surreal he looks on the back of the camera.
It may not work out exactly the way you want the first time. Jess and I did something very similar once before but I didn’t really like anything we shot. It was close but no cigar for me from a lighting perspective, though we learned valuable lessons from it, particularly about the placement of the continuous light! I will certainly be experimenting with this again!
Hodie wrote:
Thanks! That’s what I was trying earlier (before your post) but I didn’t use a continuous light, just a speed light with a gel, and my results were unspectacular. I also think the placement was all wrong. I only got to experiment for about 20 mins so I will need to fiddle around some more. I want to get the result where the face is sharp but there is movement with the foil (“sword”).
I’ll probably use one of my cheap Aperture LED lights and throw a gel over it or use my AD400 modeling light and use my speed light as the key.
Thanks so much for sharing! The most challenging part for me will be getting a 6-year model dressed in full fencing gear to be willing to let me experiment 😂.
p.57 #6 · Portrait and People Image Thread using Sony
Thanks Jim! That first shot there in particular is lovely!
Grenache wrote:
Joshua, Fuzzykeys, and GabrielPhoto, I am just in awe. INCREDIBLE photos, and I really admire how you guys also share your approach and BTS setups. Really inspiring.
I try my best NOT to shoot people, as they tend to have "opinions" about how they should look, and mountains and flowers tend not to. Much less pressure for me. . However, the pandemic has made it tough for people with occasions to find photographers who they can be confident have been careful about the virus and such. Enter these two seniors and me, the work-from-home photographer. I tried to do my best, but since this is REALLY not my forte, hopefully it was good enough.
p.57 #7 · Portrait and People Image Thread using Sony
fuzzykeys wrote:
Thanks man! The fencing idea sounds awesome!
The basic principle is you need a continuous light to capture motion during a semi-long exposure, a flash to freeze it and a black background. I don’t have a proper continuous light so I just used my Xplor 600 Pro’s modeling light at full power in a 7” reflector with barn doors and teal gel set up behind Jess. For the flash I used the 400 Pro in a 25” softbox. The BG was a Westcott X-Drop. For the captures, I shot ~1 second exposures at f5.6 with front curtain sync and then panned the camera after opening the shutter and tripping the flash.
The most critical aspect is the placement of the continuous light. If you want motion in front of the subject, move the light closer to the lens and spill a bit of light onto the face. If you want to try to get more of the face lit cleanly with white light, move it back and watch your spill. In the latter case, focusing can be a bit challenging since you need to be in a dark area and turn off the strobe’s modeling light to prevent it from capturing white light motion.
If you wanted to capture your son and the sword moving, you’d probably want to try the opposite of what I did and have your son move throughout the exposure after the flash fires. You could try moving the camera on top of that as well and you’d probably get some totally crazy stuff. You’ll have to fiddle around with the exposure times to find a sweet spot. It’s a very unpredictable process and tons of fun!
In post, I really didn’t do too much. My usual beauty retouching routine but less of it because I wanted a bit of a grittier look and the crispy highlights of the smaller modifier, a little greenish-yellow split toning to the highlights in ACR, and then I desaturated the blues and increased their luminosity a bit.
p.57 #8 · Portrait and People Image Thread using Sony
I will try to remember to take a bts shot the next time I do a long exposure portrait (soon!) but I don’t actually know how useful it would be because you will get very different results when you slightly change the flash power, continuous power or shutter speed. IMHO it’s kind of like doing an in camera composite because you essentially have two different shutter speeds in the same shot (camera shutter and flash duration), but to me the really interesting stuff happens when you overlap the lights a bit. The parts of the frame lit by the continuous light only will be blurred, the parts that are hit by only the flash will be frozen sharp, and the parts lit by both will be somewhere in between to an extent determined by your flash power, continuous power and shutter speed settings.
Teo Rey wrote:
I would love to see a whole thread dedicated to this technique!
p.57 #9 · Portrait and People Image Thread using Sony
For whatever reasons, I stopped down the aperture just a tiny bit although I knew it would perform admirably even at wide open. The new GM would have a tough time getting to this performance, I think, albeit lighter and more compact. Shortly before the pandemic in Feb. 2020...
p.57 #10 · Portrait and People Image Thread using Sony
AGeoJO wrote:
For whatever reasons, I stopped down the aperture just a tiny bit although I knew it would perform admirably even at wide open. The new GM would have a tough time getting to this performance, I think, albeit lighter and more compact. Shortly before the pandemic in Feb. 2020...
Excellent use of that Sigma 1.2 pop (even at 1.4) !
. However, the pandemic has made it tough for people with occasions to find photographers who they can be confident have been careful about the virus and such. Enter these two seniors and me, the work-from-home photographer. I tried to do my best, but since this is REALLY not my forte, hopefully it was good enough.
