There’s a portrait round in the club coming up and I’ve been trying to come up with a different style of shot. I expect there will be an abundance of traditional portraits doing the rounds and I fully expect I’ll submit a few of those myself.

But I also wanted a few more unusual shots.

And after watching the Matrix a few months back, I couldn’t get the idea of a computer lit shot out of my mind. I lined a person up for the shot, but had no idea about lighting it. So rather than waste their time, last night I used myself as my test subject.

OK. It’s maybe a little 1999. But I kind of like the effect.

I started out by just lighting my face using the glow from a laptop monitor with a series of lines of bright green text on it. This just wasn’t generating enough light though and holding still for 30 seconds was a nightmare. So I settled on reducing the exposure time to around 15 seconds and firing a flash with a green gel from my right during the shot.

An overlay layer, a graduated filter and some curves later and the shot was done.

I’ll do the same shot again with the friend who’s volunteered, but I’ve learned some lessons along the way.

1. Long exposures are impossible to manage for the model.
2. It’s impossible to auto focus a Canon 400D in the dark, so you need to get the focus set and then stay still until the light goes off and the shot’s taken
3. Make sure the strobe is behind a diffuser otherwise you’ll get hot spots
4. The text on the monitor needs to be bigger to be legible (and will be reversed (duh) on the image
5. Even if you’re planning on having one side of the face dark, you need to be careful – no light means no detail. If I lift the image on the left side the ear is just a lump of noise
6. Straighter on to the monitor would have helped the text a little more

The latest challenge, Daily Ritual, was set by Shereen a few weeks back. Talking to those who submitted, I think this probably caught the flavour of the game perfectly. Everyone seemed to go through the same series of emotions, from “what will I take” to “I’ve loads of ideas” and ending up with “this is really tough”. The final images though are all good, and all different – it’s interesting the different take people ended up with.

Though hygiene seems important!

The entries for this round were:

Geoff -

Stuart -

Gordon -

Shereen -

Paul -

Darrell -

It’s interesting that three of us picked self portrait shots.

This months winner, able to take home plaudits and bragging rights is Gordon. The shot of the aftershave bottle really impressed me with the complimentary colours and the strong shadows leading you into the feeling that it’s a morning thing.

Gordon, you’re up – next theme when you’re ready and we’ll have another go.

I’ve been fortunate enough to get my hands on a little Marumi ring flash unit for a while. Mostly I’m planning to use it to take some Macro shots, but I’m told ring flash works well for portrait light as well.

Given my reluctance to post (and therefore take) portraiture, I’m not going to comment on this aspect. Although, for reference, Marvin had a bit of the ring flash about him. And now I think of it, he was taken with a 100mm Macro lens as well….

… Anyway.

The nice thing about Ring Flash is the ability to get light to the front of your lens. When you’re shooting at a distance of 30cm and you’re using F22, you need a lot of light in a little area. Straight on flash can be an issue. It actually makes it almost possible to shoot Macro hands free.

This is actually a bobble my daughter has for her hair.

the Marumi seems like a decent little light. It’s a lot cheaper than the others on the market and I guess you do get what you pay for. The Marumi only has one bulb so no individual side control as offered by Canon ring flash. Also, it’s fully ETTL so there’s no manual control of the light (unless you use flash compensation on your camera).

However it does come with a set of adapter rings so mounting on a selection of lenses is possible, and it’s pretty quick to charge and recharge as well.

The light it throws off is pretty consistent, certainly meeting the challenges I gave it over the last day or two.

If you’re going to be spending your life with macro, invest in the Canon or Nikon ring flash. If you want something to supplement your gear or you’re shooting on a budget, I’d suggest taking a look at the Marumi.

Oh, and there is one for you Nikonites as well.

“You make me very angry...very angry..” – Marvin the Martian.

Life. That is. How dare it get in the way of me playing with cameras.

“Oh, I'm going to blow it up, it obstructs my view of Venus.“ – Marvin the Martian

There’s about 1 week left in the Daily Rituals challenge.

If you haven’t taken the photograph yet, its time to get those thinking caps on!

There’s a macro themed competition this year, so I’ve been trying to get the hang of macro photography. I guess the stereotype for the competition will be an inset shot and so I started out with those because I love stereotypes and it’s a decent way to practice focusing.

I ended up converting this to B&W as part of my messing about with the image and actually quite liked it.

I’d love it to be sharper though.

Been a while since I posted something just because it’s Friday…

If you hate HDR, look away now…

(I kind of expect this to turn up on one of those 50 images that prove HDR is evil sites….)

I’m playing with a new add on for Photoshop (Well, new to me anyway).

I’ll put a write up about my thoughts with it later in the week, but I wanted to throw up an image now so I could look at it in the cold light of day and see what I think.

Sometimes with these things I can get a little target blind, seeing only what I want to see, not the actual picture as a whole. It’s good to reflect a little.

Anyway, this picture was originally taken in December 2007. It’s always been on my pile of “I wish it was better…”, it seemed like a good sample image for the new utility.