Quickie

Last week a client asked me to do some product shots that he needed in a hurry for a promotional campaign. He has ten pairs of sunglasses to photograph with the country flags on the lenses for each land competing in the forthcoming football world cup. Time was of the essence so I decided to shoot them in my front room.

 The products

Another friend recently asked for advice on using a Somikon "Studio Box"  which she'd recently purchased so I used the sunglasses as a test so that I could show here the results that can be obtained from this piece of equipment.

I set up the studio box on a table in my sitting room and placed the glasses on the bottom. Using my Canon 5d MKII with a 50mm lens and my Benbo tripod.

To prevent my constantly bending over to look through the viewfinder, I attached my camera to my Samsung Galaxy tablet using the free DSLRdashboard software which is available from the Google Play store. This software shows me the captured image and I can zoom in and out to check focus etc. The software also has the option to save the images onto the device itself or just on the memory card.

I started at nine o'clock and with the help of the software and a big display, I was able to move various reflectors and light blockers around until I had an image that the client wanted.

 1st set-up. Too many reflections

The set-up I ended up using.

Another piece of equipment that I put to use were my Phottix Odin wireless flash triggers. These are quite simply, fantastic flash triggering devices. As they are wireless, they can fire the flash around corners and out of line of sight. With more than 2500 exposures I have not had one single misfire. You can also control the individual flash compensation by thirds of a stop. 

Glamour photographer Michael Zelbel also uses these triggers and have uploaded an interesting video about them. 

With the help of all these time saving devices I was able to get a good setup which I mailed to the client. He gave me the OK and I then photographed the next nine pairs.

After converting the CR2 RAW files into high resolution JPG's, I uploaded them to a website where I can apply clipping to make the background pure white.

Total time for the job was four and a half hours.

Here's one of the finished images.

Thanks for reading.

Three different ways of using an image.

I was at Zürich airport last weekend to say goodbye to a family member.

I neglected to take a camera with me as I thought it would be a quick goodbye at the airport and then back home. 

I was mistaken.

There is an observation deck open to the public which costs only Fr 5 and affords the visitor some splendid photo opportunities so we decided to take a look.

After seeing all the aircraft taking off from such a great vantage point, I decided to take a few snaps. 

First off I used the panorama function on my Samsung Galaxy S3 to take in a wide area of the apron.

This is the view I got with five images.

Press the play button and you can use your mouse to "move around" in the image.

I then went to the other end of the observation deck and watched the larger aircraft taking off.

It was a very sunny day and I could hardly see the screen on my phone even when it was shielded by my hand. I found myself having to use reference points to guess when the aeroplane would be visible. With that in mind, I decided to use the "burstmode" on the Galaxy to make sure that I would get the 'plane in view ( the so called spray and pray method so beloved of many sports photographers ). On the Samsung Galaxy this is activated simply by holding your finger on the release button. I was making around twenty images in a few seconds.

Burst sequence on the Galaxy S3

When I got home, I had the idea of making an animated Gif of this sequence.

A quick search online led me to this website which makes free gifs using images that you upload. I simply resized all the images I needed then uploaded them. In seconds I was presented with an animated gif of the Swiss aeroplane taking off.

Animated gif, courtesy of Gifmaker.me

One of the images I decided, would make a great desktop background, so I loaded it into Snapseed. After lightening the shadows a bit and increasing the saturation a touch, I was ready to use this image on my PC.

 My new PC background

I did take several other images that day but they will have to wait for another post.

I hope you enjoyed reading this.

Earning and shooting bread...

Interesting problem last week.

The company I work for has developed a range of LED lights which can be adjusted to complement various products from meat to designer textiles.

There's a setting for meat to bring out the succulent bloodiness of fresh produce on a butcher's counter to accents to subtly highlight delicate fabrics on a mannequin in a shop window. The lights can also be dimmed without losing colour.

Anyway, I digress.

We discovered at the last minute that there wasn't a suitable image of bread that we could use. I solved this by going to the bread department of a shop where the lights are already installed and working successfully.

The baker in charge gave me a selection of products to play with and I arranged them on a wooden palette. I set the EOS 5d on my Benbo and shot the buns in a vertical orientation because I knew from studying the layout that this would be ideal. My 28 - 135 zoom allowed me to crop tightly and fill the frame as envisaged by our art department.

The setup recorded with my Samsung Galaxy

That finished, I returned and they are now, as I write this, being incorporated into a brochure.

 Close-up. Again taken with the Galaxy

 That's it for now. My next assignment is to shoot some meat and a range of designer lights.

By the way. If you want to know more about these LED lights, my company has produced a microsite where all your questions will be answered. You'll find it here.

Thanks for reading.

Photography in the evening

T'was a full day of photography yesterday.

I spent the morning photographing a new lighting set up at Zaugg AG, a large construction company based in Rohrbach.

The afternoon and evening were spent about 10 kilometers (six miles) away surprisingly enough, in a another construction firm also with new premises by the name of Koenig.

Of particular importance to us was the exterior lighting provided by the company for whom I work, Regent lighting.

Dusk is the best time to photograph "night time" images as you sill get detail in the sky. Unfortunately, you only have about 20 minutes to a half an hour before it gets completely black and featureless.

Luckily, darkness is coming earlier as we draw towards the end of the year and that meant that dusk (or Dämmerung as it's called in German) is earlier. I took some twilight photos for Regent earlier this year and had to wait until a quarter to ten for it to start to get dark. Last night I began at a quarter to eight.

Luckily I have a standard exposure which I use for twilight shots. I set the exposure to 2.5 seconds at f10 and bracket one and a half f/stops each side. Then I combine all three later into a HDR which I DON'T (most of the time) Tone-Map.

Here's a picture I took of my EOS 5 on the tripod. I used my new Samsung Galaxy phone to test it^s night time capabilities.

 Taken with the Samsung Galaxy

This image however is the finished HDR picture.

Taken at 20:04 in the evening

 That's it for now. Have a great weekend.

Tom