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How to Light a Portrait with a Single LED

23 October 2009, 10:01 am

Previously we explored the idea of creating beautiful portraits with a single LED. In this post, Christina N Dickson will give 2 short tutorials on the LED portrait.

The LED for On-Location:

There will be times in your on location portraiture sessions when the available light is just too dim or weak to create an even portrait. Getting rid of shadows and adding catch-lights in this scenario is impossible unless you bring in another light source. An LED is a quick and non-imposing way of adding just enough light to create an artistic flair to your portrait.

1. Position your subject near the primary light source. In this case, window light is my main light and illuminates my subject. I turn my subject into the light until her skin is appears soft and luminous.

2. Add the LED. Rather than the LED acting as my main light, I use it to soften the transfer edges of the highlights and shadows along my subjects face. I am able to maintain shape and depth along her face without having harsh and distracting shadows.

3. Pull the LED away from your subject: If the LED is too close to your subject, the lighting will become flat – especially if we are using the LED as a fill light. Move the LED away from your subject as much as possible while still filling in and softening the shadows just a bit.

The LED for Studio:

If you don’t own strobes or speed lights, you may not be as limited with off camera lighting as you think. LED’s can help you create extremely artistic portraits without a lot of financial investment. Here’s a look at using the LED for a studio like portrait.

1. Place your subject away from your backdrop. If the area behind your subject is dark, you’ll create a nice, black backdrop – no matter where you are. For this portrait. my subject is 5 feet in front of a dark hallway wall.

2. Get rid of all other light. To create a contrasty portrait, eliminate other light sources. Though you are using a single LED, the light will be more even and controlled without other competing light sources.

3. Position your LED. For a close up portrait with no other light sources, you will want to position the LED, 1 foot above and 2 feet away from your subject. This distance will enable you to cast light evenly along the face, and you won’t have to worry about distracting shadows falling under the eyes or the edge of the nose.

An LED can be purchased at Wal Mart or Amazon for $10 to $20 and is a pretty simple solution to acquiring an additional, easy to use light source for any off camera need.

Post from: Digital Photography School - Photography Tips.

How to Light a Portrait with a Single LED

Filed under Google Reader Shares, Syndicated. Tagged artistic flair, artistic portraits, Christina N Dickson, dark hallway, LED, Light, light move, location portraiture, Mart, portrait, Portrait Photography, post, source

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Flickr Adds People Tagging. And It’s Better Than Facebook’s.

21 October 2009, 5:00 pm

My mother always yells at me when she looks at my pictures on Flickr, saying that I don’t take enough pictures of people. The truth is, I do, I just put most of those on Facebook because it’s a billion times better for pictures of your friends because you can easily tag them. Now Flickr is gaining the same functionality — but better.

Its new “People In Photos” feature is long overdue. With it, you’ll be able to select a picture and start typing a person’s name, which will then scan your Flickr contacts to see who it should add as a tag to the picture. And like Facebook, you’ll be able to draw an outline around someone’s face to show exactly who they are in the picture.

But the reason this feature is even better than Facebook’s functionality is the opt-out and opt-in options. While most users love the people tagging for photos in Facebook, just about everyone wishes there were more options that allow you to opt-out of being tagged in certain photos. You can untag yourself, or block people from tagging you, but there isn’t a good case-by-case method of doing this.

Flickr is offering that by allowing you to opt-out of being tagged in individual photos. And once you opt-out, unlike Facebook, no one can put you back into that photo. You can also set who is able to tag you in photos. And you can set who is able to tag people in photos that you shared.

The stength Facebook has over Flickr is that you probably have many more contacts, or at the very least, actual friends on Facebook. Because Flickr relies on your Flickr contact list, it probably won’t be as useful as Facebook’s, at least at first. But this is a great incentive to get you adding more contacts on Flickr, and encouraging your friends to sign up.

Users have long been working around Flickr’s lag of people photo tagging by doing it manually in the tag section of pictures. Now it’s getting a whole lot better. Undoubtedly, some users will hate this feature, but they can opt-out entirely from being tagged.

When you’re tagged in a photo, it will show up in your recent activity stream. And Flickr has revamped users’ profiles to show pictures you’re tagged in.

[photo: flickr/spuz]

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Filed under Google Reader Shares, Syndicated. Tagged case method, Company & Product Profiles, contact list, facebook, feature, flickr, photo, picture, whole lot, Yahoo

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10 Simple Freezer Tricks to Save You Time and Money [Clever Uses]

20 October 2009, 1:00 pm

It's that time of year again, when our freezers are filled with the summer's bounty in preparation for the long winter months ahead. Get the most out of your freezer, and learn a few of its other uses, with these great tricks.

Photo by: Stevedepolo

Freezers are hard working appliances that can do more than just keep your bagged veggies chilled. Try on one of these 10 ideas below and see if you can make it pull double duty, or at least keep it running a little more efficiently:

Can I freeze that? A Guide to Freezer Do's and Don'ts

More often than not things can be saved from expiration date, mold or for a later use, by freezing them. But how do you know what can be frozen and how long it keeps? The National Center for Home Food Preservation has done the dirty work for you and made a list! (Original Post) Photo by gregoryjameswalsh

Unstick Plastic Wrap in the Freezer

Plastic Wrap loses it's static cling when placed in the freezer. It will attach to any bowl or plate that needs covering, but eliminates it sticking back on itself. (Original Post) Photo by Mike Wade

Freeze Ground Meat in Small Portions with a Chopstick

The extra 10 minutes it takes to thaw ground meat in the microwave is time you could have spent doing something else. Eliminate it by pressing a chopstick into the meat on the outside of a zip top bag. It will allow you to break off as much as you need without thawing the entire amount. (Original Post)

Preserve Surplus Summer Herbs for Winter Use

Fresh herbs bought from your local grocer can cost more than buying an entire plant. Try chopping and covering them with water, stock or oil before freezing. They'll be ready for any dish, all winter long. (Original Post) Photo by suavehouse113

Make Your Freezer More Efficient

Freezing used plastic bottles or jugs (milk and orange juice work great) full of water will help keep your freezer at a level temperature and use less energy to maintain it. (Original Post) Photo by Sarah Rae Trover

Save Your Hard Drive in the Freezer

A hard drive that is left in the freezer for 24 hours and then quickly inserted back into your machine can make a recovery. Or at least long enough to back things up before it says adios forever. (Original Post)

Tame Freezer Burn to Keep Food Tasty

Freezer burn can get the best of everything in your freezer. To make sure it doesn't happen as frequently, try keeping your freezer at a more steady temperature and keeping out as much air as possible. (Original Post)

Make Freezer Jam as an Easy Alternative to Canning

Freezer Jam is an easy way to use up remaindered fruits and doesn't even require a waterbath or any other canning know-how. Just a little pectin. (Original Post) Photo by Jennie Faber

Convert a Chest Freezer into a Super-Efficient Refrigerator

Chest freezers use 1/10th of the energy that an upright refrigerator does. With the addition of a thermostat, a chest freezer can end up being the ideal place to keep things cool, without freezing them. (Original Post)

Frost-Proof Meat with "Drugstore Wrap"

Zip top bags and Seal-a-Meal systems can be time consuming and inefficient. Try kicking it old school and wrap your meats in freezer paper for a frost free freezer experience. (Original Post) Photo by Rio Designs

How do you put your freezer to good use—apart from the obvious? Have something to add to the list above? Sound off in the comments.

Filed under Google Reader Shares, Syndicated. Tagged Clever Uses, cooking, Don, freezer, freezing, fresh herbs, ground meat, home food preservation, Household, Jennie Faber Convert, Kitchen, local grocer, Mike Wade Freeze, national center for home food preservation, original, photo, post, Rio, Sarah Rae, Summer Herbs, Top, Winter, Winter Use

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High ISO High Noon

16 October 2009, 4:31 pm

Entirely by chance, both Ctein and I, unbeknownst to each other, were writing short essays on the same topic at the same time. So I thought I'd put them up together. This wasn't planned, it just happened. I took the short term, existing-technology view of high ISOs, and Ctein (at least at the end of his piece) took the infinite-possibility, far future view; not even really contradictory, despite my indulgent "high noon" header....

Mike: Not Needy and Nothing If Not Conservative

I was rather surprised that the result to Wednesday's poll turned out to be a classic bell curve; I thought it might well be an infinitely-rising curve, with the most people choosing the highest number, or, in effect, "all the speed I can get."

So what was my own answer to the question "When you're shopping for a digital camera, what's your minimum standard for high ISO of good quality?" I chose ISO 1600. [I waffled between 400 and 800. —Ctein.] I'm not greedy. Not needy. My requirements are modest. And Lord knows I'm nothing if not conservative. (Big smile.)

The reason has its basis in pure empiricism, as usual. I've simply observed over the years that with every digital camera I've owned or used extensively, from the meanest digicam to the Nikon D700 and D3, no matter how good the high ISOs look, lower ISOs look better.

Don't get me wrong—I'm very grateful for the high-quality high ISO speeds we all now enjoy. I spent the first half-decade of my photographic life shooting a black-and-white film (Kodak Plus-X) that I rated at E.I. 80...and usually shot with a yellow filter! Speed was a constant...issue. And I distinctly remember a brief window in the early years of this millennium when digital image quality had caught up to film at low ISOs but not at high ones, and I'd encounter forum postings from pros saying that before switching to digital, they would have to hold out for high-ISO performance from digital that at least matched that of film.

That period sure didn't last for very long. Canon led the way, but very soon all digital cameras matched film’s best speed. And then exceeded it.

What I do today is simply shoot at the camera’s best ISOs, unless I can’t, in which case I shift to something higher. Doesn’t everybody?

For any given camera, as ISOs increase, image quality deteriorates. It’s not just a question of noise. Sharpness and resolution subtly degrade, as does the richness and purity of colors, dynamic range, and so on. Noise intrudes too, as everyone knows, but I suspect that people who say things like “quality is identical from 100 to 800” are looking only at noise, and nothing else. I’m not saying I can tell the difference between 640 and 500, but there are more differences than just noise over a three-stop ISO range with the cameras I’ve tried.

One exception is that shooting specifically for B&W conversion allows a real increase in usable ISOs. Partly because chroma noise isn’t an issue—and partly, I suspect, because I’m used to grain with B&W and it doesn’t bother me! Well, it doesn’t really bother me in color, either. Not nearly as much as it bothers some. If noise is pretty, I don't mind it.

Still, with image stabilization and reasonably fast lenses, I’ve found I almost never need more than 1600—and seldom that, although it’s luxurious to have that speed in reserve. With the Nikon D3, 1600 was fully usable and 3200 was a reasonable “in a pinch” speed. With the Panasonic GF1 (although I’ve just started using it and reserve the right to change my mind as I work more with raw files), I suspect that 800 is the top “fully usable” speed and 1600 is the “in a pinch” speed. Which is okay for a digicam—it’s a lot better than my now-ancient Sony F-707. ISO 400 was really well beyond that camera's comfort level.

I have no quarrel at all with those who want more and more high ISO speed. I have no doubt they need it. At some point, however, I suspect we’ll reach “market saturation” on high ISO speeds...it’s happened that way with many other marketing/technical parameters in the history of photo techniques, from film size to lens speed. The new D3s indicates that we probably aren’t there yet. I don’t know where the market will decide to stop, but, just personally, I’m good where we are now.

From our Wednesday poll, looks like a fair number of others are reaching that point too.

Mike

Ctein: I Was Built for Comfort, But I Could Live With Speed

In the thread on the Nikon D3S, quite a few folks expressed serious doubts about the value of such high speeds, arguing, in various forms, that there isn't much merit in trying to produce fine photographs under conditions where we cannot even clearly see what we're photographing. I take firm exception to that position.

Serious, high-quality, fine-grain low-light photography (in contrast to the push-processed, available-darkness kind) has been part of the canon since at least the 1930s. When I was a noob in college in the late '60s and entirely ignorant of that canon, I clearly remember the night I wondered, "Hey, what would happen if, instead of loading with Tri-X or 2475 Recording film and pushing the bejeezus out of it [as I was accustomed to doing in my reportage photography], I set up the tripod, loaded up with Pan-X and pull-processed a bit for range, and just let the exposures take as long as they needed to?"

WOW! Gorgeous! Completely changed my artistic direction. I very quickly mastered night photography, figuring out which slow films had the best reciprocity characteristics and what the compensations needed to be to get accurate results in both B&W and color with exposure times up to 40-50 minutes. I made this one just a few years after I started on this track.

Ctein, Purple Gantry (original, with more accurate color, here)

In case you're wondering, no, I did not bracket. It sucked up enough of my life just making those 40-minute masterpieces. I made sure I got it right in one exposure. Carried a paperback and a flashlight in my bag; got a lot of reading done those nights. Metering? Meter off a highlight or a white sheet of paper and it's like boosting your meter sensitivity an order of magnitude. If I could see it, I could meter it. It went like this: meter would tell me I needed 2/3 second at ƒ/2 off of white paper. Okay, that's 5 seconds for a proper grey. Now start stopping down for depth of field. There I am at ƒ/13 for a photo like this one and the nominal exposure time's pushing over 200 seconds. The film I'm using's got a 10X reciprocity correction at 200 seconds. And so, it's reading time!

My first noteworthy bodies of work involved substantial amounts of just that kind of low-light photography (I never cared for Arthur Ollman's available-darkness "grain-o-graphs" when he showed up on the scene). That still includes some of my best photos. Two thirds of the photos in this screen required exposures of 30 seconds or more on slow film. I still routinely make multi-minute, low-light/ISO100-speed photographs (check out the Christmas in California series).

Digital sensors have better reciprocity characteristics, so my exposure times have dropped a lot the past few years; rarely do I need to go beyond a minute these days. Nonetheless, my style remains the same and the results are still artistically satisfying. Would I jump at ISO 100K? Not particularly; I'm okay with tripods and a couple of minutes between frames.

BUT...

There are lots of photos I don't make because the subject matter won't sit still for large numbers of seconds. Do I think having 1,000 times the ISO I now use would open up all sorts of artistic opportunities? Hell, yeah! Is it artistically, conceptually, and philosophically valid? Double-hell, yeah! Photography's never been merely about photographing what you could see; it's always been about photographing what you wanted to see.

Ctein

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