Q & A : How do I make a High Key portrait?

To ask a question simply send an email to ross@thephotovideoguy.ca Reader Jens sent in the following question. "I have seen some portraits called high key on the web.  The picture looks very light and the background is completely washed out, but there is still lots of detail.  How do I do this?  I have a Nikon D7100, a 105mm micro and a SB-910 flash.  I think I need a background and more flashes but I am not sure.  Is this an expensive method? Can you help?"

Thanks for writing in Jens and yes I can help.  High key as a style has come in and out of favour over a long time.  I like the look myself and it's pretty easy to do.  You will need at least one, probably two, more flashes but you don't have to spend a ton of money on the other flashes since purely manual ones will do.

It will help if you have a flash meter but it isn't completely necessary.  I will tell you how to do it without a flash meter using all the flashes in manual mode for simplicity.  You will definitely need a white background, preferably a paper roll to reduce wrinkle shadows, a background stand of some kind and a diffuser of some sort for your SB-910.  Fortunately you have a D7100 that supports Nikon's Creative Lighting System so this gets easier to get your flash off camera.

Let's work back to front.

Start by putting your paper roll on the background stands and rolling it out to make a smooth backdrop right to the floor and forward on the floor a bit.  You want white on the ground for more reflection.

Put a simple manual flash head on either side of the background and angle them so the beams "cross" each other to make even light coverage on the white paper.  Set the flashes at full power to start and make sure that their slave mode is enabled.  This will cause them to fire when they detect your main flash going off.

Put a mark a few feet in front of the flashes where your model with stand or sit.

Put your SB-910 in manual mode at say ¼ power and put it on a stand and use a soft box.  If you are doing only head shots, a 20" x 20" soft box will do the job, go bigger for more coverage.  A good place to start is the Lastolite Ezybox Hotshoe.  I recommend the Joe McNally version for high key because the box is lined with white instead of silver, producing a softer light.  The box comes with the bracket for your flash, you will need a light stand and tilter bracket as well.  If you already have a flash diffusion system, you can get by with what you have.

Position the soft box so it is in front of the model and aiming down towards the model.  This produces a sort of beauty dish style light but one that is softer.

Set your D7100 to Commander mode so the popup unit will trip the SB-910 but not contribute to the light.  You might need to fiddle with the sensor orientation on the SB-910 to get it to read the popup.  If this is a hassle or you are shooting right under the soft box, you will need a set of radio triggers.  Get the Cactus V5 system and you are good to go.  They don't do TTL but you will be just fine without it, and it doesn't really work for high key anyways.

What you want is the light on the background to be AT LEAST two stops brighter than the light on your model.  So if your test exposure says that you get a very nice exposure of the model at 1/125 and f/5.6, you want the exposure on the background that gives completely white response to be at least 1/125 at f/11.  This is why you turn the back flashes up high and the front one down a bit, to help get this ratio happening.  You aren't using TTL because your camera would be trying to turn down the background making the model silhouette out.  This is where manual is best and actually easiest.

I've attached a simple diagram so you can see what I mean.  Keep your main light close to the subject so it's really soft.  You may need to dial down the power on the SB-910 to get the right ratio, just keep adjusting until you get the initial exposure on the face right and then manipulate the power on the two rear flashes so they are at least two stops brighter.  This will give you the washed out background, some nice spill around the model's periphery and that high key look.

Now start experimenting with some over exposure of the main exposure.  If the "correct" exposure is 1/125 at f/5.6, shoot at f/5, f/4.5 and f/4 to see which you like best.  You'll be overexposing the background as well but there's a lot of subjectivity that goes into what the "right" exposure from your main light is.

Now, if you have a flash meter, it gets easier because you just meter the light coming off the background when the rear flashes fire and then set the output level on the main flash to be at least two stops less.  What does this get you?  It saves you time getting to your starting point.

Ideal Gear Scenario

• 3 Flash Heads of similar output, manual mode, output power control, slave function
• 2 Light Stands with hotshoe flash mounts
• 1 Light Stand, Boom optional
• 1 Softbox, flash bracket and tilter head
• 1 Background Stand Kit
• 1 Wide Roll White Background Paper
• 1 Radio Trigger Set from Camera to Main Flash
• 1 Flash Meter

Note that the gear listed is going to be useful for a lot more than just high key portraits and will be valuable for all kinds of different shooting scenarios.  I've recently discovered the Lastolite Hilite, a dedicated popup background specifically for high key.  It's a 6' x 7' pop up system with an outer white diffusion panel and an inner white reflector stitched together by separators about 16" wide.  It comes with four 16" rods to hold the front and back sections apart and has zippers on all four sides that open to allow you to get the front of the flash heads inside the enclosure.  It's not inexpensive but it is readily portable and collapses into a disk about three feet in diameter.  I've just ordered one in and will provide a review in the future.

Thanks for the question, I hope that this has been useful.

The Travelling Carnival

When I was growing up in small towns, the annual visit of the summer carnival was something to look forward to with excitement and fear.  They would bring rides and neat treats, and scary images and animals and in the more distant past "freaks".  Carnies are a very unique group of people and while things have tamed down a lot in nearly half a century, there's still a bit of magic and a lot of fun in the travelling carnival. This past weekend the show came to Newmarket, and while the weather was not good, given our endless winter, families and then later the teens came out to get out of the subdivisions and into a bit of fun and sparkle.  The carnies have been struggling, you can tell, but they were all very pleased to see us photographing them, the other patrons were pleasant and even tried to avoid "crossing in front of the camera" to prevent a picture from being ruined.  This was no issue since the primary goal was longer exposures and a ghosting quest.

I was lucky to have NCC member Isabel come with me, as a peer photographer, not a tag-along and she has self described and the fact that I have processed a couple of images as black and whites is due ENTIRELY to her inspiration.

The travelling carnival is a piece of the past that still exists in the face of always-on tech.  I suppose it's because I am of the generation of Rush's Lakeside Park, that I love going to photograph them and it was very cool to have Iz laughing beside me.  I do wish that the carnies were more commercially successful but it is what it is.

Since folks ask regularly about my workflow, it's pretty straightforward.

1. Copy the images from the card to a hard drive
2. Open them in Photo Mechanic and scan through the images employing judicious use of the  DELETE key
3. Import the remainder into Lightroom
4. Apply the lens profile correction to all imported images
5. Process as desired
6. Export as 1024 pixels on the long side at 72dpi as high quality JPEGs
7. Open the exported JPEGs in Photoshop and apply the Digimarc digital watermark filter to all the images

In this editing session, I used Lightroom 4.4 for all the core editing as I wanted the images in my regular catalog, not the LR 5 test catalog.  The black and white conversions were done in Silver Efex Pro 2 (Ghosts in the Fair) and Perfect Black and White (Ageless).  They are very different plugins but through competitive offers you can have the entire OnOne Perfect Photo Suite and the entire Nik Collection (until the Goog kills it) for about $300, money well spent.

All my images were shot on a Canon 1D Mark IV using a Canon 16-35/2.8L lens mounted on a Really Right Stuff tripod and ball head.  I did try using a Hahnel remote but being powered it kept turning itself off so I just went with the 2s self timer in the camera.  All exposures were in manual mode using experience as a guide for the first frame and then moving around based on what I saw.

If you have one of these travelling carnivals come to your town, take advantage to go out and make images.  You'll have way more latitude than at one of the big theme parks, and the vibe is completely different.  Plus, you will definitely get some very cool images when you apply yourself.

Tips to Make Better Photos : Shooting Hockey

Shooting sports is not my forte.  I shot soccer and football a million years ago in High School and have been shooting Polo for a couple of seasons.  My friend Susan's son plays in the OJHL for the Aurora Tigers and I went out once last year to provide her some coaching support.  This year was busy but I've been pushing to make time to attend local games.  We're into the Quarter Finals of the OJHL playoffs and the action is great!

What I love about OJHL hockey is that the young players are really committed to the game and are NEVER going through the motions.  I actually prefer this hockey to the NHL, but that's my choice.  I can attend a lot of games at a very fair admittance price, get very close to the ice and shoot like a mad fool without being in the way of the other spectators.  I have the good fortune of being able to attend local team's games as both the Newmarket Hurricanes' and the Aurora Tigers' home ice is reasonably close.

These shots are from a recent game between the Newmarket Hurricanes and the Whitby Fury.  I thought it might be interesting to share some of the things I have learned the hard way about shooting hockey.  First, you have to know the game, at least to some extent.  I surely don't know the ins and outs of hockey as well as my wife does, but well enough to set up for shots and to be continuously learning to anticipate where the puck will be, to paraphrase the Great One.

So to get started, one of the first things I learned is that the lighting in Junior hockey arenas is pretty horrible.  It looks ok (mostly) to the eye but is a mess of colour temperature.  In the Ray Twinney Centre in Newmarket, my friend Brian Watts, who shoots hockey professionally, warned me of the "red" corners.  The ice looked fine to me live but once I downloaded the photos the span of white balance was all over the place.  I have tried arriving early to do a custom white balance but that didn't work out well because of the amount of variance so now I shoot AWB and correct in post.  The other thing about the lighting is that it is dimmer than you think it is.  I've shot everywhere between ISO 800 and ISO 2500 and now go in with the ISO set to 2500 and live with slighter reduced tonal range and nominal noise.  This is one place where the low light capability of the 1Dx blows me away.

My shooting kit for hockey is as follows;

• Canon 1Dx in Av, ISO2500 EV, +1 2/3, Focus Tracking in Mode 6, AI Servo, Evaluative Metering
• Sigma 120-300/2.8 lens either wide open or f/4 and RRS lens plate
• Gitzo 3551 Carbon Fibre Monopod with RRS MH-02 Head
• Black Rapid HD Sling Strap

That's pretty much it.  If I want "environmental" images, I put my Leica M9 with Zeiss 35/2 in my coat pocket.  As much as I love the Leica, rangefinders aren't optimal for sports and the high ISO performance need in hockey rinks isn't wonderful.

The 1Dx has Canon's new case based focus tracking module and I've tried all the different cases to shoot hockey.  The 5D Mark III has a similar system and I find that Case 6 for subjects that are fast moving and change direction erratically works well for shooting with the long glass.  I get a lot fewer missed shots because the AF is not transitioning in accordance with the game.  In this mode the AF works with me, not against me.  I can now say I understand why pro sports shooters love this camera.  In fairness most all semi-pro and pro level gear has focus tracking of some type built in, but I find the Canon system so fast and so easy to use, I love it.  I set a single focus point and follow the action, using the back focus button (AF-On) to enable the AF in advance so it's locked when I press the shutter.  Obviously I have the AF set to AI Servo mode.  I've tried spot, center weight and evaluative metering patterns and have gone back to evaluative.  It's not perfect but nothing in a hockey rink is neutral grey so my experiment with spot metering linked to the AF point produced a disproportionately high failure rate.

The Sigma lens is extremely sharp. There are Lightroom profiles for it and I give the Sigma folks credit for their design because the corrections are relatively small, the lens is that good out of the box.  The only downside to the Sigma is that it is big.  I mean really big.  I'm no tiny guy, but if I had to handhold this glass for a full period, I'd need a chiropractor, a sports masseuse and bed rest.  So I go with the Gitzo monopod and the Really Right Stuff MH-02 Monopod head.  This head is AWESOME.  It offers a smooth moving tile mechanism so I can loosen it off and have smooth but not sloppy tilting while panning with my body.  This is a new monopod head for me and I'm looking forward to the coming Polo season as it will help a lot.  By mounting a Really Right Stuff plate on the lens foot, I can have the foot in the LR clamp on the monopod and leave the Black Rapid strap with the Really Right Stuff FAB adapter attached at the same time.  Very handy and very secure.

From a shooting perspective, I find arriving early at the arena and surveying potential shooting locations is critical.  Most town arenas have pretty beaten up glass and shooting through it isn't optimal.  You want to be close enough so you aren't cropping out 80% of the shot but also high enough so you aren't shooting partially through the glass.  I can shoot manual but find that Aperture preferred works well for me.  I set the lens at f/2.8 or f/4, depending on the available light and find in most arenas that with an ISO of 2500, I will get shutter speeds above 1/500 of a second.  Yes the lens has optical stabilization and yes I am using a monopod but that doesn't change the fact that hockey moves FAST.  In the sample pictures, I am able to mostly freeze the players yet in most cases, the puck is still blurred.  I like this as it conveys the sense of action.  You'll also note that by default I dial in +1 2/3 stops of exposure compensation to keep the whites from going grey.  I tried just dialing in +2 but I kept running into situations at certain points on the rink where the shot just blows right out.   I can add the 1/3 stop in post processing but if the important stuff gets blown out completely, there's no bringing it back.

Hockey is a blast to shoot.  I'm starting to wonder what sport I will shoot when the season is over other than Polo.  Junior hockey is a professional league and the OJHL is very supportive of photographers (no selling of images is the major rule).  Many other sports leagues are very protective of photographic rights or are against photography at all where youngsters are playing.  If your child is playing, it may be easier for you.

I'm hopeful that both my local teams go all the way.  They have a wonderful rivalry and it would mean plenty of games for me to shoot before season's end.  Many of the players I have photographed this year are going away to school on hockey scholarships next year, so we'll see a new group of players in the 2013-2014 season.  If you want to learn to shoot hockey, your local teams are a great place to go shoot and you'll be supporting your local community.

A Proposal for your 2013 Photography Project - 10 Steps to Photos That Matter

Yeah, it's that time, the time for resolutions and self-promises and all manner of other stuff that generally develops a best before date of February 3rd. My proposal to you.  Build a plan to become a better photographer.

Sounds simple huh?  Really it is.  And like many ideas, it has been influenced by a number of sources and reinforced by the opinions of others that I will listen to from time to time. So here goes.

1.  Repetition is the mother of skill.  That's why you practice the same kata a thousand times in martial arts.  Even if you aren't making a photo, practice changing the key settings on your camera without taking the camera from your eye.  You'll be surprised what a huge difference this will make for you.  Repeat daily.  Test yourself.  Change the ISO without taking your eye from the viewfinder.  If you cannot do it, then you had best do some practicing.

2.  Shoot everything.  We're in this for fun and joy, not necessarily to earn revenue.   If you are really attracted to an idea shoot it a lot.  If you aren't, give it a try to find out if you might like it.  I'm not a fan of watching sports.  When I was first offered the opportunity to photograph Polo, I wondered why the heck anyone would want to photograph this, let alone watch it.  Turns out, I love shooting Polo.  Many of the people I can live without, but the athletes and riders impress me.

3.  Becoming a good photographer requires generalization, you should be able to competently shoot a variety of topics and styles.  Experiment!  The cost is pretty darn low.  Try new things, but expect that one shoot does not an expert make.

4.  Becoming great will require specialization.  Figure out what kinds of photography you really enjoy and invest time in that.  It doesn't matter what it is, but it's very hard to really push the envelope of learning if you are trying to do everything well.  It's easier than you think.  Ask yourself questions about the kinds of things you like and you don't like.  I can shoot weddings.  I don't.  I don't enjoy the process so I don't spend time becoming a great wedding photographer.  I love wildlife.  I buy books, learn biology, look at great wildlife photographers and try to copy what they do, and shoot lots.  Sometimes I even get images I want to keep.

5.  Don't fall into the "daily dose" claptrap.  This is the time of year where people sign up for 365 projects.  Don't do it.  While you may be able to make a decent photograph each and every day, odds are against you so why end up with hundreds of barely passable images.  Make images that matter, not images that fulfill a quota.  Think, plan and shoot.  365s are the equivalent of Fire, Ready, Aim

6.  Look at the great works of photographers in your areas of specialization.  If you are committed to street, look at Cartier-Bresson, if sports, look at Dave Black, if portraiture, look at Yousef Karsh.  Don't know where to look for inspiration?  Go to 500px.com and search your topic of interest.  Be prepared to be amazed and perhaps even a bit discouraged.  Seeing great work is challenging and we get to rise to the challenge.

7.  Seek critiques from photographers you trust.  Non-photographers don't see like photographers and won't be able to help you.  Flickr is not the place to seek help, because all you get is "great photo" suckups.  You can post an out of focus picture of a toilet bowl on Flickr and someone will tell you its great art.  I would not recommend sending images in to Scott Kelby's web show The Grid either unless you want your self-esteem eviscerated.  Mr. Kelby is an incredible instructor and I think he's a very talented and funny guy, but I don't care for his critique style.  The hosts take too much pleasure in being nasty when they don't see something that they like.   However, I'd pay Joe McNally for a critique because his approach is so developmental.  I'd also shy away from the pay by the hour booth style crap such as I've seen at the Imaging show.  I saw and heard a lot of really horrible guidance from alleged professionals there.  A good critique is about you, not about the person offering the critique.  Massive egos make lousy coaches.

8.  Learn to edit viciously.  Just because you went out for four hours to make images doesn't mean you will come back with greatness.  I have spent hundreds of hours shooting, and upon review on the computer, determined that I might be better off taking up wallpapering.  I am constantly frustrated by my own work.  The X key in Lightroom is your friend.  Don't lie to yourself about whether the image is good or not.  If you feel it's not, it's not.

9.  Take classes, workshops, One on Ones, video trainings, shoot days, field trips.  Get books by the photographers you admire, if not to learn their technique, to have something to emulate.  Focus on the things you want to learn.  Basics are fine, but they aren't enough. Be able to articulate what you want to learn and go learn those things.  Don't do a basic field trip if you want to get better at macro photography of wildflowers, unless that's the curriculum.  If you focus on portraits, make it complete and learn portrait retouching.  If you focus on landscapes, learn about the zone system and how to expose in camera and post-process effectively.  If you want to really learn about HDR, take a class, get a book and here's your first tip.  Clouds are NOT black.  If you want to work with studio flash, learn to use a light meter.

10.  Create constriction.  Go out with only one lens, or only one focal length on the zoom.  Pretend your memory card can only hold 12 images and make each one count.  Shoot only from a tripod.  Shoot only from one knee.  Shoot only in portrait mode.  Shoot only at ISO100.  Require motion blur in every image.  Not only think outside the box, smash the box to bits.

So that's it.  Your mission, should you choose to accept it.

Happy New Year!

Ross

Tethering your Nikon to your computer

Canon owners are probably aware of the EOS Utility that simply allows tethering of your Canon DSLR to your computer whether running Windows or OS X.  It comes in the box with the camera,  Nikon users have to look further afield and a couple of club members were asking me for a tethered solution for their Nikons if they don't already own Lightroom or Aperture. If you use a Macintosh, the tethering app you want is called Sofortbild.  It's done by a fellow from Germany and he does a great job of keeping it up to date.  You can get it on the Mac App Store or download it directly from here.  It's a simple app that does what it promises giving you simple and efficient tethering from your Nikon to your Mac using a simple USB cable.

If you use Windows, check out Camera Control from www.diyphotobits.com  They have a compatibility listing posted on their site.

Both tools are free.  Be aware that there are a slew of chargeable apps for tethering but I wanted to focus on tools that work and don't hit your wallet.

iPhone : Great panoramas with Microsoft Photosynth

 Photosynth has been around for a while, as a sort of skunkworks project from some really clever folks at Microsoft.  Photosynth on the PC allows you to do some pretty cool photo tricks and the app has been enhanced to facilitate posting images to Bing as a sort of share your work scenario.  Those are not the things that excited me however.  What is wicked cool is how simple the iPhone app makes the creation of panoramas. Now certainly you can create panoramas with your DSLR both manually or with a glut of obscenely expensive tools.  You could also go with the Gigapan system that programmatically uses servos and information you program in to create incredible panoramic images.  (I like the tech, but not the perpetual license to use your images).

But as I am prone to say, perhaps at the risk of babble, "the best camera is the one you have with you", and I, like many of you, always have my iPhone and with the 4S, the camera is pretty decent.  Photosynth for iPhone does many things but most importantly it makes creating panoramas scary simple.

Launch the app and you follow the process to capture images and then stitch them together.  There are tips sites as well but I found the app so simple and so powerful that I am doing panoramas a lot, certainly not all good, but lots because it is so simple and fun.  Putting the 4S in one of the little cases with a tripod mount and you are set to make some pretty darn nice images.  At the time of this posting, Photosynth is free.  If you have an iPhone, have ever fired up the camera and would like to try making panoramas without getting a solid headache or spending a fortune on added kit, get this app.

5 out of 5

New iPad app from Kelby Training - Light It

I really get a lot out of my membership in the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP).  Today I received a release advising of a new iPad magazine and delivery application called Light It.  It is produced by Kelby Media Group, who are well respected for the quality of their materials and sessions.  The magazine focuses on, unsurprisingly, studio lighting and off camera flash.  Since we all hate red-eye and that horrible deer in xenon lights look that comes from on camera or in camera flash, this magazine looks like it will be really useful.

The first issue is free, and Mr. Kelby's dark sense of humour might appreciate that it's a bit like a heroin dealer, the first taste is free.  Kelby Media Group produces excellent content that is not only informative but visually rich and the first issue of Light It delivers on the promise.

Yes you do need an iPad to use the magazine but if you are a photographer and don't yet have an iPad, here's another substantive reason to get one.  I use mine for a multitude of purposes including backup of my memory cards in the field during a shoot, so there's another justification.

The layout of the magazine is clean and elegant, the content is rich and instantly usable and I'm very excited to find this resource.  I've focused on the articles and have not yet determined how future issues will be delivered or what the cost will be, but given my positive experiences with NAPP and Kelby Training, I'm pretty confident it will be a great value.  Perhaps they will use the Newstand functionality that is coming in IOS5.

Take a look, I think you'll be impressed.

Peace.

Ross