A Simple Headshot (of Myself)

I needed a new headshot for something recently, and I figured it might be fun to expand a little on something I started playing with while shooting my friend Mairi. I wanted to work on getting my backgrounds blown out to pure white.

I think this was mostly due to reading the great Zack Arias “White Seamless Tutorial”, and trolling around on The Strobist again. I also just got my camera back, so it was as good a time as any to put it through some paces… (Plus, I needed the practice).

So first, here is the final result after all of my fiddling:

Could have been a lot worse, I think…

So my first desire in shooting this was to play with getting the background blown to pure white. I happened to have a whiteboard in my office conference room that I figured would be a good background to start with.

The Open Source Portrait (Equipment & Environment)

As promised, I thought it might be fun/helpful to walk through a portrait shooting session from start to finish using only Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS). This is my personal workflow, and hopefully I can do the subject some justice.

A Model Idiot.

I'm going to walk through the creation of a portrait of my friend Mairi that I did not too long ago. I had been wanting to shoot with Mairi for a while, and only recently got a chance to sit down and actually do it quickly. For reference, here is one of the final results that I'll be walking through the process for:

Mairi 6 - possibly my favorite from the shoot.

I say "quickly" because this image was almost spur-of-the-moment, shot in a less than ideal location with about 10 minutes of setup to dial everything in (oh - and was shot while I was keeping an eye on my 2 year old daughter who was running around playing).

The next tutorial in this series is here:
The Open Source Portrait (Postprocessing)

Visualize Photography Lighting Setups in Blender

The most patient portrait model in the world...

Not too long ago I finally got around to picking up a decent manual flash for exploring lighting and speedlight techniques. I picked up a Yongnuo YN-560 Speedlight Flash for Canon and Nikon, and my friend Sean was kind enough to send me his old radio triggers to play with. I was mostly all set to start exploring the world of off-camera lighting...

I say mostly because though I had a rough understanding of how I wanted to use the light, I was not well versed on what could be done with it. So I spent a bit of time on the Flickr Strobist Group, and read through all of the Lighting courses on the Strobist site. There is an absolute wealth of information on the site, and I cannot recommend it enough.

Having a reference for how the contribution of different types of light will affect the final outcome is very handy for me. I've seen people who have taken the time to setup lighting diagrams where they will modify a given light for direction/angle, and cycle through many possibilities to help as a reference (Here is one cheat-sheet from DIY Photography).

This is nice, but what if I wanted to visualize the effect multiple lights will have all simultaneously? I guess I could go and shoot every, possible, variation, but I am really lazy. Plus, I don't have access to a model with the patience to sit there while I fiddle with multiple lights, multiple times.

It occurred to me that I already had a great tool for doing this visualization already installed on my computer. That tool is Blender 3D. I already had been using this open source 3D modelling tool for some time, and was familiar enough with it to be comfortable emulating my lighting setups. All I needed was a good model.

DIY Ringflash Tests

I recently had a party at my house for some co-workers of my wife, and managed to get a few of them to let me shoot some quick photos using my DIY ringflash. These are the results.

Whitney, a photo by avhell on Flickr.

Considering that I constructed the ringflash from 2 bowls bought at a dollar store, and an old plastic cup, I'm pleasantly surprised at the results. I still need to place diffusion material over the front to help soften the light a bit, but the overall effect is pleasing. I'll have a DIY tutorial on how I built the ringflash, as well as my softbox shortly.

To Randi, a photo by avhell on Flickr.

The rest of my DIY ringflash tests are here in my Flickr set.