August 22nd, 2009

Are you a Hard-Core Photo Nerd?

This article is a followup to the Extreme Macro Results post I made. It is only meant for those readers who are very technically oriented.

Nerd Out With All the Technical Details

July 4th, 2009

This post is the culmination of six months worth of research, experimentation, and refinement into high-magnification macro photography. Taking pictures of extremely small objects with extremely high resolution systems is an incredibly technical endeavor with great challenges and even greater rewards.

I’ll be posting an article for my readers interested in the nitty-gritty of the techniques and equipment used for this work.

More Ultramacro Shots

June 24th, 2009

I took these shots while on the workshop using my Phase One 645 Body and a self-made pinhole lens (body cap + coke can+ jewler’s drill + gaffe tape).

April 12th, 2009

Back when I worked primarily with film and a darkroom the options to style a finished image were relatively limited. Color palets were mostly a function of film type, the contrast and natural coloring a function of the paper, and toning could only be accomplished by chemical agents like Selenium, red wine, bleaching, and adjustments to the white balance of the darkroom enlarger. If I wanted to see how an image would look with a particular toning, contrast, or white balance it would take hours of work to produce a relatively limited range of options.

Now with Photoshop such creative experimentation can be done in seconds. Some photographers bemoan the reduction in skills required to create these different styles in the digital age, but I feel differently. Now that the photographer can see a dozen iterations of a photograph with relatively little technical effort the photographer can focus on the image rather than the process.

Below are seven different takes on image toning and styling. Strictly speaking these styles were the result of image processing (conversion from the raw file into a processed file) rather than retouching (manipulation of the processed image).

If you’re feeling sociable then leave a comment to say which style is your favorite.

Clothing, makeup, and wardrobe styling by Pearl and Company.

January 14th, 2009

One of my passions is creating traditional-chemical-based cyanotypes. This blue-toned printing process is a hands on art form in which an image is permanently printed on normal cotton rag fine art paper. Having grown up shooting film, processing the film myself, and printing the film in a traditional darkroom I love the ability to get my hands wet and create the final image rather than just “push print” and to yet again watch a latent image materialize at the bottom of a photo try after exposure to light. Since maintaining a full black+white wet darkroom based on a silver-halide process is now extremely impractical, cyanotypes allow me to tap into that magic again. Because of the chemical process it depends on cyanotypes can be done in a general purpose room and requires very little specialized gear.

After the Jump: a Step-by-Step Tutorial

January 12th, 2009

The Team:

Very few high end photographers work alone. It can take an entire team of talent, assistants, and production agents to accomplish a single finished image. This weekend I was very fortunate to be part of an amazing team photographing fashion in South Beach. The makeup artist and wardrobe-coordinator/stylist did a wonderful job of creating a look for the models that either contrasted or complimented the grungy look of the location. The three photographers (myself included) traded off shooting and assisting. Below is the team as captured by Tom and I at the end of the night. The room we are in was completely dark, which allowed for easy light painting. In light painting you leave the camera open and use a flashlight (or strobe, candle, or whatever) to paint light on. In this case I ran through the frame like a mad man waving an LED flashlight which I then tossed to Tom so that I could be included.

From left to right are: Julia Kreibich [Stylist], Scarlet Fernadez [Model], me, Claudia Davila [Model], Tom Laveuf [Photographer], Lauren Coleman [Makeup], Krista Leger [Photographer].

The Location:

My Results, Claudio:

My Results, Scarlet:

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After the Jump: More of my Keepers

January 6th, 2009

Pinhole photography is one of the oldest and truest forms of photography. Rather than a lens, a hole is used to project the image onto a light sensitive medium (film or digital). It’s really that simple.

More often than not when you see work from a pinhole image shown in a gallery it is from a home-made camera taken with a sheet of film.

The images you see here are from a modified Phase One P30+. This 32 megapixel digital camera system is normally used because it provides top notch lenses. So it is not without irony that I choose this platform for my latest pinhole project.

32 megapixels worth of soft, ethereal mush. It’s almost insulting to the camera.

Some fun links for pinhole:

Technical Calculators for Pinhole work

6 month long exposures by pinhole

After the Jump: More Pinhole Images

October 11th, 2008

My friend Stu Baserman and I went to the Botanical Gardens together. We were both shooting pretty unusual photo equipment. Pictured below is Stu with his Cambo Wide DS Technical Body and Phase One P45+ Digital Back with Rodenstock 35mm Large Format lens. I was shooting a similar Horseman SWD Pro II with a Infrared-Modified P45+ and Rodenstock 35mm Large Format lens.

Using an infracolor filter I was able to capture this half-infrared half-color image. It reminds me a bit of Jurassic Park.

May 11th, 2008

Creating iPodesque Silhouettes

1) Shoot a silhouette. Raw file flexibility will make this process much faster, but even a point and shoot camera will do. Do NOT rim lite the subject as you want the harsh edges from a total silhouette.

2) Add an S-Curve to increase contrast. This makes it easier to edit.

3) Using the magnetic lasso, trace the body. Adjust the “frequency” (pixels between anchor points) until you capture details like hair, but otherwise have smooth lines.

4) Fill the person-shaped selection with 100% white.

5) Add a drop shadow with a spread of 100% and distance 0. The radius will be the thickness of the outline, so experiment until you like what you see. I’ve reduced the opacity to 75% to allow the color added in the next step to show in the outline as well as the background.

6) At this point you can use the brush, eraser, or other tool to reshape the body. In two of these images I’ve repositioned limbs which didn’t look right in silhouette. The Shift button is your friend here, click on a point, hold shift and click on a second point and a line will be brushed (or erased).

7) Add a Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer set to Colorize. I’ve found saturation set to 25 gives a very appealing pastel color. If you’re doing multiple images experiment with Hues which are spaced 90 degrees apart. The hue of the three featured images in this post are 0, 90, 270.

8) Select All, then Select > Modify > Contract. This width will become your frame.

9) Fill the frame-selection with 100% white.

April 20th, 2008

Moving Past Analog Analogies

The first wave of development in digital photography was a struggle to replace film in quality and use. Now that it has, a new wave of development will push photography into new places and redefine still image creation. Digital Photography is about twenty years old; it’s acne is gone and its about time to move out of the family house, and become its own medium.

Photoshop has already begun this transition. Most features of Photoshop replace analog tools such as airbrushing and dodging and burning. Even seemingly new tools such as Unsharp Mask and Liquify have analog origins. But tools such as HDR move past the imaginings of the analog world into entirely new techniques possible only in a digital workflow. HDR is part of the new wave in photography with entirely new way of representing photographic vision.

Four attributes of digital photography have improved rapidly since the first mainstream professional digital cameras: resolution, ISO, burst-capture speed, and dynamic range (hereafter: DR). New workflows will arise from these technological advancements and each will bring complete virtualization closer. By virtualization I mean that a particular decision, now made at the time of capture will become part of the information contained in a raw file, able to be easily and accurately changed during post.

Some of these changes may not take place for decades, but some have already taken place. Exposure is virtualized in current high-end cameras. At the time of capture a photographer has to pick a certain exposure, but contained in the raw file is enough information that the exposure can manipulated during post without artifacts.

Drastically higher ISOs, burst speeds, and dynamic range will lead to the increased virtualization of photography which will shake the very foundations of still photography. If you thought the transition from film to digital was a game-changer you ain’t seen nothing yet

Read on for

After the Jump: my thoughts on virtualized — shutters, apertures, camera position, lighting ratios, and subject matter

October 1st, 2006

These are a few infrared images I took while at the Whitsunday Coast.

Infrared photography relies on light outside the visible spectrum. Just as a red flower is red because it strongly reflects red light, an object is brighter (or darker) in infrared photography based on how much infrared light it reflects. Foliage containing chlorophyll, which strongly reflects infrared light, is bright, while open sky, which reflects blue light but very little infrared light, is very dark. This creates an interesting reversal of tones; instead of a light sky and dark foliage, the sky is very dark and foliage glows brightly. Photographers can take advantage of this tone reversal to create an eerie or ethereal feeling.

September 19th, 2006

Water Drops for Santos Energy

Several months ago I ran across a nerd-toy called the Time Machine. It is an external dedicated intervalometer and sensory input triggering device. In other words, it is a box which plugs into a camera and triggers a picture to be taken at set intervals and/or when a sensor (e.g. laser, motion, noise) is triggered. Seeing some of the possibilities on the Time Machine website my interest was immediately piqued. Then several weeks ago I ran across the work of Martin Waugh who uses a similar system to take pictures of splashes from water drops.

I loved the images so much that I bought a Time Machine and made my own water-drip setup. That attempt failed miserably, mainly because I tried to setup a water drip reservoir, so that drops would fall at regular intervals without intervention. For my second attempt I replaced the reservoir with a water dropper and got some decent results. Finally, I was able to setup a water dropper system that was sufficiently repeatable that I could focus on lighting and image design.

When using a water dropper to produce a single drop, water splashes are only a few millimeters across. This size creates two problems. First you need a macro lens that can focus REALLY close. Second, with a macro lens focused that closely the depth of field is often less than the width of a splash, which means precise focusing is critical. After all the effort required to perfect a water drip I wanted to make sure to capture the result in the highest practical quality. Therefore I used my Mamiya 645 Manual Focus camera with one of my favorite lenses, the Mamiya 120mm Macro. If you are so inclined, you can experiment with the numbers using an online depth of field calculator.

As it happened, just as I was perfecting the water-drop technique, my university received an invitation to submit images to a corporate client. The client had blue/white corporate colors and wanted generic images that showed energy and fit with the feel of their current website. Water drops seemed to fit the image request quite well. Shown below are the images I submitted to the client, which they accepted for a hefty sum. The return from this investment will cover the cost of a scuba diving trip around the Great Barrier Reef that I will be going on this coming week.

Use of my photos:
As a professional photographer my photographs are my life’s work.
In this case Santos Energy bought the rights to these images by paid contract, and are used here under the Portfolio Use terms of that contract. The images may not be reproduced in any form. Leave a comment if you wish to discuss the creation of similar images

UPDATE: My submission to Santos Corporation was used on the front page of the annual Sustainability Report (an addendum to the financially-focused Annual Report). I was particularly pleased that they repeated the predominate color of the image throughout the report.

Further Details after the jump

Read the rest of this entry »

September 19th, 2006

Creating compelling images using nothing but the human body and lighting is challenging. Any sexuality or awkwardness is obscured by the constant struggle to find interesting lines, shapes, and textures.

In both of these shoots I used two cameras. The first was a point and shoot digital camera which I used mainly to evaluate lighting and composition. The second was an 8″x10″ film view camera. Being 8×10 this film has 80 sq. inches, a full 60 times more than 35mm. The resulting image is around 100-200 megapixels. This quality is why digital cameras won’t displace film in applications requiring top-quality for quite some time. In fact, a group of photo nerds has modified an air force aerial camera to produce 1000+ megapixel images.

These models have given permission to have the images used in this blog. Please respect their privacy by not reproducing these images without my explicit permission.

Please Note: Artistic Nude Images are Shown After the Jump
Read the rest of this entry »

August 25th, 2006

Our assignment: High Key fashion using a piece of fabric and a model.

____-Key refers to the range of tones in the image. A High-Key image is predominately gray-to-white in tones, while a Low-Key image is predominately black-to-gray in tones.

This was not an assignment I expected much success out of. I am not a fashionable guy, nor care to be, and I know very little about fabric. However, in the interest of making my semester abroad worthwhile I put forth a good effort.

I came across a model at Uni who had natural red hair and freckles. My roommate was nice enough to take me to a fabric store and we picked out a light blue sheer chiffon and a green satin that would compliment the model’s hair color. I thought of many ideas before the shoot and when the model arrived we went through most of them in good time. I had a very good assistant, who I know from America. She did an excellent job in helping the model pose and arranging the clothing.

For the photographically inclined, here is my lighting diagram:

August 9th, 2006

My Studio Photography class had the following assignment: Using white paper and a white background, make the viewer feel or think about something other than paper.

My original idea was to produce gentle rolling hills at sunset, but paper will only bend into nice curves in one direction. So instead, I crumpled the paper up and then shaped it into jagged mountains. Using blue gelled lights I made the paper the color and shade of Nordic mountains, and with a red gelled light I created a sun in the orangish color of sunset. Finally a white light hit the mountains from behind to give them the nice “rim lit” look of a sunset.

In retrospect, the sky is black, when in fact it should realistically be red/orange and fairly bright. However, I think the surreal mood the black sky creates ends up being a positive. I’d love to hear comments for or against on this.

Shown below is the final image and a snapshot of the setup. For the uninitiated this type of camera shows the image upside-down and backwards when you look through it, so it’s not unheard of to shoot your subject upside down when the situation allows. In this case though, the paper is mounted upside-down because I thought I might add fog using a water-heater, allowing its steam to rise and fill in the valleys. I ran out of time before I was able to try this idea.

This was shot on 4″x5″ transparency film. This type of film costs US$2 a sheet and processing costs US$8. The resulting film can be scanned to 100-150 megapixels, which translates to a file size of around a gigabyte. A print can be made at 40″x48″ and still have every part of the print show sharp detail at a viewing distance of 10″. A print of this size or larger is not viewed at 10″ but at several feet, so in the practical sense there is no limit to how large a print can be made from this type of film.

Use of my photos:
As a professional photographer my photographs are my life’s work.
You are free to use any of the photos I blog in any non-commercial use, provided you do not change the image’s content and you link to my website: www.doug-peterson.com