I spent most of the day down in Palo Alto hanging out with a few photographers and doing a little shooting. We were modeling for each other, and mostly just discussing technique.
I thought this portrait turned out nice. It’s really simple lighting, and actually the fill is just the light bouncing off Mark’s shirt.
So far, March is shaping up to be a busy month here at Ben Peoples Photography. Sue Fox and I are finishing the giant pinboards, I’m doing portfolio shoots for a metal sculptor and a stone sculptor, around 20 quilts for three different clients, and several random side projects to boot. And that’s just what I know about so far.
This is not to say I’m completely booked up, there’s still plenty of room in the schedule, but it’s going to be quite the month. So if you’re sitting on the fence, you should probably give me a call, or drop me an e-mail, so we can get you on the calendar.
Thanks all!
Longarm 2Originally uploaded by blp1979.
Longer post forthwith, but here’s a picture for now.
Sue Fox is a quilter with a studio in Berkeley where I do my larger quilt photography. She’s an awesome person, and does beautiful work. This is a shot of her LongArm machine, idly enjoying a President’s Day off.
We’ve now gotten the huge pinboards built, although not quite finished, in her studio, which will speed quilt photography– the longest part is getting the quilts hung square on the wall. We figured out that you really just need a huge (in this case, 10′x12′) board to pin into.
Update: the results of the giant pinboard are here: http://photo.benpeoples.com/2007/03/25/huge-quilt-shoot/
I have Sue Fox’s contact information, if anyone is searching the web and finds me first — just drop me a line at the address below
Early morning in the Alameda-Oakland Estuary.
Snow is a problem– it’s white. So if you’re trying to use an automatic exposure system to expose a scene that’s mostly snow, it tries to expose the snow as “gray”.
The way auto-exposure works is to try to make the scene average out to a middle gray. So you point your camera at the snow, press the shutter button, and you get a nice dark photo. Some of the more advanced metering systems will compensate for this, if there’s enough things that aren’t snow. And certainly if there is snow in the picture, but your kid is 80% of the frame, you probably won’t need to compensate. The trick to capturing scenes that are mostly white is that if you meter for the white, that white should be around 3 to 4 stops brighter than what you meter. 4 stops will make it blown out, or brighter than your camera’s sensor can see, and have no detail, but that’s where the really bright parts of the snow should be. The rest should fall within that stop, and then you’ll get nice detail and texture.
My camera lets me set an exposure-correction, generally for just such a situation. I can also bracket exposures, which is where the camera adjusts the exposure while taking several– this is often why you see photographers taking three shots right in a row. The first is the metered exposure, the second is as much as one or two stops “over exposed” and the third is one or two stops “under exposed”. (And now, if you used a tripod to take the pictures, you can put the photos together and get the whole range of exposure values).
What I found worked best working in the snow was to start with an exposure correction of around +1.5 (or one and a half stops brighter than the camera thought it should expose for). I also set the camera to bracket another +1.5 stops brighter (+3.0 stops total), just in case. The camera seemed to be getting pretty good readings when the scene was not all snow, but sometimes would try to meter entirely off the snow– so the second exposure was to deal with that.
Of course, if the camera was metering correctly, that second exposure was seriously blown out. But that makes for a nice orton effect.
Off the bat: this post has nothing to do with photography, but I see this as a public service announcement, I had no idea these adapters existed until a friend told me about them.
The hardware is known as a “ball joint to 1/2″ MIP” adapter. It should be around $5 at any hardware store. 
It’s pretty easy—took me a good 5 minutes, including the photos. You grab the nut at the rear of the existing shower head, and loosen the head (turning the head towards the left). With that unscrewed and filed away for the day you move out, you’ve got a captured nut hanging on the end of the shower arm. You can use teflon tape to ensure a tight seal, I didn’t and it worked out okay. The one thing to be sure of is that the adapter’s gasket is in place, as that will be critical to the seal. Hand tighten the adapter into the nut as tight as you can get it. If you aren’t getting a tight seal, try a little teflon tape on the threads, and retighten. Tools really shouldn’t be necessary to get a watertight seal—the gasket is actually sealing off the water, you just need to jam it hard enough into the ball.
Once you’ve got your adapter on, it’s a simple matter to screw on the new shower head, again hand tighten—there should be a gasket on the showerhead. If it’s leaking you can try teflon tape, or see if you’re missing the gasket.
You’re done—enjoy. And fix the drippy shower head next week.
Another bit of flat art I’m photographing. These are two framed pieces hanging in my parent’s condo in Colorado. My brother painted them I think around 93 or 94, might have been earlier. I really like them, but I hadn’t gotten a chance to document them. Spending a week in the condo gave me the opportunity to do so.
I’m traveling light this trip– two lenses, one body, and one little shoemount flash. The ideal to shoot this with a couple of studio lights, softboxes to either side, and modeling lights so I could figure out where the reflections were.
So I shot it in complete darkness– not complete darkness, one light in the kitchen was on so I didn’t trip over everything. The camera was on bulb, which means that the first trigger from the remote opens the shutter, the second trigger closes the shutter. Tests with my camera have shown me that up to around 30 seconds, you can’t see any noise at ISO 200, so I had up to about 30 seconds to pull this off.
I did a test shot to establish exposure– which was about 1/2 power on the flash. It looked pretty good so I dropped the exposure to 1/8 power and planned on doing 4 pops to get back to the 1/2 power exposure. A few tries later (shadow of a lampshade was a problem on one try) I had this lovely image– with a white background and lots of shadows. I clipped out the background, replaced it with black, and thusly: a nice copy.
You can’t light painting like this face-on– they usually have enough sheen to them that they bounce a lot of the light back at you. You have to hit them with light so the glare from the flash bounces away from the lens– doesn’t have to be much, and with a modeling light you can see the glare and make sure its off the camera.
We’re currently up in Steamboat Springs, CO, hanging out for a week and playing in the snow. Neither of us ski much, so it’s been a weekend of sitting around drinking hot chocolate, playing cards, reading, listening to music, and walking around in the snow.
The snow up here has been described as champagne powder– super fine powder, perfect for skiing. Because it’s so cold, it makes terrible snow balls. The sun came out for a little yesterday, and Sarah was able to make a snowball stick together long enough to throw it at me.
I’m planning on working this into a lovely long article about what to do in Steamboat other than skiing, which will post around the time I get back. Also, of note, the whole 42-words-for-snow thing really isn’t true. But the Inuit language is really interesting nonetheless.
I’m currently vacationing in Steamboat Springs, CO. I’m going to put together a longish article about Steamboat and the trip in general, but the “live” photo log of my trip, which will be a lot of fairly rough and not heavily processed B&W images, will be hosted over on Flickr. And a big thanks to Katy Kelsey who bought me a flickr! pro account in exchange for some photography I have yet to do.
You can see the beginnings here. Updated about once or so times a day.
