Photographs and other stuff..

This site is about me, my photos, my gear and the process of becoming a better photographer.
Okay! So, it’s been almost a year since my last post, pretty bad stuff. But now im gonna try to update this site as best i can. Been alot going on since the last time, i’ve become a father for the first time and i also got a job at a paper/magazine called Bodø NU. I have for a long time been searching for a way to achieve a certain style on my photos and a couple of monts ago i found out how to do it. I stumbeled upon a guy called Dustin Snipes, he also runs a blog on image processing and lighting. I was pretty sure after reading some of his posts that i could do the same thing. So, i went out and bought me some proper lights, in this case a couple of Walimex VC300 studio strobes (same thing as the Visico VC series). I ordered some strip boxes from ebay, and got to it.  We were going to do an article about dancers in the magazine and i thought, what better way to try this out? The shots were taken at their dance studio, with this incredibly cool old stage.  The rimlights were placed about 2-3m at each side of the model, the key light 2-3m away in front. I used my cheap Godox EX600 in an 105cm octabox for key. The trick to this kind of lighting is for the rimlights to be the brighter part of the light, overpowering the key with just a tad. I cant remember the exact settings right now, but without a lightmeter you’ll just have to give it a try, adjusting as you go. I knew that i wanted to shoot at about f/9 - ISO 200 and maybe 1/200-250, so i’d set my lighting acordingly.  Over to the processing, it’s actually not that complicated. I created a blank new layer removing all the unwanted stuff in the photo using the healing brush and clone stamp. Then i created another blank layer and filled it with 50% gray (Shift + backspace), now you’ll have a completely gray image, from you blend mode palette choose overlay and your image goes back to normal again. Now you’ll have a base for dodging and burning the photo, witch is the second most important thing to this besides the lighting. Using you brush tool at 3-7% opacity to paint in every highlight with white and every shadow with black you’ll start to se the image is taking a more 3D look. When im done with this i create a merge visible layer and makes it b/w by pressing (shift + cmd + U) setting the blend mode to soft light, you will have a more contrasty image, then select a highpass sharpening filter and adjust the blend mode to around 50-70%. Thats pretty much it, you could adjust curves or colors as you like to fit the photo. 

Okay! So, it’s been almost a year since my last post, pretty bad stuff. But now im gonna try to update this site as best i can. Been alot going on since the last time, i’ve become a father for the first time and i also got a job at a paper/magazine called Bodø NU. I have for a long time been searching for a way to achieve a certain style on my photos and a couple of monts ago i found out how to do it. I stumbeled upon a guy called Dustin Snipes, he also runs a blog on image processing and lighting. I was pretty sure after reading some of his posts that i could do the same thing. So, i went out and bought me some proper lights, in this case a couple of Walimex VC300 studio strobes (same thing as the Visico VC series). I ordered some strip boxes from ebay, and got to it. 

We were going to do an article about dancers in the magazine and i thought, what better way to try this out? The shots were taken at their dance studio, with this incredibly cool old stage. 

The rimlights were placed about 2-3m at each side of the model, the key light 2-3m away in front. I used my cheap Godox EX600 in an 105cm octabox for key. The trick to this kind of lighting is for the rimlights to be the brighter part of the light, overpowering the key with just a tad. I cant remember the exact settings right now, but without a lightmeter you’ll just have to give it a try, adjusting as you go. I knew that i wanted to shoot at about f/9 - ISO 200 and maybe 1/200-250, so i’d set my lighting acordingly. 

Over to the processing, it’s actually not that complicated. I created a blank new layer removing all the unwanted stuff in the photo using the healing brush and clone stamp. Then i created another blank layer and filled it with 50% gray (Shift + backspace), now you’ll have a completely gray image, from you blend mode palette choose overlay and your image goes back to normal again. Now you’ll have a base for dodging and burning the photo, witch is the second most important thing to this besides the lighting. Using you brush tool at 3-7% opacity to paint in every highlight with white and every shadow with black you’ll start to se the image is taking a more 3D look. When im done with this i create a merge visible layer and makes it b/w by pressing (shift + cmd + U) setting the blend mode to soft light, you will have a more contrasty image, then select a highpass sharpening filter and adjust the blend mode to around 50-70%. Thats pretty much it, you could adjust curves or colors as you like to fit the photo. 

This shows a before and after image of Stine. The light and exposure on these images were pretty good so i tried to keep the shopping at a minimum. A quick skin cleanup as weel as  some softening, quite alot of curves and levels adjustment. I also did lighten the lights/highlights on the skin and hair. 

This shows a before and after image of Stine. The light and exposure on these images were pretty good so i tried to keep the shopping at a minimum. A quick skin cleanup as weel as  some softening, quite alot of curves and levels adjustment. I also did lighten the lights/highlights on the skin and hair. 

Yesterday i decided that it was time for a photowalk, with temperatures at around -10c and gale force winds it was a walk of the short kind. I still managed to get at least one good shot, of this old boathouse. This is made up of about 20-25 exposures with the “Brenizer method” in mind. For those of you that dont know what that is i’ll give you a short fill in.  The whole point with this thing is to make an image that looks like it was shot with a mediumformat of some sort, an image with a very shallow dof but with a normal/wide angle look on it.  So, first of all, find a subject that is standing out from the rest of the landscape. You should be using a fast medium tele lens (50-100mm). Set the whitebalance to fit the light (you dont want the wb to change while making all the exposures). Now, get a good exposure (you should be at f/1.4-f/2.0. When you look through your viewfinder you should se about 1/2 your subject in it. Focus on the important part of it and hold the focus for all the remainding shots. It’s important that you overlap exposures, giving you enough material for photoshop to work with. It is also no point in shooting raw here, it takes to much space and ps would probably crash in the middle of merging.  When you have all your shots you simply press File in ps, then automate and then photomerge, hit browse and select all the images. Ps will now merge all these shots together blending them with very very smooth layermasks and in the end you’ll have a beautiful mediumformat looking image. 

Yesterday i decided that it was time for a photowalk, with temperatures at around -10c and gale force winds it was a walk of the short kind. I still managed to get at least one good shot, of this old boathouse. This is made up of about 20-25 exposures with the “Brenizer method” in mind. For those of you that dont know what that is i’ll give you a short fill in. 

The whole point with this thing is to make an image that looks like it was shot with a mediumformat of some sort, an image with a very shallow dof but with a normal/wide angle look on it. 

So, first of all, find a subject that is standing out from the rest of the landscape. You should be using a fast medium tele lens (50-100mm). Set the whitebalance to fit the light (you dont want the wb to change while making all the exposures). Now, get a good exposure (you should be at f/1.4-f/2.0. When you look through your viewfinder you should se about 1/2 your subject in it. Focus on the important part of it and hold the focus for all the remainding shots. It’s important that you overlap exposures, giving you enough material for photoshop to work with. It is also no point in shooting raw here, it takes to much space and ps would probably crash in the middle of merging. 

When you have all your shots you simply press File in ps, then automate and then photomerge, hit browse and select all the images. Ps will now merge all these shots together blending them with very very smooth layermasks and in the end you’ll have a beautiful mediumformat looking image. 

Behind the scenes! Pretty sweet having a human light stand :D 

Behind the scenes! Pretty sweet having a human light stand :D 

Here’s a taste from the “strong woman” photoshoot! This shot is lit with two Sb-600 speedlights triggered with Nikons creative lighting system. After shooting in an area of the gym where the ambient light and crowd was pretty rough we went down and found a huge available room. We had much more space and the colors of the room combined with a lot less fluorecent light made this area a whole lot more suitable for shooting. So, one of the flashes was behind the model camera right for rim lighting and the other one was in my DIY beauty dish camera left about 1m from the model. I had about 10 images i had to edit so i kept it pretty simple. Lets go through the list: First of all i got rid of the ceiling surrounding the ball, also i got rid of some dust spots made by my sensor and a candlestick hanging on the wall. Then i cleaned up the skin, this models skin was very nice to begin with so that didnt take long.  I then made a merge visible and added a topaz adjust layer at about 50% opacity, and then i made a new layer and smoothed the skin out with a big soft brush. Then i added about 20-30 layers using a very small white brush to emphasize the highlights pretty much all over the image, tights, face, hair, shirt, ball, arms, neck, hands and so on. The reason why i did the topaz adjust layer before everything else is because it has a tendensy to remove skin smootheness, so, by making it the bottom layer i get the roughness combined with the smootheness. Now, when that is done i adjust the curves a bit by lighten the shadows a tad and adding some blues to the shadows also. As i wrote in my first post i like to import all my photos into Lightroom and work from there, now when i hit “save” in PS the image pops up in LR with all the changes i made, this is perfect because i like to do my color adjustments i LR. I Increase the vibrance and lower the saturation to give it very smooth tones. Then i added a small vignette, i increased the lightness on the red channel to make the shirt pop really well. Last i do some sharpening and 40-50% increase in clarity. Thats it! 

Here’s a taste from the “strong woman” photoshoot! This shot is lit with two Sb-600 speedlights triggered with Nikons creative lighting system. After shooting in an area of the gym where the ambient light and crowd was pretty rough we went down and found a huge available room. We had much more space and the colors of the room combined with a lot less fluorecent light made this area a whole lot more suitable for shooting. So, one of the flashes was behind the model camera right for rim lighting and the other one was in my DIY beauty dish camera left about 1m from the model. I had about 10 images i had to edit so i kept it pretty simple. Lets go through the list:

First of all i got rid of the ceiling surrounding the ball, also i got rid of some dust spots made by my sensor and a candlestick hanging on the wall. Then i cleaned up the skin, this models skin was very nice to begin with so that didnt take long. 

I then made a merge visible and added a topaz adjust layer at about 50% opacity, and then i made a new layer and smoothed the skin out with a big soft brush. Then i added about 20-30 layers using a very small white brush to emphasize the highlights pretty much all over the image, tights, face, hair, shirt, ball, arms, neck, hands and so on. The reason why i did the topaz adjust layer before everything else is because it has a tendensy to remove skin smootheness, so, by making it the bottom layer i get the roughness combined with the smootheness. Now, when that is done i adjust the curves a bit by lighten the shadows a tad and adding some blues to the shadows also. As i wrote in my first post i like to import all my photos into Lightroom and work from there, now when i hit “save” in PS the image pops up in LR with all the changes i made, this is perfect because i like to do my color adjustments i LR. I Increase the vibrance and lower the saturation to give it very smooth tones. Then i added a small vignette, i increased the lightness on the red channel to make the shirt pop really well. Last i do some sharpening and 40-50% increase in clarity. Thats it! 

Yey! I got my new Cactus V5 triggers today! Now i can throw my old “Shoot PT-04 triggers away :) I hope these ones work a whole lot better than the old ones, and unboxing them i noticed right away that they seem much sturdier and well put together. I cant wait to put them to the test! 

Yey! I got my new Cactus V5 triggers today! Now i can throw my old “Shoot PT-04 triggers away :) I hope these ones work a whole lot better than the old ones, and unboxing them i noticed right away that they seem much sturdier and well put together. I cant wait to put them to the test! 

Strong woman photoshoot

So, on Wednesday i did a shoot for a magazine called Treningsforum magasinet. It was pretty fun and pretty unusual. We were at the gym shooting in a mix of ambient and flash which did not cause any major problems. I was originally going for a three or four light setup, but since im still waiting on my new Cactus V5, i had to shoot with cls, which limited my number of flashes to two Sb-600. I used a light setup with a beauty dish for key and a Westcott 43” silver umbrella for fill/rim. As everybody knows, a gym contains alot of mirrors so it was a challenge finding a spot which did not cause any unwanted reflections and still gave me enough room for a decent light setup. Anyway, i think it went pretty well and im uploading some images as soon as i get done with them and get them delivered to the editor of the magazine. 

Nothing new lately so im posting something not new. The lighting consists of one Sb-600 in a reflective umbrella camera right, one Vivitar 285hv in a medium octabox above camera, and one Sb-600 bare camera left. They were all triggered with PT-04 ebay triggers. Pretty simple setup actually, but what really makes this shot pop is the great available light and that cool looking sky. I might not have made this shot 1hr before or 1hr after.  So, edit wise, there’s not much to it, some clean up on the skin. Also the hair, the zip hood and the pants are dodged and burned a bit. The sky has got a layer with highpass, then i lowered the vibrance and sharpened the whole thing up. EasyPeasy! 

Nothing new lately so im posting something not new. The lighting consists of one Sb-600 in a reflective umbrella camera right, one Vivitar 285hv in a medium octabox above camera, and one Sb-600 bare camera left. They were all triggered with PT-04 ebay triggers. Pretty simple setup actually, but what really makes this shot pop is the great available light and that cool looking sky. I might not have made this shot 1hr before or 1hr after. 

So, edit wise, there’s not much to it, some clean up on the skin. Also the hair, the zip hood and the pants are dodged and burned a bit. The sky has got a layer with highpass, then i lowered the vibrance and sharpened the whole thing up. EasyPeasy! 

I made my own beauty dish!  I had some help from one of my colleagues at work making it. I bought a saladbowl made out of polycarbonate, i think its about 45-50cm in diameter. The other parts is just a 25cm steel plate that i polished with autosol, some nuts and bolts and  three threaded rods, i used this to make the distance of the steel plate reflector adjustable. I painted it black on the outside and white on the inside and used at umbrella bracket for attaching the sb-600. It took some adjusting of the reflectorplate to make the spread of the light just right. It looks really good and performs probably as good as anything.

I made my own beauty dish! 

I had some help from one of my colleagues at work making it. I bought a saladbowl made out of polycarbonate, i think its about 45-50cm in diameter. The other parts is just a 25cm steel plate that i polished with autosol, some nuts and bolts and  three threaded rods, i used this to make the distance of the steel plate reflector adjustable. I painted it black on the outside and white on the inside and used at umbrella bracket for attaching the sb-600. It took some adjusting of the reflectorplate to make the spread of the light just right. It looks really good and performs probably as good as anything.