Lighting Eggsercise

This is "Project 27" from Michael Freeman's "Photoschool", a quick little exercise in lighting direction.  I was a bit sceptical that there would be much to learn from this, but it didn't take long to do.  It was surprisingly fun to do, and made me realise that the desk lamp that I'd bought for photography was actually pretty versatile, with an excellent head on it that makes it easy to point in the right direction.

The point of the exercise is to demonstrate the fundamentals of controlling lighting direction.  The book suggests using an egg, which is a nice simple subject that everyone has to hand.

Top lighting

Right Side Lighting

Left side lighting

Left 3/4 side lighting

Left 3/4 side back lighting

Front lighting

Back lighting

Bottom lighting

The most surprising thing was that the one direction that I expected to be the easiest (front lighting) was actually the most challanging.  I was using my 50mm lens with a close up filter fitted so that the egg would fill most of the frame.  These are all full frame shots.  This meant that my camera was in the way when I tried to get the light coming in from the front, so my front lighting example is more like a "front 3/4 top" lighting example.

The back lighting was a bit tricky, but expected that.  The main reason for the difficulty was that my lamp has a large 100W spotlight bulb and I was trying to block it completely with the egg.  I'm not even sure if I was successful!

Zoom blur

I was playing around with zoom blur today after reading about it in Amateur Photograper magazine (Feb '09 issue).  Of course I've known about the technique for ages, and played around with it before, but I was looking for something interesting to try today.  I took inspiration from the first photo I'd seen demonstating the technique - from John Freeman's "Photography".  It was a shot of flowers, a subject that I had readily available.

Here are some of my earlier, not so good attempts:

 

This shot was my favourite.  Shutter speed was 1/5s and the focal length started out at 33mm and I zoomed in to 85mm, but I don't know at what point the shutter would've closed.  Aperture was f/16 (shot in Manual)

Matches - Macro shot.

As noted in my previous post, I set out to imitate this photo using the cheap macro options I have available. Here's the best shot that I've achieved so far:

This shot was taken using my manual 50mm Ricoh lens coupled with my modified extension tube set.  The extension tube was effectively 56mm long.  Shutter speed 0.8s aperture f/5.6.  Natural window light, using a white sheet of paper to reflect a little more light onto the lower left side of the matches.  The light was coming from the right hand side.

The image has been cropped slightly (only 11% of the image width has been cropped of the sides).

The level of detail is pretty good, especially after some mild sharpening.  My shot at f/2 showed how poor my manual focusing was though, not spot on the end of the match heads.  Reducing the aperture down to f/5.6 gave me enough DoF to make much of the match heads look sharp though.

I think I should try to this again using artificial lighting.  Johnnytitan's original certainly had more dramatic lighting than mine and I think it really helped to bring out the detail in the match heads.  It also provided a nice yellow glow from the matches themselves.

Update:

I had another go using artificial lighting.  This involved a more complex set-up:

  

I took a couple of test shot to gauge my exposure (it's always a bit random using extension tubes it seems).

The first (left) indicated that I was a little to the left of the subject and that my exposure was a little on the high side.  The second shot had the glow of the yellow wood nicely centered,  exposure and focus looked good.

I stopped down the lens to f/8 and adjusted my shutter speed in manual mode.  Took another shot, oops, forgot to have it in RAW, so after downloading my shots I went back and had another go:

Final shot:

100% crop (no sharpening (click for full view to see at 100%)):

I was pretty happy with that, but after I compared my results to the original I realised that my contrast wasn't high enough, so I tried boosting that in RAW processing in photoshop.

A little closer, but still not quite there.  Oh well I didn't achieve the same level of detail, sharpness and contrast, but it was fun to try.  That's all I can be bothered trying.

Matches - something to try soon.

I was checking out johnnytitan's 31 day photo challenge, all of it's inspiring stuff. I particularly like his day 5 entry. The detail in the match head is stunning. I'd like to see if I can get a similar level of detail using the cheap macro tools that I have at my disposal. He's posted a thread in the Worth1000 forums describing some of the tricks he used. This should certainly help with my set-up, but getting good lighting will definitely be a challenge. I don't expect to be able to match his lighting, but I'll see what I can do.

See also:
The complete 30(+1) photo thread on Worth
My worth profile

The Zone System - My first attempt

I've got a great book out of the library at the moment, it's called "Photo School" by Michael Freeman. It's very old school, published in 1982, but it's full of fantastic stuff. Because it was published well before the digital era it's not packed full of stuff about digital editing, so that saves a lot of space for the good old basics that haven't really changed.

One thing I've wanted to try out for a long time is the zone system. It's a system for establishing which exposure you should use that was invented primarily by Ansel Adams. It's been around for a long time, and I suppose it's lost a lot of it's relevance in this age of fancy matrix metering and, with the ability to check the histogram after taking a photo, you hardly need it at all. One of the things that appeals to me about using it though, is that it slows the picture taking process down, forcing you to consider what parts of the image are important, and how you'd like them to appear in the final print. Print? What's that? Do people still print photos?

I've kind of vaguely understood some of the concepts, but never really understood just how you apply the system to your photogaphy out in the field. There's a section in this book though that covers it quite well. It included a couple of key points that motivated me to try it out.

The system needs to be adapted a little to apply it to digital photography. Apparently digital only has five stops of exposure latitude, but I'm not sure how relevant that still is, and I don't know just how good my camera is in this regard. Also, I know that images taken in RAW mode have more usable exposure latitude than those taken in jpg. One of the points of trying the zone system out is that it involves recording the range of exposure in your scene, and in doing so you can then find out just how much exposure latitude your camera has. My landscape photography sure could do with a bit of work, so I see this as a good thing.

Anyway, my main motivation for going out for a walk last Sunday was to try out the zone system. I selected my scene, drew a little sketch of it in my notebook and decided on a good aperture to use to capture it (f/14). I set my camera to spot metering, aperture priority on f/14 and metered away on the main zones in the scene. These are the results:



I opted for an exposure time of 1/15s @f/14. My focal length was 17mm so I could've easily taken the shot hand-held with image stabilisation on, but I still used a tripod.

The histogram looked pretty good, with only a few blinking pixels in the sky, and no visible blip at the right hand end. With a bright overcast sky, a few blown highlights in the sky was what I expected with a correct exposure, so I was happy with the result. Having said that, it was a pretty easy scene, with not a lot of contrast on a afternoon like that. Also you can't really be 100% sure you've nailed it until you see the print - because the zone descriptions refer to the appearance of the zones in the print.

Here's the photo:

Not exactly a stunning landscape photo, but that wasn't really the point. The point was all about learning the technique.