Three Bottles of Campari on a Seamless White Background

Nikon D300s, Nikkor AF-S 85mm f/1.8 G, f/11.0, 1/160s, ISO 200, 1x Elinchrom D-Lite-it 2, 2x  Elinchrom D-Lite-it 4, 1x Large Sheet of White Cardstock, 2x Long Narrow Strips of Black Cardstock on each side of product, 1x Sheet of Clear Glass.

Downtown Fredensborg - Deserted

Taken at 23:03 at night and totally deserted it's almost eerie, but great for taking photographs. At this time of night there was still enough light in the sky to balance nicely with the street lights and end up with a single shot containing a wide gamut of fairly even exposure. This sort of photography always requires a tripod as we have to deal with longish exposures and hand holding is impossible without getting a blurry and unusable photo. Tripod = sharp and clear. Get a good sturdy tripod, it'll do wonders for your photographs!

Most people shoot until the sun goes down and then they head indoors for dinner. I try to hang around for an hour or two (or more) after sunset to get this sort of light. It can make for long, cold, hungry evenings, but it gets pictures that very few people are willing or able to take simply because they lack the dedication and commitment to suffer a little inconvenience to get the photo they really want. But then maybe I'm a little too obsessive about these things? ;-)

Nikon D300s, Nikon 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6 VR, sturdy tripod, remote trigger, f10.0, 13.0s, 18mm, VR off, ISO 200, Auto White Balance, Matrix Metering, Aperture Priority, quick run through Dx0 Optics Pro 8, and then some adjustments in the curves tool of PSP X5.

Traffic Circle in Fredensborg

The (almost) Eastern corner of the Landskrona Citadel

After posting a few low-light/night shots of the Landskrona Citadel I decided to post one of it during the day, and what a beautiful Swedish summer day it was!

Waterfront at Lake Esrum in Denmark

I still haven't got used to the extremely long summer evenings in Scandinavia, despite having been here for over a year now. This is my second summer in these northern countries and the beautiful lingering light still appears miraculous to me after a lifetime of the abrupt sunsets that characterise the evenings in Southern Africa. This particular photograph of the waterfront at Lake Esrum was taken at 20.03pm, and there was still another hour of useable light for a fruitful and fulfilling photowalk that splendid Danish summer "magic hour".

Livet är mycket bra!

Jetty on Lake Esrum in Denmark

I have photographed this jetty before, but never in a beautiful pastel painterly sunset like this!

Fredensborg is one of my favourite places in Scandinavia, and Lake Esrum is down past the palace a couple of kilometers or so from the town center. It is a beautiful walk through a forested area interspersed with parkland from the palace and then the beautiful lake is the cherry on the top.

Life is good!
:-)

Lake Esrum Sunset

I don't often venture into the world of HDR, but when I am faced with a huge lighting challenge like the one in the scene above there really is no other way to get the full dynamic range on offer. If I exposed for the setting sun the boat in the foreground was diminished to murky blacks and greys, and if I exposed for the foreground the sunset became a wash of blown out highlights. Cue bracketing function on camera, roll on Photomatix (I never upgraded from version 3!) tweak in PSP X5, and voila! A simple exposure blend is enough for me, I try to keep these looking as natural as possible given the circumstances because overworked HDR is an abomination to behold... at least to me.

Campari on Ice - another three light product photograph

Same basic lighting set-up as the photograph in the previous post.

Victoria Falls - from a long obsolete camera!

An oldie from 2009 taken on a Canon 350D that I got super cheap because they were end of line and had been replaced by the 400D back in 2006! I took it with me on a trip to Zambia and got some great photographs from the old 8 megapixel obsolete relic. ;-)

This pic is of the Victoria Falls taken from the Zambian side looking towards the setting sun. It was the rainy season and the Zambezi was in flood making for a very spectacular flow of water over the falls and the "smoke" plume (water mist/spray) that can be seen from many kilometers away. The locals call these falls Mosi-oa-Tunya "the Smoke that Thunders". David Livingstone renamed it after Queen Victoria when he finally got there.

I still have the 350D but these days it mostly just sits in a drawer in my office. I have been trying to decide what to do with it as it is a pity to have such a wonderful camera just gathering dust. What would you do with it? Any great ideas how I can put it back into use? Be creative!

Mmmmm, beer! - Lighting is in Layers.

I like to think of setting up lighting as adding a series of carefully thought out layers. I normally start out with a background, work out the lighting for it and then slowly add layers until I match the vision I had in my minds eye for the particular subject.

Here is a final shot of a glass of beer and the can and then I will show the various "layers" of light as I added them in my quest for this photograph:

First up, the background light shot which is a softbox aimed from behind the product:

Next, snoot only aimed at the label of the beer:

Now, snoot and a strip light from the right of camera:

Fourth up is the snoot, strip light and a large fill from camera left:

And finally, back to the final shot with all four lights firing at the same time:

Works for me!

The best part about photographing beer is consuming the product after the session is over! :-)

Snooting a Snoot is very snooty indeed!

Had to snoot my snoot today to get the shaft of light exiting the front a little more tight and controlled to highlight a label on a wine bottle. Here is the snooted snoot:

Piece of cardboard from a recent tent purchase (not a light tent, the camping kind) with a round hole cut in and a toilet paper roll cardboard tube stuck in the hole tightly. All taped on with some masking tape. Worked. No more to say.

And here is the result, well two of them really, one with a white background and one with a black background:

And the compulsory "set up" shot just to give you an idea of what was going down:

Three Light Product Photography Tutorial

Today I have a quick and simple "how to" on putting together a nice slightly low key product shot with three lights. Here is the final result and then I will go through the steps on how to build the lighting to get this photograph:

The starting point as always is the background. The first thing is that I chose a black paper background to lower the look and feel to give a little mood. But a plain black background is a little boring by itself so I added a splash of slightly blue light to provide a separation of the product (in this case my favourite German beer mug) from the black background. I used a gridded snoot with a light blue translucent plastic cup inside, yes that's right, cup.  I have learnt to make do with what I have when I don't have the thing I actually want. ;-)

Ok, so here is how it looks with just the background light:

Not quite what I wanted because the snoot, despite being gridded still gives some light spill onto the product. Had to fix that so I put a flag onto the snoot to keep the light from hitting the beer mug and then got this result:

Aha! That's much better, nice background light without spill, just what I was actually after. So on to the main light. I wanted a large light source here so I implemented my own advice to use the bounce technique to good effect and bounced my softbox off the wall to the left of the room. Worked out ok and got this result:

I was happy with that outcome, but the shadow on the right is a bit too dim in this shot so I needed a fill light which I got by shooting another softbox onto the opposite wall and with the power output turned down a little from where the main light was set. I set it up, fired off a test shot and had some direct spill from the softbox which I cured by setting up a large flag to prevent that and only have light from the wall hitting the beer mug. Now we have a nice (almost) final shot that I am happy with:

And here is the final shot again (shown at the top of this post) after a just a touch of post production in Lightroom 4:

That is about the way I envisioned it in my minds eye and through a little gradual setting up I have a result that I am happy with. For now. Next time... black perspex seamless background! :-)

Here is a setup shot so you can see where the lights were and how they were placed to achieve the look in the final pic above:

All fairly simple and set up in the lounge. A few suggestions, get lots of light stands, it's always a pain having too few for lights, backdrops, flags, etc. rather have a couple too many than have to start looking around the house trying to figure out if the broomstick would work. Second, get lots of clamps for backdrops, and whatever else you want to keep fixed to a light stand or table. I use some cheap plastic ones I purchased at the local supermarket. They look like this:

So all that remains is for you to get shooting! If you don't have studio lights then try out the same thing with your speedlights, they will give the exact same result. If you don't have enough speedlights then maybe just get a couple of cheap studio lights, they are much more powerful than the speedlights and a whole lot cheaper as well. For a small home studio Elinchrom have a nice little kit called the D-Lite RX ONE which is very affordable and cheaper than buying two Nikon or Canon portable flashes, and stands, and adapters, and softboxes, and wireless triggers... you get the idea.

Don't be afraid to experiment. Have fun!

How Colour Can Change (Quite Dramatically) from Day to Night

Just a quick comparison between a photograph of the same subject taken several hours apart, with the first in all natural light and the second at night with mixed artificial light sources. First up, daytime:

Very nice light coming from the setting sun and giving a very pleasing and (at least to me) quite interesting quality of light. And now for the night shot:

Very different photograph, despite being of the same subject from just about the same angle. Which one is better? Well that is a very subjective answer and one that will undoubtedly elicit a very different response from whoever is asked. Flavour to taste I always say, sometimes I like mayonnaise and other days I like tomato sauce, but neither is better or worse. Today I choose the night shot, next week it may well be the day shot... or I might hate them both and prefer a Black and white!

Landskrona Stadshuset

The Landskrona Stadshuset, or in English simply the Landskrona City Hall, offices of the towns municipality, and very beautifully located overlooking part of the harbour.

Fountain in Landskrona

In my ongoing quest to document everything worthy of photographing in Landskrona I now have this unusual fountain that stands in the middle of a roundabout at the intersection of Östergatan and Regeringsgatan.

Landskrona Station

The Landskrona Station was opened in 2001 to replace the original station in town which is now used as a freight only station. The little metal flag on the top of the roof has the year 2000 on it which I assume means it was built in 2000. Both Pågatåg and Öresundtåg stop here providing easy transport links to pretty much anywhere in Sweden and to Denmark.

In the picture above a train is departing the station heading towards Helsingborg and leaving some nice light trails in it's wake.

Town Square in Landskrona

Cobblestone Street in Landskrona

I am really enjoying Landskrona, mainly because it is such a picturesque and historical little town. It is 600 years old now and much of the old architecture is still in great shape making for a very wonderful place for a photographer to live! ...or visit. If you are in Southern Sweden then please drop by for a fika, and I'll tell you how to get to all the really good spots!

As always a tripod is a must for this kind of photography, this exposure was 5 seconds long and no amount of VR is ever going to make that hand holdable.

How to Enlarge Your Lightsource for Softer Light, easily.

I did a little experiment this evening just to demonstrate how to make a really large lightsource and give much more even light on your subject than just blasting away with direct light.

I have two 65x65cm light boxes that are quite handy. So here is a pic of them set up pointing directly at a nice Dutch vase. The camera was on the tripod in front of the table.

From here it looks like that should make for some pretty good light on the vase, but as we can see in the next photo they also leave some not so great specular highlights on the vase and two distinct shadow areas behind the vase.

Not a bad photograph as such, but we can do much better than that! So, in order to increase the overall size of the light source I simply faced the lights up at the ceiling. Of course I also had to increase the power output of the lights because the light now had much further to travel and the inverse square law robs us of light very quickly when we increase the distance the light has to travel.

As you can see from the pic above the light has now been spread over a much larger area. So what has that done for our lovely Dutch vase?

Well the first thing you notice is that the ugly specular highlights have vanished and the light is much more evenly spread on the vase itself. The second thing is that the shadows behind the vase have also disappeared. Overall a much more pleasing result!

If all you have are two speedlights instead of the bigger studio lights then don't be disheartened because the exact same principle still holds true and will work just great. Simply pump up the power a bit and let 'er rip, it will have a similar wonderful softening effect on the quality of light.

Happy product photographing folks!

A (slightly) Different View of the Landskrona Citadel

I adjusted the angle a little to have a view of the bridge over the moat.