Steve is working on building a bike stand for future shots so it won’t show up in the images.  This stand makes it look like the bike has training wheels.  Lessons learned!  Setup shots are at the end of the post.

My favorite image from the series.

Technical Ramblings

The shoot was done in my living room on a 9′ wide Savage black seamless paper.  Three AlienBee B800s used with the 2 bees on the sides in large softboxes with grids.  The bee on the boom arm is in a strip box with grid as well.  I used the grids to control the spread of light.  Without the grids then the light goes everywhere and the black background doesn’t go real black. Steve is on the floor to the left helping out.

Another view of the light setup to show how I have the lights to the front of the bike.  I did this to feather the light onto the bike.

–
Mark Mortensen
Lakewood Colorado portrait and event photographer.
www.MarkMortensen.com

This first image shows how the light fills the room.  As you can see it fills the room with a nice soft quality of light which I really dig.

This next image was shot to see the hot spots of the reflector.  It appears like a ring light in the reflector which again I personally like.  The two lines on the diffusion material are seams.

Finally, some images with a model.  Please note that the model isn’t necessary that good looking but he was hard up for some work.  I really like the ring light type of catch light in the eyes.

Overall, the PLM is great.  The only downside I’ve seen so far is putting on the diffusion material.  As you get one side hooked up the other side slides off.  I ended up using some binder clips to hold the diffusion material onto the reflector till I got all edges hooked.

–
Mark Mortensen
Lakewood Colorado portrait and event photographer.
www.MarkMortensen.com

Before I get to the technique of photographing artwork I’ll show you her drawings.

Shading with crayon

Pencil drawing of a Tarantula.

Charcoal sketch.

Technical Ramblings:  For photographing artwork I’m sure I could do it easier if I would spend the time to create a stand to hold the artwork.  However, I don’t do this type of work often and haven’t seen a need to spend the time as of yet.  I improvised this weekend and used blue painters tape to hold the artwork to the cardboard backer that was in turn clamped to the backdrop stand.  Two AlienBee B800s in large soft boxes were placed on either side of the artwork to feather the light on the piece.  This eliminates any glare and allows the texture of the paper to be shown in the photo.  I also used the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport to create a custom Adobe Lightroom camera profile for this lighting setup.  This allowed more accurate color matching to what you see in the actual drawing to what shows up in the final image.

Artwork is leveled and balanced vertically and horizontally between the strobes.

Another view from above to show how the strobes feather the light onto the artwork.

A third view to give some context to the positioning of the strobes and tripod.

–
Mark Mortensen
Lakewood Colorado portrait and event photographer.
www.MarkMortensen.com

It’s spring in Denver and the trees are in full bloom. Every evening for the last couple of days I’ve been wanting to go do some macro shots of the flowers. However, the wind would gust too much for any picture taking. With the weather forecast saying a high of 43 and 40% chance of snow tomorrow I figured this evening was my last chance. I have a plum tree in my back yard and it was sheltered just enough from the big gusts of wind to get in a few shots. I also wanted to use these shots to experiment with the ‘Totally Rad Actions‘ from Boutwell Studio I had picked up this morning. I’ve noticed pictures that just seemed to pop in color and wanted to know how they do that. The reason being is that I know of no camera that will capture that much saturated color in RAW format. I also can’t get Lightroom to do that much post processing either. I discovered that one way other photographers get images to pop (or snap in Butwell terms) is to post process in Adobe Photoshop. I guess I could of spent hours reading manuals on how this is done but I don’t have that much time on my hands. I needed a quicker solution and these actions seemed like they would do the trick. So for this blog post I’m going to show you the before and after shots of the flowers.

Here’s the straight out of the camera RAW image (Canon 40D). I shot this image with my new EF 70-200mm f/2.8L using a 25mm extension tube. This combination makes a pretty good macro’ish lens. I’ll also note that I had to expose to the right about a full stop to get the exposure correct in my eyes. Overall the the composition is good and image is okay.

Next as part of my workflow I bring all my RAW files into Adobe Lightroom and convert to DNG files. Why? Just because I want to. Inside of lightroom I tweaked with the white balance and some Vibrance and Clarity. I believe I also tweaked the Sharpness and Chromatic Abberration. The end result is this image.

The changes are very subtle but they are there. Then the fun started when I exported and brought the image into Photoshop. I’m still really new to the ‘Totally Rad Actions’ but had done enough research to know to use the ‘Oh Snap! and ‘Yin/Yang’ actions. I actually used the ‘Oh Snap!’ twice to bring up the color even more. ‘Oh Snap!’ does just what it sounds like, it snaps the colors and clarity. In the Yin/Yang, which is a dodge and burn action, I darkened the sky around the flowers to bring attention to them. Here’s the resulting image. Looks good I think.