One Flash, Multiple Frames

I've dabbled in HDR a few times. One of my first posts on this blog was about HDR using RAW images from my Canon PowerShot point and shoot camera. I knew a lot less back then, but I certainly had the photography bug. The resulting image of that experiment, admittedly, looks like ass, but I took that experience and moved on 'poco a poco'. Now, if you look at my Flickr stream you will see a couple examples of my finer HDR work.

One thing I had yet to try was actually compositing an image out of multiple frames rather than using tone mapping. So, last month when I saw this funky abandoned structure in Tarifa I thought I would give it a go. It turned out to be easier and more fun than I had expected, but I couldn't have done it without one cool little trick. Keep reading to find out what that trick was.

Compositing vs. HDR

Now, some of you might be wondering "What is compositing?" Well, composite literally means to be made up of various elements. So compositing is the process of taking more than one picture and making one image out of the bits you want. But, how does this differ from HDR? Well, HDR uses something called tone mapping which 'maps' one set of colors to another. This allows you to choose between a wider set of color ranges to compensate for too-bright or too-dark regions in your scene. This means you can expose for both your sky and your foreground and get some really amazing colors.

When making an HDR image, you typically have a static scene, or else you get weird ghosting artifacts. When making a composite image it doesn't really matter, because you get to choose which parts of the frame get included. In my original pictures (19 used for this image) the pop of my flash can be seen at least six times, and yours truly appears more than once as well. And although some of the better HDR programs can compensate for this, I wouldn't have had as much control over the finer details without being able to mask areas like I was able to here.

How I Did It

I stumbled upon this scene while scrambling to catch the last of the sunset on our overnight

trip to Tarifa. Tarifa is the southern most tip of Continental Europe and juts right out there into the Atlantic, pointing towards Morocco. It's only 10 miles from the Moroccan coast and about 18 miles from Tangier, as the crow flies. It's also where they hold the kite surfing and wind surfing world championships. To say it's windy is an understatement, but luckily it wasn't windy on this winter day.

As you can see, the weather was hardly conducive to taking sunset pictures, so when we came across this monstrosity I thought "What the hell!" I promptly set up my tripod and

took some shots, exposing to the right while preserving my highlights. Here's an example of what I was getting with that straightforward approach with a before, straight out of the camera (only cropped), and after (processed in Aperture and Viveza).

I admit the sky certainly looked a lot better 5 minutes later when I took my composite images, but other than that I can see that the structure i

s lacking in detail. The diffused light doesn't really give me the detail I'm after. This was when I remembered my strobe. I knew I wasn't packing all that crap around for nothing! As Joe McNally says, your gear doesn't do you any good sitting back in the studio. I promptly pulled out my hot shoe flash, whacked on a radio trigger and called in my support. I had Ellie (my wife) press the shutter while I walked around aiming my strobe at certain areas on the structure. I tried getting some bursts a bit farther back, but I soon reached the distance limit of the Cactus V2s'.

The Trick to Making Great Composites Really Quickly

Here's a screen grab of the 19 images I used to make the composite. I opened all of them as 16 bit TIFFs, then copied each one and pasted them all into one single file one at a time.

As you can see, there's a bit of detail in each image, but none of them make a very good pic on

their own. So this is where one little trick can save you a lot of time. All I needed to do was set the blend layer of every layer (except bottom layer) to Lighter Color. Magically, all the lighter areas of all the layers were exposed. Then I went through each layer, created a mask and eliminated the areas I didn't want to show, such as myself, my flash and the areas where the clouds overlapped. Once I had my composite made I selected all layers and pressed Shift+Alt+Cmd+E (Replace Cmd with Control on Windows) to create one new layer from all the others. After saving I discarded all the previous layers and was left with one nice manageable layer. Also, deleting all the other layers dramatically reduced my file size which saved more than a few RPMs on my scratch disk.

From here I was able to create my typical adjustment layer masks to make local changes to the sky and the structure. A quick trip into Viveza and a final stop at Noise Ninja and I was now ready to save back into Aperture for the final touches.

I really like how this turned out and it almost seems a bit richer in tone than your average HDR. I think that's because I wasn't really messing with compensating for my shadows and highlights, I was just adding in touches of light where I wanted them on my subject.

What Would I Change?

If I were to go out and do something like this again, the first thing I would do is make sure to pop my flash in EVERY possible area within the frame. The bottom left corner in this image could have done with at least a bit of light, but I didn't realize this as I was looking through my pics on the back of the LCD. The other thing I would have done is fired my strobe through an umbrella. I did have the flash set to wide zoom, but I would have liked a lot more falloff at the edges of my beam of light which would have avoided some of the hot spots.

What do you think? Have you ever tried a composite image? Share in the comments, I'd love to see what everyone else is doing.

-CB

Jewelry Shots on a Budget

I got a job out of the blue the other day from my wife's ex-employer to take a few shots of his jewelry shop and a couple products as well. Proof you should never burn any bridges! The amazing thing is that, after taking a few shots of the store front, he handed me €9,000 worth of rubies and diamonds to take home and shoot. I was shitting myself on the way home, constantly checking my bag was zipped and latched.

So, after editing the store front pics (soon to come in another post) I got down to lighting the three pieces of jewelry that cost more than my yearly rent and electricity combined. So, how does one light such an elegant and costly subject? With a piece of paper I rescued from the garbage, of course! I was just going to try this out for experiment's sake, but it ended up working really well, so I went with it.

Use What You Have At Your Disposal

Basically, I took the piece of paper, wrapped it into a cone shape and stuck it down to the desk with a little Blu Tack ® (you really need some of this stuff, really). I also used the Blu Tack ® to make the heart and earrings sit the way I wanted to add some interest. Here's a shot of the jewels in the cone.

The one main disadvantage to working in a cone, is that you either need to have skinny little monkey arms (which I don't) or you need to use something like a Wacom pen to push things around. Luckily I convinced myself I needed an Intuos 4 a few months ago, so that was that problem solved. The pen came in really handy when I had to get the chain adjusted just right. You may think I just laid it down like that and, VIOLA! But, no, I adjusted every link on the chain to get the perfect wave.

Shining A Light On A Heart

Now, the lighting. In retrospect, I would have maybe thrown a little more light in from the front, slightly camera right to fill in those two black holes in the front of the heart and the one dark ruby on the right earring, but all in all I'm happy with the final result. I used two flashes, one on either side and both adjusted for roughly the same light output. It wasn't too scientific, as the two flashes have different power and one was closer than the other. Here you can see the setup with the tripod, the Vivitar 285 on the right coming in low and the Pentax 360 on the left up higher.

I messed around a bit with the position of the lights until I had sufficient glow in the stones. By coming in low with the Viv and high with the pentax I was able to bathe the whole piece in nice soft light which made the piece look as though it was glowing from within. I added a bit of light to the front by setting up a silver reflector to bounce some of the Vivitar's extra light back in. This killed any shadows I had showing up in the front underneath the pieces and also gave the front stones a little more kick. As I said before though, I should have added another light source from front / camera right to knock out those black holes. This is an image showing the reflector at work, and also shows the Haruki Murakami books I used to squish the cone in to make it a bit taller inside. If you like funky crazy books, you can't go far with Haruki Murakami.

Don't Forget The Little Details

Now, the only thing about shooting such a detailed object at such a long focal length is that you really start to lose detail due to a shallow plane of focus. I was shooting at f/16 and the focal plane was really only about one inch. That's all well and good if you're going for some artsy bokeh, but I needed to convey the intricacies of this beautiful piece by showing lots of detail.

This is where focus stacking comes to the rescue. I took five shots, one focused on the front, and then consecutively further back. This got the front, the middle, each earring and the middle of the chain. Then I took those five images, after adjusting my levels and all, into Photoshop to blend the parts of the image which were in focus. And if you want to see how I did that you'll have to tune in next time!