Studio@jumpers-inn.de

A lot of time passed, since I posted something here. It’s because I’m in the process of finishing up my PhD thesis which is taking a lot of time away from other (more fun) things. But every now and then I allow myself some time for recreational things like photography. Recently I saw an image at klick.de (ordered some prints there) which inspired me to recreate that. Recreating images that you like is really a good exercise, especially if you have no description of the light setup or camera settings. Makes you look at the image really carefully to try and find out what the direction of the light is, the camera angle and what post processing might have been involved.

The picture in question for me this time was something erotic. A woman’s legs in nice stockings, stretched to the sky and crossed. Together with the vintage style processing this gives a really nice image. You can check it out here.

To recreate this, there’s of course need for some beatiful legs, which fortunately were available I set up a white background and two speedlights which where pointed at two large white styrofoam boards to give a diffuse lighting. These lights were located left and right of the camera at a 45° angle to the model, straight forward and simple. I experimented a bit with the power of the speedlights and at the end the one on the right was set to 1/2 while the other was at 1/8. This way I had a little bit more light coming from the right. First result is this one:

Recreating vintage style photography

Post processing involved masking out the legs and replacing the background with a solid color. On this image I then added a texture to the background with very high opacity to just give a slight pattern. Some adjustments to the levels and a bit of vignetting complete the treatment in PSE. I then took it to Nik ColorEfex 3 and applied the Old Photo filter to give the final result.

The second image was a different take on the subject with a different pose. This was to get more attention to the nice shoes

Recreating vintage style photography

Post processing was rather similar to the first image, except no texture to the background. I also had to do some sharpening on this one and added a more pronounced vignette. Then again, ColorEfex for the final look.

Had this little argument with my friend Tilo who claimed that using a UV filter on your lens will make the images less sharp and generally be bad. So I made a little comparison shot. Left is with UV filter and right is without. Looks pretty identical to me. So if the UV filter is affecting image quality it is under some other circumstances, which are probably pretty rare. If anyone has some suggestions on how the influence of the filter can be made visible, please comment!

Left: UV filter attached, right: no UV filter attached

Full resolution images can be seen here and here.

UPDATE: Used some Google-Fu to see if there are other people wondering about the same thing. Some interesting results came up. The overall statement seems to be: UV filter is theoretically affecting the image quality, but in 99% of the cases this is not noticeable. In very extreme light conditions the effects can be visible though.

Now for some finer points:

• http://www.cameralabs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14617 - seems to indicate that aperture plays a role for sharpness with the filter, will have to test that
• http://www.petapixel.com/2011/06/16/experimenting-with-stacks-of-uv-filters/ - using a big stack of filters obviously affects image quality a lot!
• http://www.lenstip.com/113.1-article-UV_filters_test_Introduction.html - very detailed UV filter test, the first I found so far with some illustrative images of the mystic “flares” everyone seems to be getting all the time, supporting the overall statement above