Studio@jumpers-inn.de

Been in Frankfurt for some photo shooting with my friend Tilo. We went on top of the Main Tower where there is a observation platform located above the 54th floor. It was super windy and kinda cold but it was a great view. I tried different things, panoramas and HDRs and today managed to put something decent together. This is a wallpaper friendly size

Frankfurt by night HDR wallpaper

You can see the other results in my Flickr stream.

Very simple and easy setup for bright white flower macro shots. What you need:

• flower
• two speedlites
• white styrofoam plates

Place the styrofoam plates in a L-shape and point the speedlites at them. The flower is positioned in the middle of this setup with the camera on the same height as the blossom pointing towards the styrofoam plates. Now adjust the speedlites’ strengths as you see fit (I used 1/16 and 1/8). See this setup shot:

Setup for bright flower macro

And the result:

Resulting bright flower macro

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

Ever wondered why those product shots look that much better than the pictures you take of your grand-granddad’s heirloom watch? Most probably because of the light. As we all know, lighting is everything in photography. A lightbox is a neat little gadget that helps you light stuff you want to take a picture of. Well, it’s not suited for everything because of spacial restrictions, so people will most likely not fit in there. But everything else does, like watches, food or that amazing shell you found on the shore last vacation. This little article shows how I built myself a cheap lightbox, so maybe you can take inspiration from this. There’s of course countless other build instructions on the web on how to do this, so feel free to fire up Google and get creative!

Here are the first results I got from my lightbox. Not great, but ok I think. I need another flash light…