People – Page 9 – Peter Oshkai photography

December 13, 2014December 14, 2014

In the dance studio

Today, I took photos in a children’s dance school, not as part of a pro photo shoot, but being a spectator in a class. I did not use any flashes – just a 70-200mm f/2.8L IS lens on a Canon EOS-1D X body. I shot at f/2.8 and auto ISO, varying the shutter speed between 1/200 sec and 1/800 sec, depending on how fast the children (3-5 year old girls) moved.

It turned out that motion blur was not the problem (the girls were not vary fast at that age), but the flickering fluorescent light caused all sorts of weird colour casts. The light tubes were not only quite dim – they flickered between pinkish and greenish colours. To make matters worse, different light tubes in the studio flickered with different phase relative to each other, so in some of my images, part of the frame had pink cast and another part – green.

Normally, I would correct the colour in post-processing, aiming to create realistic skin tone. However, with colour gradients across the frame, often the only option was to convert the photo to black-and-white. Still, today’s shoot was the case where being spontaneous and unobtrusive mattered more than creating high-quality lighting conditions.

December 10, 2014December 11, 2014

Making holiday greeting cards

I have been considering various options for sending greeting to family and friends for the Christmas and New Year. In the past, we ordered paper cards customized with our own photos using iPhoto on a Mac. The quality was excellent for the price. Also, I like to believe that there is something special about a handwritten card that arrives in the mail. Unfortunately, I am almost always late with ordering the cards and then sending them out. This, combined with uncertain snail mail delivery times for some overseas destinations, often caused us to miss the actual holidays, which somewhat defeats the purpose of the holiday cards.

This year, I am considering a fully electronic alternative to traditional, handwritten paper cards, but I still want to convey the personal attention and avoid a cookie-cutter look.

Broadly, there are three options:

Printed cards. There are several online printing companies that would accept a custom-designed card, print it and ship directly to the address specified by you. One example is Holiday Cards by Sincerely Ink. For me, the drawback of this option that the greeting would not be written by hand and thus would lack the personal feel.
E-cards. There are many options for creating custom e-cards either on an iPad/iPhone or on a Mac (naturally, there are counterparts for Android and Windows machines). I have tried the eCard Express, and was a bit disappointed by the lack of customizable fonts and very few templates that accept your own photos.
Fancy emails. This seems to be the most promising option. In OS X, the built-in email client, Mail, has an option of using custom stationery (accessed by pressing the button at the top right of the message window.) Several companies offer stationary sets that include greeting cards. For example, Equinux has stationary sets that cost between $8 and $15, which is substantially cheaper than printing and sending traditional paper cards. Finally, this page gives a comparison of greeting card software for Mac, with Hallmark Card Studio for Mac being the top pick.

Upon considering these options, I am leaning towards creating the card from scratch in Photoshop and sending it as an email attachment. I can use my own photo and draw the graphics elements, such as snowflakes, etc., using a Wacom graphics tablet. I can also incorporate handwritten text into the design, which I think would be a good compromise between a traditional card and an e-card. While my digital card would not be one-of-a-kind, it would still be “handmade” as much as a digital image can be.

December 8, 2014December 8, 2014

At the theatre

Last Sunday, we took our three-years-old daughter to see her first ballet performance – the Nutcracker. She is really into ballet (to my continuing surprise), and she was looking forward to the show for the last week. I thought that the expectation might be too high, but she really enjoyed the whole theatre-going experience and the show itself, even though she was a bit disappointed that Cinderella was not it it.

I wanted to take a few shots of my daughter at the theatre for our family albums (in a virtual sense – perhaps, actual paper albums would not even exist when she grows up). I knew that an iPhone would not do it, as it is quite dark in the theatre. Fortunately, since we have a young child, we always carry a shoulder bag with some snacks, change of clothes, etc., so I put my Canon EOS-1D X with a 35mm f/1.4L USM lens in it too. I wrote earlier that this is a great camera-lens combination for low-light photography. The 35 mm focal length was also sufficiently wide for taking photos from a very close distance, such as sitting right next to a person.

Having seats next to an aisle was very convenient, as I could back away into the aisle to take a wider shot without disturbing others. Naturally, we only took photos before the performance and during the intermission, as we walked through the hallways, but that was all we really wanted.

The colour of the lighting in the theatre was not flattering for portraits, to say the least. In some shots, the shadows ended up with a purple cast, while the highlights were green – nearly impossible to get a realistic skin tone. In this case, I converted the photos to black and white, which also helped with the noise.

December 7, 2014December 7, 2014

Family portraits: best lens for shooting in natural light

When my daughter decided to help baking pancakes on a Saturday morning, I could not resist taking a few snapshots of the process. Something in the very fact of her wanting to help to the best of her ability as a three-year-old (even if it actually creates more work at this age) resonates deeply with me, and I always want to capture the moment and the feeling.

I happened to have a borrowed Canon EF 85mm f1.2L II USM lens that day, so I used it to shoot the portraits of my daughter and wife in our kitchen using natural light from a skylight located directly above them. I shot wide open, at f/1.2, which gives such a shallow depth of field, that the typical kitchen clutter in the background is not very distracting. The wide aperture also lets in a lot of light, which allows the ISO (and therefore, noise) remain relatively low.

The inherent challenge of shooting at f/1.2 is getting acceptable sharpness for both people in the shot. The depth of field is so shallow that if I focus on the closest eye of one person, for example, even other parts of the face of the same person are out of focus, not to mention the other subject(s). As my daughter was busy stirring the batter, I asked my wife to try to move as closely as possible to her and then positioned the camera so that both their faces would be approximately the same distance from it.

Despite being tricky to work with, I think the 85mm f1.2L is the best lens for natural light portraits. It is a bit difficult to define what makes this lens so remarkable, but I think it is the combination of sharpness, bokeh and low noise that makes the images taken with it stand out.

December 3, 2014December 3, 2014

Photo contests

Whether participating in photo contests is useful for one’s development as a photographer or not, depends on the photographer, or rather, on what he/she takes away from the contest.

Some contests are judged by a panel of judges, while many online contests (in various Flickr groups, for example, such as Matchpoint Challenge or Flickr’s 100 Best) are adjudicated by the participants themselves. There are even popular sites dedicated to head-to-head photo “duels” (e.g. pixoto). Some sites, e.g. 500px, do not run contests per se, but give photographers bragging rights by ranking their photos and portfolios based on their popularity.

While no competition is objective, I personally value them for the feedback they provide regarding my photos. Incidentally, I found that off-line contests are largely useless from that perspective. Sometimes, the outcomes are surprising, in a sense that some of my personal favourite photos do not resonate with the audience, while others that I do not particularly care about (I would enter them because they fit the theme of a contest, for example) become hugely popular.

It is also interesting to see that different audiences prefer different trends. For example, the 500px community, which consists mostly of photographers, favours more subtle, elaborate post-processing effects than the pixoto community. Pixoto is more representative of a general population, and the preference is given to brighter, more saturated colours and generally images that “pop” more.

Participating in contests gives focus to photography when otherwise might be no external motivation to go out and shoot or creatively process images. Doing this regularly is an important practice for developing one’s skills.

I think that just as it is important for improving my work, receiving criticism helps me develop thick skin regarding the opinion of other people about my work. It may sound counter-intuitive: why invite feedback if what you learn is to ignore it? But it is not ignoring the harsh comments that is valuable, but rather learning not to take them personally. Any artist consciously makes him/herself vulnerable by putting out his/her work out for the World to see and judge. Nevertheless, even though our work is an expression of ourselves (to a degree, this is true of any work, not just photography or art), it does not define ourselves. Developing this concept requires practice, and contests provide such opportunity.

December 1, 2014December 2, 2014

Printing photo albums

I have been looking through various options for printing an album for the wedding photo portfolio to showcase my and Armando’s work in that area. While both of us printed photo books before, we wanted to try a top-quality printing company for this project.

These days, there are so many online printing/binding companies that selecting the top one is quite difficult. My personal experience to date has been with the White House Custom Colour (not with books per se, but with gallery wrap prints). The quality was excellent, and one of the canvas prints hangs on our living room wall. I also ordered a couple of books through Apple, directly from iPhoto. I very much liked the result, and the workflow was very intuitive. However, I feel that a wedding portfolio calls for a more substantial binding.

Our top two choices were KISS and The Leather Craftsmen. Both companies came highly recommended by professional photographers in podcast interviews. Both websites have a registration process that involves verification of the user as a professional photographer. After my registration was approved (Yey! An external validation that I am a pro!), I was able to see the price lists. The prices of the albums from both companies are comparable, and they are significant – certainly not what we can afford to just try out by ordering a few different options. That is why it is a difficult choice.

We decided to go with The Leather Craftsmen because of the wider range of available formats. The KISS offers only square format, which is simple, but somewhat limiting for what we want to print. I am looking forward to trying the procedure for preparing the photos and designing the layout of the book and, of course, to seeing the final product.

November 26, 2014

Family Christmas card idea

This year, we wanted to take family photos that we could use for a printed Christmas card, but did not want a formal, “studio” look. My wife and I took some photos of each other and our daughter, while we were painting wooden Christmas tree decorations in our living room. The photos were not strictly “candid”, since we were aware of the camera, but we used only ambient light to imitate the candid, spontaneous photo style.

The lighting was quite dim, so the photos turned out quite noisy. This is Ok, however, since the prints are going to be very small, so they can handle quite a bit of noise reduction in post-processing. We used a Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L USM lens on a 1D X camera body. I set it to a manual mode with f/1.4, 1/200 sec and auto ISO. I found that our daughter moves sufficiently fast, and the camera with the 35mm lens needs to be sufficiently close to her, that a slower shutter speed gives too much motion blur.

For a group portrait of all three of us, I set the camera on a tripod and used a 10 sec timer. After a few tries we got a decent shot, but shooting with the wide aperture gave a narrow depth of field, and our daughter ended up being slightly out of focus. Hopefully, this will look Ok in a small image on the card.

A really precious and unexpected moment for us happened when our daughter walked over to the camera that was sitting on the tripod and started taking photos of us. Below is her very first photograph. As a parent, I am biased, naturally, but I like it!

November 23, 2014November 24, 2014

Photographing newborns

Newborn photography is a very popular genre because it represents a major emotional milestone for any family. Overall, babies are easy to photograph, compared to toddlers, for example, but there are a few points that I keep in mind to improve the images and the photo shoot experience (which is probably at least as important for the young family as the photos themselves):

The best time to for a newborn portrait is within the first ten days of their life. After that, babies lose their natural curled-up posture, which makes iconic images of a sleeping child so cute. The first couple of weeks are also some of the busiest for the new parents, so it’s good to plane the shoot in advance.
It’s important to keep the room very warm (barely comfortable for adults) – babies get cold very easily.
Babies’ eyelids are very thin, so the flashes can disturb their sleep. The opportunities to capture the “sleeping baby” photos may be few. Of course, there is an option to shoot with natural light, if there is a large window in the room.
Post-processing is a must. Baby’s skin is not a smooth as we are used to think. In fact, it is spotty, scaly and translucent, showing all the tiny blood vessels. It is also very red, compared to an adult’s skin tone (I am talking about a white baby here – different races would have their own differences).

Overall, I think newborn portrait are a lot of fun, particularly because of the opportunity to capture the emotional connection of the adults and the newest member of the humankind. Taking this king of photos always feels like a privilege.

November 12, 2014November 12, 2014

Combining window light with strobes for portraits

A large window at midday is a great light source for portraits. During a staged wedding photo shoot at the Empress hotel last summer, I had a chance to combine window light with studio strobes. The colour matching between the natural and artificial light sources is not an issue, since “standard” studio light is daylight-balanced.

When the model is extremely close to the window, as in the photo above, the backlight provided by it is very intense, and it is easy to blend it with the strobe light. I shot this portrait at f/4.0 and 1/200 sec (ISO 200), which gave correct exposure for the window light. A single strobe fitted with a large softbox provided the light from the opposite direction. The resulting lighting arrangement is, essentially, equivalent to “cross-lighting”, when the model is located between two light sources of equal strength that are aimed at each other. The light distribution on the model is then controlled by her position relative to the imaginary line connecting the two light sources (if the model is located behind the lights, she is largely lit from the from the front; if she is mostly in front of the lights – she is backlit).

The difference between cross-lighting and the window-softbox arrangement is that in the latter case the light sources are, effectively, very large. This results in contrasty light (deep shadows, bright highlights) that, at the same time, has soft transitions between light and dark areas.

In contrast, the image below is shot with window light only. No additional strobes or reflectors were used to fill in the shadows. The dynamic range of this scene is quite high, but even when exposing for the highlights (so that they would not end up over-exposed), my Canon EOS-1D X fitted with a 85mm f1.2L II USM lens was able to capture some details in the shadows.

These two relatively easy lighting setups give completely different feels to portraits. Personally, I like the subtleness of natural light, and not having a strobe makes the shooting process more flexible and intuitive. However, without a flash to balance the window light, the range of poses that can be explored is fairly limited. Basically, the model has to be facing the window, or at least be partially turned towards it. With a flash, variety of poses is possible, including portraits with the window as a background.

November 8, 2014November 9, 2014

On feedback to and from models during photo shoots

I wrote yesterday about involving other people in photo shoots. A particularly effective way of doing this is showing the photos to models during the shoot and asking if they would like to make any adjustments. The models would have an opportunity to see if there is anything wrong with the pose, the hair, the makeup, etc., and give the feedback to the photographer. I usually show the photos on the camera’s LCD screen, but it can be done on a computer screen if shooting tethered (having the camera connected to the computer by a USB cable, so that the photos are downloaded as soon as they are taken).

Professional models are different from amateurs people in that they know the poses that work well for them and can produce those poses repeatably. They are also used to critically reviewing photos of themselves from the technical viewpoint. For me personally, having the model’s feedback is tremendously helpful, as it allows me to tap into their experience, which can save a lot of trial and error in producing the best possible image.

Even if the subject is not a professional model, it is very useful to show the photo to her/him and ask for feedback. First of all, it helps the model relax and feel more involved in the shoot. Also, most people have preconceived ideas of what the final photo would look like. Showing the photos to them during the shoot can make a difference between satisfaction and disappointment with the final images. Seeing the photos during the shoot adjusts the expectations of the final product, and sometimes all it takes for a bride to be happy with her portrait is adjusting the position of the bouquet so that it does not cover a detail of the dress.

At first, I hesitated to show “unfinished” photos to other people, especially to models and clients. However, in my experience to date, nobody ever complained that the images were unprocessed or not sufficiently polished. At the same time, people were often able to make small, easy adjustments during the shoot, which saved a lot of post-processing work and resulted in much better final photos.

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