Finally after one year of hiding it, I will finally reveal to you, my faithful followers, my biggest secret: My superhero ability that I have obtained through years of meditation and self-discipline.

*drumroll*

Ladies and Gentlemen. I have. The Ability. To telekenetically take a photo of myself taking a photo of myself taking a photo of myself taking a photo … using a D90 that I borrowed from friend photographer Razvan Oprisor.

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Tyler Ye from EyVisuals recently asked for 16 self portraits of photographers with their cameras and this is what I came up with. The only other portrait I’ve seen from this series so far is from fellow friend and photographer Steve Campbell who managed to come up with something pretty damn cool for way less effort haha.

The entire shooting and postprocessing took about 4 hours, not because the shoot itself was hard but because I didn’t have a clear concept of what I wanted when I started out.

Initially, I didn’t plan to have the whole multiplicity thing working for me but rather wanted to have a picture of me telekenetically manipulating a camera and a flash to take a self-portrait of myself. Cool concept, eh? Pretty hard to put into action.

I ended up wasting about an hour and a half trying to come up wiht a convincing floating camera model using a piece of glass, a white shirt, two flashs, my dinner table and some dental floss. It didn’t work.

Mid-way, I decided to take some self portraits since the probability of a succesful telekenetic photoshoot began to diminish faster and faster.

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I knew from the start that I wanted a high contrast image. Actually, I almost always want high contrast images because they make me happy! The first step was to have extremely directional light:

• 1x SB-600 flash unit at around 75 degrees from me pointing bare at my face.
• 1x SB-600 flash unit behind me at 45 degrees lighting up my hair.

From a subject point of view, the entire thing worked out. The problem was however, that I was having too much light that were bouncing all over my white walls, which were lighting up my background instead of giving me a solid black I was hoping for since I don’t actually own a black backdrop. By the way, this was shot in the middle of my living room not in a Studio which is why I encountered these issues.

Since I was shooting at ISO 100, 1/250th, I knew that the background was definitely not lit by the ambient tungsten lamp hanging in the middle of the room. I tried using gobo’s to block the light thinking that maybe that was the reason that I was getting too much bounce, but turns out that the light just wasn’t falling off quick enough (see inverse square law on lighting).  The solution was to simply bring down the flash power and bring it closer to me. This caused a bit of flaring in my lens cuz the flash’s were now so close to the subject, but I could at least deal with that.

I added my final SB-800 unit equipped with my DIY cardboard snoot (that looks far uglier than the one in the link by the way) to the mix by having it light the palm of my lower left hand.

Lighting schematic:

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Besides the lighting, I was wearing a black suit on the right half of my body which is what makes my white shirt disappear into darkness and hand come out of nowhere so that really helped the effect.

I’m not sure what the proper procedure is for having a good focus on the right spot when taking self portraits. What I did was put a flash stand approximately where I would be standing, focus and lock it. I’m sure there’s a better way!

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For the camera, what I did was shoot the shot approximately where it would have been if it had really been floating. I moved the hairlight over to maybe a 30 degree frontal light to provide some fill and voila. As one of my friends Kyle Ruggles mentionned, the depth of field isn’t really fitting… but hey, it’s just for fun =) (Unless some of you guys actually believed my talk about superpowers right!? … anyone? … damn.)

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Besides that it was really just combining the two images in Photoshop which took no time at all. That being said, I have two final products. I did a quick survey and people thought the sharp one was better which is the one I posted. What are your thoughts?

vs

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Benjamin Wong
http://iintrigue.com
Montreal Based Photographer

Opinions seem mixed here in this shot… am I glowing radioactively? have I turned to stone? What do you think?

What happened here was A little bit of photoshop and a little bit of innovation with Nikons CLS and two geeky photographers : Myself and Razvan. Razvan actually helped photograph this semi-self portrait so I’d like to throw out a big thank you =)!

A simple two light setup was used here. One blue-gelled SB-600 unit was left on a little stand pointing upwards, and a second snooted SB-600 was used bare to light the face/hair section.

I did some readings and the experts say that being lit from the bottom makes you look creepy… looks like they were right!

For those who want a pretty diagram:

—
Benjamin Wong
http://iintrigue.com
Montreal Based Photographer

~ Click on the photo above to access the full album

Before I start, I just wanted to shout out a big thanks to Razvan Oprisor for coming as my voluntary assist on this shoot. If you’re interested in coming to assist at a future shoot, give me a shout!

The event “Concours TADAM” which took place in the Bistro Laurier, was one out of a series of  small battle of the bands competition for local talent to compete for the opportunity to perform live at the Bel-Oeil Summer Festival.

The competition was a fantastic musical experience and although  I’d love to give a description of each of the groups that performed but unfortunately, I don’t know the group names. Hopefully I’ll be able to update this in the near future.

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The stage that I had to light was a square about 20×20,and reasonably well lit although the light tones kept changing thanks to these futuristic club lights travelling all around the place at random …  which means that both Raz and I would occasionally end up with weirdly shaded singers in varying blue, purple and/or green tones! (Black and white suddenly becomes your best friend!)

To make sure I would be able to get some clear well-defined outlines (like the shot above) without having that front dear-in-headlights look, I decided to take a gamble with some CLS - wireless flash from Nikon! (First time fooling around with CLS in a concert setting!) Doing a quick survey of the stage, I quickly noticed that I was going to have some trouble.

- Dark walls, dark cieling meant no large white surfaces to bounce light off of
- No space to discretely set up an umbrella for some softer fill
- No space in general to set up a lightstand for the flashes!

The improvised solution was:

- put a light stand on top of a speaker with the SB-600 pointed to a white air conditionner to create the soft side fill and gradiant cieling
- wrap a second SB-600 upside down using a gorillapod hanging from the wires of the cieling speakers as a hair light for the artists.
- use a camera mounted SB-800 to trigger the two units and provide some frontal fill light.

Hopefully the little diagram below can help to explain:

This shot here will shows the results  in real life -

• a glowing gradiant from the bounced light off the air conditionner on the upper right
• the flash hanging from the cieling on camera left overexposing the poor main guitarist’s face

Final comments on the event:

• Continuously experiment with your camera. It’s ridiculous how much variations you get in your shots from simply cranking up or down your shutter speed or aperture.
• Play around with one setting at the time. For me at least, that was the turning point in the evening. I was trying to set manual power on all 3 flashes while varying shutter and aperture speed (5 variables!) during the event and was having a ridiculously hard time. It’s only after I decided to cheat and leave the CLS on TTL mode that I got anything great because I had less to think about.

Cheers, and please leave a comment!

Hey,

Me again! Before beginning my post, I just wanted to ask you to give me your opinion about the brand new logo that has been graciously designed with the help of Olivier Joseph and Crisco Dean.

Thanks! It’s very appreciated =)

Now, the purpose of this post is simple. I simply wanted to share the results of  an interesting experiment that involved a dimly lit Karaoke room, two flashes, a gorillapod and my D300!

I’m sure for all of you that have ever been to a karaoke room, you’d notice that the room itself was dimly lit which would result in completely horrible pictures.

Now, thanks to the meager knowledge I’ve accumulated from studiously following articles up on strobist.com, I was able to think of somewhat of a solution!

Step 1 was to find a nice bounce surface. Thanks to the fact that all the walls were white, the choice wasn’t too hard.

Step 2 was to try to figure out how to hide the flash so it wouldn’t interfere with the picture. The solution?

By bouncing the second flash off an opposing wall, voila!

Cheers and have a good evening!

Benjamin

So a couple days back, I believe I see on strobist.com that Dustin Snipes had decided to unveil some of his post-processing tricks . (Link HERE if you’re interested in giving it a shot!)

Turns out that I’m lucky because a friend of mine (Razvan Oprisor) had to drop by to return an SB-800 and SB-600 that I had lent him a couple days back. Now Raz is this Romanian dude that has this look that just works for a “detective mode” so that’s what we started off working with.

For the first shot, three speedlights were used. One on the left side with a green colored gel shooting through an umbrella, a second on the right side with a CTO (Color Temperature Orange) gel, and a third flash hanging from the ceiling light with a gorillapod and diffuser attached to light the hat.  For the second shot, the cieling light was switched off and the green and orange inverted sides.

Lighting Diagram for First Shot:

lighting-diagram-1233769945

From there, I applied the Dustin Snipes instructions, fiddeled around a bit with my own meager photoshop skills and voila.
Note: Ok fine, it really doesn’t look anything like the Dustin Snipes effect… but I tried to use his technique… hence “Dustin Snipes Attempt”

Feedback/Comments/Criticism welcomed!

Ben