Sunday, November 22, 2009

Self portrait

Self Portrait

I shot this to practice my lighting.

I used three lights for this. My key light was bounced off a low wall to my right (camera left). This gave me a nice diffused light. My fill light was to my left (camera right) using a PVC drain adapter as a mini snoot to control the light on my face. The background light was behind me near the floor, pointed up into the stairwell.

Originally, main light came out very orange because of the wall color. To correct for this, I set the White Balance on my camera to Tungsten. What this did was to 'correct' the orange light that was reflected onto my face to be white. The side effect is that the background and fill lights turned blue (Flash and sunlight read blue when the WB is set to tungsten). To compensate, I added a CTO (Color Temperature Orange-corrects flash/sunlight to tungsten) so that I wouldn't have blue fill on my face. I left the background light ungelled to increase the drama.

Friday, November 20, 2009

Lakeside Cemetery, Braintree, MA

I went out to take pictures of local headstones for www.findagrave.com the other day. I only found a few of the many requests, but I did get some nice pictures anyway.

Lakeside Cemetery, Braintree

Lakeside Cemetery, Braintree