Tag Archives: strobist

06/12/14

Making of "Ephemeral dreams"

To create this work, I mixed a 3D rendered labyrinth with some photos. The final photo is composed by these three kinds of images, created in this order:

Hands: I used a Canon 17-40L lens at 17mm, f/20 to get a lot of dof and flash on the right with a small softbox.

hands_setuphands

 Sand falling:

I needed to get some photos of sand falling and merge them together to create the parts where the labyrinth was melting. My photoshop skills are very limited so I had to get a good perspective and shoot at 17mm too in order to facilitate the edition. I did some tries using a shutter speed of 1/30, also f/20 and natural light to get a kind of “silk effect”, but when I joined the captures with the 3D labyrinth, the result looked like plastic. I repeated the sand captures using flash to get the opposite appearance (freeze the motion), and I stuck with that setup for the rest of the photos I needed (just 3 or 4).

sand_setup

sand

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Labyrinth: Modeled with 3D Max 2014 with iray. First I created in Photoshop a 2D image in black and white with the labyrinth I wanted, until I got this:

plantilla_laberint2

I added some layers and used the gradient tool to darken the corners so that the labyrinth appeared that was melting when applying later the “displace” modifier in 3D Max (depending on the shade of gray, the height of each wall will differ).

Then in 3D Max, applying the modifier “displace” I used the displace map created to get the 3D appearance. With the modifiers melt, noise, wave and bend I added some imperfections, and also edited the mesh of the labyrinth to melt much drastically the middle part and the sides. Result:

laberint_high_low_mid_fused

Each part was processed with Lightroom to add some dramatism by using clarity and blacks, and changing the temperature of the captures, and also desaturating to have a similar appearance in all of them and facilitate the Photoshop part.

Final photo:

04/8/14

Making of "Captivity"

In this one, I wanted to create an mood similar to a jail by projecting the light through something like “metal bars”.
I used a cutter and cardboard to create my bars and set a flash behind it on the right of the camera to project the shadows of the bars onto the composition.

I could have created shadows with a more defined borders by placing the flash farther from the cardboard, so that the relative size of the flash would be smaller, but for me it was ok this way, because it can be interpreted as an office curtain too, which I also found appropiate.

To emphasize the highlights and textures of my hand and give the impression that the person was in tension and sweating, I used a dropper with water to wet my hand. I used an old keyboard I had at home because by combining it with the b/w processing seemed more adequate to me than a modern keyboard.

Before:

20121011_200023

After:

02/24/13

DIY Water Balloon Photography Tutorial

One of the interesting techniques I hadn’t still tried until now was to capture an exploding water balloon just in the moment the plastic breaks, but the water still has the shape of a balloon. I didn’t want to invest any money in laser barriers or something similar, so I built a very simple mechanism that wouldn’t give me the perfect timing but maybe an acceptable approach.

Materials I used:

  • 2 sewing needles
  • A pice of plastic of about 20cm of length to build the lever.
  • 3 meter camera cable (for ease, depending on camera position)
  • A plastic washbowl
  • A small flash with wireless remote
  • A bag of small water balloons
  • A hot glue gun if possible (or just glue)
  • A tripod to hold the mechanism and water balloon, and another to hold the camera.
  • A mop!

Camera and flash settings:

  • Shutter of 1/100 or similar is enough, because we’ll illuminate the water balloon with the small flash only.
  • I recommend using an apperture of f/8 or narrower, because sometimes water goes in many directions and this way we’ll get more dof.
  • For the tests the flash was at 0.5m approx, at 1/64 of power. I recommend using the lowest power if possible to get a more sharp result.
  • Camera focus must be set to manual and I also recommend to adjust the frame for each photo since the size of the water balloons is not always the same.

Shutter trigger construction:

About the shutter trigger, my Canon 5D MKII uses an N3 connector, so I cut an old shutter cable to build the new one. It has three wires (Ground, Shutter, Focus) that will allow us to make a photo by doing a short circuit between Shutter and Ground wires. I’ve marked with a green dot the two necessary pins in the photo of the N3 connector. It’s not necessary to use the Focus wire since the camera will be in manual focus.

To build the other side of the wire, I welded each wire (Shutter, Ground) to a needle. Then I used the hot glue gun to attach the needles to a long piece of plastic with a little inclination so that if the needles touch a rigid surface they will touch each other. My initial idea was that the water of the balloon would short circuit the two wires, but at practice it didn’t result in my case, so with a little inclination in the needles they also touched each other when breaking the water balloon.

To hold the lever I used the materials I had at home, but it’s possible to hold it in many other (and better) ways.

Once the setup is mounted, a water balloon is hold with a string in front of the lever so that when the lever is released it will break the balloon and the needles will also touch each other to activate the camera shutter and make the photo, so the only thing we have to do is hold the lever in a higher position and release it to make each photo.

Photos of the parts and results:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Video of the mechanism in action:

As you can see the results are quite different between each other, because the timing was a little unpredictable. There are a lot of ways to improve this first test, trying to anticipate the explosion by placing the shutter cables in another place in the lever or changing the way the wires touch each other.

Opinions and questions welcomed 😉