For months and months I kept seeing other photographers and models working with colored smoke. Seeing how I love colorful shoots (even though I am color blind), I had to give it a try.
I researched colored smoke and found an online store that ships colorful smoke grenades typically used for paintball games. Check out Ansgear to see their collection. They have several different sizes, varieties, and colors of smoke grenades. The grenades I settled on were wire pull basic grenades. I started collecting colors over a few months..
I knew I wanted to use several different models in several different outdoor locations for the images as well as a video so I reached out to several different models and started lining up shoots. I experimented with a grenade to see how much smoke it would produce, for how long it would produce it, and how hot the grenade would get (just to see if they could be safely handheld). The amount of smoke is nothing short of amazing. You can easily get close to 45 seconds of really good smoke with each grenade. And although they didn’t get extremely hot, I still decided to find another method for the models to hold them. Wife to the rescue! She found a decorative wire enclosure that worked great. Simply start the grenade, drop it in the basket, and swing the basket around.
Each model found amazing outfits to match or compliment their smoke colors and the shoots began. Since I knew I wanted to make a video related to the shoots, I employed my 8 year old daughter to man the video camera (cell phone). By the way, she is so excited her name is listed in the credits on the YouTube video. She’s curious as to how many ‘describers’ (subscribers) she has now!
I love several of the images we got from the shoots and the video is one of my personal favorites (despite the fact it is one of my most disliked videos to date – go figure). I am now on the hunt for more ideas that involve colored smoke. Thanks to the awesome models, my wife, and my daughter for helping me with this several month long project.
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Flour – it’s good for more than just baked goods. I have done flour/powder shoots about four or five times now and they are still just as challenging and interesting as the first time I tried them. And no, I do not tire of doing the same type of shoot more than once. I learn something new every time. For this particular shoot, I enlisted the help of a competitive dancer, Sasha. I have worked with Sasha on a couple of other shoots before and I knew she would be perfect for this idea. This shoot can be done in a large studio but cleanup will be an undertaking. Doing the shoot outside helps alleviate some of the cleanup. I find the best background for these types of shoots is a black background. I buy packages of black plastic sheeting that is 10 feet by 25 feet for about $10. I buy two and tape them together with black tape giving me a single piece that is 20 feet by 25 feet. I then hang the sheet from the eves of a two car garage roughly 10 feet high - the rest of the plastic drapes down the driveway. I then place two flashes on either side of the driveway with flags (barn doors) on the side of the flash facing the plastic hanging over the garage door. Each light is placed slightly in front of the plane of the model aimed slightly back towards the model. The intent is to illuminate the model while at the same time avoiding light from spilling on the background. Despite many online tutorials, I find I get much better results illuminating the flour from the front rather than from behind. However, that just may be my personal preference. I then mark a spot on the ground about 6 to 10 feet from the background and obtain focus with the model standing on that spot. After that, I select a relatively wide depth of field (focus) around f/7 and switch the camera to manual focus. The camera remains on a tripod throughout the shoot and is triggered remotely for each image. After that, it is all a matter of timing. Some of the images were shot throwing flour on the model and other images were shot with flour simply flying off the model. Obviously the images where flour is tossed on the model take more timing accuracy but after a few attempts, you find the sweet spot. For this shoot, we also employed the use of a trampoline. Flour is placed on the surface of the trampoline and the model simply bounces on the trampoline. Setup is exactly the same. A black tarp hung behind the trampoline with two flashes on either side of the model slightly ahead of the model aimed slightly behind the model. When editing the images, I will darken the blacks and lighten the whites, or you can adjust contrast to your liking. After the shoot, you sweep all of the flour to the edge of the plastic and into a bucket or other container. The plastic can then be cleaned off, folded up, and re-used for another shoot. Any fine powder that gets in the air as a result of the shoot typically blows away in the wind. If you were in a studio however, it would eventually settle down on everything in the room requiring additional cleaning. Do it outdoors if you can on a night that isn’t windy and rain is not expected. I love these messy and crazy shoots and highly recommend everyone try it at least once. Go buy a bunch of flour, some plastic sheets, and find a model that isn’t afraid to get a little messy. And don’t forget to have fun in the process.
I recently wrote an article about night time portrait photography with, and without, a flash. Since that shoot, I have returned to the idea and have some updates and suggestions that might be helpful for those struggling with this technique, as I have. I generally scout out locations for shoots but this is especially important for night time portraiture as you need to know ahead of time where to find nice lights for the background. Instead of returning to the location I used previously, I looked around my neighborhood and found a few decent spots. I ran across an incredibly awesome location but was asked by security to leave the property AND delete all my photos of the building (we’ll discuss your rights as a photographer in an upcoming post as I found his request both amusing and infuriating). After location scouting, all I needed was a model. Mattie was the first model that came to mind for this idea. Mattie has a very elegant and classic, girl-next-door, type of beauty that works perfect for portraits, IMHO. After pestering her to help me out, she agreed. Click on an image for a larger view. And on a side note – I’m willing to bet Mattie doesn’t realize her own beauty. I find that most people and models don’t. We are all so quick to focus in on our own flaws and imperfections that we rarely take the time to look beyond our self-critical glasses and really appreciate ourselves, myself included. And yes, you can realize your own beauty without being vain or overly confident. I know for a fact that I have never taken a picture of someone that isn’t beautiful but I’m also willing to bet most, if not all of the people I have photographed would disagree with that statement when looking at images of themselves. So incredibly sad. Celebrate your beauty! Anyway, for this second round of night time portrait photography, I changed my approach a bit. With the prior shoot, I was simply trying to get night time portraits with mainly available ambient light. Only on an occasion did I resort to a flash when the surrounding light just wasn’t bright enough. This time around, I exposed specifically for a dark background and the background lights first, and then used a speedlight with a relatively large softbox to illuminate the model for every shot. I did not rely on ambient light to light my model at all. If your try this method at night, you will quickly learn that the overall color of the light at night is much warmer (oranger, if that makes sense) than the light you get from your flash which can appear quite cold (bluer). This is something I discovered on my first shoot. To correct this problem for this shoot, I used an orange gel (CTO) to help balance the color temperatures. It worked great! For a few of the shots, I probably could have used a stronger gel or maybe even two gels to get the look I was after. Much like my original outing, I wanted to get a decent amount of bokeh from the background lights so I shot as wide open as I could. I used mainly two different lenses (50mm f/1.8 and the 24-70mm f/2.8) for the shoot. Shooting this wide open aids the camera collecting light from lights in the scene. It also helps create amazing bokeh but with one significant drawback – speedlights produce a lot of light, even on the lowest power setting. There were several times I needed to move the softbox further back to reduce its power. Even on its lowest setting inside of the softbox with two layers of internal diffusers, the flash was simply still too bright. In the future I will bring an additional diffuser I can place over the flash head to help reduce its power in addition. I did not want to raise my f stop and lose the bokehlicious background and my ISO was already at its lowest. The only option left was to move the light further from the subject (which in turn made it a harder light which I didn’t necessarily want either – just can’t win). We made a night of going from location to location – one of which was a parking lot outside of a police station. At one point, a police cruiser watched our activity for a bit but eventually tired of our antics and left. As always, Mattie brought several different outfits to keep the images looking fresh. I experimented as much as possible with different settings because this type of photography is not something I feel competent at…yet. Upon review of the images, some I liked and some not so much. But that’s okay! It just means I get to try it again and build on my experiences. I never tire of failing. It’s when I learn the most! So as usual, pick up your gear, find an idea you’ve never done before, and go mess it up as best you can! Special thanks to Mattie for helping out when I’m sure she had a plethora of other more appealing options that Friday night. Much appreciated!
What could be more fun than putting a model into a straitjacket for a photo shoot? Nothing! Absolutely nothing! Can you sense I had fun with this idea? This idea was born about a year ago when I was trying to find a fun shoot ideas to do that I hadn’t seen replicated online a dozen or more times. Although coming up with a completely original idea for a shoot is nearly impossible, with a little digging around I discovered very few images related to my idea and even fewer videos. Woohoo! – made it over the first hurdle.
The second hurdle is finding a willing model. My good friend Alecia commented on a picture I posted that she wanted to do a themed shoot. Silly rabbit! She should know better than to tempt me. I contacted her and ran a few ideas I had in mind for shoots and we settled on the straitjacket idea (with a little persuasive begging from me). I knew the idea had the potential for varying degrees of emotional expression from the model. I also knew Alecia would be a perfect fit for this idea. She is an incredibly creative person herself and can get into character very easily and convincingly. Woohoo! - second hurdle down.
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The third hurdle is finding appropriate costumes and props. A genuine straitjacket is prohibitively expensive to purchase for one simple photo shoot. I think the lowest priced genuine jacket was a little over $200. Plan B, take to social media and see if I can get lucky! Who knows, maybe one of my friends actually has one (…and as an aside, a friend of mine corrected my request on social media for a straight jacket. Indeed, it is spelled ‘straitjacket’ and is one word. Thank you Paul!) . No traction with plan B. Plan C, costume straitjacket. My go-to costume store didn’t carry anything close to resembling a straitjacket. Most of the costume straitjackets I saw online were so obviously ‘costumes’ that I didn’t think they would be very convincing. I did, however, find a decent looking jacket on Wish that turned out to be about as good as I was going to get for the price. Since I wanted the images to look realistic, I needed to either find or make a padded room. I decided to make a room, or at least a corner of a room.
For the construction of the room, I purchased two 4 feet by 8 feet composite boards and also purchased some wall insulation. After placing the insulation on the boards, I covered the insulation and boards with plain white king-size flat sheets for the walls of the room. I placed a comforter on the ground and covered that with another white sheet for the floor of the room. All in all, I think the cost for this shoot was somewhere around $60 or $70 (closer to $100 if you include the jacket). Since I purchased several pieces for the shoot over the span of several months, I honestly lost track of the final cost, but compared to most of my other ideas, this one was on the pricier side.
Click on thumbnail for larger image.
Once everything was set up inside of a garage, all that was left was taking images and playing with different poses and ideas. For most of the images, I simply flooded the scene with lights from just about every angle. I wanted the look of a room that was so bright with no relief that the feeling of the room itself would drive someone crazy. An overhead bare flash with no modifier worked perfectly to simulate a ceiling light. The fact that we only created a corner of a room with no ceiling left open the option of some other creative use of lighting and camera angles. Despite being bound-up for the majority of the shoot (which I probably couldn’t have done) Alecia did her thing and played the part to perfection.
Despite this shoot costing more than my normal shoots, it was well worth it! This idea was also fun because I got to work with my hands and build a corner of a room. I enjoyed that just as much as the actual shoot. Plus, I’m not a drinker and I rarely gamble so photography seems like a decent vice to spend money on. Although I’m not quite sure what I can do with all of the insulation leftover from the shoot, the wooden boards have come in handy for other ideas – like aluminum foil. Lots of aluminum foil.
As always, get out of your comfort zone, build some props for an idea, and have fun. If you don’t find a way to express your creativity, you may just go insane!
It’s amazing what you can do with a little light and a camera capable of taking long exposures. Well, maybe there is a little more to it than that, but not much. For photographers into light painting, ‘tube painting’ has become a bit of a trend lately. I originally ran across the idea of making illuminated circle behind models when I saw Wien-Jié Yang’s video several years ago. More recently, Eric Paré and his model Kim Henry have refined the process using very specific items to create amazing images. If you are not familiar with either of their work, please take a moment and check them out. Once I saw the resulting images, I had to give it a try.
In essence, you want to create a long tube of light you can move around your subject. By placing a flashlight at the end of a clear tube, you can create this effect. You will need a flashlight, T12 tubes, white tracing paper, and colored film for this shoot. For the flashlight, Eric Paré uses a very specific and bright flashlight for his work. The flashlight, however, isn’t cheap (~$70) and if you want a strobe effect in the resulting images, you’ll need at least two of them. Always trying to keep my shoots as cheap as possible, I simply modified one of my brighter flashlights instead of purchasing the more expensive flashlights. The T12 tubes are clear plastic tubes that are placed around T12 fluorescent light bulbs to protect them. These tubes also come in smaller sizes such as a T8. The tubes come in 4 and 8 foot lengths and can be found at most local hardware stores for about $4 and $8 respectively.
At this point if you simply place the flashlight in the tube and turn it on, the tube will not light up enough to be visible in camera. You need to find a way to disperse, diffract, and bounce the light around inside the tube to make it brighter. I experimented with sanding the outside of the tube to create more areas for the light to bounce and reflect through, but this process was not nearly as successful as simply putting a piece of white tracing paper inside the tube. The white paper really does help diffuse and spread the light more evenly throughout the tube. I then purchased several different colors of cellophane ‘basket wrap’ from a local hobby store and cut the cellophane to fit inside the tube as well. At first, I put the colored cellophane on the inside of paper but found it worked better putting the colored film on the outside of the paper. I also found if I doubled up the colored film, I could get more saturated colors. If you are lucky enough to find them, some T12 tubes come in different colors therefore eliminating the need for the colored cellophane. I did not find colored tubes locally and was only able to find them online so I decided to try the colored cellophane.
Find a bright flashlight that will fit inside the tube, or can be easily modified to fit inside a tube. A flashlight that allows you to focus the beam can be helpful in getting the light to more evenly reach the other end of the tube as well. I used my strongest LED flashlight, unscrewed the housing around the light, and found a PVC adapter that fit both the end of the flashlight and the end of the tube nearly perfectly.
After having created the tubes and modifying my flashlight to fit inside the end of the tubes, I spent several nights trying to find the best camera settings for the effect I was after. This was probably the hardest part of the process. Each night of practice would yield different results given the different ambient light. It is impossible for me to advise anyone on the ‘correct’ settings as it drastically depends on so many different variables. For the most part I shot around f/5 or lower (wider) with ISOs anywhere from 100 to 500. Again, it really depends on the strength of the light from the flashlight, whether or not you want some detail in your model, the ambient light, etc.
I triggered the camera with a radio trigger. I do have an infrared trigger for my camera but it simply is not the best choice for this type of shoot. First, you will be relatively far from the camera and infrared triggers become less reliable the further away you are from the camera; much more so than radio triggers. Second, you need to be behind your model to prevent your body from being visible and infrared triggers require line-of-sight. If you do not own radio triggers for your camera, there are several options available and many of the cheaper ones work just as well as the more expensive ones.
This also brings up the issue of hiding yourself from being exposed in the images. Have your model wear clothing that fans out and covers a lot of the area at and around the ground and the model’s feet. You should be directly behind the model. Any part of you that is not in constant motion will be visible. In other words, the dress acts as a cover for your legs and feet. Next, always wear black or darker colored clothing when light painting. Lastly, keep in motion. Anyone that has experimented with long exposure knows that static objects will appear and fast moving objects generally will not – or at least not as much as the static objects. That being said, make sure your model holds as still as possible during the exposure as you move around rather quickly.
I once asked a photographer friend to join me one night for shooting and he asked if we were just going to go out and ‘mess around with light’ (in a very ‘that’s kind of ridiculous’ tone) but light painting can yield some incredibly amazing results. Maybe it just wasn’t his thing but I love trying different light sources and methods for creating long exposure images. If you try this idea, I’d love to see your results and if you don’t get the results you were looking for the first few times, keep trying! My first few practice attempts were laughable (and I think I did actually laugh). Even the edited images from this shoot could benefit from some more attempts and refining the process. I believe there are no absolutely perfect images and that’s okay. The joy comes from the pursuit of trying to obtain them! As always, step outside of your comfort zone and give this a try!
And a HUGE THANK YOU to my wonderful model (and photographer herself), Alecia!
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