Greg Reinacker Photography - Blog

I did a shoot on Saturday, pretty much all day.  Loaded into the studio at 8:30am, and everyone left at about 5:30pm. Yikes!

I don’t really even notice during the shoot…when the energy is flowing, and the shots are working, the time just flies by. I’m totally focused on what’s going on, and for the most part, it’s just me and the model.  I mean, there are other people there involved with the shoot, but when things are clicking, we both tune everything else out.

But after the shoot, when everything is unloaded, whew - what a crash. I grabbed some taco bell, and plopped down on the couch - finally realizing how exhausted I was. Shooting usually isn’t physically demanding (well, unless you count a 5-pound camera/lens combination as demanding - lol), but it’s mentally exhausting. But I don’t notice until I get back home!

One thing I’ve learned is never, ever, edit the shots the night after a shoot. I’ve found I’m hyper-critical at that point, and I would discard great shots just because I’m tired. I always try to wait until the next day - or at very least wait a few hours.

I also shot tethered for the first time in quite a while - I have mixed feelings about shooting this way. Maybe I’ll write a bit about this later.

And I’ll post the shots from this weekend in the next couple of days - check back soon!

I often hear questions about how to shoot with a white background.  The first time someone tries it, they will typically get a nice white spot somewhere, and a gradual fade to gray as you move away from the spot.  Then, they spend a bunch of time in Photoshop making it pure white as they originally intended.

I typically spend extra time trying to get things right in the camera, so I don’t have to fix them later in Photoshop.  There are a number of reasons for this, but the bottom line is I want to reduce the total time per-image I have to spend in post processing.  I sit in front of a computer screen just plenty, thank you, so if I can do something in the studio to reduce it, count me in!

So let me try to talk a bit about one way to get a nice, all-white background, without Photoshop.

Waist up

If you only need to shoot head and shoulders, or perhaps even down to the waist, you might be able to get away with a single light on the background. Maybe not, but it’s at least possible.  But I’m going to assume you have two lights for the background, and go from there.

This is easier than full length, because there’s a limited amount of backdrop visible behind the model. So really, you only need to light that part evenly.

I typically use two medium-sized softboxes, one to each side of the background paper, each pointing about 1/3 of the way in from the edge.  Meter them together, so the whole area behind the model meters within +/- 0.2 stops or so.  And overall, you’re looking for about +1 stop brighter than you’re going to use for your key light.  More than that, you’ll most likely run into a lot of spill and flare problems; less than that, you’ll have problems getting your background to look pure white.

And you don’t have to use softboxes on the background here - just pick something that allows you to get even coverage across the part of the background that shows behind the model.

Full length

This one is tougher - to shoot full-length, and get a perfect white background, everything has to come together just so - because there is a LOT of background you have to light.

I start with the same two medium softboxes pointing towards the white seamless background; if you have more lights, 4 heads is even better.  I start with the boxes about 5 feet high, pointing in about 1/3 of the way on the background.  Then start metering again all across the background - top to bottom, left to right, and keep adjusting things until you get it pretty even (as before, ideally you want this +/- 0.2 stops).

Now, you have the problem of the floor the model is standing on.  This is a tough spot to light.  What I typically do is place a large sheet of plexiglass material (white or clear works) on top of the white paper you’ve pulled out.  This plastic sheet will actually reflect the light hitting the background, and once you get things adjusted right, will seamlessly blend into the background.

The tough spot with all of that is the back edge of the plexiglass; you’ll sometimes get a shadow there, which appears as a dark line going across the picture.  You can adjust the background lights a bit to compensate for this - try pointing them down a bit more.  Or…you can use a platform.

I usually use a platform that’s about 10 inches high.  I cover the platform with white seamless paper, and then put the plexiglass on top of it.  The model stands on top of all of this.  Once you do this, you effectively hide the part of the background that is most difficult to light (the part on the floor), and the plexiglass foreground reflects the background light…with no seam.

Note in the lighting diagram above I’m not showing the fill - just a main light and two background lights, with the platform.  (Many thanks to Kevin Kertz for the lighting diagram template!)

The Vogue cover shot with Kirsten Dunst certainly wasn’t everyone’s favorite, but there’s an interesting behind-the-scenes video of the shoot. This was done by Annie Leibovitz and crew in Versailles, France.

[via Style Bites]

This is pretty cool…the Broncolor web site shows a head-to-head comparison between different light modifiers. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people ask about this, so I have to blog it so I don’t forget the URL!

I wish they included the huge parabolic umbrella reflectors they have in the comparison, which I’d love to try out, but hey - you can’t have everything.

[via Strobist]

Every now and then, someone will ask me “what lens should I use?” or “do you think this lens would be good?”. The answer is nearly always “it depends”, and the first thing I ask is what the person intends to shoot.  Let’s assume for the purposes of this post that the answer is “people.”

Focal length

The first question is focal length - and that just depends. :-)  Personally, I use anywhere from about 30mm to 200mm for my fashion and glamour work, and that’s on a Nikon digital body with a 1.5x crop factor.  The big thing to worry about is normally the perspective distortion you’ll run into if you use a short lens, and end up having to get very close to your subject.  Longer lenses also have perspective issues of their own (in that they tend to “flatten” images), but it’s generally a pleasing perspective for photographing people.

The focal length question is also related to how much room you have to shoot.  If your studio is 50 feet long, you will have no problem shooting full-length shots at 100mm if you wish.  But if space is more cramped, or you want to be closer to your model, you may need to go with a wider lens.

Max aperture

The max aperture is a more touchy question, as the price of the lens is often directly related to how wide the max aperture is.  Having a “fast” lens gives you two advantages: first, it lets you shoot at that max aperture (duh!), in the event you don’t have a lot of light or you want to limit your depth of field.  And second, it lets more light into the autofocus mechanism in your camera, which will generally let it focus faster and more reliably.  Let’s dive into each of these for a moment.

How often are you going to be actually shooting at f/2.8, or perhaps even faster?  Good question.  When I first got started, I thought I’d be shooting down there a lot in the studio…turns out I actually don’t all that much.  You can take some cool shots with very wide apertures; it just depends on your style and what you’re trying to achieve.  Note, however, that I do use f/2.8 or faster fairly often when shooting outdoors…just not often in the studio.

What about the autofocus advantage?  This one is big.  When you’re setting up a shot in the studio, often you’ll have all of the ambient lights off (or turned way down), and you’ll be setting up the shot with just the strobe modeling lights on.  These modeling lights are sometimes nice and bright, but not always, especially with big softboxes or other modifiers.  If you don’t turn up the ambient lighting before you start shooting, you’re just going to have the modeling lights - which means you won’t have a ton of light to focus.  You’ll likely have enough - just not a lot…which means the more light your lens can pull into your camera’s AF mechanism, the better off you are.

Variable aperture

The last thing I’ll mention about lenses for studio work is this - be careful about variable-aperture lenses.  Many “consumer-grade” lenses (meaning ones that are reasonably priced!) have a variable maximum aperture.  So for example, Nikon makes a 55-200mm lens that has a maximum aperture of f/4 at 55mm, and f/5.6 at 200mm.  The problem comes if you’re in the studio, using strobes, and shooting on manual…you may need an exposure of f/4, and when you set up the shot (at say 55mm), everything is great.  Then during the set you zoom in for a close-up of your model’s face - and your camera is suddenly (and silently) shooting at f/5.6.  You’re now a whole stop underexposed - and you might not realize it until you download your images later.

For that reason, all of the zoom lenses I use for studio work (or any other times where I’m shooting on manual) are constant-aperture across their zoom range.

Sharpness

This one never ceases to amuse me.  On some of the internet forums, people obsess for days over whether a certain lens is sharper than another; and I’m not afraid to admit that I was one of them when I first got started. :-)  But here’s the thing…

Most lenses are very sharp when stopped down a couple of stops.

Now, that’s a pretty big blanket statement to make…but if you buy a name-brand lens (Canon, Nikon, Sigma, etc), it’s generally going to be true.  So if you can live with shooting at f/8 or f/11 (which is common in the studio), most lenses are going to be plenty sharp.

However, if you want to shoot with a lens wide open, or close to it, that’s what separates the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.  If you need tack-sharp at f/2.8, or f/4, then do some research.

So for shooting people, do you need that sharpness?  Interesting question.  I about fell over when I read a forum post that said something to the effect of “for shooting people, you really don’t want a very sharp lens, because you’ll have to retouch more.”  Not sure I would go that far. :-)

My take - yes, you want a lens that’s nice and sharp.  And it’s not because you want to see every last pore on someone’s face - you usually don’t.  But there are parts of an image you want nice and sharp.  For example, fashion shooting isn’t only about skin, but it’s also about products - and there might be details in the product that you need absolutely tack-sharp, depending on what you’re shooting and how large it will be printed.

So anyway, lots of random thoughts in here…hope it’s helpful to someone!

That’s right, I’m supposed to be shooting right now.  I had an fashion editorial shoot planned, to be shot in the studio.  If you haven’t been involved in many photo shoots, lemme tell you, there’s a lot involved…but everything was ready.

• Model - check
• Makeup - check
• Hair - check
• Wardrobe - check
• Assistant - check
• Studio/set - check
• Another blizzard in Denver - check

Yep, had to cancel the shoot because of weather. So instead of doing a fun shoot right now, I’m sitting at home, just came in from shoveling snow, and looking at a picture of a snow-covered branch that a friend sent me.  Ahh, you gotta love Denver’s weather!

So to remind me of warmer days, the picture on this post is the fantastic model Amy, shot on an island in the Caribbean earlier this year.

From MSNBC, their annual Year in Pictures.

Some excellent and thought-provoking images.

[via Thoughts from a Bohemian]

On one of the forums I hang out on, there was a post asking for advice about how to take a candle-lit portrait of several children all at once. One of the responses linked to this site, which says:

If you mix outside light sources, be they tungsten bulbs or strobes with amber gels, you will lose the legitimacy of the scene. An image like this tends to look more set up and fake when you deviate from your original idea.

The problem was, though, that there are three children - and they’re just not going to stay still long enough to get a really long exposure. So I got to thinking, I bet you could do this with strobes…and the fact that the other site said that’ll never work appealed to my sense of adventure. :-)

As you may know, Denver is pretty much shut down, and we’re all snowed in…so I had limited resources for this. No one else is here, nor could they get here, so my mannequin head (which I call “Angelina” :-) was going to have to suffice. And I could only find one place in my house I could get things completely dark during the day today, and that was a bathroom. So forgive the primitive arrangements!

I first photographed the scene using candlelight only - this is what I got:

Nice and moody, pretty much what I was going for. This was shot at ISO 200, f/2.8, 1/4 sec, from a tripod. Any movement (subject or camera) whatsoever would blur the entire image.

Next it was time to try to simulate this with a strobe. I measured the candlelight to be somewhere around 2100K; a strobe with a full CTO gel is the closest I could get to that, in the neighborhood of 2800K, so that’s what I used.

I used a single strobe, using a 10 degree grid and the CTO gel, and positioned it so it would hit the face at roughly the same angle as the candlelight. Here’s a shot of the setup (like I said, primitive I know!):

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the strobe further away from the subject, and I was on minimum power…so I was shooting at f/22. This required a 1/4 sec exposure to bring in the flame sufficiently; the difference, though, is that only the flame is being exposed for that 1/4 second. The subject is only illuminated with the strobe, for a very short duration - which means that if the subject is moving around, like those kids are inevitably going to, you’re still going to be fine.

In the end, this was the final result:

It’s close, in mood, to the candle-lit shot, although not perfect. Getting the strobe a little further away, or dialing down the power, would allow a faster shutter speed and/or showing more ambient light at the top of the candle from the flame. Generally, though, this is close - the light is falling off in generally the same pattern, color temperature looks roughly the same.

So don’t get me wrong…ambient light is great, and strobes aren’t for every shot. But in this case, where difficult subjects might be involved, using strobe could make the difference between taking home a good shot, and sifting through lots of “ok” shots looking for one that’s acceptable.

Ah, my first studio strobes - the White Lightning X1600’s. I remember them fondly…unpacking them, the first test firings, and the first actual shoot I did with them. And I also remember selling them. So before I forget what I liked and disliked, let me write it down here, in the hopes it helps someone.

First, what I liked. The build quality was excellent - they feel like you could drop them and they’d probably still work. I also liked the 1/4 power mode - effectively giving you a 660 ws strobe with a 7-stop range; very nice.

Other plusses are the 250W modeling lamps (nice - only a few manufacturers ship more powerful ones), and the relatively quick (for the price) flash durations.

Here’s a list of what I didn’t like about them, though:

• The little fingers that hold accessories on the end (such as speedrings) aren’t confidence-inspiring. If I was hanging a 7-foot octadome on the end of one of these strobes, especially on the end of a boom where I’m adjusting angles on the fly and such, I’d be pretty nervous that the whole thing might come crashing down. Now, I get that there are other ways to mount heavy accessories without having them hanging off the mount on the strobe, but I’d rather not have to worry about it.
• There’s no ready-beep. This sounds stupid, but it was a deal-killer. When the strobes are fully recycled and ready to fire again, there is a little light on the back panel that goes on…but unless you’re looking at the light, that doesn’t do any good. Just a little beep is all I ask! This is especially important if your style of shooting is pretty quick - for me, this comes up in fashion shoots.
• They will fire when partially charged. This compounds the ready-beep problem. Since there is no audible ready indicator, you have to just wait until you think the strobe is probably recycled (a second or two maybe), and then shoot again. But if you fire too soon, the strobe will still flash - just not at full power. So you get a random amount of power - not a good situation if you’re shooting where every shot counts. I’d rather they not fire at all until they are charged and ready.
• I don’t like the slider power controls. Say you’re using several strobes, and you want to take one of them down 0.5 stops. You slide the slider thing a bit, so it looks like 0.5 stops…but you’re never sure. If you have two strobes, and you want them both down 0.5 stops, and you and your assistant each adjust one of them, it’s almost certain you’re not going to move them the same amount…so out comes the meter. IMHO, digital controls are much easier to manage.
• Power consistency on the lower end was iffy. On several occasions, I noticed that when shooting at low power settings, the shot-to-shot power difference would vary by perhaps 0.3 to 0.4 stops. I hesitate to mention this, because this was anecdotal, and I wanted to do a bit more analysis, but I never did do that…so I mention it here in case someone else has run into this.

All in all, the WL1600’s were bulletproof and completely reliable, and I still recommend them to some folks…but the negatives I listed above eventually became show-stoppers for me and the way I shoot, and I ended up selling them and buying different lights of another brand. More on that in a later post.

Welcome to my blog! Here I’ll be talking about all things photography, and specifically about what’s going on at Greg Reinacker Photography. Stay tuned and visit often!