I have been attempting the Strobist assignment on “apparent light size”. Here are my efforts with a toy mini and an apple:

I think with the apple I “got it”. The idea is that the bigger the light source the softer the shadow. On a sunny day the sun is a small (relative to the rest of the sky) light source and you get “hard” shadows. On a cloudy day the who sky is the light source (very big) and you get soft shadows.

I’m struggling with my equipment (I know, a bad workman always blames his tools). My cheap Chinese imported “ebay triggers” just don’t want to work with my Canon flash. I attempted to fix this with tin foil and a short sync lead - a little improvement but the camera has to be close to the receiver for it to work. I shall have to go “wired” until I can affort some Pocket Wizards. Any donations welcome

Flickrvision: A fun site to see what photos are being uploaded where in “real time”.

Five weeks of the studio still life course are over. Basically this was how to light “product” shots.

I found this course trickier than the other studio photography courses that I have done. Composition was the most difficult - bottles and fruit just aren’t that exciting!

To see more of my efforts check out my Flickr photos.

A few of high lights for the coming week.

I’ll be taking my first shots on the new photography course “Product Still Life”.

Hopefully I can improve on the above photo.

On Saturday I’ll be going to the Interesting 2007 conference. I’ve no idea what it will be like. I was encouraged to attend by Dave who is also one of the speakers at the conference.

And finally…

Diet starts this week

Sadly the end of the macro course, but lots to practice at home.

And next term back for another course. More about that in due time. Also to keep my busy there is the Lighting 102 on the Strobist blog starting in June, and preparation for the Swallowfield Show in August.

This week playing with a light box and also doing some experiments with a studio flash and a softbox.

The light box was “daylight” balanced, however there were fluorescent and tungsten lights around the room that may have interfered now and then. I generally used an exposure that was 2 stops overexposed judging by the camera’s light meter.

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This picture I did hand-held without a flash:

These used the studio flash and softbox:

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More playing with liquids and food colouring this week. This one was a bit hit-and-miss.

The set up was a camera on a tripod with a Speedlite flash set on “multi” or “strobe” setting. Camera was ISO 100, 125th second, and f/16. Shutter was set to continuous shoot. My camera only manages 3 frames per second, and doesn’t have a very big buffer before it has to write to the memory card.

The liquid was milk with food colouring in it. Drips were allowed to fall by turning a tap on some glass equipment that looked liked it came out of a school’s chemistry lab.

I took nearly 300 photos but still not satisfied with the results.

Later on a played around with a studio light and softbox to take some pictures of shells. I’ll try and get a bit more arty next week.

What fun you can have with some water, food colouring, glue, a light and a camera!

A useful technique that I have recently discovered for improving my portrait photos (and others) is the use of “levels” to adjust the blackness or whiteness of the background.

The software that I use to manipulate my photos is Corel Paint Shop Pro XI. This technique can also be used in Photoshop (which I’d love to have but is too expensive - any donations welcome), and I guess (although I don’t know) Photoshop Elements.

Here is an example. This shot was taken in my home studio (a black cloth draped over a door):

It may be difficult to see, depending on your monitor contrast/brightness, but the black background is not completely black. You can see that the cloth is not completely flat. Sometimes I find that it is easier to see flaws in a photograph if you look at the negative:

(In Paint Shop Pro go to “Image -> Negative image” to see the negative image).

Back on the positive image, select “Adjust -> Brightness and contrast -> Levels…” and the following box will appear:

At the bottom you will see a histogram showing the distribution of the dark and light tones in the image. The peak at the left hand end is where most of dark parts of the image are. For the background to be truly black you would expect that peak to be as far left as it could be. But it isn’t in this case.

Drag the black diamond under the histogram to the right until it is in the peak. This will darken the who image and make everything to the left of the diamond black. So that the rest of the image is not also too dark, drag the middle diamond until its value is about 128. This will lighten other parts of the image. click OK when done.

The final image looks like this:

As you can see, the background is now a nice even black.

This same techinique can be used for white backgrounds - just work from the other end of the histogram.

Well not really fame, but Dave does have some nice pictures of me in his Funkypancake blog.