Gloda.net

London Zoo

gloda — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 13:45:10 +0000

A day after having visited the London Aquarium, Alison and I went to see the London Zoo. I had been there quickly once during a DPC get-together, but this was my first opportunity to actually explore the zoo properly.
The photos above were all taken with a Canon EOS 5DMkII and EF 70-200 2.8L IS lens, handheld.
Mouse-over the photos to see the name of the animal on the photo. I can’t ID the owl on the third picture, if someone can help me there please leave a comment.

Speedlinks February 2010

gloda — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 17:00:49 +0000

After I uploaded some photos from the Pimpamelen blogpost to Photogen I half-jokingly said that the next step would be 3D macro photography with flash. Well fotoopa on flickr has been doing just that for a while, check out the photos of his setup(s) and his insect and water photographs in his sets.
A trawlerman recovers a digital camera from the Atlantic with its photos still intact and now tries to find the owners. You can read more on this over at BBC News.
The Mostly Color Channel has a neat tutorial on how to ceate a light tent out of nothing but paper and binder clips. Cheap and disposable! A Paper and Binder Clip Light Tent.

Wedding: Kirstin & Christophe

gloda — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:11:59 +0000

What an awesome wedding. Kirstin and Christophe made sure that their guests would have a marvellous time, and the great atmosphere made being their photographer a great experience. Christophe is a user on photogen.lu, where he and Kirstin had seen some of my work. In fact quite a few members of that community were present at this wedding, apart from myself and Christophe, there were his brother-in-law Alain and of course Olivier, who assisted me throughout the day.
We arrived at the church well ahead of the couple to give us a bit of time to reevaluate the positions from which we’d photograph – children from the church communion had built a symbolic space rocket which remained set up between the altar and the congregation. It turned out not to be a problem though, the Belair church is fairly spacious. The ceremony was one of the most beautiful and entertaining ones I’ve witnessed this summer. Both the bride and groom are members of church choirs and they’ve been friends for a long time with the priest that ministered.
After the ceremony Christophe was made to showcase his talent with the accordeon and Kirstin hers as conductor. Quite a fun interlude! After Kirstin and Christophe had shaken hands with all the guests at the reception we drove to the communal park in Hesperange that I had already visited with them beforehand, to shoot their couple photographs. The weather played along nicely, a slightly overcast sky makes it easier to balance artificial and ambient light. Like before, it was Olivier’s job to make sure the light was held in position just where I needed it.
The dinner was in a lovely restaurant near Altwies, called Le Moulin. We took the group and guest photos outside the restaurant in front of the picturesque brook before moving inside the luxuriously decorated converted mill to cover the dinner, games and emotions for the rest of the evening.

Behind the Scenes: Shot Glasses

gloda — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:43:48 +0000

I wanted to play with some water and came up with this constellation of shot glasses. The glasses actually stay like that on their own – no glue needed. To light this image, I used the back of a poster as background – probably a Star Wars poster, I have more of those than I have space on my walls. In order to avoid highlights in the wrong places on the highly reflective glasses, I directed the light from the flash at the background. The whole thing is therefore backlit. I used a DIY snoot to concentrate the light on a small area and to create a soft fall-off, so that the center of the background would be slightly brighter than the edges. I also put a double CTO on the flash. As a result, the background in the original RAW was plain orange. When I turned the background back to gray during RAW conversion, the ink in the main shotglass got a stronger blue colour as a result. The post-processing consisted mostly of getting rid of dust and scratches on the glasses.
The photo was used in the last issue of inQuire to go along with an article on drink spiking.

London Aquarium

gloda — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 09:17:40 +0000

I visited the London Aquarium and decided to film a bit rather than take photographs. I lost quite a few takes because somebody bumped into me while I was filming… The place was really packed with people.
The video is CC-BY-SA.

Kasematten

gloda — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 15:06:19 +0000

Alison and I visited the Kasematten as part of a touristy visit of Luxembourg. I’ve been there a couple of times, but it’s the first time that I’ve seen a bat hang from the ceiling of one of the tunnels! The little guy didn’t seem to be bothered by all the people passing through there (most of whom didn’t notice the animal was there), and it didn’t even move when we photographed it close-up with flash.

Speedlinks January 2010

gloda — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 11:00:12 +0000

I hang around on the internet so much and browse so many photography forums, websites and blogs that I stumble across a lot of interesting photo-related stuff. Here are some cool pages that I discovered recently that you may enjoy:

DIY Gary Fong Lightsphere. The Lightsphere is a popular (in my opinion overrated) but expensive light modifier. Make your own by following Artur Gajewski’s guide on instructables.
RGB Music Lab. Ever wanted to know what your photos would sound like? Feed them to this freeware Mac/Win software to find out.
What camera should I buy? This question pops up in forums all the time. The ones who ask them usually don’t give any information on what kind of camera they’re looking for. Read through Scott Bourne’s article and you can probably find the right camera yourself or help others help you.
Studio Lighting Techniques. Addicted to Life shows some cool studio setups to build upon and experiment with.
Possible World Record. A Canon EOS Rebel XT falls 3000ft from the sky and survives.
Classic Portraiture. Joe Zeltsman has written an in depth guide on posing people for portraits.

Pimpampelen

gloda — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 21:26:48 +0000

Alison and I made a trip to the butterfly garden in Grevenmacher. This time the temperature was a bit more comfortable than the 40°C in the World of Butterflies. We only had one macro lens between the two of us so we took turns in photographing and holding a flash for one another. We started out with the ringlight adapter but moved on to a DIY diffuser to light the butterflies. It’s quite useful to be able to sculpt the light the way you need it to be rather than being at the mercy of the sun shining through a glass roof and foliage. I used the Pocketwizard Mini TT1 and Flex TT5 to allow the camera and flash to communicate with one another. Setting the flash power manually would have been tricky, since we worked without tripods. At those small distances, a few centimeters change in the distance between flash and subject can make a big difference. (Inverse square law: if the flash is giving me a correct exposure at 1/8 power and 10cm distance, if the flash moves 5cm closer the power needs to change to 1/32. ETTL takes care of this on the fly.)
So my technique here is to get the aperture I need for a decent depth of field, then dialing in a shutter speed and ISO that get me enough ambient light for a photo that’s slightly underexposed, then bring in the flash to get the exposure to where it needs to be.
(For those wondering what the title means: it’s one of the Luxembourgian words for butterfly.)

Wedding: Carole & Jules

gloda — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 13:36:21 +0000

I first met Carole and Jules at the wedding of their friends Martine and Mike the year before. They got in touch with me last winter and I ended up shooting their wedding day in July together with Olivier Kerschen as assistant. We took photos of Carole getting ready at her parents’ house and, once we determined that the weather was going to play along, drove to the Parc Municipal in Mondorf. It’s a really great place, quite big with lots of different possibilities to take the couple shots. The size meant that we had to walk around a bit to get to the places I had scouted beforehand but it worked out nicely. I used the 5DMkII again, mostly with the EF 70-200. Olivier was in charge of getting the lights where I needed them – which sometimes includes dangling halfway off a bridge to get the light in the perfect spot.
The wedding ceremony was in their hometown Ellange, in a lovely small church just opposite the venue in which the reception was held. And you should have been there to see their faces when the white limousine arrived to pick them up! We moved on to the the Restaurant Delicious in Sandweiler, outside of which I took portraits of all the couples before everyone went inside for the dinner. It’s a nice place, they had hired some cool DJs and the fun just didn’t seem to stop. I especially liked the balloon-popping-sumo game their friends had come up with. When we left around 3am the party still wasn’t showing any signs of slowing down!

Photo Shopping

gloda — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 11:10:05 +0000

Last week I posted a bit of behind the scenes information about the setup for the picture Zombies at an Airport. This time I’m publishing the original image along with the finished photo so that you can see what can be done to give a photo some flavour.
I actually shot this for a competition on Photogen, but then it turned out I had misinterpreted the topic, so I submitted something else instead. If it wasn’t for the competition which requires anonymity though I might have taken the picture the other way around, showing myself pushing the trolley.
I borrowed Alison’s EF 17-35 2.8L lens for this. (I don’t have a proper wide angle lens for the 5DMkII yet. I’m hoping for Canon to release the 14-24 2.8 L that’s being rumoured about this year.) The camera is mounted to the trolley’s handlebar using a Manfrotto superclamp. I dialed the camera to ISO100 to get the best possible image quality, and then closed the aperture down so that I could get a long enough exposure time. In this case I ended up with f/9 and 1,6 seconds.
The post-processing should be pretty self-explanatory from the pictures. I fixed a highlight from a ceiling light with the clone stamp, then I used Curve and Hue/Saturation/Lightness adjustment layers to add contrast and shift colours the way I wanted them. The advantage of using adjustment layers to do this is that you can re-adjust them later if you change your mind, and that you can easily apply layer masks so as to apply the effect of an adjustment layer to a specific area of the image only. As you can see it’s nothing too fancy, but I think it makes all the difference between a picture that looks fairly flat and one that pops.
In case you’re wondering what I was shopping for (I didn’t go to our local supermarket just for the photo), it’s Spicy Moroccan Stewed Fish with Couscous from Jamie Oliver’s Ministry of Food. Lots of great recipes without too much fuss in there. And some cool and helpful pictures by David Loftus and Chris Terry (although I think they went a bit overboard with the tonemapping on some portraits).