Sin City

For my lighting class last fall, we learned how to shoot with high contrast aka “Sin City” just like the comic/movie. This assignment was the one I had most fun with because you can get so creative with this kind of lighting. Instead of the homework usually being, “use 2 umbrellas” or “use 1 umbrella and 1 grid,” this time it’s “shoot like Sin City.” We watched some parts from the movie in class to study the lights and how they were used and placed and how the lighting was different for a “good” guy and for a “bad” guy.

The effect of the Sin City look is to make the photo look like it could’ve been drawn with a pen, which the first 2 photos were. I like the 3rd one just because it looks awesome and glamorous using the flare from the lights.

In the setup shot below, what we did was used 2 lights with the same grids (I forgot the degree) and the same power and placed them on either side of the model. And then we shot with a speedlite on-camera with the lowest power for added fill to light up the sunglasses and make things shiny.

After we finished, my friend asked if I could take a photo of him smoking since the lights were already set up. The smoke looks really good in the light and the catch lights in his eyes look great!

And then while shooting, it started to rain so we quickly packed up. Don’t want to get electrocuted with the equipment, it’s powerful enough to kill us. My friend told me a model was modeling in a pond with the photographer in it and then one of the lights fell into the water and both the model and photographer died. (O_O;)

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Some times you think a photo looks good and it doesn’t

One of the locations we shot at for my advanced location lighting class was at the Mr. Smith’s bar where we were learning how to “piggyback” light which is placing a focused light (to light the subject) in front of a large, soft light (to fill in the shadows).

The light on the model looks great, it’s just the other things around the model that took away from the photo. These things are pretty much what my instructor nitpicked on during class critique. Honestly, I saw them and I didn’t do a thing about them. (´∩`。) All I did was brought down the brightness of her dress and shoulder.

Because her dress was too bright in the chest area, we flagged it down with our hand to block off some of the light from her dress. The brightest part of the photo is where the eye goes and unless you want to bring focus to the dress as opposed to the face, it ought to be brought down.

I went to class with 4 photos to get critiqued by 3 instructors. ALL photos were… eck. Critique obviously didn’t go well. The photo above was actually the best of the bunch. After class, I was in a horrible mood and then said “I got to get my sh*t together.” Photos taken after that never sucked again. Shhh… don’t jinx it.

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Francesco at Old Mint

Now that my finals are over, I have time to update my blog (´・ω・`)

For our class photo shoot, we went to the Old Mint building downtown. I shot this last February and since it was the beginning of the semester, we started out with simple lighting by using only 1 light with 1 modifier. In this case, we used a strobe with a 10° grid and used it in a way to create dramatic lighting.  We aimed to create “Rembrandt lighting” like Rembrandt paintings where the angle of the light causes the shadow of the nose to reach the corner of the mouth, creating an upside down triangle of light under one eye. Because of the dramatic lighting, it actually reminds me of film noir.

I had the most fun with the set up shots. Francesco was playful in them and it’s always fun to wrap up each shot with a set up shot by having fun with it.

We used black wrap in some of the shots to block off the light hitting Francesco’s shirt since it was white and too bright when the light hit it; it was taking away the attention from his face.

 

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Too Busy

I completely forgot about these photos that I took a year ago for an assignment during my first semester of art school. The assignment was to show what you do for a day in your life. I decided to shoot floating self portraits at the places I usually went to like the Safeway, dorm laundry room, Chestnut st. and a hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese restaurant right outside my previous dorm. This makes me miss living in the Marina though I definitely don’t miss the dorms.

Basically, the concept was that I was too busy running errands that my feet never touch the ground because I’m constantly rushing from one thing to another.

In terms of how I shot this, I asked my roommate to stand in the area where visualized myself standing then set up my tripod, composed and adjusted the camera settings, switched it over to manual focus and traded places with my roommate. I set the shutter drive to continuous high speed shutter and told my roommate to press and hold the shutter as I was jumping to get the right “floating” shot where the clothes weren’t moving all around as I was in mid air. I also put my hair in a bun so it wouldn’t go crazy and move around too.

The chair shot was the hardest to shoot. I had to make sure my thighs were parallel to the ground and my butt had to land on the chair. My butt did not feel good after shooting. I was constantly landing on my butt. THAT CHAIR WASN’T EVEN SOFT.

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Project Pointe

Over the past semester, I’ve started to really enjoy shooting photos in black and white after learning creative control over controlling the black and white tones on-camera instead of having to do it through Photoshop. Throughout the pre-production process, I wanted to keep the photos as simple as possible while showing the environment the dancers’ in. My original idea was to shoot a dance-based fashion editorial in color using an elemental theme to bind all the photos together. I ended up not going that route and shot something fine art instead. I actually haven’t shot anything “fine art” for about a year. I’ve been shooting portraits most of the time so it’s great to create work like this again.

I arranged 3 photo shoots with 3 amazing ballet dancers and shot at different locations in San Francisco. I didn’t have any permits to shoot at any of the locations so I was worried about getting kicked out of the area or worse, getting fined or even worse, getting asked to delete my photos. Luckily, no one asked us to leave. A couple of people just stopped by and watched.

Here are a few set up shots below. I lit all photos with a soft box and a couple of photos with a soft box + speedlite and reflector.

 

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