January 25th, 2010 by Brian Cooney

What a day.  My birds wouldnt shut up this afternoon, and they were actually starting to hurt my head,  so I decided to take a drive and ended up at dads house.  Dad and his wife, Sandy, were watching the football playoffs.  The only light sources in the room were the Television,  a dim tungsten light in the kitchen,  and a candle.  I liked the look of this light mix, so I decided it was a good time to get a picture of Sandy.

The main thing lighting her in this frame is three candles on her tray table.  I know the TV was dark when I snapped this frame because I don’t see its reflection in her glasses.  In this dim environment, I had my canon 50mm wide open at f1.8.  I had the shutter speed at 1/8th of a second.  There are a few things you need to think about  in this type of shot.  The first thing you need to think about, is what your camera wants to do.  You camera wants to make an image that looks like a well lit room.  I don’t want that…..  a candle lit room shouldn’t be bright….. so you need to tell the camera what you want.  You can do this by taking full manual control of the camera, or you can use an exposure compensation.  I used Exposure compensation, dialing in -2 f-stops.  The second thing you need to think about is motion.  Sandy was rocking… so I had to ask her to stop blurring my picture.  Sandy kindly kicked her feet up with the recliner, which also made the chair lock into position.  Good thinking Sandy!  The next thing is…. unless you are a robot, there is no way you are going to get a sharp image with a 1/8th shutter speed, unless you throw the camera on a solid tripod or object, and use a shutter release or timer.  I greatly prefer a shutter release cable…. because with a timer I can’t snap when I see her smile.  Timers are for when your waiting for somebody to buy you a release cable for Christmas, or or when you accidentally forgot the cable.  Think about the ISO.  I used to always try to go high on ISO in a dark enviornment, but this isnt always best.  If your trying to hand hold the camera, you might NEED to go as high as you can on ISO….. but if there is a tripod involved, go as low as you can while getting a sharp image.  This will make the image look much less noisy. Also, watch your white balance.  If you have it set to auto, you aren’t going to get the pretty warm candlelight… because your camera is going to want to make the candle light look like daylight.

I also used my camera’s Live view mode…. which lets you “zoom in” on a small part of the frame that will actually be captured…. to make manual focus on the eyes easier.  This is a huge help in a dark room, as long as things aren’t moving. I wouldn’t even want to waste my time trying to autofocus with light like this…. unless I was trying to handhold the camera, which would be silly.

Dont try to follow my exposure formula for this image by the numbers… just think about what you are trying to achieve, and push your camera around to get it.  I wanted a candlelit environmental portrait… one that shows you my wonderful stepmom and tells a little story about her at the same time, and I feel thats what I got with this image.  I moved some things on her tray table, slid the tray table a little closer, added the seocond two candles, and moved her book into the frame… but otherwise this is what I saw when I showed up to visit.

January 12th, 2010 by Brian Cooney

So this post is a little early…. because I am boared and in a hotel room all by myself.

I am here in Cincinnati tonight, after flying in for work.  I decided to try some of the magic I have learned form reading Strobist, and came up with these pictures.  I am pretty happy with the results, given the tools at hand and it being just me, myself, and I.

How did I do it?  Well,  I re-arranged my hotel room.  The room has UGLY two tone striped wall paper.  I hit that wall paper with my Vivitar 285 at 1/2 power, from about four feet away.  The flash was tied to one of the rooms wall lights (which was de-shaded and de-bulbed) with a big piece of Velcro.  My crappy little radio triggers werernt working right, so I ended up putting a second flash on the camera and using an optical slave to trigger the first one.  I was planning on using two flashes anyway… I just didnt really want the one lighting me on the camera.  Oh well.

The Light on the camera was probally at 1/4 power, and definatly pointed strait up, with a Lumiquest 80/20 to try to get some even light on me.  So what we have happening here is simple.  Two flashes.  One of them is over exposing an ugly wall so bad it just looks like I am in a softbox.  The wall is at my back, five feet behind me.  The first flash is to my left, blasting the wall.  The second flash, with the 80/20, is on the camera, and is set with enough power to make me look good.  I am fairly happy with the results.

You will be amused to know that not only did I not have a light stand, but I also didn’t have a tripod.  My camera is sitting on the hotel lap desk,  which is sitting on the luggage rack,  which is sitting on the bed.  This whole mess is about 3-4 feet away from me.  Focus is always a pain in the butt when you are doing a self portrait.  I used a ugly floor lamp as a stand-in to manually focus on…. putting it close to where my face would be.  I have decided that… while shooting other people scares me a bit….  shooting myself is MUCH more of a pain in the butt from a logistical point of view.  Anybody want to be a subject so I don’t have to work as hard to make a frame?  Let me know.  On the bright side…. Live view…. and zooming in on what you are focusing… makes focus MUCH easier when there is a bed preventing you from putting your eye to the camera without killing your back.  God Bless live view for this type of case, and to think I would only use it for macro.

All and all, not bad for two flashes, and ugly wallpaper.  I didn’t even have to edit the pictures to get this look…. which is good because I suck at editing pictures.

January 11th, 2010 by Brian Cooney

My Brother went to school for digital arts.  What this means, is that he is kinda descent at hacking with graphics, and layouts, and has some nifty tools on his laptop.  Anyway,  with a little help from him, I am ready to actually let the world see this blog!  As a thanks,  I drug him out in the cold to spend time in front of the camera.  From my first test shot, to my last image, we spent 8 minutes outside.  I would have loved to be there longer… but it was COLD!  Here are the images as recorded by the camera… no editing.  Not bad for 8 minutes.

So heres how I did it:

Take a few test shots with the camera in manual exposure mode.  Underexpose the crap out of it to keep the sky all pretty.  My first guess was right on….  1/200 as f5.0. At this point, Tommy is a Deep Dark mass.  Then I put One light on a stand, and use it to bring him back.  I adjust exposure on Tommy by moving the stand around to control the light power.  If I needed a major change, I could have adjusted the flash power, but for little tweaks varying the distance is better.

A second light would have made him look a little better, and let me control the shadows.  However, its cold out.  I knew going into it that this would be One light job….  thus avoiding frozen (well, too frozen) fingers.

See?  He doesnt look that bad if you get him out of thoes Nintendo shirts  Thank you for helping me with the Blog Tommy!  Feel free to steal whichever pic you want for your Facebook Profile

January 10th, 2010 by Brian Cooney

My name is Brian Cooney. The first time I picked up a camera, I was probably 10. I somehow could always get film, but never manage to get it developed, so I didn’t learn a thing. In High school, I played with SLR cameras in Graphic Arts class… and I loved it, but I never did anything with it outside of the loaner cameras, and in class darkroom. Photography simply was priced way out of my budget as a kid. About five years ago, I finally bought a digital camera and started occasionally “snapping” some shots. Three years ago, I bought my first SLR. Now, I spend most of my free time reading other peoples blogs, and hardly doing any shooting of my own. When I do shoot, I show the unedited files to my wife, and then forget about them. The purpose of this blog is to allow me to share my work with more than just my beautiful wife. It is to help me torture you instead. It is to force me to actually learn to edit those images, and do something with them. Hopefully, I will actually get good enough at this blog thing to have at least one regular reader, besides my Wife .  I have done blogs before… and never update them. Hopefully, this will be a year of change. I will try to keep most of my posts photography related, but dont be suprised to see some tech rants too. All and all, if you have read this much stuff, mabey I can hook you in and keep you here for awhile! Add me to your RSS feeds, and comment on my posts. Finally, If you blog, let me know about it and Ill check out your work!

My first order of business will be to meet up with my brother and make this blog look like…. well not like a default wordpress.  Tommy is a Digital Arts major… so hopefully he can help me come up with a slick, sexy, custom layout.  Once that is one, I will need to move some other websites from my old server back to my new one…. the one this blog is running on, and redirect cooney.cc to this machine instead of my old blog.  Then it will be time to figure out some of the magic of making the blog sing and dance….  and customize it to really fit my needs.  Hopefully, the learning curve of switching from Slackware to CentOS for my server wont get in the way…. but so far so good.  My end goal:  A new blog, and an update once per week!  Stay tuned to see if I can pull it off!