I took this opportunity to create a story on Exposure. I learnt about this service from Scott Kelby and this celebration was a good candidate to try this service.
Exposure service is really good (I only used their free offer). The image layout options are basic but good enough for such an image-oriented story. There is only one place where I would have preferred to use a grid layout with same size for all images. I also would have liked more typography options to better distinguish the (sparse) text.
Over the week-end I experimented with portraits of Marion holding our baby, Raphaël. I wanted to go for an intimate moment between a mother and her baby. The idea was to have a soft portrait of Raphaël and Marion wrapped in shadows.
Regardless of the darkness that surrounds them, their love is a bright light that will not be dimmed.
The end result looks like a chiaroscuro painting of La Vierge à l'Enfant.
Technical (boring) corner
Technically, this is a simple photo with a soft light to preserve this private moment.
I used a one-light setup with a Yongnuo YN-560 III flash reflected by a 34" white umbrella. I positioned the flash at their right, at 45° above them. The light is feathered so they only catch the edge of the light (retrospectively, I should have feathered it even more to increase the intimacy).
The background is a 40"x60" reflector with its black surface. Since the light is feathered, almost none reaches the black background and it remains pure black.
I positioned Marion so that Raphaël's face could catch most of the light and only her right side would be lit... plus a tiny bit of reflection on her left cheek thanks to the almost bald skull of our baby ;)
I used my Fuji X-E2 with its awesome 56mm ƒ/1.2 lens that I opened at ƒ/5.6 to have enough field of depth for both of them.
Raphaë was intrigued by the flash tests and I just had to make a few pictures to capture this one.
Simple stuff, and a lovely moment that all three of us shared.
This webcast can be watched for free and you can also read the slides I used for the presentation. They contain most of the information I talked about during this 1-hour long webcast.
Thanks to the people at O'Reilly (and especially Yasmina Greco) to setup this presentation, it was a great and fun experience.
I am now a father which will make many photographs of his baby :)
I am already making good use of the Fujinon 56mm ƒ/1.2 lens that I bought a few months ago when we learnt that Marion was pregnant.
I am not accustomed to baby photography (or portraits in general) but this will change now that Raphaël is here. We were back at home for one day and I was already setting up a studio to shoot his portrait. Next step is to make photographs of Marion and the baby together.
We went to Venezia last May and had a rainy day during our trip. We spent almost the whole afternoon at a coffee shop and I was shooting the soaked people rushing to cross the street.
This old man stood out with his red umbrella and his leisurely pace.
For the past 18 months, I have photographed bottles of beer for my friends of Une Petite Mousse. On their web site, you subscribe to receive every month a box of six bottle of beers. The selection changes every month and contains a mix of well-known beers and others from micro-breweries. It is a great way to discover and taste new beers that you can not find in a store near you.
They need pictures of the bottles for their online catalogue and the paper guide that comes in the boxes.
Making photographs of a bottle of beer is suprisingly challenging. I want to give on overview of the color of the beer inside the bottle (which are often made of a dark glass) while highlighting the label on the front of the bottle. In order to build the catalogue, I want to have an uniform style for all pictures with a pure white background and a square format (to keep the respective size of the bottles).
In this post, I'll explain the process I have used for the latest box (available mid-september). For september 2014, one of the beers is the St. Stefanus Blonde, brewed in Belgium.
The first step is to place the bottle and the various white and black foam boards that will give the bottle a distinctive shape. In order to highlight the color of the beer inside the bottle, I will light white foam boards in the background. The light will bounce on the boards and go through the bottle before reaching the camera. The background will be overexposed to be pure white.
I also want to have well-defined edges on the bottle. I place two black foam boards on each side of the white background. These black boards will appear on the edges of the bottle and increase the contrast and sharpness of its shape. Without these black boards, the light coming from the white background would splill on the edges and make them too soft.
I put the bottle on a white foam board (with a plexiglass to have a small reflection at the bottom). Finally, I put other black foam boards on each side of the bottle and on top of it to prevent any leaking light to reach it.
I then place the camera at the right distance of the bottle to have it fill the image height. The image will be cropped to square in post-processing. I activate the X-E2 guides on its screen to have a good overview of the final size.
Once the camera is correctly placed, I fine tune the placement of the black boards on each side of the white background. They must be placed so that the edges of the bottle are dark but not too close so that they fill the inside of the bottle.
I put the bottle on top of a small box to be able to place the flashes below it (so that they do not appear on the photos) and angle them appropriately to light the scene.
I want to control the lighting and block any ambient light (the garage where I took the photos has lights coming from windows that can not be easily blocked). I configure my camera to 1/180 (the highest sync speed for the X-E2) and ISO 400. The lens is stopped down to ƒ/8 to have enough depth of field.
With these settings, the image is so dark that I know I will not be bothered by any ambient light (the photo is cropped but no other postprocessing has been applied).
Next step is to place the two flashes and provide the lighting.
Back (Main) Light
The main light is provided by the flash behind the bottle. It is directed towards the white background and will light the bottle after bouncing on the background. I use the Yongnuo YN560-III zoomed at 24 mm with a diffuser to spread the light on the white background.
When I take the picture, I can see that the beer inside the bottle is well lit and the background is overexposed to pure white. Thanks to the black foam boards, the edges of the bottle are dark and sharp enough (the photo below is cropped but no other postprocessing has been applied).
The liquid inside the bottle is lit but there is no light reaching the label on the front of the bottle.
I then to use the second flash (Nikon SB-700) to light only the label. The placement of the flash is tricky because it can easily create highlights on the glass if it is not properly directed. I place it below the bottle with an angle of 45° or so. It is fully zoomed at 135 mm to focus its light on the label. With this angle and zoom, the flash will lit the paper label but most of the light reaching glass will not be captured by the camera.
The photo below shows the bottle lit by the front flash only (the photo below is cropped but no other postprocessing has been applied).
We can see there are two highlights on the bottom of the bottle and near its neck. They are small enough that I will be able to remove it in post processing.
Final Picture
Once the two speedlights are setup, I tweak their power to have a correct ratio between the back and front lights. At then, I use the following ratio:
Back (main) light 1/16 +0.3EV
Front (fill) light 1/64 -0.3EV
When I take the picture with both the back and front lights, I capture the final (cropped but unprocessed) picture below.
Once the image is imported, I correct the lens distorsions and crop the image to a square format.
I slightly modify its global setting in the Basic module:
I fix its white balance (using a photo of the scene with a grey card)
I punch its Tone
+0.75 Exposure
+41 Contrast
+26 White
-63 Black
I increase its Presence
+16 Clarity
+26 Vibrance
-4 Saturation
I also increase the sharpness in the Details module (+52 Sharpening).
The numbers are meaningless. They are different for each bottle, depending mainly on the color and texture of the liquid and glass. The goal with any of these settings is to have a pure white background and a bottle that is well exposed and contrasted.
I use the Spot Removal tool to remove the highlights caused by the front flash at the bottom of the bottle and near its neck.
Last step is to use a few Adjustment Brushes to finalize the images:
darken the bottle reflection on the plexiglass
lighten the bottom corners of the label (that's a mistake I did not catch when capturing the image)
sharpen and increase contrast of the label (to have the text standout)
I finally export it in JPEG and hand it over to Barbara, the graphist designer of Une Petite Mousse, that uses it for the paper guide and the web site.
Since March 2013, I have photographed more than one hundred different beers1 and each one is a different challenge. The shape of the bottle changes, the color of the liquid and the glass change too. Some have dark labels, others have golden labels. Some do not have labels at all and the text is put directly on the glass.
I am always tweaking and refining the process to capture all these subtle differences and I am sure that I will continue to do so for as long as I take pictures and enjoy it.
Les 3 Pucelles, the Three Maiden, are three rocks high above Grenoble in the Vercors. It was an important location used by the Resistance during the 2nd World War.
This 90-metre springboard was used for the ski jumping competion during the 1968 Winter Olympic Games at Grenoble. It has been closed since the 80s and can no longer be used.
Yesterday, I was reading a book about André Kertész, one of my favourite photographers. I tried to reproduce one of his most famous photographs, La Fourchette, that he made in 1928.
The shape of my fork and plates are different from the original ones but the lighting is pretty similar. I used a single strobe to get a unidirectional hard light and tried several positions to get the shadows of the plate, the fork and the teeth close to the original:
. This book is an invaluable help to understand how light plays with shapes and textures.
