Tip of the Day: DIY Bungee Camera Strap Mod

Note: CSUN squirrels, they are vicious natural born killers that roam around the campus and if you were their size, they would eat you faster than you could say, "nuts". The picture has nothing to do with the post.


Well, I got myself a new Canon 40D for Christmas. I initially bought a 5Dmk2 but returned it because the shutter release was jammed and the camera would try to focus by itself. So instead I decided to sell my Rebel, buy the 40D for 750$ and wait a few months for the 5Dmk2 to go down exactly 750$ and only then buy it killing three birds with one stone!

Anyway, turns out the 40D ( and 5Dmk2) is much heavier than the decidedly petite Rebel and its weight was very apparent during a hiking trip. Not since the Olympus E-3 have I carried such a heavy camera.

So the solution is: add shock cords to the strap. This concept is pretty common in high-end backpacks and climbing gears. Here's how it works, you basically add a bungee cord (the shock cord) in between your strap and the camera. Another piece of webbing is then attached to the strap and the camera to keep the cord from over-extending and breaking. The webbing attachment must be longer than the shock cord as to allow most of the weight to be absorbed by the latter creating a cushioning effect. Makes sense? here's the diagram..














I call the piece of webbing between the metal ring and the camera the "pre-strap". I really can't think of a better term. Camera straps with quick-release systems usually have them. For clarity, the diagram shows the bungee cord being longer than the pre-strap but you must in fact make it shorter or it won't work.

Materials:

- A camera strap with quick-release attachments (or the "pre-straps" as I call them), I use Domke Grippers
- 3/8" bungee cord (from camping/climbing department of your sporting goods store)















Step 1:















Attach the "pre-strap" to your camera. Attach the strap to the "pre-strap".

Step 2:















Loop a length of bungee cord through the eyelet

Step 3:















Run the other end of the bungee through the camera strap. Make a double loop. Make sure the final length of the cord is SHORTER than the length of the "pre-strap". It won't work if it's longer or equal in length! The specific length needed for a good "cushioning effect" depends on the elasticity of the particular bungee cord. I suggest you experiment.

Cut off the extra bits and quickly burn the nylon to keep it from fraying. Try not to burn the rubber elastics inside, they become gooey and don't harden back!

Voila!















This makes the camera much much easier to carry around for extended period of times. If you're too self-concious to walk around with something like that around your neck, you can get neoprene sleeves and wrap it around the cords.

Happy New Year Everyone!

- TN

Update: fellow blogger Matt Dewitt made some diffusion panels too and wrote a post about it. I think he explains it better than I do! He also made some modifications that I think are awesome. Check out his blog!

Update 2: the reason I bought the 40D and not the newer 50D is because I believe APS-C sized sensors have reached their sweet spot at 10-12 megapixels. From what I can see from the sample pictures on the internet, the 15mp 50D is only marginally (undetectable in prints) better resolution-wise yet doesn't perform as well as its older brother in low-light. In simple term, they are pretty much equal when it comes to image quality. Lastly, the 40D is about 400$ cheaper than the 50D.

Tip of the Day: Improving Focus and Brightening Eyes

If you've shot in a studio before, you'll know that it's pretty dark in there. Even thought ambient light from the room does not really affect the picture (f5.6, 1/250, ISO 100) photographers still like to turn off the lights because the modeling lights from the strobes are easier to see.

There are two problems to that:

First, your camera may have problems focusing under low light. That problem is especially evident when you're shooting with longer lenses and not using the center focus point. (please click here to learn why it's bad to use the center point exclusively while shooting with a telephotos)

The second problem is your model's eyes having LARGE, drug-junky'ish, dilated pupils. Remember the time you went to the eye doctor and he put the liquid thingy to dilate your eyes and make you look like a freak? This problem usually does not bother me when I'm shooting brown-eyed people but for lightly-coloured eyes, it's just unsightly (pun intended). You want those blue and green (or gray, as below) eyes to show their colours!














So to solve these two problems, I've come up with this little cool solution that I'm sure someone has thought of before. It's as simple as putting 1 and 1 together. I call it Shooting Commando Style.

A LED flashlight attached to the lens with bungee cords. (note: yes that's a macbook plug adapter)

Cool uh? now focusing is easy, eyes are bright and colourful, and as a bonus (if you're a guy), you can pretend you're a space marine hunting aliens in a derelict spaceship. That's another reason why I like turning off the lights.














At my usual shooting distance (around 8 feet), the light coming from the flashlight does not affect the exposure. If you like to shoot closer, you may want to use a flash light with a lower light output.

Also, the extra light may throw a tiny catchlight in the model's eyes and you may or may not want to retouch that out depending on your own aesthetic.

- TN

My Workflow

(disclaimer: the "picture" above was taken a long time ago with a camera-phone, no creative process was involved!)

A reader asked me what my workflow was and I promised him I would do a write-up on it (and 'cause he donated money to my "feed me" fund, thanks Jeff!) Keep in mind that this is my style, my way.... it works for me, it was adapted to my needs. It may not work for you.

Shooting Stage:

I currently shoot with the consumer-grade Canon Rebel XSi (you can only laugh at me if you think your pictures are better than mine). My favorite lens is the 70-200mm f4L but I also like to use the 50mm f1.4 when I need a very soft, dreamy look. The f1.4 has very high level of almost-neutral-coloured halation, a form of chromatic aberration. Another lens that I have is the 17-40mm f4L that I use for environmental portraits. When I'm on the go, I shoot with the Olympus E-410 and a 14-42mm f3.5-5.6.

I shoot mostly wide-open and only rarely go above f5.6 when details such as clothes and accessories need to be in focus. I also shoot in RAW exclusively.

My lighting equipments consist of Sunpak 383's, Nikon SB-26's, Nikon SB-80's and Olympus FL-36R's flashes. All of them except the 383's have built-in optical slaves. I also have an Alien Bee B800 when portability is not needed. All of them are synced wirelessly with Cybersyncs and built-in slaves. To complement the lights, I also have various stands, umbrellas, a Photoflex LiteDome Q39 medium softbox and my home-made panels.

For memory cards, I use 4 GB Sandisk Ultra II SD cards. I have around 4 of them. I've tried other cheaper brands before but few of them were able to keep up with the Rebel's speed. I like the 4 GB capacity (which gives me around 200 exposures on the Rebel) because it allows me to stop often to back up and transfer my photos. You would NEVER find me shooting with a 32 GB card! I would rather lose 1/4 of my pictures when a card goes down than the whole of them. Don't put all your eggs in the same basket.

Immediately after filling up a card, I take a break and transfer my pictures to two portable firewire hard-drive enclosures. The daisy-chaining ability of firewire allows me to have the two hard-drives connected to one another and then both of them routed to my computer through a single cord.

To transfer the images while in a studio-setting, I either use my Macbook or my tiny Asus Eee PC runing XP. While on-the-go, I use the Wolverine Flashpack backup hard-drive to transfer my pictures directly from my cards without using a computer.

Post-Processing Stage:

After a shoot is over, I transfer all the files from my backup hard-drives into my custom-built PC runing Windows XP / Ubuntu. I wouldn't mind having a Mac as a desktop computer but they are too expensive. I've tried Vista and totally hated it. Vista takes an innordinarily amount of time to transfer files. Emptying my recycle bin (which usually contains around 1000 images) takes half-an-hour! Backup up in and syncyng with Vista is a pain in the butt. It's probably a bug that Microsoft is just too lazy to fix.

They rather spend their times making ass-sucking commercials. "I'm a PC and I eat cheese".. yeah how uncool is that uh? that's like the Joe The Plumber of IT*

All the RAW images from the shoot are converted to Adobe DNG format (you should do that!) using Lightroom 2 and are burned into DVD's for archival. I processs my images as 16 bits TIFF files with Photoshop CS4. My only plug'ins for Photoshop are Nik Color Efex 3.0 for skin softening, Nik Silver Efex for black and white conversion and PictureCode Noise Ninja for noise removal. I use a 4x6 Wacom Intuos3 graphic tablet to do my retouching. When it comes to tablets, I've found that the smaller the size the better - your drawing hand does not have to move over a big surface. My images are viewed and editted through a Dell LCD monitor calibrated with ColorVision Spyder2Express calibrator.

Backing Up Stage

All my files are backed up on my desktop computer (named Skynet), two external hard drives (Vault1 and Vault2) enclosures and one portable hard drive (Nomad). And as if that's not paranoid enough, I have yet another one at work just in case my house burns down. Note that I do not buy external hard drives such as the MyBook or MyPassport. I rather buy enclosures such as the Macally's and use regular 3.5" hard drives. That way after one fills up, I can copy all the files to another drive and move the maxed out drive to a safe location as a backup.

All my drives also have an exact copy of my Lightroom library so if I wanted to edit my photos from the Nomad with my Macbook when I'm away from my desktop, I could. I would then go home and sync all drives at the end of the day.

To sync everything, I use the awesome and free Allway Sync installed on my Sandisk Ultra USB Titanium Plus Cruzer drive using PortableApps. Having the syncing software on a USB drive allows me to run it even when I'm not at my computer.

- TN

* Although I have to admit, I do hate Justin Long. If I could only bitch-slap that smug look out of his face.

Starving Artist's Guide to Studio Portraiture: Butterfly Lighting

This one is a nifty little tool that you can have in your lighting arsenal and it's called Butterfly Light, also known as Beauty Light. It's an especially good light to use on women (hence butterfly) if you want to make them look pruuuuty (hence beauty).

In its simplest form, a butterfly light is a light that is placed above and in front of the model. Lets look at the setup diagram:

(click on images for larger versions)



For the picture above, title Ravenclaw, I wanted the light to be soft yet directional and dramatic. One of the good things about butterfly lighting is the catchlight it throws in the model's eyes. It's amazingly good at enhancing already gorgeous eyes and my model, Denise Manila(MM#834507) certainly has the goodies.

Light A: For the main light, I used a Sunpak 383 strobe mounted on a stand. I placed it high in front of the model and a bit to the left. The light was pointed down toward the model's face until a shadow is visible right under the model's nose.

Modifier A: Using two stands, I placed a 3x4" panels with white rip-stop nylon fabric stretched over in between the model and the light. This soften the raw light coming from the strobe considerably. I made sure to light illuminated the fabric evenly for maximum softness. I also made sure the strobe was pointed directly toward the center of the frame.

Yup it's that simple! All you need to do is get the model to give you THE look. (hint: a beer or ten helps*)



A few things to keep in mind...

First make sure the nose shadow (when the model is directly facing the camera) is not too long and not too short. When it's too long (when it drops down to the model's lips) you may get the Adolf Hitler look, and that's definitely not flattering. When it's too short, you may get a very flat, deer-in-headlight, bloated, kind of look. The length of the shadow is determined by how far in front of the model the light is. It is also important to take note of how high the light is especially on models with deep set eyes. The shadows created by prominent brows may not be too pleasing.

Second, I originally wanted about half of the light to strike pass the panel and into a reflector below it to lighten the shadow but the resulting image lacked drama. That light setup is sometimes called "clam shell" light. It gives really nice, watery catchlights in the model's eyes.

Third, you can do butterfly lighting with many different lighting modifier. The picture below of Aragorn (who, to the best of my knowledge, is not a girl) was probably lit by a grid spot judging by how hard and tight the nose shadow is. Take note of the very small catchlight in his eyes.










(Copyrighted New Line Cinema)

You can also use umbrellas which may be hard to position if you don't have a boom stand or softboxes which are definitely hard to procure (and position) if you don't have the dough. Me, I like my DIY panels because I get so much control from them at a fraction of a price.


* It gets messy after the eleventh one

Starving Artist's Guide to Studio Portraiture: Working with Panels

So I hope y'all went out to Home Depot and made some PVC light panels of your own? Shame on you if you haven't, go here and come back and I'll show you how they are used to shoot a glamour shot of a gorgeous model with plumbing implements (*giggle* stop it! lets be mature about this!! Geee)

I'm going to try explaining the setup in a different way this time. I'll go through the setup one light at a time explaining exactly what's the purpose of each one. I'll also go by the order they were placed on the set.

Lets start by looking at our diagram. Yeah that's right, Picasso's got nothing on me.



(click on the picture for a bigger version)

It's a bit crowded but it's technically a two-lights setup, with an Alienbee 800 (Light A) on the right and a portable Sunpak 383 (Light B) on the left. The background is a dark gray seemless paper and the model is Dina Zaki (aka Blondie).

Note: I won't tell you how far the lights are from the model because distance is a very relative thing - it depends on how powerful your light is, how soft you want it, how much of is lost from the diffusion fabrics etc.

Light A: This is our key light, our main source of light. It was placed high enough as to allow it to cast a downward nose shadow on Blondie's face. You don't want upward shadows unless it's a scary, zombie scene.

Diffusion Panel: Light A was very harsh so I decided to place the freshly-made light panel with white rip stop nylon fabric stretched over. I made sure it was placed a bit toward the camera to get that "wrap-around" effect. (I'll write more on this later as it is a confusing concept for a lot of people).

Black Flag: The problem with Light A is that it spilled over the Diffusion Panel and lit the background. I wanted the gray seemless background to be dark so I had to put another light panel this time with black rip stop nylon to block the unwanted spill.

Reflector: The right side of Blondie was too dark so I added a white reflector (white foamcore) to brighten the shadow. That helped somewhat but it still wasn't enough. I had two solutions: first is to move the reflector closer which I couldn't have done because it would have shown in the camera. The second solution was to move Light A bit forward (toward the camera) so around 3/4 of it would shine pass the diffusion fabric and into the reflector. Yup that worked.

Update: Well another solution is to add yet another light but that's for losers and people who don't know how to use what they have efficiently :P Not to mention another light would complicate our setup a whole lot more and reduce our already depleted bank account.

Light B: The picture looked pretty good but the gray background was a bit meh. We needed more glam so I used a Sunpak 383 with orange gel to sex things up!

With the lighting all spiced up and ready, we started shooting while "nasty girls" was playing on the stereo.

In retrospect, that was a rather bad choice of music....



















That's Blondie giving me the one-fingered salute. She's such a MEANY!

DIY Step-by-Step Light Panels Tutorial

Dean Collins was DA Man and his Bogen Lightform Panels were awesome. Their concept (pdf) is surprisingly simple. The only thing the booklet didn’t tell you is that the original Lightform’s has bungee cord running through them to make transport and assembly easier.

This is an almost exact replica of the original P22 panel.

(Click on any of the images for a bigger version)















Material Needed

- Schedule 40 ½” PVC pipes
- Couplers (90 degree elbow joints and straight joints)
- length of 3/8” shock cord (bungee)
- Hacksaw
- PVC cement and primer
- Rip Stop nylon fabrics (white and black)

PVC pipes can be found in the plumbing section of almost every hardware stores. I went for 1/2" schedule 40 PVC because I thought it has a nice balance between weight and robustness. I've found the 3/4" schedule 40 pipes to be too heavy. You're also going to need couplers - a 1x2m panel needs four 90 degree elbows and two straight joints.

For the fabric, I went to Joann's and bought white (or black if you need a flag) Rip Stop nylon, it's durable, won't rip, is easily washed and diffuse the light just right. They cost around $7 a yard. Use their "40% off" weekly coupon! (Thanks Carsten for the money-saving tip!)

I bought the bungee cord (aka shock cord) from a sporting goods store(REI). Look for them in the camping / mountain climbing department. They are sold by the yard and are relatively cheap.

Note: 'cause I'm Canadian and I live in the US, I'm mixing metric and imperial measurement. Yeah it annoys me too!

Step One: Cutting

First you need to cut your PVC pipes down to the desired length. I have two set of frames, one is a 1x2m for full body portraits and the other is a 1x1m for faceshots. We’re going to focus on doing the 1x2 here as it’s a tiny bit more elaborate.

For our 1x2m frame, we're going to cut down our PVC pipes into six 1-meter long sections.

Note that all pipes must be of the same length if you want them to fold down properly. It’s physically impossible to fold a 1 by ¾ m frame without dividing at least one of the longer sections into smaller pieces. (I found that out the hard way)

Step Two: Dry Fitting and Cementing
















Now dry fit all the pieces together. Make sure everything is straight and level then glue the joints to the pipe with PVC cement. I’ve found that the disassembly of the frame to be easier when the 90 degree elbows are glued to the 1-meter bases (two per bases). The two straight joints are then cemented to one of the long-side sections on each side. All the rest are left unglued.

Step Three: Bungee Cord Installation
















For this step you’ll need to run the length of bungee cord through the inside of the frame. You’ll likely need about 6 meter worth of cord. Once you have it through the whole frame, pull it taut and make a double knot. Note that the tighter the tension, the easier it will be to assemble (it just snaps right out!) but the harder it will be to take down and vice-versa.

Step Four: Installing the fabric















Stretch the Rip Stop nylon fabric over the frame and cut it to size with about an inch bigger. Sew the seems down and affix elastic bands to all four corners (my mom is awesome!) .

If you don’t having any sewing skills (I don’t) and don’t know anyone who does, you can tape the sides with gaffer tapes. I did that on my prototype and it worked fine but for the elastic you’re going to need to do some sewing.








Tada! now you have a poor man's (or woman's) Lightform P22 panel!

SAGTSP: DIY General Purpose Super Clamp

So I guess the Starving Artist's Guide to Studio Photography won't come in parts anymore. I'll just write whatever I feel like writing as they come to me in whatever order I want. I hope nobody minds.

With that said, I needed a way to clamp my diffusion panel to my stand. I needed it to be stable yet maneuverable. I went online and looked for various DIY guides and came up with a few ideas. The following is amalgam of all that I've learned...

(note that you can click on the pictures for a bigger version)













Materials Needed

• 1x micro ball head
  
• 1x Spring clamp
• 1x 1/4" washer
• 2x 1/4" external locking washer
• 1x 1/4" wing nut

The ball head that I used is a Giottos MH-1004 (B&H), it was around $10 when I got it a year ago. I'm sure there are more alternatives out there. For this, I needed one that was small enough and cheap enough. The Giottos performed acceptably. I also higly recommend the use of locking washers. Without them the clamp sometimes unscrew itself when the weight makes it turn counter-clockwise. Lastly, I used a wing nut instead of a regular nut because of the way my metal clamp was built - it has a recess in the handle that makes it hard to fit a regular nut inside. An even better reason is that I MAY need the ball head for other purposes during a shoot and I didn't want to carry around a wrench (I prefer the Leatherman Skeletool which is awesome!).

Step 1














First, I needed to drill a 1/4" hole into one side of the clamp. For that, I borrowed a drill from work and bought a 1/4" drill bit specially made to drill into hard metals. They are not expensive.

Step 2














I then removed the plate from the ball head and assembled the whole thing in this order: first the regular washer followed by a locking washer and the clamp itself, then followed by yet another locking washer for good measure and finally toppled with a wing nut.

Step 3













Tighten everything and voila!

-TN

PS: I'm working on a tutorial for building Bogen lightform-style light panels, not just pvc pipes connected together but real, quickly deployed and awesomely sweet panels! Keep checking back!