Okeydokey, Comment Moderation it is...

My link-happy commenting friend was especially busy after my request for he/she/it to stop. So I spent the last two hours cleaning up the mess instead of doing the water assignment after-action post.

Thanks for the comment moderation suggestion. We will try that and see how it works. If you could please sign (some kind of) a name to your thoughts it would help me in the moderation process. I will likely start nuking the anonymous ones without reading them if they start coming in wholesale.

Hope you understand.

All the way at the other end of the scale of humanity, I would like to take a moment to publicly thank those of you who have been supporting the site through your Amazon/Adorama purchases and PayPal contributions.

That (and the caffeine, of course) is what keeps the site going. I am pretty sure the missus would put the kibash on this gig if I were spending this much time on a hobby site.

No pun intended.

And in yet another totally unrelated thought, I cannot tell you how much fun I am having learning sound editing these last two days.

After 16 hours of shooting, recording and editing yesterday and only realized at midnight that I had gone the whole day on nothing but a banana and a handful of popcorn. You know I am having fun when I forget to eat.

If you want to play with noise, you can do it for free. I highly recommend Audacity, a free, open-source, multi-platform sound editor.

Create a sophisticated, multi-track audio project - or talk like a chipmunk. Whatever floats your boat.

As for me, it's bedtime. And I exit the day with only a slightly smaller backed-up work pile than when I entered it.

But no worries. After I shoot the Orioles game tomorrow, I have nine days off. First priority is to enjoy the last week of summer vacation with the family at home.

But I will also have time in the evening to post some. On deck is the water stuff, plus part three of the food shoot.

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Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam.....

Sigh.

FWIW, I do see every comment that is posted to Strobist as an e-mail. It allows me to keep loose tabs on what is happening without having to cruise through the whole site every day.

In the last few days there has been an increasing amount of comment spam. I have the "drunken type recognition thing" set to "on," which pretty reliably stops the spambots. (Without the type recognition, we'd fill up with junk almost instantly.)

So, that means that someone is likely hand cutting and pasting long lists of links into the comment fields.

The only sure way I can stop this is to take away the comments function on the site, which would be a loss to all.

I'd rather not do that. But given the nature of some of the links, I probably would.

Before I resort to that, I'd like to try an unusual, non-technical solution. Here goes.



To whomever is filling the comment fields with spam links:

Could you please stop, so I do not have to nuke all of the comments to prevent it?


Thanks,
David

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Water Shots are In

Whew.

I worked 16 hours straight (8:00am til midnight) yesterday, but I now have a firm grasp on sound editing.

I did a web thingie on the Morgan State University Band, who kick a - well, let's just say they are a kickin' band. I'll post a link when it is up.

I am digging myself out of a pile of admin work, and will get to the water stuff ASAP-est. There's some great stuff in there. too.

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Bogen Stands Galore

Moishe Appelbaum, of Midwest Photo Exchange just dropped me a line to say that he got a big ol' pile of Bogen 3353's into stock.

They are $55, but you need to e-mail him to get that price.

There are more Westcott Double Folds coming, too.

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Water... Give me WATER...

Just a brief note to remind you that the water assignment is due tomorrow at 11:59pm local time.

This effort, by Jeremey, is apparently not even his final submission. Which I would read as a bit of a "shot across the bow" to you other guys...

The stuff is looking sharp so far. I guess you people really get motivated when you don't have to scrounge a model for your shoot.

And as for the purity of this (or any other) particular brand of bottled H2O, I would point out that "Evian" is "naive" spelled backwards.

I'm just saying.

Strobist's Lighting Boot Camp is sponsored by Midwest Photo Exchange, so please check out their site for new and used gear. As far as I know, they still have a stash of Westcott Double-Fold Umbrellas and Bogen 5-Section Stands, too.

Click through for more info.

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Tupperware and Trash Bags, Part 2 of 3

Picking up from the last post in this series from an afternoon of shooting cold food for the features section at The Sun, this week's entry will detail a quick shoot of a bean salad in an ice bowl.

As with the gazpacho, we shot using a just pair of SB strobes in the designer's kitchen. We used normal kitchen surfaces, and found objects as light modifiers when needed.

This ice bowl shot was the main reason we were not working in our paper's studio. We had no freezer, and these things like to melt. Fast.

So I used a technique I employ on almost every lighting job I shoot. I used a subject stand-in.

For shooting people, I will test the light by having my left hand stuck in the general position that the subject will occupy. This gives me feedback on both the quality of the light and the exposure.

Product shots are no different. I had the added variable of a subject with a fast (melting) half-life. So the stand-in approach helped me out there, too.

I would be using the light-oak kitchen table as a surface, and choosing a shooting angle that would give me a smooth background gradient. This, and the backlight, was what I would test by shooting an extra snoot as a stand-in.

This photo allowed me to get a base exposure on the background light. It also let me get in the ballpark exposure on the (snooted) main light. I would be using my subject to hide my battery powered background strobe. I also used this test to choose the aperture that would give me a nice seam at the end of the table. More on that in a minute.

Here, using batt-flashes provided the additional advantage of having no cords to hide, and only a small light to obscure with the subject.

I have noticed that one of my SB-800 puts out cooler-temperature light than my other flashes. You could see this as an annoyance, or you could remember that this flash is just cooler, and use it in that way. That's what I did here. This is a white wall, but it came out cooler when exposed down to medium-grayish.

The takeaway idea here is to test, test, test, test, test.

And write the variant info on the piece of equipment, (on tape) so yo know what you are dealing with.

(One of my D2h's, for instance, handles fluorescent light better than the other one. So it is marked that way. When I have a critical shot in fluorescent lighting, I'll use that body.)

So, the background flash is sitting on the table, set to very low manual power (either 1/64 or 1/128 - I forget) to establish my background exposure. Next, we dialed up the snooted main light until the stand-in subject looked pretty close. We'd quickly fine-tune when the ice bowl showed up.

Here's a quick test of the bowl. Thirty seconds later it was back in the freezer, until we were ready to fill it with beans and shoot a final.

Note that the light came through the empty bowl much better than it did (see up top) when the bowl was full. Were I shooting a product shot of the bowl, this would have been very important to try to maintain. But as the bowl was only a prop for the food, I was OK to let it go a little darker.

With the lighting tested out, we filled the bowl and quickly shot the version you see at the top of the article.

Taking a second to talk about the light, you should note that the backlight is a bare strobe, synched by a Pocket Wizard. The beam is set to 70mm, giving us a nice gradient on the wall.

The front light on the food (which is really more of a top/back light, actually) is snooted. This controls the spill onto the wall, and keeps the nice background glow.

Speaking of gradients, note the smooth transition from the foreground to background tones. You can get this with a low shooting angle and control it by the aperture selection. The "foreground" surface is really a reflection of the lit wall off of the oak table. The tones blend a little, too, which I liked. You have to get the lens right down to the table's surface to get this effect. The bottom third of the lens was actually below the surface, off the front edge of the table.

Use depth of field (aperture) to control the focus of seam between the table and the wall. (I chose the aperture first, then adjusted the flash power to zero in on the exposure.)

Here is a wide shot, exposed to bring up the surrounding environment, which shows how simple the light was.

And here is a second look in which we surrounded the base of the bowl with ice.

I could have gone more complicated with the light. But I was pretty worried about the third shot, which was to be tuna tartare. For this, the designer had chosen a stainless steel, spherical (convex and concave) spoon.

Thank you so very much. No, really. Now, ninety-eight percent of my brain was in use figuring out how to hide myself (not to mention my camera and lights) from that fun-house-mirror of a spoon.

Which will be Part Three.

Next: Tupperware and Trash Bags, Pt. 3 of 3

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On Your Mark, Get Set...

Moishe Appelbaum, of Midwest Photo Exchange has let us know that he has 40, (count 'em, 40) of the Westcott Double-Fold Umbrellas in stock. He's got them in both white and silver.

(Note: Moishe stuck his e-mail address up on the Flickr thread, so I will echo it here. If you cannot find the umbrellas on the website, you can e-mail him and get in line if you wish. I will pull this when/if he runs out or gets a direct site link to me.)

Back to the gear:

But that's not all.

He also has 8 or so of the chrome version of the Bogen compact, 5-section stand. It is the 3353, instead of the 3373 (the model number for the black one.) So if you don't have to have black, you are set for the stuff that has recently been darn-near impossible to find. Heck, give it a coupla months and chrome will be the "new black" anyway.

But that's not all, either.

Midwest Photo Exchange has picked up sponsorship of the rest ot the Lighting Boot Camp, and will be sending a free Westcott Double-Fold umbrella (his choice of white or silver) to the person who turns in the best overall photo in each of the pro and amateur categories.

(When the time comes, I will narrow down the entries and have a few photogs from the staff at The Sun help me pick the winners.)

Moishe said he is willing to ship worldwide, so you Antarctica-based photogs get on the stick (if you can find a stick) and make him earn his keep of you win.

(Just kidding, Moishe. I don't think we have anyone down there.)

So that leaves 38 umbrellas left. First come, first-served.

Folks, these things are pretty hard to come by. And my own affiliated Adorama has been coming up triple-goose-eggs for months in the "in-stock" dept.

So it won't do anything in the monetary graft dept for Strobist. But it'll be good for Moishe (what a cool name - I love typing it) and he is doing good for you guys in the umbrella-donating dept.

And while we're at it, I have also rounded up another affiliate source to backstop Adorama when the out-of-stock blues keep coming and you still want to contribute to the site through your purchases.

More on that soon.

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