H A S H W I N Photography

Photographing glass objects is pretty interesting. A major difference is you don’t have to focus the lights on the objects,  but at the background (this is with no liquids in the glass). Of course that is not a hard and fast rule. Like with any lighting setups, you can play with the positions, angles and intensities of the light to get different effects. All of these shots are right out of the camera with just a little bit of contrast processing.

The following were used for this setup:

• 2 flashes
• color gels
• black background
• white base
• cybersync remote trigger (can also use a wired remote…)

Here are some of the shots and their corresponding setup shots:

wine glass with blue and red gels

This is the setup for the above shot:

wine glass shot setup

The flash on the left has a red gel and the one on the right has a blue gel. The cybersync trigger is connected to the left flash and the right side flash is an optical slave.

A couple of  shots using the above setup but without the gels and the glass at the rear:

wine glass with white background

wine glass with white background

some more…

wine glass (blue gel in front of glass and red gel on background)

wine glass

and the setup for the above shots…

wine glass setup shot

the setup shot from another angle.

wine glass setup - from a different angle

more shots to follow…

here is one with water in the glass.

wine glass with water

Here are some pictures on how the photek softlighter looks mounted on a light stand with a hot shoe flash. There were some limitations because of the umbrella mount clamp.  I wasn’t able to align the flash head to lie parallel to the umbrella stem because of the orientation of one of the screws on the umbrella mount clamp.

flash head inside the photek softlighter

The image above shows the screw on the clamp that prevents the clamp from being tilted further.

flash head inside the photek softlighter

the softlighter mounted on a light stand and flash connected to the alienbees cybersync receiver

softlighter with the umbrella stem

One big plus is the ability to remove the umbrella stem. This allows for the light to be placed very close to the subject.

the softlighter with the umbrella stem removed

the complete setup

and finally here is the catchlight. the softlighter about 45 degrees camera right…

photek softlighter catchlight

btw, this umbrella has silver and gold reflectors that can be placed in the umbrella. dont have those pics yet.

This was something i did about 3-4 yrs back. Water drops on dvds and cd surfaces produced interesting patterns. What makes them more interesting is the different colors you get just by moving the camera a little to the right or left. The angle at which you view the drops dramatically changes the colors on them. and more so if you use a second dvd/cd to reflect some light on it.

The patters get more interesting when you crop the images further.  i spent quite a bit of time with the crop tool on these set of images!

Here is the setup shot. (canon 20 and canon 100mm f/2.8 macro lens mounted on a tripod and triggered either using a cable release or set on self timer).

Shot Setup diagram

and here are some shots from this setup:

UFOs

silkworm

trapped

disgusted

marching towards the prey

isolated - h1n1 ?

peacock feathers

In the ‘peacock feathers’ shot,  you can see the reflections of the second DVD that actually gives the peacock feather look.

I had a chance to photograph the bharathanatyam arangetram of Alagu. This event took place at the Roseville high school. One of my usual routines is to take some photos of the idol of Lord Nataraja that is usually place on the right corner of the stage and typically there is a flood light that is focused on the idol. I walked up to the lighting technician to request him to turn on the lights so that i could get a few shots. While talking to him, he said that they had done some rehearsals earlier and that the screen colors turned out very saturated and asked me if i needed to get some test shots before the program began. Since it was about time to start, i decided to just take it live… and boy, what beautiful colors…. check out these images below….

orange

blue & orange

dark orange

blue & green

Lord Nataraja in purple & orange

darkblue & maroon

deep pink

with the musicians

the lobby decorations were awesome as well. the highlight was the floral arrangement. will be adding more photos of it and more dance photos as well.

we also did a guest sign in photo book for alagu with the pictures taken during a photo shoot. more photos of that to come…

Congrats to Alagu on the wonderful performance !

update: here are more photos from the arangetram: vibrant colors, set1 and set2

these are a few sample pages from the guest sign in book

guest sign in book sample page

guest sign in book sample page

guest sign in book sample page

guest sign in book sample page

When they are in a good mood, i can get my kids to pose for me. Usually, when it is outdoors, they have the freedom to move about and i play papa-razzi. This time it was indoors and they were limited to a couple of square feet of space. So i struck a deal, candies for poses…

These set of photos were taken with just one flash, off camera and  shot through an umbrella. Just a single flash can also produce pretty flattering results. The flash was triggered via a PC cord. Unfortunately i didn’t note down the flash settings for these shots…

For all the shots above, the flash was at 45 degress to the left of the camera and just a tad bit above her head level.

For this image above, though i could have used a second flash with a snoot to get the effect, i just burned the edges in photoshop.

For these 3 shots, the flash was almost at 90 degrees to the left and at her shoulder level. Tweaked the white balance in these images.

And here is a simple collage…

We were at Windsor castle and having a good time. The 17-40L was the primary lens for this trip and i got some good shots while on the London eye and also of the castle just before it snapped into two. I found it broken when i opened my camera bag to take some shots.

I have taken this bag, camera, lens , flashes etc on so many trips within the U.S and to India several times. The only difference is, this time i had a Canon BG-E2 battery grip on my 20D. This extra height causes a steeper angle between the lens and the base of the bag. So i guess a little pressure on the bag, which normally wouldn’t do anything without the battery grip, caused the lens to snap… just my theory…

Here are some snaps of the broken 17040mm f/4.0 lens

The two piece 17-40mm lens

broken 17-40mm lens

chips & chips

You can see the spot where the plastic gave way

broken connectors

I am yet to send to Canon to see what they say.

and now, i make sure i have only my 50 mm on the camera body when the battery grip is on it… so far so good…

UPDATE: I sent the lens to the canon service center at Irvine, CA for repair and they charged $175 to fix it. I think they put put the optics in a totally new casing. I got it back and now it works just fine. phew !

I had a chance to photograph the bharathanatyam arangetram of Navya Maithri Konda. Such a beautiful event… Right from the lobby  to the stage decoration, every minute detail was taken care of.

I also had the opportunity to do the pre-arangetram photo shoot for Navya. You can find pictures of it here. The three dresses, in red, blue and white were fantastic. The accompanying jewellery for each dress was fantastic and complemented the dress so well.

Red

Blue

and white

The lobby decoration varied from life sized cut outs, to posters to digital displays. This is a shot of the larger than life sized displays.

Life sized cut outs

This is a picture of one of the 16×20 posters that i made for them.

16x20 arangetram poster

and here is the guest sign on book we made for the arangetram.

guest sign on book

guest sign on book

The performance itself was great ! Navya did a wonderful job that had the packed auditorium giving a standing ovation. She was the 108th graudate of the Shri Krupa Dance Academy (108 is considered a very auspicious number in the Hindu religion.) Here are some shots from the arangetram performance .

(COMING SOON)

Oh here are some shots taken just before the arangetram

the last minute energy before the solo debut performance – (arangetram)

First attempt at water drop photography.

My initial readings about water drop photography lead me to believe that a complex circuitry that triggers at the exact moment the water drop hits the water surface needs to be connected to the camera etc…  This was a big discouragement, until i read a post on strobist. This post by Gavin Hoey outlined an amazingly simple procedure to get some great water drop shots.

One thing i found very critical is the rate of the water drops. too slow, too many wasted shots. too fast, the patterns are not very appealing.

Here are some of the shots from the first attempt

next couple of things to try

• different liquids (oil, milk)
• multiple simultaneous drops
• glass bowl with different colored papers in the base

Here are some shots of the setup

The umbrella itself has no significance to the setup. just used it to suspend the ziploc bag

The flashes need to be placed behind the water drops. With the above placement, i saw the light from the flash hit the water drop directly as well

One more thing i realized is that this camera angle is too steep. A lower angle will probably yield more interesting patters.

Using two flashes gives an opportunity to use different gels for more dramatic effects.