Shooting Underwater is something I’ve never done before, not really sure why… I don’t really have the fancy tanks that a lot of the great underwater photographers have and I guess that kind of always kept me from messing around with it.
But then the other day I realized, I didn’t used to have most the equipment I use today and that never, ever, never stopped me from experimenting and having fun.
So, I decided to give some underwater images a try. What better way to start out than with some relatively inexpensive, easy to use point-and-shoot cameras? Both are 14 megapixels, both can go underwater for up to 33ft, and both retail for around $300 or less at B&H. 14 megapixels for $300? Just five years ago I would have had trouble wrapping my head around that… my how times have changed!
Versus
What’s in the Box
The Panasonic Lumix comes with a couple cool little extras, like a rubber camera case, a plastic battery case and a CD that I’d never look at. Other than that they come with almost identical offerings.
There is one difference in how the batteries recharge though. The Panasonic Lumix comes with a separate battery charger, however you have to plug the Olympus camera TO the battery charger with the USB plug. To me the Olympus design is absolutely unacceptable. For one, if you’re traveling with it you need to remember to bring the chord AND the battery charger that plugs into the wall… two, you’ll have to remember to bring the chord home with you… three, and this is the big one, you cannot buy an extra battery and charge it while the camera is in use.
Score one BIG point for the Panasonic Lumix.
Specs
The Olympus comes with 2GB built in memory, which is really cool, but the Lumix comes with an LED light for video, which is also really cool. I can’t really say which one is better because both of them would be AMAZINGLY convenient during that one or two times in your life when you filled up all your memory cards and you NEED a few more picture. Or when you’re 12 feet under water and you want to throw a tiny bit of light onto that eel you’re videoing.
I’m giving them a TIE.
The Test
Anyone interested in purchasing an underwater P&S isn’t going to be extremely picky about minor differences in technicalities, so I’m skipping those.
What really matters to me for a P&S camera is whether or not it’s easy to carry around, there is an intuitive interface and button layout and biggest of all that it is FUN to use… and it should take decent pictures.
So, I decided to jump into a pool a few times with both cameras and see what I could come up with just messing around!
I assumed I would be writing a review about how both of them are great, fun little cameras. I also thought I probably wouldn’t be able to tell much of a difference between them. On this I was very surprised to find out I was VERY wrong I was.
I preferred using the Panasonic Lumix much, much, much more and it all came down to how short of time there was between me pressing the button and the camera taking the picture. The Olympus seemed to take an eternity! As a photographer I want INSTANT responsiveness.
Score a BIG point for the Panasonic Lumix
The Photographs!
After shooting with both cameras on three separate occasions I went through the images and picked some of my favorites. NONE of these results are straight out of the camera, I’ve taken all of them through my standard development process in Lightroom.
It should be noted, for all of you purists out there, that this sort of tweaking has gone on in the darkroom long before a computer was invented… in my opinion a photo is not finished until it’s been tweaked.
So tweak I did! Here are the results, grouped by camera.
Results From the Olympus Stylus Tough!
Results From the Panasonic Lumix!
The Verdict
I had a blast shooting underwater. If you live anywhere near a source of water I think the $300 for either of these cameras is well worth it, if nothing else just for the fun factor! I got plenty of useable images from both cameras, one wish would be that they could shoot in RAW format rather than JPG but for $300 I can’t complain too much!
That said this was just a warmup, in a week or so I’ll be taking my Canon 5D Mark II beneath the ripples while trying out the Aquatech Underwater Casing and let you know how the experience compares to the more spontaneous feeling Point and Shoots…
I’m very excited for that, but until then back to the results.
The clear favorite!
Overall the Panasonic Lumix‘s response time made it much more fun to use and I was able to catch the decisive moment much more easily. Also, since it was quicker I could get an extra shot or two off while holding my breath.
The runner up…
So how do I rank the Olympus Stylus Tough? Well, it took great pictures but the slight delay from pressing the button to opening the shutter was very annoying… that loss in “fun-factor” and ability to capture the “decisive moment” gets it a solid luke-warm rating.
First of all, I have no idea why there isn’t a standard name for octagonal softboxes, every company uses their own name – Elinchrom Octa, Photoflex Octodome, Hensel Octaform… it gets confusing! That said the Octagon shaped soft-box is one of my favorite light modifiers. Not only does it make for beautiful catchlights it also wraps around the face and body in a way other soft boxes just can’t seem to pull off.
I wanted to get a new one but I couldn’t really find any good reviews on the differences between brands, so I asked B&H to send me a couple to take for a test drive, thanks so much! A few days later they arrived and the match was set!
Versus
I’m not a professional reviewer so I set out to simply experiment with both softboxes and report on which one I liked best. I selected the Photoflex for the very simple reason that Photoflex soft-boxes have speed-rings that will adapt them to several different brands of strobes and I chose Elinchrom because that is the brand of strobe I currently use in my studio. For this particular test I used the Elinchrom Style 600RX.
In order to keep the results between the two soft-boxes as fair as possible I used the same settings on the strobe without moving the light stand at all between shots, I also kept all the camera settings exactly the same. I had Bailey (the beautiful model) try to hold the same pose between shots. We did this a few times with slightly different styles to get as broad of results as possible.
I didn’t have any expectations going into it, I have used Elinchrom and Photoflex soft boxes and have had great success with both brands. What I found out surprised me.
Photoflex comes with a lot more stuff, but Elinchrom’s design eliminates the need for a lot of the extras. For instance, the octagon shaped cover for the back of the softbox isn’t needed by Elinchrome simply because the design of the softbox fits perfectly snug with the Elinchrom strobe. This may be because Photoflex is designing their light for maximum compatibility across multiple brands of strobes.
The double sided lining that comes with the Photoflex box is kind of a cool idea. Why you would use a gold reflector? Well if you ever shoot in the shade on a bright sunny day you’ll notice that there is a blue-ish color cast. The reason you get a blue color cast is because the ambient light is blue – mainly because it comes from the blue sky. Since gold is a yellowish color (yellow is opposite Blue on the RGB color wheel) the gold reflector can help correct the blue cast in shadows. If you’re shooting the octa mostly inside a studio (like I am) then the gold reflector is pretty much useless… it is cool to have but it’s also a little bit of a pain to put on.
The texture of the two inner linings is significantly different, the Elinchrom has a raised, pebble like texture that you can see and feel. The Photoflex lining is completely flat (both gold and silver). I’m interested to see if this has any affect on the final images.
Also, the baffles are made out of markedly different material. The Elinchrom material feels more cloth-like whereas the Photoflex baffle feels more plasticky. The cases don’t really affect how they’ll shoot but it’s worth mentioning that the Elinchrom case is much cooler and better quality.
Assembly
I hate putting together softboxes, especially big ones. It’s a hassle.
As far as hassles go the Photoflex was much less stressful putting together, even though I had to put on all the linings the built in tent poles were much easier to manage during set-up. It’s a trade-off though, once finished the Elinchrom had a smoother front to it, all the edges were crisp, it was much, much lighter, and the back of the softbox fit snuggly to the light which eliminated all the nasty spill light. Also, the Elinchrom has zero velcro on it and the Photoflex feels like it was born in a velcro factory.
The Photflex does sell a mesh grid which fits the front of the softbox. An equivalent option is not available from Elinchrom. For this review I both soft boxes without a grid the entire time, I’ll do a separate review on the mesh grid in a later post.
All-in-all, if I were choosing soft-box that I was going to take apart and put back together often I’d probably go with the Photoflex, though if I had the option to leave it constructed most of the time (which I do) then the Elinchrom’s light weight and more solid construction make it a bit more convenient moving around the studio.
Shoot One: Beauty Portrait
On first glance many of you will notice one difference between the two images, the Photoflex seems to be brighter – especially near the center of the image (right around the middle of her face). I think the brightness has to do with the different fabric on each of the softboxes, the Elinchrom’s cloth baffle simply disperses or absorbs the light more than the Photflex.
Brightness aside the Photoflex seems to be a more specular light source than the Elinchrom. Specular vs. diffuse is one of the main principles in the quality of light and generally speaking the smaller the light source the more specular it is, and the more specular a light source is the harder the shadows and highlights are. That’s why an overcast sky (the biggest light source of all) creates nearly zero shadows.
What’s confusing to me is that since the Photoflex soft box is bigger it should be putting out a more diffuse light, but that’s not what is happening.
It’s a very, very subtle difference though, so we’ll take a closer look at what I’m talking about.
Look at the shadows just below her cheekbone on each of these completely un-retouched images. Notice how the edge of the shadow on the Photoflex is just a tad bit more defined than the edge of the Elinchrom? I’m not talking about darkness of shadow, I’m talking about the edge where it transitions from shadow to light. You may need to squint to see it but you’ll notice that the bottom edge of the Elinchrom is very soft, whereas the Photoflex is a little more defined.
This is the exact opposite result of what I would have expected since Photoflex should be the more diffuse light source. I’m not saying that a more diffuse shadow is better in any way. Many jobs call for more defined shadows, in which case a more specular light source is ideal, but a 5′ foot octagon softbox is designed to modify a light into a diffuse source. Certainly this difference is not a major one at all, though it is noticeable to me.
Also, the Elinchrom seems to have slightly yellow color cast to it, again, easily corrected before or after I took the shot – but I wanted these to be with identical settings.
I think both would be an excellent choice for a beauty headshot. I do prefer the Elinchrom mainly because of the subtle hot spot from Photoflex in the center of the image.
Shoot Two: Full Body Side Lighting
Again, the Photoflex appears brighter overall. Both create very useable results. It was only after very careful observation that I realized something really strange. It has to do with the light hitting the model’s left thigh.
On careful inspection (you have to look at how well the light reflects off the top of the thigh) you’ll notice that the light on the Elinchrom image is brighter than the Photoflex image. Which is strange for a couple of reasons, first of all the Photoflex softbox is larger so her leg should be closer to the light source, and the closer the subject is to a fixed intensity light source the brighter that light will appear. Of course spreading the same amount of light across more surface area would definitely decrease the intensity slightly but we already know the Photoflex is producing brighter images overall. Maybe it was just because her leg is bent slightly more towards the light-source in the Elinchrom version – that would definitely cause a brighter light… but I don’t think the difference would be this much. I could absolutely be wrong though, I decided to do another experiment to find out.
Like any 5th grade science teacher will tell you, in order to create a successful experiment you need to develop a hypothesis and then create an experiment to test your hypothesis.
I developed a theory, even though the Photoflex was larger I figured the strobe was not actually spreading it’s light very equally across the front baffle. To test the theory I came up with a plan. I set my aperture to as high as it will go (f32) and shot the front of each softbox directly, at three different power settings. 1.5 | 3.0 | 4.5
The results are below (Elinchrom is on the left, Photoflex is on the right)
After converting these images to black and white I used the eyedropper tool along with the info tab in photoshop to measure the amount of black present at similar points in both lights. I labeled each of these as seen above. This test verifies my theory and explains both issues I was having with the Photoflex soft box, there is a ring of more intense light (with a darker center) in the center of the Photoflex softbox and as the light goes out it stays brighter for longer but then drops off much faster than the Elinchrom.
Shoot 3: Front full Body
Even though the Photoflex appears brighter throughout the entire image you can see that the transition from the tones in her face to the tones in her legs is more drastic than in the Elinchrom version. Not much, but when I look for it I can definitely tell.
Of course I could have shot still images of cubes and cylinders for this light test and we could have eliminated the tiny movements of the model in between tests but overall I think the best kind of test is a real life one. That makes the beautiful Bailey a perfect choice for this experiment and I would like to thank her for her patience while I yelled at her to hold still while I swapped out lights.
The Conclusion?
All in all both, of the soft boxes performed well. If I’m being honest I prefer the Elinchrom. Not only does the light transition more smoothly (with a less-pronounce center hot-spot) but the lighter weight and tighter construction makes it something that is just easier to move around in the studio.
One big complaint about Elinchrom though – I’d really love it if the Elinchrom softboxes weren’t nearly IMPOSSIBLE to remove from the Elinchrom 600RX!
However, it needs to be said that I am certain I could get very useable results from the Photoflex.
As part of The Hive gallery’s fashion month we did a live shoot at the mall (during open hours) for the public to come watch! It was tons of work, tons of fun and we had a great turn out of spectators! Here is a behind the scenes look with lighting diagrams (click them for a full size view) and video which will give you some real life peeks at how everything was set up! Enjoy!
As part of The Hive gallery’s fashion month we did a live shoot at the mall (during open hours) for the public to come watch! It was tons of work, tons of fun and we had a great turn out of spectators! Here is a behind the scenes look with lighting diagrams (click them for a full size view) and video which will give you some real life peeks at how everything was set up! Enjoy!
Neck wrinkles in photos is my number one Pet Peeve
Neck Wrinkle (n) The overlaps in skin caused when a person’s head is turned with a seemingly unnatural angle relative to the neck.
Even though most photographers and models will create images that avoid overlapping wrinkles of skin somehow neck wrinkles pop up in professional fashion and beauty photography not commonly, but definitely not rarely. There are neck wrinkles in a book titled “Fashion Photography” for crying out loud!
I don’t know why I allow myself to be so bothered by them. Maybe it’s because it’s so easy to make posing adjustments to relieve the excruciating pressure required to overlap one’s skin on itself, or it might be because neck wrinkles remind me of over-active models trying too hard to show their arse AND their face, ala “Bikinis and Cars 18-month Calendar” style.
Whatever the reason, if there is a neck wrinkle in an image I just can’t stop looking at it (and thanks to this article I’ve now cursed you with the same affliction). It’s like this, 1 of my 5 senses wants to abandon their post and render me temporarily deaf whenever I stumble onto one of Jay Leno’s monologues, yet my brain orders it to even greater attention, and in a true plot-twist my senses are repulsed but my brain is fascinated by the agony of it all. So I cannot look away.
I even spend a few minutes talking about posing techniques that will eliminate neck wrinkles in my photo workshops for crying out loud! It’s that big of deal to me. I’m not condoning it, that’s just the way I am.
That being said sometimes, sometimes the perfect shot happens to have the wrinkles. That’s just the way it is. No amount of posing or time-machine can fix it. The perfect comedy line-up just happens to include Jay Leno… what are you supposed to do? Do you skip the whole event just because of one overlapping skin wrinkle? Bless his heart.
The answer is of course NO. You cannot abandon the perfect shot because of one dulwarp.
dulwarp (n) 1. Jay Leno 2. Neck Wrinkles.
So I’m working on a set of images I call the Chameleon Series. You haven’t seen the images yet, nor do you know anything about it because it’s a surprise (the series will go on display at The Aperture gallery in Salt Lake City on Friday June 23rd, 2010 – stay tuned for details) yet it happened… the perfect shot of one of the models just happened to have them. I don’t know how I missed it during the shoot or if I noticed them and just didn’t realize we just made THE shot, but in any case I had to accept the fact that they were there.
THE shot (n) The shot of all shots in this particular look.
At first I just let them be, I thought to myself that I could do it. I could release an image with neck wrinkles, it would be fine. But as the image neared completion I realized I couldn’t live with myself if Jay Leno accidentally made his way onto my TIVO anymore than I could put an image into this series with neck wrinkles.
So, I had to fix them and fixing them takes quite a bit longer than you’d think, yet it was all worth it.
Thank you to everyone that shared their opinions on how I achieved the Spiraling Out effect in my first Exercise in Photoshop Forensics post. I definitely think it was successful enough that I’ll do another one in the future but for now let’s get to the solution!
Ofir Abe’s description was correct in his guess about my technique, which was to process multiple iterations of one image (using Adobe Lightroom) and exporting each version to Photoshop where I exposed different parts of each image using layer masks. Why do it in Lightroom rather than adjustment layers? Well, it’s a matter of bit depth and tonal range and pre/post demosaicing… by doing it in a RAW file I have access to ALL the data the camera captured, whereas if I converted it to a JPG/TIFF/PSD first then the file has doesn’t have access to all the data captured by the camera – especially if it’s been converted it to an 8-bit file. Now if you convert it to a 16-bit file then that’s better, but if you ask me it’s still better to make all the adjustments before locking in your settings and exporting it to a JPG/TIFF/PSD. By making the changes in a RAW editor (like Lightroom, Aperture, Adobe ACR) you have more power in your exposure, saturation, white balance, tonal curves etc.
To sum up for all you non-technical folks, shoot in RAW (rather than JPG) and use a RAW editor to make any color or exposure adjustments to your image, then thank me later. Sure there are some downsides to using RAW – specifically they are a larger file size and take longer for your camera to process, but for 99% of the projects I work on RAW is so far superior it’s not even a question on what should be used. RAW is most akin to a digital negative whereas JPG is akin to a digital print. In a print/JPG what you see is what you get, there is no extra detail that can be extracted. But in a negative/RAW file there is a lot of non-visible detail that can be extracted, if you know how.
But onto the step by step process of how I created them!
Straight out of the Camera
Using a classic lighting technique for beauty photography (over/under softboxes) we get a nice even lighting that provides a perfect palette to paint shapes on.
If you think it’s easy to get hair to look this perfect think again, Janae Johnson had to spend a long, long time perfecting nearly every single strand! Lucky for me Paula Dahlberg’s incredible makeup skills combined with Sarah’s statuesque looks makes for an easy retouching job, making this out-of-camera shot nearly too perfect for a “before” image… yet that’s exactly what it is.
First Lightroom Export to Photoshop
Basically I wanted to shift the entire color palette around making her skin a near-neutral white. To do this I adjust the Temp/Tint along with the exposure, vibrance and saturation sliders in Adobe Lightroom. I would give the exact values I shifted but they wouldn’t translate correctly to an image with a different starting point so if you are truly interested in experimenting then you’re going to have to do just that, experiment!
Obviously shifting the yellow in her skin to white requires adding a blue hue to the entire image which is how the white wall changes to blue. Once the image was brought to this point I exported it to photoshop where it became the bottom layer soon to be joined by…
Second Lightroom Export to Photoshop
I loved the blue shift on the entire image and how it created an understated quality to it but I wanted to bring back some vibrancy to the hair, which I would later match the color of the patterns with. So I brought the color balance back to where it needed to be but this time I increased the vibrance and saturation in all the colors to give it all an other-worldly pop in saturation.
First Layer Mask
This step is simple, I overlaid the new vibrant layer onto the first layer and using a layer mask I hid everything and “painted” back her hair and a white gradient into the blue-ish background. Incidentally, I did all the masking by hand using a very precise Razer mouse. I’ve seen some promising shortcuts but nothing beats good old fashioned manual masking… though it seems CS5 may have made some progress in smartly refining masks… but I didn’t use their new tools for this, just good old fashioned painted on mask.
Third (and final) Lighroom Export to Photoshop
Basically I adjusted the white balance to get a color that matched the hair, then I dropped the exposure way down which made an all around darker tone, using the tone curve in Lightroom I brought the highlights up a bit to give it a more shiny appearance rather than just a darker appearance.
Second (and Final) Layer Mask
Using only the default brush set in photoshop I hand-drew all these shapes, once again using a highly precise Razer Mouse. It will be stated (I’m sure) that I should have used the pen tool and created the shapes using bezier curves which would have resulted in a much cleaner vector shapes. Though I am quite proficient with bezier curves (from my days as an Adobe Illustrator guru) I find whenever I’m creating vector shapes they lose a certain organic appeal, all the curves become a little too precise, a little too polished. For that reason I opted for the old fashioned process of simply painting in the crazy shapes and allowing my imagination to stay less focused on the details.
A look at the Layers
Here is a closer look at what my final PSD looked like, notice I added a heal layer so that I could do some slight touch up on the hair fly-aways, other than that you can see the three images with the two layer masks. Very simple.
Thoughts or Questions?
I’d love to hear them! Leave a comment and I’ll respond, and if you liked this series of blog posts on Photoshop Forensics let me know because I could definitely be talked into doing more in the future!
I used a couple very simple techniques to create these images and rather than offer a post-processing tutorial I’m going to turn the challenge back onto you, my blog readers. Sometimes the best way to learn your tools is to imagine how other photographers are using them, so in that spirit look at these images carefully and leave a comment describing the post processing techniques you think I used to ‘paint’ these images, if someone gets it right I will be sure to let you know!
(Click the images for a larger view)
Hair by Janae Johnson
Makeup by Paula Dahlberg
Models Sarah Whitmer, Crystal Coleman, Alexandra Mathews
About a month ago I received an email from B&H asking if I’d be interested in reviewing photo equipment on my blog, all I had to do was tell them what I wanted to review and they’d send it out.
Well, I could have done the selfish thing and found something ultra expensive that I’ve been dying to use (for free) and asked for that, but then I remembered how many people ask me about what lighting equipment I’d recommend for someone that is just starting out, without a big budget. My stupid bleeding heart got the best of me… so I requested to see some lighting kits with these qualifications.
It had to be at least two lights
Include EVERYTHING needed to get started
Cost had to be less than $500
My very helpful marketing rep from B&H gave me some choices and a few days later UPS dropped a single (big) box on my doorstep.
Here are all the fully retouched images… see if your eye is keen enough to spot any tell-tale signs that they weren’t shot with more expensive lighting equipment.
I used the following equipment to make all these images.
Hot lights are fantastic for learning about how light falls on your subject.
This kit was very easy to setup, and take apart.
The kit comes with two good quality soft boxes that you can definitely use even when you upgrade your lights (about $80 each to purchase separately)
Lights are very light and easy to move around and small enough to be used in a spare bedroom of your house!
Cons
You can’t adjust the power of hot lights, so if you need to change their intensity your only choice is to move them closer or further away from your subject.
The hot lights are not as powerful as strobes so you need to shoot fairly wide open with a slower shutter speed.
Light stands in the kit are pretty cheap and probably won’t support much heavier lights/modifiers.
I generally prefer to use larger softboxes, so to fake a large softbox I placed these side by side for a couple shots.
Overall
This kit is EXACTLY what I wanted it to be, a very inexpensive, easy to use set-up that is perfect to learn and experiment with. Are there lots of technical limitations? Yes. But the biggest limitation on getting started with using any studio lights is not starting your experimentation, and this will be a good way for you to jump right in, for not very much money, and start experimenting with studio lighting in a spare room in your own home!
Here is a step-by-step lighting diagram guide showing how I set up this particular 4-strobe shot. The images next to the diagrams are straight out of the camera, also you’ll notice I don’t really make the model pose too carefully while I’m doing the light setup.
See the rest of this finished series at Black Lace
Here is a step-by-step lighting diagram guide showing how I set up this particular 4-strobe shot. The images next to the diagrams are straight out of the camera, also you’ll notice I don’t really make the model pose too carefully while I’m doing the light setup.
See the rest of this finished series at Black Lace
Versus
