Creating a Ghost in Photoshop

I was going home by train one day when I thought of a cool/creepy image. The good thing was that I brought my camera to work that day, and my fellow passenger Marie-Louise was going home as well.

The result (after just a few minutes of Photoshop) is this photo in which Marie-Louise looks at her phone, but her reflection in the window is looking at herself!

Marie-Louise's reflection looking at herself

Making such an image is quite easy. I made two photo's of Marie-Louise, one looking at her phone and one looking outside the window. While doing this I tried to move as little as possible.

Photo 1: Looking at phone

Photo 2: Looking outside

Next I used Photoshop CS 6 to combine the two photo's. I stacked the files by opening them like this: File -> Scripts -> Load files into stack -> Select your files here, and also select 'attempt to automatically align source images'. If there are enough 'handles' for Photoshop, and the photo's are similar enough, alignment won't be a problem.

Now, the two photo's are aligned and put into separate layers. I put the 'looking-at-phone' image on top and used the eraser (with a feathered brush) to remove the window. Note: before you do this, disable the layer visibility of the other (bottom) layer so you can see what you're doing.

Window is erased

Now, when the window is removed, turn the bottom layer back on to watch the result, and there you go: save the image and your 'creepy-ghost-photo' is done in just a few minutes! :-)

"Das Verrückte Haus"

(Translation: The Crazy House)

If you are ever visiting northern Germany, and you are close to a town called 'Bispingen' (maybe because you're spending your vacation at Centerparcs 'Bispingerheide') be sure to bring your camera and visit "Das Verrückte Haus".

What's so crazy about this house is that it is turned upside down, including the interior! It's a unique opportunity to take some amazing pictures (without using photoshop or anything, well... maybe for rotating :-) ). The house is also tilted a few degrees, so you might experience a funny sensation in your tummy while walking there ;-)

It's not a place you will spend hours and hours of time, but is is a really nice visit, and you will end up with photo's that could look like these:

You can find more info on this website: http://www.dasverruecktehaus-bispingen.de/

And here's a short youtube entry about 'the making of': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCBdOdjepHE

Band shoot

"The making of..."

About a week ago a friend of mine asked me if I wanted to do a photo shoot for a metal band together with him. Of course I thought this was a very cool idea, so yesterday evening I packed my gear and we went to shoot some cool images of "Born Of Flames".

 

(The photo's shown in this blog are not (yet) edited)

First we shot some photo's of the complete band outdoors. I used a remote triggered Canon Speedlight 430 EXII with a shoot-through umbrella for this. It was still pretty bright outside but I wanted to make some darker looking photo's. To achieve this I used the manual mode and dialed in a low ISO value and a high aperture value. The shutter speed was 1/200 as this is the speedlights synch speed.

 

f/13 t:1/200 iso:400 23mm

f/13 t:1/200 iso:400 21mm

f/13 t:1/200 iso:400 18mm

f/13 t:1/200 iso:400 27mm, used reflector on front man to create fill light

After the outdoor session we shot some "action-shots" inside. Here we used some studio flashes with a snoot  (drummer) and gold-reflection umbrella's which were positioned at a low angle. It was hard to focus these images as the light was very low. The auto-focus system didn't know what to do with it, so I had to use manual focus. But also for the human eye it was hard to see if the image was sharp.

 

f/5 t:1/200 iso:800 46mm

f/4.5 t:1/200 iso:400 42mm

f/5 t:1/200 iso:400 59mm

f/4 t:1/200 iso:800 25mm

f/4 t:1/200 iso:200 33mm

It was pretty cool to do this shoot. It's not every day that you get a band-shoot request for a grunting metal band. For safety, I put some wet tisues in my ears during the action-shots :-)

Light painting

The word "photography" means "light-drawing". In this blog we'll take a look at the literal translation of our favourite word: We are going to draw stuff with light!

To be able to do this, it needs to be dark. The darker the better. Also, we need to put the camera in manual mode. Next, dial in a slow shutter speed, like 15 or 20 seconds. If it's REALY dark you can even try 'bulb' mode, which means that the shutter will be open as long as you hold down the shutter release button (to avoid camera shake, better use a cheap cable release with which you you can 'lock' the release button).

Choose an ISO value which is not too high to avoid noise. The shutter will be open for a long time anyway so don't worry too much about not enough light falling into the camera.

Now choose an aperture that fits your needs. With a little bit of experimentation you'll get the correct setting. If the photo is too dark, just choose a lower f value to open the aperture some more. Too bright? Choose a higher f value to close the aperture.

You'll also need a light source of some kind. A flashlight or the led light on your phone will do perfectly fine. A model is not necessary, but it makes the photo's much more fun! (Don't forget to tell your model to stay perfectly still for as long as the shutter is open :-) ) And now for some examples:

f/22 t:20sec iso:1600

f/22 t:20sec iso:1600

At the location of these poto's there was a lamp post pretty near by. Because of this, the guy with the light (that would be me) is visible as a ghost-like figure. This would not have been the case if the surrounding lights were less bright, and wearing darker clothes would help as well. In a more ideal (darker) situation we would have opened the shutter, made the light painting, and then use a seperate flash on the model to make him/her visible in the photo. But since this was not the case, we thought of another solution. First we made the desired photo, with me as the light ghost (especially visible at the 'k' position of 'Frank').

f/7.1 t:20 sec iso:200

After this, we made another photo with the same camera settings but without the people in it.

f/7.1 t:20 sec iso:200

Then, in Photoshop (any advanced photo editor will do) these two photo's were combined so that the ghost appearance was removed.

Combined image (also cropped)

The light paintings above were made with a little led light that was available on my phone. The downside of using a led/flashlight is that the person holding that light needs to be in the image. This might cause some ghosting if there is too much surrounding light. To avoid problems like that, you could also use a laser, as can be seen in the following examples:

f/3.5 t:10sec iso:320

f/3.5 t:10sec iso:125

Making light paintings is a lot of fun! Try different light sources like leds, lasers and flashlights. You could even attach them to a rope and swing them arround to create cool effects. I allready bought some glowsticks for the next session :-)

Here are some more, very cool, examples from a Finnish photographer called Janne Parviainen: http://9bytz.com/light-paintings-made-by-a-single-led/

The "StarBurst" effect

My God, It's full of stars! (Dave Bowman: 2001, A Space Odyssey)

While a large aperture gives you a small depth of field, a small aperture gives you a large depth of field, which means that more content in your photo is in focus. But there is also another effect that can be made to use when using a small aperture.

If you shoot a photo (about f16 and above), especially at night, with a light source in it, this light source will show up in the image as a star shaped light. It will also work with the sun during the day. However, the bigger the difference between the surrounding light and the light source in the photo (that should be brighter of course) , the better the effect. So if you want to use the sun for this, use it during a nice sunset.

Aperture: f29

Aperture: f22

Aperture: f22

Quality Photo Books

In this blog I want to discuss photo books, and one in particular, that can be ordered online. Unfortunately for some readers, these are books that can be ordered in the Netherlands. And although it may seem so, I am not sponsored by the mentioned book-provider.

In the past, I have tried out several online photo book 'providers'. Most of them deliver nice books, however, the quality of the photo's is not that great. Mostly your beautiful images get rasterized (so your sharp photo is now build up out of ugly visible coloured dots) and sometimes you can even see print-lines.
This is not why you have that nice expensive DSLR :-)

Thanks to a colleague, I discovered Top-Fotoalbum. They deliver fantastic quality books that have some great advantages, and they're not even that expensive!

First, and very important to me, the photo's are not rasterized and printed on real (heavy) photo paper. I will illustrate the difference with 2 examples.

Enlarged Top-Fotoalbum example, still looks good

The first picture is an enlarged scan of a Top-Fotoalbum photo book. There are no lines, dots or any other ugly artifacts visible. 'Real colours' are used during printing, just as you would expect.

Same enlargement as above, other book provider, looks terrible

The second picture (other provider) has the same size and the same magnification as the first example. However, it is nowhere near the same quality. The colours are build up from coloured dots, which is clearly visible, and even some printing lines can be seen here and there. This is not how I would like to see my images.

Other great advantages of Top-Fotoalbum are the hard cover, and the 'lay-flat' technique that is used with all available books. What 'Lay-flat' means is that no space is lost in the middle of the book. This creates the possibility to (for instance) put a panorama image spread over two pages without missing any part of the photo. This is what that looks like:

Lay-Flat technique so everything is visible, also in the middle

As with almost all photo book manufacturers, the provided software is very flexible. The photo books can be fully customized with layouts, backgrounds, text etc. etc.

So if you need a photo book, make sure you try this one out: http://www.top-fotoalbum.com/

Shooting waterfalls

Ever since I saw a YouTube video of Karl Taylor demonstrating the effect of slow shutter speeds on moving water, I am trying to find waterfalls and stuff like that. But since I am living in the Netherlands (not at the sea side), that's easier said than done.

T: 1/800 sec (Fast shutter speed, and it's a bit dark)

So I was pretty happy when we went for a small weekend-vacation to CenterParcs (only 25 minutes of driving from our home), where they seemed to have a few nice waterfalls to my surprise. Of course they were small, and man-made, but hey: good enough to do some experiments and take some nice photo's.

T: 4 sec (Slow shutter speed)

The beautiful thing about moving water is that you can 'freeze' it with your camera, using a fast shutter speed. But when you use a slow shutter speed, the water turns into 'mist', and with this effect some really nice images can be
created.

All photo's in this blog show the same waterfall which was the nicest around, and indoors. The first image of this blog was shot with a fast shutter speed of 1/800 sec. The water in this photo seems, more or less, frozen in time. All the drops that are falling down are visible.

The second photo was shot using a slow shutter speed of 4 sec. This time the moving water is blurred out and seems to have a mist-like quality. Personally this is my favourite way of shooting water.

I moved the camera around a bit, used the zoom lens, and made some more experimental shots. Here are some of my favourites. The first one is just to show what it looks like with a fast shutter speed:

T: 1/100 sec (fast shutter speed, but should have been even faster)

Same position, T: 4 sec, nice :-)

This is my favourite waterfall photo of that day. T: 5 sec

Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 "Plastic Fantastic"

Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II

The Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II Lens is also known as the "Plastic Fantastic" or the "Nifty Fifty". It is a 50 mm prime lens, which means that it's 50 mm and that's it. There is no zoom or whatsoever.

The lens is very light, as its body is mainly made out of plastic and that's what makes this lens so cheap. It's available for around 100 Euro.

The best part is the light sensitivity. It's an f/1.8 lens so you get an enourmous amount of value for your money (Normaly, the more light sensitive a lens is, the more expensive it gets). This lens simply should be in every camera bag containing a Canon DSLR (Nikon also has an equivalent, which is just a bit more expensive if I'm not mistaken.)

Because of this light sensitivity factor, this lens can be used to shoot great photo's when there's not a lot of light to work with. But what's even better: you can make photo's with a very shallow depth of field. What this means is that you can make a photo of which only a very small area is in focus. Personally, I love these kind of images. It is a great way to draw the viewers attention to a certain part of the photo.

I could write much more about this fantastic piece of plastic, but a few examples probably say a lot more :-)

f/2.0

f/2.0

f/2.0

f/2.0

Flash experiments

External Flash, possibly even harder to use than a DSLR itself, at least if you want correctly lit photo's. Therefore it is wise to experiment with it as much as possible. To perform some experiments, I made a small Do-It-Yourself studio in the garage. For now, let's call it 'Studio Le Garage' :-)

Studio "Le Garage"

So what can we find in "Le Garage"? Of course we have a nice (cheap :-) ) tripod with the DSLR on top of it. On the right there is the flash on a not-so-professional stand, with on the floor a even less professional diffuser (an Ikea storage box). We also have a reflector (at the foot of the tripod in the photo) which is a piece of white foam board that I found in the back of a painting that we bought years ago (never throw anything away ;-) ) As a background I use a black piece of fabric that I bought for 2 Euro per meter at the market.
The flash is a Canon Speedlite 430EX II that is remotely triggered by the Canon 600D (wireless).

For my saturday morning experiment, I wanted to create some low-key (dark) photo's.

Experment 1

As a first flash experiment I made a self portret. A low key photo with some pretty harsh shadows. The flash was not on full power mode and not diffused. Also, no reflector was used to create fill light.

Experiment 2

For the second experiment, I diffused the flash using the Ikea-storage-box-diffuser. On the other side of my face I used the reflector which I held myself, just outside the frame. As you can see, the shadows are much softer.

Experiment 3

Next experiment: always nice to use a model so that more photo's can be made using different settings and setups. Unfortunately I only made a few photo's when the flash batteries went dead :-) For this photo, the same setup was used as experiment 2.

Experiment 4

This photo was not made in "Le Garage" but in the living room during a bright day! The background (just normal living room stuff) was darkened out by increasing the apperture (f/32) so that hardly any light reaches the sensor. The light that is vissible in the photo is created by the off camera flash. Using this method, low key photo's can be made without having a special dark background, everywhere and every time of the day.

Getting creative

Are you experiencing one of those boring sunday afternoons, you don't know what to do, or you feel like shooting some nice photo's but you want to create something 'different'? Then it's time to get creative! So get your gear together and go for it!

Below the example photo (Featuring 'Franky Potter') you'll find a youtube collection from the people at DigitalRev, with great creative ideas that you can try out yourself.

Levitation Photography example

How to do Smoke Photography
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ld_ervQfKyM

How to do Levitation Photography
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaSH0d60Zso

Cool Long Exposure Photography Ideas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T24_uq0AY6o

How to: Flash Photography - Bikini Powder Girl
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21hhPuXU0Ls

"Stuck at Home" Photo Ideas #1: Tiny People Photos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8u0QKjf65Q

"Stuck at Home" Photo Ideas #2: How to Shoot a Water Curtain
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yx-pPHaJp60

"Stuck at Home" Photo Idea #3: How to Shoot Freelensing Photos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WerEA1BZRYA

Bokeh

Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II Lens, F-stop: 3.5

When using a small compact camera in a 'standard' way, most of the time much of the foto is in focus. This is because the sensor of such a camera is small, and mostly, the lens is as well.
With a DSLR, things are very different. Because of the bigger sensor and bigger lenses with a larger aperture, a much shallower 'depth of field' can be created. In other words: a very small part of the image, for instance your subject, can be in focus, while the rest is blurry. This method can be used to draw the viewers attention to the subject. Now, the quality of these out-of-focus areas (especially light points) is described as 'Bokeh'. As you can see in the photo on the right, Hellen is nicely in focus while the Christmas tree is blurry and has become a cool 'Bokeh-tree' in the background :-)
To create a nice bokeh-effect you need a lens with a large aperture, for instance the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II. The bokeh photo's in this blog were made with one of these. A smaller F-number means a larger aperture, or larger 'opening' of the lens, and this results in a shallower depth of field (so more blurry-ness in the background...).

If there is no lens available with a low F-number, you can get the same result (more or less) with a zoom lens. However, in order to get the effect you have to zoom in on your subject that is relatively close to the lens while the background needs to be pretty far away. Using this method you can even get the effect with a simple kitlens.

Christmas tree bokeh filter construction

Bokeh filter

Christmas tree shaped bokeh

The shape of the bokeh is highly dependant on the construction of your lens. However, there is a fairly simple way to influence this. With a black, dark or non translucent piece of paper, a sharp knife and some sticky tape you can make your own bokeh-filter. Just cut out the desired shape from the black paper, for instance a christmas tree. Then fold the paper is such a way that you can use it as a lens cover. Put this cover over your lens and shoot. Truth be told, the resulted image shown here isn't the best photo possible. It was a quick 'n dirty test of the bokeh-filter principle, and for such a small experiment it was a quite successful one. As you can see the bokeh-lights now have the shape of tiny Christmas trees.

On the web, you will find a lot of discussion about what good/poor bokeh really is. I think it's about your personal taste and what you are trying to get. So go ahead and shoot some 'Bokehlicious' photo's!