More from Inside the Spooky Crypt!

Another from the crypt beneath the Domkyrkan in Lund. If you are ever in the area it really is worth spending a couple of hours in there with your camera and a tripod.

Getting creative with the white balance slider got me closer to the effect I was really after!

Three Bottles of Campari on a Seamless White Background

Nikon D300s, Nikkor AF-S 85mm f/1.8 G, f/11.0, 1/160s, ISO 200, 1x Elinchrom D-Lite-it 2, 2x  Elinchrom D-Lite-it 4, 1x Large Sheet of White Cardstock, 2x Long Narrow Strips of Black Cardstock on each side of product, 1x Sheet of Clear Glass.

Downtown Fredensborg - Deserted

Taken at 23:03 at night and totally deserted it's almost eerie, but great for taking photographs. At this time of night there was still enough light in the sky to balance nicely with the street lights and end up with a single shot containing a wide gamut of fairly even exposure. This sort of photography always requires a tripod as we have to deal with longish exposures and hand holding is impossible without getting a blurry and unusable photo. Tripod = sharp and clear. Get a good sturdy tripod, it'll do wonders for your photographs!

Most people shoot until the sun goes down and then they head indoors for dinner. I try to hang around for an hour or two (or more) after sunset to get this sort of light. It can make for long, cold, hungry evenings, but it gets pictures that very few people are willing or able to take simply because they lack the dedication and commitment to suffer a little inconvenience to get the photo they really want. But then maybe I'm a little too obsessive about these things? ;-)

Nikon D300s, Nikon 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6 VR, sturdy tripod, remote trigger, f10.0, 13.0s, 18mm, VR off, ISO 200, Auto White Balance, Matrix Metering, Aperture Priority, quick run through Dx0 Optics Pro 8, and then some adjustments in the curves tool of PSP X5.

Traffic Circle in Fredensborg

Campari on Ice - another three light product photograph

Same basic lighting set-up as the photograph in the previous post.

Mmmmm, beer! - Lighting is in Layers.

I like to think of setting up lighting as adding a series of carefully thought out layers. I normally start out with a background, work out the lighting for it and then slowly add layers until I match the vision I had in my minds eye for the particular subject.

Here is a final shot of a glass of beer and the can and then I will show the various "layers" of light as I added them in my quest for this photograph:

Three Light Product Photography Tutorial

Today I have a quick and simple "how to" on putting together a nice slightly low key product shot with three lights. Here is the final result and then I will go through the steps on how to build the lighting to get this photograph:

How Colour Can Change (Quite Dramatically) from Day to Night

Just a quick comparison between a photograph of the same subject taken several hours apart, with the first in all natural light and the second at night with mixed artificial light sources. First up, daytime:

Very nice light coming from the setting sun and giving a very pleasing and (at least to me) quite interesting quality of light. And now for the night shot:

Very different photograph, despite being of the same subject from just about the same angle. Which one is better? Well that is a very subjective answer and one that will undoubtedly elicit a very different response from whoever is asked. Flavour to taste I always say, sometimes I like mayonnaise and other days I like tomato sauce, but neither is better or worse. Today I choose the night shot, next week it may well be the day shot... or I might hate them both and prefer a Black and white!

Landskrona Stadshuset

The Landskrona Stadshuset, or in English simply the Landskrona City Hall, offices of the towns municipality, and very beautifully located overlooking part of the harbour.

Fountain in Landskrona

In my ongoing quest to document everything worthy of photographing in Landskrona I now have this unusual fountain that stands in the middle of a roundabout at the intersection of Östergatan and Regeringsgatan.

Landskrona Station

The Landskrona Station was opened in 2001 to replace the original station in town which is now used as a freight only station. The little metal flag on the top of the roof has the year 2000 on it which I assume means it was built in 2000. Both Pågatåg and Öresundtåg stop here providing easy transport links to pretty much anywhere in Sweden and to Denmark.

In the picture above a train is departing the station heading towards Helsingborg and leaving some nice light trails in it's wake.

Town Square in Landskrona

Cobblestone Street in Landskrona

I am really enjoying Landskrona, mainly because it is such a picturesque and historical little town. It is 600 years old now and much of the old architecture is still in great shape making for a very wonderful place for a photographer to live! ...or visit. If you are in Southern Sweden then please drop by for a fika, and I'll tell you how to get to all the really good spots!

As always a tripod is a must for this kind of photography, this exposure was 5 seconds long and no amount of VR is ever going to make that hand holdable.

How to Enlarge Your Lightsource for Softer Light, easily.

I did a little experiment this evening just to demonstrate how to make a really large lightsource and give much more even light on your subject than just blasting away with direct light.

I have two 65x65cm light boxes that are quite handy. So here is a pic of them set up pointing directly at a nice Dutch vase. The camera was on the tripod in front of the table.

From here it looks like that should make for some pretty good light on the vase, but as we can see in the next photo they also leave some not so great specular highlights on the vase and two distinct shadow areas behind the vase.

Not a bad photograph as such, but we can do much better than that! So, in order to increase the overall size of the light source I simply faced the lights up at the ceiling. Of course I also had to increase the power output of the lights because the light now had much further to travel and the inverse square law robs us of light very quickly when we increase the distance the light has to travel.

As you can see from the pic above the light has now been spread over a much larger area. So what has that done for our lovely Dutch vase?

Well the first thing you notice is that the ugly specular highlights have vanished and the light is much more evenly spread on the vase itself. The second thing is that the shadows behind the vase have also disappeared. Overall a much more pleasing result!

If all you have are two speedlights instead of the bigger studio lights then don't be disheartened because the exact same principle still holds true and will work just great. Simply pump up the power a bit and let 'er rip, it will have a similar wonderful softening effect on the quality of light.

Happy product photographing folks!

A (slightly) Different View of the Landskrona Citadel

I adjusted the angle a little to have a view of the bridge over the moat.

Citadellkliniken in Landskrona

The Citadellkliniken in Landskrona is probably the most beautifully located clinic I have ever seen, nestled as it is on a piece of land jutting out into the Öresund, with a lovely beach on one side and gorgeous seafront parkland on the other. Taken at 22.37 with the sky still fairly bright from a sun that set at 21.27 it is resplendent in a golden glow that couldn't be more spectacular!

Tripod, Aperture Priority, f11.0, 10.0s exposure time chosen by the camera, ISO 200, quick run through DXO and then time spent in PSP X5 working on colour, contrast and sharpening.

Water Tower - Landskrona

This huge water tower dominates the landscape at the harbour area in Landskrona and just begs to be photographed! ;-)

Why I think shooting after sunset is a good idea!

Yesterday I posted a comparison between a CPL filtered and un-CPL'd photograph and how using a Circular Polarising Filter can improve the look of your photographs during the day when the sun is shining.

But now I'm going to show you a photograph taken from the same spot (almost exactly) but that has a whole lot more "wow" factor simply because of the time of day it was taken. I took this photograh about 55 minutes or so after sunset but while the sun was still giving plenty of golden glow to the sky. The foreground is also lit by the street lights which kind of matches the colour of the sky, and also prevents the foreground from just being plain black.

Of course this required me going back to the beach much later and dressed a little warmer, but I think the results were well worth the effort!

At this time of the day colours are super saturated and beautiful. However, because the light is nowhere near as bright as during the day shutter speeds are way slower than while the sun is shining so a tripod becomes essential. I used f11.0 and let the camera choose it's own shutter speed which was a full 30 seconds in this particular case. A bit of playing with sliders in PSP X5 lowered the highlights, raised the shadow areas and increased the saturation some more until I got what I was after.

Nikon D90 and my trusty el cheapo 18-105mm kit "plastic fantastic" lens.

Landskrona Citadel - a High Dynamic Range Photograph.

From Wikipedia: Landskrona Citadel (Swedish: Citadellet or Landskrona slott) is situated in Landskrona, Scania, southern Sweden. Initially built 1549–1559 as a purely defensive fortification with two complete moats, the inner with a width of 70 metres (230 ft). The outer (complete) moat is between 40 and 70 metres (130 and 230 ft) wide, and has cross fire bastions for artillery and guns. Outside the outer moat, a third narrower moat covers the northwest and northeast. There also exist remains of a fourth moat (between the two outer moats). The fortifications and moats system surrounding the castle is known to be one of Europe's largest and best preserved.

Three bracketed photos taken 2 stops apart, a quick run through DXO 8 for the special pixie dust magic that the elves at DXO lavish upon RAW photos to make them look better, and then "Exposure Merged" in Corel Paintshop Pro X5. Tweaked the levels, contrast and did some sharpening, also in PSP X5. For this type of photography a sturdy tripod is essential because of the very long exposure times. I used my D90 and the 18-105mm kit lens, Aperture Priority and f11.0, always RAW. :-)

Old Brass Bell shot with a Nikkor 40mm AF-S DX Micro f/2.8G

Nikon D90, AF-S DX Micro Nikkor 40mm f/2.8G, Aperture Priority mode, ISO200, 1/80s, f9.0, two off-camera Speedlights into bounce umbrellas fired via Nikon's fantastic CLS system.