Before anything else is said in this post, I would like to take this opportunity to thank the wait staff of the Artisan for putting up with me and my camera on three separate occasions (twice in one day).  I had staked out the café as my tungsten source early on, and had messed up my first take by, quite simply, taking terribly out-of-focus pictures and not having control over the flash. So I went back, and tried again, and produced some photos that I do like…but I forgot to follow all of the instructions for shooting, and never changed my white balance during the session. OH MY GOD. This was extremely annoying.

But because I like the pictures, I’m including them here (images have been toned and color balanced):

Anyway, after realizing that I had messed up Take Number Two, I went back to the Artisan to make up for my previous errors. And even though I controlled the flash a little bit better this time, the one picture I really like is also the one that uses mixed lighting. Sheesh. I can’t win. (It is, however, kind of neat to see the shift from tungsten at the counter to fluorescent in the kitchen. Plus, no crazy reflections on the metal!)

I ended up using a select from my fluorescent take–I went to Sub Shop (which felt almost like cheating because it’s so damn close to the J-School) and took some images of the girl working the counter. ONCE AGAIN, I forgot to set the white balance correctly, and took more than half of the images with the green gel on the flash…and daylight white balance. Whoops. Fortunately, I realized my mistake and changed the settings before the take was over. I don’t think this photo is as visually compelling as the others were, but I did get the balance part and all the technical stuff right…so it’s the winner. Gwen Douglas reads the day’s comics while waiting for customers to arrive at Sub Shop in Columbia, MO . Douglas, who has worked at Sub Shop since Halloween of 2008, describes her job as “easygoing.”

Well.

Single flash is hard. My outtakes from this were definitely something else- I was getting all kind of crazy effects (that I didn’t really want), and half of the images are strangely focused–partially because the sensor on my camera is a little messed up, and partially because focus was one of about seven variables I was trying to keep track of at all times. Meanwhile, I was still trying to get good content, and, of course, the images that had such potential for content were all wrong in terms of the technical parts, and the ones that were technically better had poor content. Yeesh.

I also got kicked out of not one, but TWO locations when I was trying to complete this assignment–one flower store downtown told me that I could shoot up front as much as I wanted, but I wasn’t allowed to go back to where the employees were making the flower arrangements (maybe they thought I would give away their trade secrets or something), and, when I headed out for my last take, I was informed that I couldn’t take pictures inside Mizzou Market without upper-level permission. This seems silly to me, since the Market is part of the university, which is public, but oh well.

The funny thing about shooting with flash is that, despite how frustrating it is to get the exposure and everything just right, I actually like messing around with the controls and not really knowing exactly how the image is going to look after I hit the shutter button. It makes it a little more satisfying when I do finally hit upon the right combination.

Here are my selects:

Direct

Jared Hammon (left) enjoys a late-night ice cream at Sparky’s in downtown Columbia with wife Jenny (right) and children Jordan and Abby (not pictured). The Hammons do not often eat at Sparky’s, except for Jared, who is “here a lot,” according to Abby.

This was picked almost entirely for the interaction element, and the fact that their hands are in near unison. Her face is just too blown out for me to really like the image (plus, it’s not perfectly focused). I tried some bounce for this, too, which had some sweet space-age effects when I bounced off the floor–it was like an alien light tunnel was opening underneath the family.

Bounce

Dryer’s Shoes employee Kristal Allen (left) models a pair of sandals as co-worker Victoria Paul (right) looks on. During lulls between customers, the two often test out the store’s merchandise.

If you look closely at the background, I actually got a little bit of fill in the window (unintentionally, but I’ll take it. Yay!). I tried bouncing the flash off of all kinds of things in the store (I wish one of the shots bounced off a white patent leather shoe had turned out; that would have been neat)…this was just basic off-the-ceiling. I’m kind of bothered by the less-than-clean background in the shoe store, but a more shallow DOF would have blurred out Victoria, and then the interaction would have been gone. Le sigh.

So, that was my first attempt with flash…I give it a “Meh.” On to the wonderful world of tungsten and f-light!

For this week’s assignment, we had to find two images from a magazine (one in which the lighting contributed to the overall mood of the photo, and one in which we wanted to know how exactly the lighting was done) and photograph them using the copy stand. We also had to ‘finish the roll’ (in film terms) of images–the catch being we had to keep the white balance set to Tungsten.

I tried shooting under several light situations (getting all the more annoyed because the Tungsten setting, well, works best when you have a tungsten light source…) before heading into the Heidelberg for some indoor photos. And–yay!–the lighting was good old-fashioned tungsten; no crazy flourescence for this bar. Long story short–this is my favorite image from the entire session. I’m partial to images of bars anyway, since my dad and brother were both bartenders, and I like the clarity (not quite present in the web image) and detail in the photo.

Bartender Jeramiah Soles straightens the counter area behind the bar of The Heidelberg restaurant in Columbia, MO. Soles has been working at The Heidelberg for ten years, though he became a mixologist only after five years as a cook. The job itself is “a little stressful,” he says.

The copy stand was a little more tricky than I’d thought it would be, probably because I am short and was standing on my tiptoes, straining leg muscles I didn’t know existed, while trying to make my copy of the full-page-spread seal photo. There’s a little bit of glare on the left side of the gutter (this story was towards the back of the magazine, making it difficult to flatten the entire page evenly…but there was probably a way to do this that I didn’t think of at the time. Grr), but color-wise, it came out great (I LOVE the bright red of the right seal’s yawn). I couldn’t figure out if any artificial lighting was used, so this is my ‘stump the chump’ select.

Photo (c) Yva Momatiuk and John Eastcott; National Geographic, 11/2008

My second copy stand image is from the same issue of National Geographic; specifically, from a story on a cave of giant crystals in Mexico. Particularly when compared to the images from INSIDE the cave (I’m including a copy stand shot of that, too, but I picked the darker photo for officially turning in because it seems more evocative), I think this photo does a great job of conveying the sense of traveling into a semi-alien world. There are a few dust specks from the glass that I didn’t notice when I was making the copies, but hopefully they don’t take too much away from the image itself. Anyway, here are both images- look at the size of the crystals! Crazy stuff.

Photos (c) Carsten Peter; National Geographic, 11/2008