*istDS in the studio

I dug out my little Jessops Portaflash studio outfit and had a bit of a mess around with my DS. I was very impressed with the results and having the ability to instantly review the results of lighting changes was fantastic and much more convenient that using polaroids as I used to do with my old Bronica system - over all a joy to use in fact.

Here's a couple of the results




In this one I was going for a low key effect and using a flash unit directly behind my son Fraser to give a halo effect to his hair. Lens used was a FA* 85mm F1.4 probably at F11.




In this one I was going for a high key effect although my moody teenage daughter Alison ruined the effect a bit by refusing to wear a white top! Tokina ATX-Pro 80-200 F2.8 at about 200mm and F11. I had two heads lighting the white background to F16, a stop higher than the front soft-box and the exposure used.




My daughter is quite interested in photography and art in general so after I'd set the lights up and a given her a little tuition she got this one of me using the same high-key set-up as above.[/img]

Thanks for sharing your first studio shots with the *istDS. Nice shots, although I find the halo effect a little heavy.

Being able to immediately see the results is fantastic!

I agree with JR about the halo - it's a technique that works best on glamour girls in my view - but otherwise I think all the pics are superb.

You have serious competition from your daughter!

G

These are fabulous. Inspires me to get cracking.

I too find your results amazing! Can you tell us what exactly did you use to produce these amazing black & white pics from the color RAW/JPEGs ?

Thanks!

The shots were all JPEG's converted to B&W using Photoshop Elements 4. Not a lot of post-processing was necessary other than setting the levels to get the correct skin tone. I'm planning to experiment with RAW files and using a channel mixer, however for portraits it doesn't look like it's really necessary.

I'm planning to set the lights up again today to experiment with using a snooted hairlight instead of the "halo" effect and I'll try shooting some RAW files then. I've also just picked up a little radio trigger cheap from Ebay so I'm looking forward to using that instead of having PC cables running everywhere.

With Elements there are a couple of good ways of producing B&W:

First method:
1. Add a new Hue/Sat layer
2. Put the Sat to -100

Second method:
1. As above
2. Change the layer mode to "Color" - this produces a B&W similar to Photoshop's Lab mode, where different colours have different "grey weights". This is actually the luminosity mode contained in a JPG

Third method (the Russell Brown method):
1. Add a new Hue/Sat layer
2. Change layer mode to "Color"
3. Add a second Hue/Sat layer on top
4. Set Sat to -100

Now, in the middle layer (the one that's set to color mode), change the Hue and this produces the effect of filtering (as if you had put a filter on the camera).

You can get great results with those methods.

Finally, you can dodge and burn by:
1. Add a new blank layer
2. Change the layer blend mode to "Soft-Light" (or Overlay)
3. Paint with a very soft black or white brush. Set the opacity to 5% or 10% and build it up slowly. Paint black to burn (darken), and paint white to dodge (lighten).

Hope that helps

Matt

(There are some tutorials on my website: www.photon.me.uk, and in the tutorials section of www.ephotozine.com )

Matt,

That's most useful, thanks. I can particularily see why the 3rd method would give more flexibility when converting landscapes and I'm looking forward to trying it with some IR shots soon.

I'd just done another studio shoot when I read your post so I tried those methods out on some of the shots. Here's one done using the 3rd method - it's a more conventional shot of my son Fraser, with the halo light being replaced with a snooted hair lamp instead. I was messing about with different lenses as well and this one was actually using the 18-55mm kit lens at it's longest setting. I've not been too impressed with it at the wide end but stopped down to F13 at the long end it's pretty decent for portraits.




My next task is to try group shots - something I've not yet tried - as my wife wants me to get a shot of the whole family.

The little radio slave (£20 from Ebay, posted from Hong Kong) worked fine and it was very nice not to have any trailing cables.

Regards
Steve

I've just got one of those little slaves from Hong Kong. It arrived in under a week, and works fine, most of the time. Not sure how long it will last, though.

G