There’s a lonely room up in the attic. I filled it up with some toys (camera, tripod, lens, flash, …). There was also a model at hand. Have a look:

In the attic - a set on Flickr

A guy on Flickr was asking, why self portraits? Well it’s easy. The model is always available, plus he/she doesn’t get annoyed by you taking so many photos. So, why not?

Video of the day: Aerosmith - Toys in the Attic

It’s the time of masquerades in Slovenia. So basically, you can’t go out without a mask these days. Luckily I have some orange things in my wardrobe, that can act as one. Nothing special, but it works for me.

While looking so orange, I just had to take a few photos. My set up was simple. A sheet with a nice texture, me, camera, diffused flash and sun light trough the window.

An article of mine has been published on Slo-Tech. It’s in Slovene, and deals with, yes, you’ve guessed it, color management on the web.

read it here:
Slo-Tech | Barvno upravljanje na spletu

For those of you less fluent in the language, here’s a list of sources (in English) I’ve referenced to prepare this.

1. Is the Web Safe Palette really dead?. Gillespie, J. 2001.
2. Frequently Asked Questions. VisiBone. 2008.
3. How a 16 color palette is represented in different pixel formats. A Witness to YAHWEH. 2002.
4. HTML Colors. W3Schools. Referenced Dec 27th 2008.
5. So Many Colors. Holley, B. 2008.
6. sRGB. Wikipedia. 2008.
7. A Standard Default Color Space for the Internet - sRGB. Stokes M., Anderson M., Chandrasekar S., Motta R. 1996.
8. Graphics Interchange Format. Wikipedia. 2008.
9. JPEG. Wikipedia. 2008.
10. The Sad Story of PNG Gamma “Correction”. Sivonen, H. 2008.
11. Browser Gamma-Correction Test Page. Roelofs, G. 2005.
12. Get better color online through Flash Player 10. Nack, J. 2008.

I should be studying - color metrics. And in a way, I am. Not the dull theory though, but trough flash photography.

A few days ago I had an idea of creating an interesting bokeh effect by using aluminium foil. It bounces off light doesn’t it? And if you wrinkle it, the reflections should be quite random. So, by taking it out of focus, it should produce some interesting results, no?

I started thinking. First of all, I need something to shoot. The foil itself would be a bit boring. And after searching my room, I found out I have a model car, just right for the job.
So, I have the subject. The background would be a wrinkled piece of aluminium foil. But the silver foil is quite dull and I needed some colour. Pros use gels to tint their light. I don’t have any gels, but I found a red plastic bag lying around. It should do. In theory, putting it over my flash should tint the light red, light would then bounce off the foil, thus making the foil look red also.
But I didn’t want the car to be red. So I would have to shoot the car with a different light. As I have only one flash, I had to wait for the night to fall, which would allow me to turn off the lights, use a long exposure and fire the same flash twice. Or three times. Maybe even more.

And so I waited …

As the night fell, I gathered some “toys”. I stole some aluminium foil from the kitchen and a dust removal product from the bathroom. To clean the car, obviously. But as I’m not an experienced cleaner, I didn’t do a very good job. Go figure. Good thing we have Photoshop.

I set everything up. Put a camera on a tripod, car on a box covered with aluminium foil and taped some more aluminium foil on the wall. For the background. I did some test shots to set up a nice composition and then some more (a lot more) to set up the lighting. I ended up having 3 lights - my flash, an iPod and an lcd screen. Flash as main light, shot a couple of times from different positions and iPod and the lcd for some fill light. And I could set the power of each of them separately to balance the light.

In the end, I came up with this:

It’s not perfect, but all in all, I quite like it. It’s “different”.

You can read my final lighting set up on the flickr page.

And I’ve almost got used to writing that name. It’s quite obvious when you think about it. There’s Lanersbach and just before it, you can find Vorderlanersbach. Have a map.

And what does one do there? Snowboard. And take photos, of course. From portraits, still life and action shots to night shots.

Also, what better way to test your flash than telling the children to look at the light as it will erase their memory? But once they god used to it I even got them to hold a plate by their face to bounce the light. A model as well as an assistant. Great!

As one of the projects in this semester I had to do a paper on quality. Quality on just about anything I can think of.

I decided to write about the quality of professional photography. Is it really worth all the expenses and time spent?

The paper is in Slovene, but even if you’re not fluent in the language, there are some pretty photos to look at.

The paper:
Kakovost profesionalne fotografije

Slides from my presentation:
Kakovost profesionalne fotografije - predstavitev