A great lighting scheme for a professional, dramatic image

This shot chosen as the main image on the site. A much warmer look was picked for the 8×10 headshot. I could have warmed up the image with a warming filter but I chose to keep it cool as it went well with the directional look and the high lighting ratio.

The lighting scheme was simple enough. Spot on the background at about the same intensity as the highlight assuring that the texture in the background would come through. Highlight was 1.5- 2  stops over the main light to get the 1:4 ratio I was after. I wanted this to be a dramatic shot which is why the higher ratio. Some tweaking of the RAW files and retouching work brought the image to just where I wanted it.

3 light set up for a dramatic effect on dark background

]]> http://www.tandysean.com/2009/12/shooting-people-on-dark-background/feed/ 0 http://www.tandysean.com/2009/12/product-photography-on-white-background/ http://www.tandysean.com/2009/12/product-photography-on-white-background/#comments Thu, 17 Dec 2009 19:22:17 +0000 Tandy Sean http://www.tandysean.com/?p=145 Product is king, and to make your product shots stand out, sometimes you need to get a little creative. I did a series of product photography recently for Janna Hurtzig, a local designer who’s astro satchels are taking Vancouver by storm. Since the shoot was for publishing in a book next year, I decided to break away from a flat white background and spruce it up with a bit of shadow.  Click through to see the lighting scheme and to read a bit more about the shoot.

Janna Hurtzig Astro Satchel's shot on white background

The shoot was for a book and we had discussed shooting on a simple white background. Janna was fun to work with as she described what she wanted and then let me go with it.  To get a better image with a high end feel I thought I’d experiment a little.  The shoot directives were to keep it simple, keep it clean and modern, and to highlight the natural elements being the nature patterns on the product.

Lighting scheme for the white background bag shoot

I went about doing this with by using 3 lights.  One main hoisted above the product and slightly angled from the front, a highlight of direct light 1 stop greater than the main coming in from the side and from above, and the background light which was the same as the main in intensity but shot through a gobo with horizontal lines cut into it.  This gave the effect of sunlight and gave some angular elements to the shot.  I also brought out a small reflector to bounce some light into the dark side of the bag.

All in all I’m happy with the results and will be using this technique far more often. The biggest issue with the lighting was deciding on the strength of the backlight, the angle of the gobo and the distance between the gobo and the light source which affected the heaviness of the shadows. Also, the highlight positioning was a bit tricky at times.

Styling the product was probably the most difficult thing about the shoot. I wanted the bags to look natural and baglike, but I didn’t want them to be under filled, over filled and I wanted the straps to look good.  To get this right required some stuffing – but not too much – as well as some lifting, placing, and pinning things into place. That’s why stylists are an important part of every photoshoot.

Pro government propaganda in Mandalay

Sitting in a Yangon park, over glasses of Mandalay Rum and soda I met with three men for insight into the current state of affairs of Myanmar.  All three have reason to fear the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), which is the re-branding of the authoritarian dictatorship ruled by the military, the Tatmadaw.  Despite understandable apprehensions and the occasional look over the shoulder checking for eavesdroppers, these men have hope in the future and believe that educating the people is the most important way to make a difference.

First meet Sein Lwin, an entrepreneur and businessman operating out of Yangon who helped arrange the interview with his friends Thet-Naung and Aung. Thet Naung hails from the country’s new capital Pyinmana and fled to Yangon shortly after the 1990 election due to his involvment in student government at the time. At 17 he was expelled from High School and at 18 was arrested and prisoned for 3 years for his involvement in the 1988 demonstrations.
Aung is a former member of the Democratic Party for Youth Society (DPYS) which joined with 1990 election winners, the National League for Democracy (NLD) shortly after the 1988 student riots. Anticipating problems with the election results when the NLD took 82% of the popular vote, he fled to Thailand as a refugee, working as a correspondent for a Thai publication.  After three years in exile, he returned home on the SPDC’s promise of amnesty but upon crossing the border was detained for over 2 weeks for questioning. 6 months later he was arrested and jailed for 2 months for being in the proximity of a university.

“The students in 1988 were having a peaceful protest.” Aung remembers. “I was not involved and was trying to leave the university campus.  The government officials bottle necked the students and forced us towards armed police.  We were just trying to go home. Some got angry and agitated for being denied exit.  Some got scared and ran into the water of the nearby lake.  Police ran after them into the water and bashed their skulls with their sticks.  Some police held the students heads under water until they drowned.” He was lucky, led to safety by some other students who knew a way around the roadblock.  At least 20 students were murdered on that day. “The government controlled media portrayed the event as a terrorist act.  It was not, it was a peaceful protest.” After this event he became much more involved in student politics and in 1989 was one of the founders of the DPYS.

All three men seem worn.  Tired of fighting for the peaceful Buddhist population of the country. “I don’t see a better future, they (SPDC) will never give up and are very powerful and rich, so are their relatives who will be their successors.” Aung-Sen’s opinion is echoed by all three, “The people get the government they deserve.”

This frustration is largely attributed to the passivity with which the people react to the current political situation, partially for religious reasons and partially in fear. “People accept their lives and situations because they never learnt any differently. They believe it’s a matter of luck,” said Aung who points out that it’s not luck, it’s politics.

Fishermen on Inle Lake with a government guest house in the background

search engine logos

Keywords

Keywords can be repeated throughout your site, be placed in meta tags, and are one of the best ways to get higher rankings. Putting keywords in the title tag, in urls,and in page names are all good places to start. Keywords should be relavent to your site content and theme. You can find a list of good primary and secondary keyword choices on google which will also help  you tweeze a few good ones out of your a pre-existing site.

Search engines are pretty smart these days and know when we’re trying to trick them so making sure you only have around 3 to 7% of the page made up of major keywords, and only 1-2% of the page of minor keywords is best. If you have over 10% of keywords on a page it is suspicious and looks a lot like keyword stuffing, a technique that can get you banned from Search Engines and is terrible for SEO.

Putting keywords in your anchor text (especially on incoming links) is also important for SEO. This promotes both your site and the keyword in particular. Putting keywords in heading tags (<H1>, <H2>,< H3>…) can also count alot but make sure you page has actual text around the keywords.

Putting keywords in the -alt- tags of images is important since browser spiders can’t crawl images.

Keywords in metatags is becoming less and less important especially for google but is still important for other search engines so filling in these tags doesn’t hurt either.

One last tip with keywords: Secondary keywords can get a great response. Since everybody is optimizing for the most popular keywords, there will be less competition when you optimize for secondaries. This can translate into more hits for you.

Some techniques that work against you when working with keywords are keyword dilution which is where you are optimizing for an excessive amount of keywords, especially un-related ones and keyword stuffing, where you artificially inflate your keyword density.

Links

There are several factors to think about when dealing with links and SEO. Everysite will have outbound links but more importantly are the links coming into your site from other places. It’s best to have reputable sites that have a good googleranking link to your site. It’s also good if the links include one of your keywords in the anchor text. Links from sites with similar content to yours is also a good thing. It shows that you are poular among your topical community. Links from .edu and .gov sites are highly valued as these sites are very reputable and it’s more difficult to get listed on these sites.

Other elements to consider with links are the number of back links to your site but again the reputability of that site matters and their anchor text, and age of the link also come into play. The text before and around the anchor text is important and speaks to the relevance of the link and generally the older the link the better as getting many new links in a short time suggests buying them.

Links from directories can help. Being listed in yahoo directory, and google business for example can be a great boost to your ranking. The fewer links on the page referring to you the better as it suggests your link is important.

Using named anchors, the target for internal links can help SEO by stressing the importance of a particular page, paragraph, or text.

Techniques that hurt your SEO: Outbound links to link farms or suspicious sites are terrible for SEO. You should regularly check the status of the sites you link to. Cross linking is when site A links to Site B, Site B links to Site C, and site C links back to site A. This can be far more complex but appears as a disguised form of reciprocal link trading and is frowned upon. Also, single pixel links are TERRIBLE for SEO! They are invisible to humans so nobody will click on it and it’s obviously an SEO manipulation tactic.

Metatags

Although becoming more irrelevant they still serve their purpose and certain metatags should still be used. The most important is the <description> and <keywords> tags. <Description> is for the description of your site and sometimes pops up in the search results.  <keywords> should only use 10 to 20 keywords at the most.  Make sure the keywords used are on the page. The <Language> metatag is good if your site language specific.

Content

Having unique content which is site relevant is great boost for your rankings.  Frequent changes of content is favored which is great when you add new content but not so good when you only make small changes to existing content.

The keyword fontsize is important as the bigger <h1><h2> etc… the better. You can also stress importance with bolded or italicized keywords. Recent documents are also favored. Poor code and design won’t get you bad but may make your site less indexable and should be avoided. Illegal content also gets you kicked out of search engines. Invisible text is a strike against as it’s obviously a trick to stuff keywords.

Other elements that affect your SEO are JavaScript, which should be used wisely and not randomly. It’s harder for spiders to follow and if it’s a mess they get confused, Text in images might be an easy way to get the pretty layout you’re after, but it is really bad for SEO. Using an <alt> tag to describe images is a good start but make sure the images are relevant. Frames are terrible! Avoid them at all costs. Flash content is ok when used correctly. It is still not indexable but with an alt tag you can at least describe it. A flash home page is terrible for SEO and should be avoided if you want high search engine standing. Using keyword rich URL’s, and filenames is good for seo so definitely use SEO Friendly Links when working with Joomla! or Wordpress or any CMS.  Generating a sitemap is also great for spiders and is really easy to do with google’s webmaster tools.

Hopefully these tips will help with your rankings, but remember that SEO is a process and it doesn’t happen over night!

My favorite opera star is the king of posing

lighting scheme for the shoot

High-key lighting does not mean over exposure, although most people don’t think so. High key simply means that the vast majority of tones in the image are above middle grey, including any shadows but exculding specular highlights such as catch lights. Working with high-key lighting requires a great degree of control over light placement as well as your camera equipment and it’s limitations.

A secret to high-key lighting is that every side visible to the camera is lit. There are no deep shadows. High-key lighting offers a timeless and classic feel to the image. They are quite popular in high end advertisements and fashion photography.

High Key lighting offers a great alternative to standard lighting for portraiture. It adds contrast, interest, and is fairly easy to do. The following shots were done with only one studio strobe, a large softbox and two reflectors on either side of the subject.

Charlie Posing

tom posing

Orlando posing

a simple yet effective example of a landing page design

What is a Landing Page

A landing page is the first thing a visitor sees after clicking the
promotional creative.

• Your landing page has to convince the visitor to stay and (depending on your goal):

* Fill out a form (but people hate filling out forms)
* Provide personal details (but people hate getting spammed)
* Buy something (but people hate being scammed)
* Read a lot of information (but people really hate reading)

•It has to convince people to do things that they hate which is why typical conversion rates are only 1 to 6% *

Think of the User

Most people don’t come to your landing page and examine every design element.  They come looking for clues to answer their questions.

They want to know:

* Is this the right place?
* Is this how I imagined it would be?
* Should I click the back button?
* Does this look trustworthy?
* How much time is this going to take?

A landing page needs to address all these issues immediately.

How to Improve a Landing page

*Define your Conversion
* Research
* Eliminate unnecessary elements
* Match the creative
* Remove Navigation
* Stay Focused
* Important Elements Above the Fold
* Provide Conversion Exits
* Lead the Eye
* Fix Forms
* Test
* Stay Focused

A Cross processed transparency of a girl jumping off of a waterfall in Laos

When I was traveling through Laos 2 years ago the unthinkable happened.  My digital camera sputtered and died! I couldn’t believe my misfortune! I mean, how often does one travel to Laos anyways and I was fortunate enough to be there during the biggest festival of the year, the rocket festival where home made rockets were shot into the sky to signal the beginning of the rainy season.  Fortunately I had been lugging my Canon Ellan 7 35 mm film camera and a bag full of film since I left home 6 months ago.  Being forced to go back to traditional photography was both a thrill and a joy. It inspired me to be more creative, make film choices that I hadn’t had to make in years, choose between color and black and white… It really brought something back to the art that died with digital photography.  So, here’s a story I wrote for a  travel website  about returning to traditional photography. There are also some tried and tested  techniques on getting better digital shots too.

* * *

I see the shot in my head and make for a group of drunken kids dancing about, ready to fire their home made missiles into the heavens at the Laotian rocket festival. Putting the viewfinder to my eye, I compose the shot and make sure the settings are where they should be. Perfect! I wait for the right moment. The projectiles are lit, smoke and fire propels them into the sky with a high-pitched wailing screech. I hit the release button. My shutter comes down with a sickening wheeze. I look down in horror and the screen is black. I start to sweat as I realize that the unthinkable has happened, my digital camera had shot its last image. It was dead and there was nothing that I could do about it.

Since digital photography became the standard several years back, film has taken a back seat in a major way.  Completely removed from the commercial market, the medium caters only to the fine arts photographer and to several pillars in the photography world, whose clients are more than happy to play by their rules

After the turn in the commercial industry I too was thrilled to make the switch to digital, and haven’t used my film cameras in over 2 years.  But of course, while traveling through Laos where electronics and equipment are not readily available, horror of all horrors my precious Canon 10D decides to give up on me.  Its shutter gave out, which I now know to be a common problem with digital SLRs. So I found myself in the most picturesque country imaginable with nothing but my film camera.  Fortunately I was prepared after years of having teachers drilling the word “Backup” into my head instilling a paranoia and dread of equipment failure bordering on the obsessive.  With a giant ziplock bag filled with rolls of black and white, color, and slide film, I embarked on a journey of rediscovering the dying medium of traditional 35mm film photography.

I was less than thrilled at the thought of reverting to film.  Having gotten used to being able to see my shot instantly and optimizing and fiddling with it on my computer right away, I was actually quite nervous.  The old feelings of “Did I get the shot?”  And “What if it doesn’t turn out?” were creeping back into my brain.  All the woes that went away with digital photography were back.  I had to remember the rules that digital made irrelevant, understand my lighting, understand the exposures, and even hauled out my light meter which had been collecting dust, buried in the deep recesses of my backpack.

But what I never expected was to rediscover something lost. In short it was amazing.  Not seeing the shot opened up my creativity and made me passionate again. In a way, I had been losing interest in digital without knowing it. It was much less exciting when I could shoot whatever I wanted at any ISO, in as many shots as I had the memory cards to hold. With film I had to think, know what I was shooting, and know the limitations of my film.

Instead of changing things with the push of a button, I had to play by the rules. With digital, imagination is made irrelevant and replaced with instant gratification which, through force of repetition, becomes unfulfilling. I found myself dreaming photography again, always thinking of the next shot, calculating how something would turn out without knowing for weeks if I was right. I was more experimental with my picture taking and had nothing to worry about other than composing the shot and shooting it properly, I found photography a challenge again and was more inspired than I had been in years.

Back in Bangkok came the moment of truth, getting the film processed, and scanned. Film or not it still has to get into my computer. I was nervous to see what would come back from the lab.  When I opened the package containing contact sheets, CD’s galore, and bundles of negatives I felt like a kid at Christmas.  Happily it worked out great.  Memories of the trip came flooding back as I remembered what I was thinking when I took the shots and saw how everything turned out more or less how I wanted.  With some surprises of course which really is the fun part.  I realized then that film has something that digital doesn’t, the quality of the image was far superior to my digital images and it was somewhat shocking and disappointing to note since I had always been a firm follower of the digital revolution.

Of course I’m now back on the digital band-wagon with a canon 5D which, after a few days shooting has offered some extremely promising results.  This is a 13 mega pixel mega camera with all the technology that my old digital camera was missing. Giving low light shooting a quality I hadn’t seen in years and with a full frame sensor allowing my lenses to shoot at their proper focal length I really think I’m in love.  Also monochrome settings allow you to use different black and white filters digitally, producing powerful images that actually rival medium format film in almost every way.

Whether or not I go back to film on occasion or not, I am happy to say that my experience of reverting to my old favorite medium helped me remember what I loved about photography and has gave me a new approach to my work be it digital or not.

Since the majority of photography today is digital and that isn’t going to change, here are some tips to make sure you get the most out of it. The biggest disadvantage to digital photography is permanence. Images should always be shot in RAW or Tiff formats when available since compressing to JPG lowers the image quality which degrades further when you access the files. Also, we don’t know how long modern computers will even recognize these formats. The lifespan of today’s CDs and DVDs is estimated at 3 years in optimal conditions so your shots sitting on that CD in your drawer may or may not last the long haul. If you do shoot digital make sure you back up your images on duplicate CD’s and on a hard drive if possible. Above all, print the images you like! That way if you lose the file you’ll always have a hard copy somewhere that can be scanned.

When shooting digitally slightly under-expose your shot and try to use a polarizer. Traditional photography requires over-exposing to get more information into the highlights, but when shooting digital if you under-expose a quarter to a half a stop, you may be able to avoid a blown-out white sky in place of the beautiful blue you were expecting. Digital highlights contain no information so fixing something after is only possible if you underexpose your shot slightly. Also, use of a polarizer in bright conditions tones down the sky so that it falls within the sensors range. Just doing this can make your subjects look more natural, colors more saturated, and preserve detail throughout the shot.