Making of a special little birdy.

Well,I had originally promised this before the weekend, but ended up getting to it only now, and the main reason is, I had the text part all done and dandy, when a system reboot while I was out working decided to eat it up into bitspace... mental reminder: "save, save, save..."

 

 

Why I thaught to write about this shoot is just to share a learning experience with those that are still getting to know their dslr's like me.

 

 

The camera in question for me is a Nikon D3200, with a kit-lens, so for the Special little birdy it was straight out of the box, and only camera settings played the biggest part of making the photos happen.

 

 

What you need to do a shoot like this are:

Pitch black room

Two narrow spotlights for the prop and doll

Tripod for the camera (This is more or less a must for low level iso shots)

 

 

The lights.

 

For the lights I came up with what I dubbed the bog-roll-spot, which is a cardboard core from either a toilet paper, or household paper roll.

 

Ingredients for the spotlight used, the bulb on the right with the single big LED is a delonghi bulb that is supposed to have a actual bulb around it, the blub part was shattered, but I still found use for it this way.

 

Complete unit. A bit ghetto, but it gets the job done relatively well.

 

 

The basic concept is, the longer the cylinder attached to the lightbulb is, the more narrow beam of light it will give off.

 

without the paper roll attached

 

with the roll attached, due to the camera having agressive exposure correction in auto mode it seems like you are getting more light, but actually the big light blob in the middle is what you only got in reality

 

I have to repeat my warning concerned this technique, and it is do not use it with anything else than LEDs, since heat and paper are a very bad combination.

 

 

The stage

 

The idea I had for this shoot was to take everything else out of the picture, and leave it all to the prop and the doll.

 

The table was covered in some black velvet, which is pretty good in absorbing excess light.

 

A velvet tablecloth hides it pretty nicely.

 

I initially had not covered up the shelf behind the table, since it was not really visible while photographing, but it still showed up in the photos themselves, adding another sheet of dark fabric made it dissapear nicely.

 

The bookshelf that appeared despite not being visible while shooting, notice how the table seems quite long in this angle, and how it differs lateron.

 

 

The Camera

 

While doing stuff with my point and shooter I found out that I always seemed to get the best results with the lower ISO settings, than higher, so thats what I used here also.

 

This was one of the more interesting differences from going from a point and shooter to a base level dslr how the exposure setup shutter time changes in full manual mode.

 

My point and shooters self adjusted for the iso settings automatically, but the Nikon did not, or rather added massive ammounts of shutter time as the ISO went from one edge to another, so I was a bit puzzled at first how I was getting extreme exposure when dialing the camera down... live and learn.

 

Since LED's are very sterile light units, I set the camera white balance to "cool flourescant" which gave the photos a relatively nice warm tint.

 

camera settings in finnish (but from top to bottom, aperture, exposure time, ISO, exposure offset, for the following picture:

 

 

 

Forcing the perspective.

 

one of the goals for the shoot concept was to keep the identity of the doll a secret to the very last moment, and to add a little drama if you wish to the revelation, I wanted a gradual focus effect.

 

I wasnt sure could it be done with the kit lens, but after some dry practice while waiting for the lady to arrive, I found out you could, but would have to place the prop, and doll about three feet from eachother.

 

This was basicly having the angel prop as close as the camera would focus with the kit lens, and the doll on the other end of the scale.

 

One style of photography I've been a big fan of ever since the first Terminator movie has been forced perspective, making stuff appear closer or further than they seem.

 

This is hardly a good example of it as the angel prop gains quite a bit of size, but I wanted to hide the lenght of the table by moving the camera, and shooting angle between the two a bit tighter so the table does not seem as big as it really was.

 

 

Accomplishing this all, the D3200 allows for you to select the focus point quite freely in its live view mode, which prooved to be a life saver, since the adjustment throw on the 18-55/G kit lens is quite short. Naturally the inbetween shot between the two was done with manual focus somewhere in between with both objects blurred.

 

But, here was my 2 cents in this category, while the more experienced guys probably are going "Well d'uh", I hope this could help someone starting out like me.

You can heighten the forced perspective by shooting with a wider angle on the lens and getting closer, if possible.

 

What you've done with the paper roll to make the spotlight is actually pretty common in photography by the way, the proper term for something that focuses light this way is a "snoot." If you want to mess around, you can get an even tighter beam by making one with a cone shape that is narrower at the tip than at the light, thin cardstock or flexible foam work well for this.

You can heighten the forced perspective by shooting with a wider angle on the lens and getting closer, if possible.

 

What you've done with the paper roll to make the spotlight is actually pretty common in photography by the way, the proper term for something that focuses light this way is a "snoot." If you want to mess around, you can get an even tighter beam by making one with a cone shape that is narrower at the tip than at the light, thin cardstock or flexible foam work well for this.

 

Mm, well all of this was meant as a begginner-level engineering, with as little expense as possible. Since I dont personally have that much money for lenses, or lighting equipment... still saving up my grocery store change for a prime lens.. heh.

 

The suppressing cone is actually a good point, since the longer roll core, that also makes the beam narrower actually starts to eat into the ammount of light given by the bulb.

 

I know lenses play a big part especially in forced perspective, but I just wanted to share how well the kit-lens also performed. I've been positively surprised with the one with the D3200, especially since everybody seems to think their useless by default.

I've been positively surprised with the one with the D3200, especially since everybody seems to think their useless by default.

 

Depends a lot on the use - with the aperture wide open and/or near the extremes of the zoom range the kit lenses tend to perform poorly (unsharp lines + chromatic aberration) but if you slow it down a few stops and primarily use the midrange of the zoom area, there should be no problems.

 

A lens tip - the older manual focus "AI-S" lenses offer equal or even better performance compared to modern ones with a fraction of the price and are usually sturdier metal construction compared to the cheap plastic lenses that they make nowadays. The Nikon 50mm f/1.8 AI-S goes for under $100 on ebay and the slightly faster 1.4 one is a bit more. Manual focusing is very easy using the live view feature of the camera and the slower focusing speed compared to auto doesn't really matter with doll photography either.

Kit lenses are good. They're cheaply built but still yield decent images. Certainly, they are smaller, lighter and focus closer than pretty much any upgrade that covers their range. Even owning better glass, I'd keep the kit lenses around for those reasons.

The modern Nikon kit lenses are actually really well regarded. They're slow and they're not built like tanks as the pro lenses are, but they're very sharp, better than some pro glass from a decade or two ago.

 

You don't actually lose much or any light by narrowing the beam, by the way. I'm not the greatest on optical theory but a snoot actually concentrates it somehow or other, so your narrower spot is actually brighter than a wide one would be. I've found that soft flexible foam sheets (craft foam/fun foam etc) make really good low-budget snoots, as you can roll them into various sizes and shapes of cones and just tape them together temporarily to get your ideal shape.