Sunday, October 30, 2016

An Expert's Vision Introduction

A Trip down the Rabbit-hole with The Expert

You Have chosen The Red Pill.......Be Prepared

Sunday, October 23, 2016

Talking Green Screen with An Expert's Vision

Talking Green Screen:

When doing special Effects, graphic design and Photo editing, Using a green screen will come second nature to you. When faced with the challenge of the Green Screen the number 1 thing to always keep in mind is your Lighting is KEY. When you have poor lighting it makes it difficult to abstract the background when editing. In most editing software the program is designed to seek out color and tone. When a area is poorly lite in a picture or video, It makes the color range of green vary throughout the background making it hard to completely clear the background. With that said always have lighting to cover the entire area and more. Depending on your subject or lay-out you should have at least five light sources not including your flash from you camera. The flash from your camera is for your main subject in the foreground, because 4 of the 5 light sources will be to evenly light your background.

Examples of good and Bad Green Screen Lighting

SIN CITY : Green Screen Effects

DIY: Expert Photography Soft Light Box

How to make a inexpensive Soft Light Box for shooting products and small objects

A soft Light Box can be very Expensive, So lets make Our own using cheap inexpensive things. Here are the

Materials Needed:

1.) A Box – It could be any size you want as long as you can light it! I prefer it to be as square as can be. You can find boxes anywhere for free. I got mine from work in which they throw out anyway. You can also find boxes in the back of strip malls, grocery stores, appliance stores or basically any place that makes or sells products. Thicker the better! (Free)

2.) Fabric ‘ This again could be any type. In my box I used white muslin fabric that is found at your local arts and craft store. Buy enough to cover the entire box. ($4.00 US or $1.99 a yard) People suggested other fabrics like White Nylon and white fleece. If your extremely cheap and have some white under shirts laying around. Cut up the sides to where you have two halves of the shirt. If you use multiple shirts, be sure that the color matches or your end result may not turn out as you like it

3.) Tape ‘ I use tape to secure the fabric to the sides of the box. Reason being is that In-case you want to try out different fabrics. I use regular masking tape. ($1.00 US A Roll)

4.) Glue ‘ You can use a “Glue Stick” ($1.00 US a Stick) or spray adhesive ($5.00 US per Can) to stick the lining in the box.

5.) White Bristol board ‘ This will line the inside of the box and will also serve as your back round (.50 a sheet X2). I would suggest to buy 2 or 3 sheets as you will be cutting up two to line your box (Could be more depending on the size of your box) and one for the back round. Bristol board is a heavyweight paper (.006″ Thick) that is used in drawing/art. The name came from where it was originated, Bristol England. If you wanted a different back round you can also pick up different colors.

6.) Lights ‘ You will need to light this box and this could be the most expensive part of the box unless you already have the lights. In my opinion lighting is the most important part of this box. Without it you will not get the picture you desire. I went to my local hardware store and picked up some “Daylight” Bulbs. Using regular light bulbs will cast a yellow light and should be avoided. I purchased “n:vision” 90 watt equivalent compact florescent bulbs ($7.00 US). Basically any “Full Spectrum” light bulbs will do.

Also suggest a lighting fixture. If you have a one of those desk work lamps, It will work fine. If you don’t I suggest getting a “Clamp On Work Light”. At my local home depot they only had two kinds, A smaller reflector dish (5″) for $5.99 (US) or the 10.5″ reflector for $11.99 (US).

7.) Miscellaneous Tools ‘ Tape ruler, Ruler or any straight edge, scissors and knife

Step By Step Process:

A) Take your box with a tape ruler and marker and measure in 2″ from the side of the box marking multiple points with your marker. When your done you will see your border, connect the points using your straight edge to where you should have a nice looking square/rectangle in the middle of the box with a 2″ border around it. Leave the top and bottom of the box alone as you will not need to mark it

B) Cut out the boxes you’ve drawn. Repeat that to the sides of the box where you have drawn the boxes. When you’re done, cut off the top of the box or remove the flaps on the top of the box. LEAVE THE BOTTOM INTACT!

C) Now take your Bristol board and make lines with your marker for every two inches 16 times. Then proceed to cut out 16 strips with your scissors.

D) Glue the paper strips into the box. Make sure the side with marker goes against the cardboard so it can not be seen.

E) Take another piece of Bristol board and cut is so the width is the same as the inside of the box and the length is much longer then the box.

F) Place the long piece of Bristol board into the box to where the piece curves to the bottom. Avoid creasing as it will show up in your photo. Cut off excess paper that is sticking out the top.

G) Cut your fabric to where it will cover the holes. Then cut a big piece to where it will cover the top of the box.

H) Tape the fabric to cover the holes in the box except the one that is facing your background. Then tape the top piece on.

YOU’RE DONE!

Now all you got to do is light the top of the box and start snapping away!

There are many variations you can do to get the photo you want. If you’re having a shadow problem I suggest lighting the other sides of the box. If you’re getting vignetting I suggest a lens hood or moving the lens more into the box. Photoshop could be a handy tool also! Since my lens and camera are not the cleanest I tend photoshop the dust that is sitting on or in my camera. I also adjust the levels so it’s brighter.

Camera sticking into the box

Easy and Cheap ways to enhance your photos and Photography Equipment

Hello everyone,

In the last past three weeks I've been sharing tips and tricks to help with your photo taking and editing. Today I'm going to focus on showing you ways to enhance your photos and photography equipment, while saving money and also getting professional results. When it comes to photography lighting is one of the most important elements. There are many different types of lighting equipment that you can buy to give your photo shoots professional lighting. We all know that this lighting equipment can run you a pretty penny and as artist/photographers you may not have the extra cash to spare on new lighting equipment. I'm going to show you different ways to use your exiting equipment and ways to enhance the lighting with around the house objects and inexpensive tools.

I’d not heard of this type of device before – but since I found this tutorial I’ve discovered a number of photographers who for one reason or another want to be able to extend the reach of their flash.

This is particularly useful for wildlife photographers who want to supplement natural light in tricky lighting with fill flash. Of course sometimes it’s difficult to get close to that animal and a normal flash would have no impact.

Enter the Flash Extender (one popular one is the ‘better beamer’).

Beauty Dish

Beauty dishes are wonderful pieces of photographic equipment to experiment with – but they can be very expensive.

Not any more (at lest if you use this DIY trick).

In this hack learn how to use a simple Turkey Pan to get some pretty amazing beauty dish results! The comparison examples in this tutorial between the turkey pan version and the real thing are pretty convincing.

I must remember to add Turkey Pans to this week’s shopping list.

Thursday, October 6, 2016

Shaper Images with a Monopod

Sharper photos with a monopod

A big, heavy telephoto lens requires a big, heavy tripod and specialist tripod head if you're going to get shake-free shots.

However, lugging this kit around can slow you down - a good thing for considered compositions, but another thing entirely when it comes to following an active subject.

If you need to do a lot of chasing through the undergrowth, do what sports photographers do and use a long lens on a monopod. What you lose in the stability that three legs provides, you gain in mobility.

Treat a monopod as another weapon in your arsenal rather than a substitute for a tripod and you won't go far wrong.

It's a perfect choice for those locations where there's not always enough space to set up a tripod, such as at the zoo or other captive animal collection.

Safe shutter speed for handheld photography

For sharp handheld photos, you shouldn't let the shutter speed be any slower than the equivalent focal length of the lens being used. If you do, you run the risk of blurred photos through camera shake.

On a full-frame camera, you can just use the actual focal length of the lens as a guide - if you've got a 300mm lens fitted, then the minimum recommended shutter speed for blur-free pictures is 1/300sec.

An APS-C has a crop factor of 1.5 or 1.6, so the lens's focal length needs to be multiplied by this amount for the 'safe' handheld shooting speed.

The same 300mm lens fitted on an APS-C body would need a shutter speed of around 1/500sec for sharp handheld shots.

Obviously this is just a rule of thumb, and the actual speed you need depends on your handholding ability, whether the animal is moving or not, whether the lens has stabilization and whether you're able to brace the lens on a fence, tree or railing.

Learn Fieldcraft Tricks

Learn fieldcraft tricks

While a telephoto lens with a focal length of at least 300mm is pretty much essential for wildlife photography, good fieldcraft makes a bigger difference to getting a frame-filling shot.

Knowing the behaviour and habitat of the animal you're photographing is key. That might sound like we're stating the obvious, but the best wildlife shots are rarely taken on the spur of the moment.

Do a Google search on your chosen species, and the best locations and time of year (and time of day) that you can expect (or are allowed) to get close to them.

Wear camouflage or neutral-colored, rustle-free clothing, ditch the deodorant and be on the spot when the animals are most active - that's usually dawn or dusk.

DIY Tools

Using longer macro lenses

Macro lenses with longer focal lengths offer the same 1:1 magnification as those with shorter focal lengths, but do so at a greater distance from the subject.

Because you don't need to be as close, you get more room to position a flashgun or other light source near to the subject.

The extended working room also makes longer macro lenses a better choice for bug and insect photography, as you're less likely to disturb them.

Start early

If you're planning on doing some outdoor macro photography, set your alarm clock. It's worth getting up early, not just because that's when the light is invariably at is best, but because wind is usually at its weakest at this time of day.

Wind is the enemy of the garden photographer, as the combination of a slight breeze and the slow shutter speeds typically required for close-ups can lead to blurred images of flowers, plants, spider webs and other delicate objects.

For long-stemmed flowers and plants try using a specialist macro support . These are essentially clamps on the end of a small stand that can be used to hold a subject in place.

A DIY solution is to tie the stem to a cane that you've wedged into the ground next to the plant.

Create your own macro backgrounds

The quality of the background can make or break a macro photo. Macro lenses with longer focal lengths will enable you to restrict what makes it into the background of a picture, but distracting colors and out-of-focus highlights might still be unavoidable.

Build up your own collection of backgrounds that you can substitute when necessary.

Sheets of colored card, matte prints of blurred natural backgrounds you've previously taken - hell, even an item of clothing could provide a soft, even background that helps the subject stand out.

Make a macro home studio

One of the (many) appealing things about indoor macro photography is that it doesn't require a great deal of space. All you really need is a small area of table, kitchen worktop or floor, plus a tripod that can get you close to that surface.

Sharper Images and DIY Tools

Sharper photos

Small apertures reduce the amount of light passing through the lens, and this can lead to slow shutter speeds and long exposure times.

Any slight movement - even the vibration caused by the mirror moving inside the camera - will increase the risk of blurred pictures.

To combat this, activate your camera's Mirror Lock-up function, or shoot using Live View (where the mirror is automatically locked up) and trigger the shutter using a remote release or the camera's self-timer.

Increase the ISO to get a faster shutter speed if necessary, although you'll get the cleanest looking shots below ISO 1600.

Make a DIY a reflector

It can be challenging to ensure a small subject is evenly lit, particularly if you're using a shorter macro lens to take life-size images - the camera will need to be very close to the subject and this can limit your creative lighting options.

A simple reflector goes a long way to solving this problem. You can make your own DIY reflector using a piece of aluminum foil: screw into into a ball and then flatten it out again to create a more diffuse quality of light.

Position it on the shadow side of a subject to reveal previously hidden details.

Break the rules

You don't have to use small apertures to make an impact with macro photography - using the largest apertures available on your lens is just as an effective technique.

You'll need to be spot-on with your focusing though, as the wafer-thin depth of field leaves little room for error.

Using wide apertures and selective focusing to sandwich a sharp subject between a blurred foreground and background is a popular food photography technique, while completely defocusing a lens can lead to abstract blurs and beautiful bokeh - a trick that's often used in contemporary flower photography.

Getting The full use of your Camera

Manual focus

Switch off autofocus when you're taking macro photos. Depth of field (DOF) can be measured in millimetres when you're shooting close-up details, so accurate focusing is critical.

Manual focusing is made easy with your DSLR's Live View. By magnifying the area you want to focus on on the Live View screen and turning the lens's focus ring, you can position the point of focus precisely.

Go easy with the focus ring though, as the difference between razor-sharp and just sharp enough is slight. You'll also need to use a tripod, as even small movements of the camera can throw the focus completely off.

Choosing the best aperture

To increase the depth of field - the area in front of and behind the subject that you're focusing on that appears acceptably sharp - you'll need to use small apertures.

Switch to Aperture Priority mode, as this will enable you to manually set a specific aperture. For small apertures, dial in large f-numbers, such as f/16 and f/22.

Avoid the highest f-numbers that your lens offers though, as this will lead to soft pictures as a result of diffraction (where the light is bent out of shape by the aperture blades in the lens).

If you can't get everything you want sharp at a single aperture setting, try using the focus stacking technique in Photoshop to increase the depth of field.

Using depth of field preview

The image you see through an optical viewfinder is always shown at the largest aperture available on the lens. Although this gives the brightest available picture, it makes it impossible to judge the depth of field at smaller aperture settings.

To be able to see what will look sharp and what will look blurred, press your camera's depth of field preview button.

This will stop down the lens to what's known as the working aperture. The image will get darker, so you'll need to let your eyes become accustomed to the change.

Depth of field preview also works in Live View. When combined with the Live View magnification control that allows you to zoom in and check focus on specific areas of the image, it becomes even more useful than checking DOF through the viewfinder.

The Basic Fundamental of Lighting a Green Screen

The Basic Fundamentals of Lighting a Green Screen

Learning how to evenly light your green screen backdrop will give you better results when it comes time to edit your video.

Lighting a green screen is fairly simple from a technical perspective, yet many DPs who don’t have much experience with chroma key work are prone to making some unfortunate mistakes on set. Unlike traditional film lighting, which is all about finding contrast and mood by balancing light and shadows, lighting a green screen is all about evenness and consistency.

For the purpose of this post, I’ll describe a basic green screen lighting setup that involves only two background lights. While two lights might be all you need for many scenarios (such as an interview setup), keep in mind that the basic principles outlined here can be applied to wider and larger green screen setups too — you just may need to add more light.

This image is inconsistently lit. The editor will have a difficult time keying the darker edges of the frame.

The most crucial thing to remember when lighting your green screen: any area of the backdrop that appears in the frame must be lit perfectly even and exposed correctly. If your backdrop is lit properly on one side but underexposed on the other, your compositor or editor will have a very tough time pulling a clean key. The same applies to a backdrop that’s either over or underexposed. Any attempt to pull a key from a backdrop that isn’t actually reading as green on camera will inevitably be a failure.

Lighting Green Screen Backdrops

The key is the same for achieving soft light in any other shooting scenario — use big, soft light sources. If you point a hard light source (such as tungsten light with no diffusion) at your green screen, you’re going to run into trouble. The light will have a hot spot and there will be a gradient surrounding it, ultimately giving you an uneven light to work with.

Conversely, if you were to point a tungsten light (let’s say a 2K source) at the green screen, but use a large 8 x 8 frame with a silk to diffuse the light, you’ll be in great shape. Personally, I prefer to use double diffusion when shooting on a green screen. My ideal setup typically involves a bright light source that’s first diffused by a standard 4 x 4 silk on a C-stand, and another 8 x 8 frame in front of that silk for an additional layer of diffusion. This ensures that the light is as even and soft as possible.

Placing Green Screen Lights

Assuming your needs are relatively simple, you can use a minimum of two lights to illuminate your backdrop. Using the setup described above, I recommend placing one light (with diffusion) on either side of the green screen, a few feet back on a 45 degree angle.

Right off the bat your results should be pretty close, and you can fine tune/adjust the angle of each light to make sure they’re not overlapping too much in the center. In other words, you don’t want to have a hotspot in the middle of your frame if both lights are spilling into each other. Be sure to adjust your lights and use flags when necessary, so your lighting is as even as possible.

It should also go without saying that you’ll want to use the exact same lights on either side of the green screen for the sake of consistency. If you’re using two different lights, you could run into exposure issues (or even worse, color temperature issues) which could once again cause headaches in post. With regards to the rest of your lighting setup, these will be creative decisions and are ultimately up to you.

If you want a more dramatic look on your talent, you can light them from the side. Alternatively, you might use two more flood lights on the talent’s face to create an even flat light. No matter what creative look you’re aiming for, thegreen screen will always need to be lit the exact same way.

On bigger productions, you may need to use overhead lighting, additional sources, or more diffusion, but the basic principles outlined here will apply no matter what.

Got any tips for working with a green screen? Share them in the comments below.

Help and Useful Software for editing

Processing your Green Screen Sequence

With your green screen sequence now shot, you need to key out your characters and props from the green screen itself. The best way to go about this process is to either use Adobe Premiere, After Effects or Nuke 9 along with a set of plug-ins. By using any of these pieces of software, along with the plug-ins and the previously discussed techniques, you can get your scene keyed out and ready for post-processing in no time.

Here is a list of software and tutorials to get you started and on your way.

POST-PROCESSING SOFTWARE:

POST-PROCESSING PLUG-INS:

We hope these techniques aid you when setting up for your next green screen sequence. If you have success using these techniques, or have questions and or comments regarding green screen capturing, let us know in the comments below.