Stimulating Pixels

I think I mentioned before that I went out to Las Vegas for the first time back in October. It was just before my trip to Bama. The main reason for the Vegas trip was to go to another Supershoots event. Here’s one of my favorite images from the trip:

And here is a link to the rest of the proofs: link

Here’s another shot of Dave with his eyes on fire. Not one of the picks, but it shows the fire even higher. I should mention that I shot this on IR film. I was using a strobe and everything in terms of the exposure was a complete guess. I’m pretty sure I had never shot infrared with a strobe before and I sure hadn’t shot fire before. The negs are pretty dense. I’d say over exposed by about two stops. Three on some frames. If I had missed that far in my guessing with digital it would not have been recoverable. Of course, when you get virtually instant feedback with a histogram, it only would have taken one or two test shots to dial in the exposure.

Here’s one of the images I was scanning. One of my favorites out of all the ones I’ve ever shot. Yes. The flames are real. Dave ended up with second degree burns on his nose. Can’t say he wasn’t willing to sacrifice for art.

Here is the first real batch of Infra Red shots that I took a few weeks ago. It’s a raggae band named “De Lions of Jah” playing out a bar called Spare Time. I had one strobe on the camera with an infrared filter over it and was shooting with it on manual. I would change either the flash output or the aperature depending on how far away from the subject I was. Even after a fair amount of drinking it was pretty easy to get a good guess on the distance/power quickly. Of course, what really helped things was the ability to get a quick review on the LCD screen.

Here’s the proofs.

One interesting thing about the IR shooting is that things tend to change “color”. Or, at least grayscale value. For instance, this guy was wearing a black shirt.

I’ve been being lazy with my blog or late. A bunch of stuff picked up at work and I’ve been trying to get a bunch of other things in life in order and I just haven’t written anything. This is kinda the way I am though. A little bit bi-polar when it comes to things. I get focused on something and do it a lot, then move away from it for a while. Anyways, there should be some more posting soon.

I still need to get my write up of the Infrared done, and get the full photo galley posted. I’m, once again, building my own web gallery template/system which is also holding up the process. Even though there are a ton of ways out there that I could pull one off the shelf and have saved a ton of time and already had everything posted they don’t work EXACTLY the way I want. They are probalby 80-90%, but for what I want, the real refinement of that last 10-20% is important to me. Plus, I get a lot of enjoyment out of building the system.

I took the recently converted to Infrared 10D out to a bar last night to start putting it through its paces with a little band photography. When I have a chance I’ll do a write up about everything, but one of the key points is that the flash setup worked pretty much as expected. For example:

What was surprising, was that for the most part, I didn’t actually need the flash. The lights weren’t that bright (and I forgot to get an actual meter reading), but apparently the stage lights put out a ton of IR and the color gels don’t block it much at all. This makes sense now that I think about because stage lights naturally get really hot. My guess is the gels are specifically designed to allow Infrared to pass to help keep them from getting even hotter. Anyway, this was shot at ISO 800 – f/5.0 at 1/80 sec.

The meter in the camera was saying that it was greater than 2 stops under exposed. Hopefully, I’ll remember next time to actually get an accurate visible light meter reading for comparison sake.

Anyway, I’ll be posting more when I’ve had a chance to edit them down and get a full write-up to push to the world for prosperity’s sake.

Just got the IR converted camera back at lunch today. I walked outside and took a couple of test images. Here’s one:

My chrome that I’m going to use for the flash filter isn’t in yet, but should be this week. So, still need a few parts to get the system I’ve envisioned together but the key part is in play. I’m very psyched.

Just an update for those following the progress. I’ve gotten a note saying that my camera has arrived in Washington, has been converted and is on its way back. Estimated Delivery Day according to UPS is Tuesday, Aug. 1.

I didn’t like the fact that August was so close since time seems to keep flying by, but now I’m REALLY looking forward to it getting here.

The first time I tried setting up an infrared flash to do flash photography without visible light was back in the film days. The experiment didn’t last long due to the price of materials. To filter the flash, I saved up and bought a 3×3 Kodak 87C infrared filter. These things aren’t cheep. I think they were like $45-50 back then. Now they go for about $57. One thing to keep in mind with a filter that blocks all the visible light and only lets infrared pass is that the visible energy turns into heat.

The first time I popped the strobe after taping the flash to the front I had it at full power and the filter singed, hissed and crumpled up a fair amount. If you have ever seen a piece of surran wrap get to hot and crinkle up it’s the same thing. This was when I was in high school or early college. And while $50 is nothing to sneeze at today, it was way more of my income back then.

This time I’m going to try the trick of using an unexposed but developed piece of slide film for the filter. Originally, I was thinking about doing this with my Alien Bees which would have probably required getting 4×5 film, but since I’ve been reading a lot of strobist, I’m going to be running this with smaller strobes which will allow me to run with 120 film. If this works, it’ll be waaaayyy less expensive per filter, and I won’t mind as much if they burn themselves up.

Just sent my old 10D off to Life Pixel to have it converted. After years of talking about this, I’m finally starting the process.