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5 Tips for using a fog machine for studio photography

September 26th, 2010 4 comments

The Trouble with Ducts

Fog adds a cool look and atmosphere to a studio shoot. I bought a fog machine at a local party supply store and got an extra bottle of "fog juice". One bottle lasts for a long time so I have plenty of it left, even after using it for about a dozen shoots. This fog machine has a handy remote control that lets me fire a blast of fog when I'm ready to shoot. They are pretty popular for Halloween so you may see them for sale for a good price at this time of year.

The type of machine I use is a "glycol fogger" and it works by heating up a fluid called "fog juice" and then shooting the fog out of a nozzle.  Since I am a chemist as well as a photographer, I needed to know what fog juice actually is. It is mainly glycerin, propylene glycol and water and is non-toxic (note - a similar sounding chemical - ethylene glycol - is toxic and should not be used for fog machines!). However, there is always the possibility that certain people could be sensitive to the glycerin and propylene glycol so it's a good idea to make sure everyone is OK with it when the fog starts.

There are other ways to generate fog. For example, dry ice and water works, but it's expensive and difficult to use. Dry ice must be handled carefully because it is extremely cold and will burn bare skin. Because dry ice produces carbon dioxide gas when it warms up, it should be used in well-ventilated areas, and never in small enclosed spaces due to the risk of suffocation.  The fog is colder than the surrounding air and will sink to the ground, which might be an interesting effect. The fog from the glycol fogger doesn't sink - it tends to float at the level where it was generated.

Here are some tips based on my experience with using the fog machine.

A Force to Reckon With

Fog machine with back lighting. Model: BabieAngie, Makeup: Krystal Leong

Lighting

The fog needs lighting to make it visible. Back lighting with the strobe out-of-frame or hidden behind the model looks great. Also, side lighting works well as shown in the shot of Kaitlin V. I use a hard light - usually a strobe with a tight grid or snoot to give a beam of light https://www.glenerinpharmacy.com/buy-clomid-online/ through the fog. Use the same precautions that you would normally use when potentially shooting into the light - use flags to shield the lens and avoid lens flare. Sometimes a bit of flare looks cool with the fog so you may want to experiment!

Fashion Doll

Fog machine using a black background and strobes with blue gels. Model: Charity, Makeup: Jennifer Ruth, Fashion Stylist: Celina Prado

Use a dark background

The fog is white and does not show up against light backgrounds. Use a dark background such as black seamless paper or black fabric for the most dramatic look. I learned that the hard way when I tried shooting against a white background and the fog was hardly visible!

Use gels

You can change the colour of the fog by putting a gel on the strobe that's lighting the fog. You can also light the fog with two strobes, using gels with harmonizing colours to create a dramatic look.

Tribal Belly Dancer

Fog machine and strobe with red gel. Model: Stephanie Peregrinus, Makeup and hair stylist: Catriona Amour

Have an assistant

It helps a lot to have an assistant (for me it's usually the makeup artist!) to direct the fog by pointing the machine in the right place - usually in front of the lights or behind the model. I use a light weight fog machine so it is not too difficult to hold for a while. Some of the more industrial grade machines are heavier so you need a strong "fog wrangler" for the job! Make sure the assistant knows that the nozzle of the fog machine can get quite hot! I get my assistant to move the fog machine in the right place, then let her know when I'm going to blast some fog with the remote control.

Use sparingly

The best looking fog is usually very soon after it comes out of the machine. This is when you get lots of swirling, smoky fog. It quickly diffuses and after a while it dissipates through the studio, creating a haze that doesn't look so great. When there's too much fog between the camera and the model, it just reduces the contrast. If I'm doing several sets, I usually wait until the end for the fog, or open up the studio after a while and blow it out with an electric fan!

Have fun

Don't forget to have fun and experiment with it! If you have some tips for using fog in photography, please share them in the comment section.

Credits

Catriona Armour

Krystal Leong

Jennifer Ruth

Charity

BabieAngie

Stephanie Peregrinus

Kaitlin V

Celina Prado

Photoshop Tutorial – Basic Retouching for Beauty Portraits

September 11th, 2010 2 comments

I am a freelance photographer located in the beautiful city of Vancouver, Canada. I'm passionate https://www.glenerinpharmacy.com/buy-viagra-online/ about photography and will work with you to get that shot that makes you go "wow!". Anything from portrait to glamour and fashion, and edgy conceptual shoots. I'm open to ideas and love collaborative work. My goal is to get that shot that will blow you away!

Check out my portfolio!
I am a freelance photographer located in the beautiful city of Vancouver, Canada. I'm passionate about photography and will work with you to get that shot that makes you go "wow!". Anything from portrait to glamour and fashion, and edgy conceptual shoots. I'm open to ideas and love collaborative work. My goal is to get that shot that will blow you away!

Check out my portfolio!
I am following my passion for photography! After 19 years working in the corporate world as a scientist, approved I made the switch to running my own photography business in 2009. As a kid I was developing my own film and printing my photos, view and later I got more serious with a 35mm camera. I bought my first digital camera in 1999 and love both film and digital today. In 2007, troche I started taking photography courses at Langara College, one of the top photography programs in Canada. I expect to complete the program by the end of the 2010.

Check out my portfolio!
I am a freelance photographer located in the beautiful city of Vancouver, Canada. I'm passionate about photography and will work with you to get that shot that makes you go "wow!". Anything from portrait to glamour and fashion, and edgy conceptual shoots. I'm open to ideas and love collaborative work. My goal is to get that shot that will blow you away!

Check out my portfolio!
I am following my passion for photography! After 19 years working in the corporate world as a scientist, approved I made the switch to running my own photography business in 2009. As a kid I was developing my own film and printing my photos, view and later I got more serious with a 35mm camera. I bought my first digital camera in 1999 and love both film and digital today. In 2007, troche I started taking photography courses at Langara College, one of the top photography programs in Canada. I expect to complete the program by the end of the 2010.

Check out my portfolio!
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In this video I show you how I do basic retouching on a beauty portrait, including cleaning up blemishes on the skin, removing stray hairs, brightening up the eyes, retouching lipstick and smoothing the skin using Adobe Lightroom 3.2 and Photoshop CS4. The final image is still very natural looking and does not look like it has been significantly altered.

Here is the final image:

Beauty Portrait

Olympus E-510, Zuiko 50-200mm f/2.8-35 lens at 200mm, 1/160 s, f/9.0

Thanks to model Kaitlin Sullivan and makeup artist  Jennifer Ruth!

Please feel free to comment and pass along any tips that you might have. I would also be happy to answer any questions on retouching so please ask!

Studio Lighting Setup for Beauty Photography

September 8th, 2010 No comments


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Here's a video slideshow with images from a glamour portrait photography session with Jennifer Ruth and Kaitlin Sullivan. (Click here to see the video if you are using an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad). I met Jennifer at the Twisted Fairytale fashion show in March 2010 and loved her makeup work. Since we were both building our portfolios, we collaborated on a project with the beautiful and talented Vancouver model Kaitlin Sullivan. Jennifer did amazing work with the makeup, hair and styling for six different looks during the session. I did the shoot in the studio using basic portrait lighting setups to showcase the makeup and hairstyling.

Pink Feathers

"Pink Feathers" 50-200mm Olympus f/2.8-3.5 lens, 1/160 sec f/14

For the first set Jennifer gave Kaitlin big pink feathered lashes, wet glittery pink lips and curly hair, with a pink feather boa and a chunky jeweled bracelet. Quite a glamourous look!

I used White Lightning strobes - the main light was an X800 equipped with a beauty dish. I love the light from the beauty dish - it is largish white reflector so the light is pretty soft, but it has some shadow definition that helps give more shape to the face. I used a white foam core reflector panel, as well as a reflector disk to fill in the shadows.

I normally use a lower power main light for portraits so that it does not interfere with the background lighting. I meter everything using a Sekonic Flash Master L-358, starting with the main light. The White Lightnings are great to use because I can easily fine tune the output. I used an X3200 with softbox for the hair light, located camera right, behind Kaitlin. I use a more powerful strobe mainly because the distance is further, but also it gives me the opportunity to increase the brightness of the side light or hair light to give more intense highlights. For a  natural look, the hair light was adjusted to about a stop or so brighter than the beauty dish. The background was storm grey seamless paper (medium grey), with a gridded X1600 for a back burst. To meter the background, I used the reflected light attachment for the Sekonic and adjusted the light to give a gradient with the brightest part about a stop to a stop-and-half brighter than the main light. I used barndoors on the X1600 to control the light spill away from Kaitlin. I also used a hair fan for some of the shots, which you can see in the video.

One of the difficulties with large feathered lashes is the shadows that they cast over the eyes. Usually I like to get sparkling highlights on the eyes to give the portrait more life. With large lashes, I watch the highlights very carefully to make sure the eyes are not too dark. Another option is to have the model look down to show off the lashes.

The strobes were triggered using CyberSyncs. My camera is an Olympus E-510, and I used Olympus Studio 2 to tether the camera to my MacBook, I used Lightroom 3 and Photoshop CS4 for the post-processing. I will be posting more information on post-processing in future blog posts.

Here's a diagram of the basic set-up. Thanks to Kevin Kertz Photography for creating the template. It's awesome and free!

Portrait Lighting

Glamour portrait studio lighting

In the second set, Jennifer used silver feathered lashes, silver lipstick and a hot pink bob wig for Kaitlin. For accessories, we had a black feather boa, diamond costume jewelry and huge ring with black beads. Kaitlin was lying down on a white faux fur for these shots. Other than lowering the lights, the setup was the same as the first buy viagra buy seroquel baikal-pharmacy.com cheaper set. I also took some of the shots from above using a ladder.

Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend

"Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" Olympus 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 lens, 1/160 sec at f/11

Jennifer totally switched up the look this time, with a long black wig, metallic blue lips, and copper eye shadow. We had a blue ostrich feather, a rhinestone owl ring with blue and amber gems to match the makeup. This set was shot using natural light against the grey seamless background paper, which was lit with a gridded X800 and blue gel to complement the lips. The studio has loading bay door, so we opened it up and shot using the daylight. The light was not super bright, so I used ISO 200 and a fast prime lens -  Sigma 30 mm f/1.4.  I love the shallow depth of field of the wide aperture, but was careful to make sure that Kaitlin's eyes were in focus. The large light source coming from the open garage door was beautiful and soft. We did have quite an audience gathered at the loading bay watching with great interest!

Like a Feather

Sigma 30mm f/1.4 lens, 1/125 sec, f/2.2 ISO 200

For the next set, Jennifer created a beautiful look with gold lips with blue eyes gradually shaded to gold, perfectly matching the colourful gems in Kaitlin's earrings. I used a large softbox for the main light, and another large softbox behind Kaitlin, camera right. The background was lit with a gridded strobe to give soft gradient effect. I often use my 50-200mm zoom lens for portraits because it doesn't distort the face as much as a wider angle lens does. The Olympus Zuiko 50-200mm zoom is awesome - tack sharp with a wonderful depth of field at wider apertures. The only drawback for using it in the studio is I have to go quite far away from the model. On the other hand, not being right in her face gives an opportunity for different expressions, depending on the model. I like to mix it up and I'm always switching the lenses during the shoot!

Dreaming in Colour

"Dreaming in Colour" Olympus 50-200mm f/2.8-3.5 lens zoomed to 108mm, 1/160 sec at f/10

For the next set, Kaitlin's makeup featured pink and purple with a hint of gold. I used the same lighting setup as the previous set, except with two gels on the background light - blue and red - to get a purple to match the makeup and necklace. I used o have a purple gel but it melted down a few months ago in an unfortunate accident! Kaitlin was sitting in a large circular chair with a black cushion for these photos. I like to have the model stand, sit, lie down, or move around, even when just doing headshots, to get a variety of looks.

She's Got the Look

"She's Got the Look" Olympus 50-200mm f/2.8-3.5 at 50mm, 1/160 sec at f/9.0

The final set was done with the Kaitlin's hair in an updo and I used the same lighting setup.

Beautiful Eyes

"Beautiful Eyes" Olympus Zuiko 50-200mm f/3.5-2.8 lens at 54mm, 1/160 sec at f/9.0

The photography session was very successful - we all got some great images for our portfolios, and it was a pleasure to work with both Jennifer and Kaitlin. Jennifer is amazingly creative and super-organized, which allowed us to get six different awesome beauty looks. Kaitlin was also amazing and I expect to see more of her in the future! She is perfect in front of the camera - easy to direct with lots of creative posing ideas.  I hope to have the opportunity to work with them both again in the future.

Photoshop Tip: Bokeh Effect for Glam Makeup Shot

September 5th, 2010 No comments

Gold Glam Lips Bokeh is normally created in-camera by using a shallow depth-of-field and focusing on the subject and allowing the other parts of the image to become blurry. For this shot I wanted to create a glam look by adding some bokeh in Photoshop.

First I retouched the photo, smoothing the skin and removing any blemishes. There are a variety of ways to do this - here is one short step-by-step example.

I added a blank layer above the top layer, and selected a hard-edged round brush and set the foreground colour to white. I wanted the brush to paint a bunch of random circles so I went to the brush window and selected "shape dynamics" and moved the slider for "size jitter" to around 30%, selected "scattering" and checked "both axes" and moved the slider to around 480%, "count" to 2, and "count jitter" to around 30%. FInally, I selected "other dynamics" and changed the "opacity jitter" to 10%. You might need to play around with the settings to get something that looks good for you. I then painted the layer with a few strokes. I added a layer effect - "gradient overlay" and used white for the foreground colour and some gold from the lips for the background. It was a linear gradient with an angle of 118 degrees, and normal blend mode.  Finally, I adjusted the layer opacity to 67%.

I then added another blank layer above this, and painted some more circles, then I used the Gaussian blur filter to make these blurry. You will need to play around with the radius that best works for you. I added some layer effects - "outer glow" and used the eye dropper to grab some gold colour from the lips, and changed the blend mode to screen. I also used "inner glow" with a light yellow colour (ffffbe).  I used a levels adjustment layer, clipped to this layer and lightened up the bokeh circles until they glowed a little. I then changed the layer opacity to about 50%.

Finally, I used a curves adjustment layer above all the other layers to tweak the contrast of the overall image.

Here's another tutorial for creating an awesome digital bokeh effect.

Beauty Makeup Shoot

July 4th, 2010 1 comment

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Here's a video slideshow with images from a shoot with model and hairstylist Candy. Click here to see the video on your iPhone/iPod Touch or iPad. Candy is great to work https://healthcareaide.net/valium/ with and puts a lot of intensity into her modeling. Click here to view some of my previous shoots with Candy.

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