My partner Brence Coghill is also a photographer, which means a couple of things:
1. We have a lot of photos, usually with one or the other of us in them, but
2. We don’t have many nice pictures with BOTH of us in them, because one of us is usually behind the camera.
To remedy this dire situation we headed out last weekend to a favourite alleyway in Christchurch armed with a 5D and a couple of lenses plus a lightstand, flash, brolley and remote trigger. Setting up the camera on a tripod and using the self-timer function (which necessitated a lot of running back and forth), we goofed around taking photos of ourselves.
Lots of them looked pretty random, as we couldn’t ‘see’ what we were doing. We’d take a few pictures and then review them on the back of the camera and realise the angles all looked terrible or we’d done weird facial expressions. “What am I doing with my ARMS?” “Why can’t I smile like a NORMAL PERSON?”
But by doing shoot-a-few-and-review we manged to hone in on some ones that worked. We split the winners and each worked up a batch in Photoshop (we both have a fairly similar post-pro process, mainly adding a bit of saturation, selective lighting enhancement, local contrast enhancement and vignetting).
Here’s some of my favourites – these had post-production done by Sharon:
These last three had post-production done by Brence (the very last pic is our favourite).
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August 27th, 2010 at 6:02 pm
Hello Sharon,
I stumbled across your website today and I must say I’m really impressed with you and your partners work. The understanding both of you have in regards to strobist style lighting is awesome. I’m a huge fan of David Hobby and Neil Van Niekerk, and it’s great to see some locals practising the same lighting concepts.
I myself am a journalism student at CPIT and a budding young photographer too. It’s a really hard industry to break into, but I try to get out as much as I can and take photos, experimenting with speedlights etc.
My question was just in regards to the photoshoot with your partner – how did you manage to get the photo in focus? Did you manually focus first then took the photo? Or did you manage to get the self-timeer to autofocus?
I’m wanting to do the same thing with my partner, and I totally understand where you’re coming from when you say you don’t/didn’t have any photos of you and your partner!
Cheers, and thanks for your time,
Sanele
August 27th, 2010 at 8:35 pm
Hi Sanele,
Thanks for your comment. Strobist is definitely a great site to start delving into off-camera lighting. There’s a LOT to learn and play around with, but it’s great fun (as well as highly frustrating at times!)
Re: the photos Brence and I did in the alleyway – we had the camera on a tripod set on Manual, with 10-sec self-timer and we varied between using AutoFocus for some shots and good old-fashioned hand-cranked manual focus for others.
Note that I have my camera set up with a custom function to use Back Button Autofocus. I would look through the lens while Brence stood roughly ‘in position’ in front of the wall and I would press the * button on the back of the camera to set focus on him. Then I would press the shutter button to trigger the 10 sec self-timer countdown, and would run over to Brence and we’d strike a pose. Sometimes we’d spend 9 seconds going “uh… uh…. uh….” and then would just do something crazy right before the shutter tripped. That’s how the piggyback picture happened.
Focusing this way was still a bit hit and miss. We shot mainly between f2.8 and f4, and did get some backfocused pictures because we ended up leaning forwards past the range of focus when we hit our poses. A handy tip is to have the person you are pre-focusing on stand as far forward as you’ll end up – your zone of focus will extend further behind then in front of your actual focus point, so if you focus on the ‘near side’ you get a bit more margin for error.
You can also increase your odds by shooting a smaller aperture and extending your depth of field (still making sure you don’t end up moving too far forward of your DOF zone when you hit your pose or clown around in front of the camera!)
You can get wireless triggers for your camera hotshoe that have a handheld remote control you can use to activate the Autofocus and trip the shutter (the standard half-press/full press action). There are some on TradeMe I believe if you want to play around. But I kind of like the running back-and-forth method because it induces a certain level of silliness and fun to the whole experience (and it leaves your hands free to wave around in the shot).
I totally encourage you and your partner to get out there and just play around. Brence and I do this a lot. One of our favourite things to do is to set the camera on self timer and then right before it takes the photo we jump in the air and try to strike the craziest possible kung-fu pose. We’ve got all kinds of totally goofy jumping photos. It’s a good laugh, and it beats watching TV.
cheers,
Sharon
If you don’t already use back button autofocus I highly recommend giving it a try if your camera supports it.