I dont know why you said a ‘attempt’ at photography Lurker – these are fantastic shots considering you are not professional (or are you??)

I wish my skills was as good as this

I look forward to seeing more of your work soon

Yes, I agree — these are excellent photos, especially from a non pro!

Some humble comments, also from a non-pro who probably knows considerably less than you do, so take them for what they’re worth.

You certainly succeeded in getting the uniform lighting that says “professional”. It looks so much better than the deer-in-the-headlights effect you get with a single camera flash, or the harsh shadows and/or odd color balance you often get on sunlight or natural room lighting.

But maybe your lighting in these pictures is a little too flat. There’s no dramatic “punch” to it, for lack of a better word. What about a key light illuminating the model’s hair and/or face? True, we are already instinctively drawn to human faces (especially pretty ones belonging to members of your sexual orientation) but a little extra emphasis from the lighting wouldn’t hurt.

If anybody disagrees with this, please say so — that’s how I learn. And I’m just starting.

I notice that in most of your pictures from this year we can still see “catch lights” (or whatever you call them), those small but very appealing white reflections in the model’s eyes. They seem to be centered, implying they’re reflections of your on-camera flash. Was that the case even though you ran it at only 1/64 power just to trigger the other strobes? Was your camera flash pointed directly at the models?

HI Lurker (and anonanonanon7),

Welcome to the obsessive-about-photographic-quality bondage photographers’ club 😉

I think you can see a big step forward going from the compact to the dSLR and improved lighting. The main thing you now have is control, rather than being stuck with the best the camera could do on auto 🙂 🙂 🙂

I’d play around with the lighting ratios a bit- maybe try using the shoot through umbrella as they key light instead of the fill, and turn the fill down a bit. Shoot-throughs are usually more light efficient than bounce umbrellas and usually also produce a slightly harder light with more defined shadows, which is usually what one wants for the key- it should be the brighter of the two lights and also the harder.

Some sort of hairlight or backlight would help too of course. Hotel rooms can be a pig to light because it can be hard to get any back light in. I sometimes put a small light on a boom or a clamp stand somewhere in the background- depending how fast you shoot, even a small regular flashgun on manual can produce a nice hairlight as long as it can trigger from the main system somehow. If and when funds permit, buying a third light that is small enough and agile enough to be used as a hairlight would complement your existing lighting rig nicely.

To answer the question about how dSLRs handle white balance, and the benefits of shooting raw. Raw files store the unprocessed data from the imaging chip (more or less- most camera’s processors do a bit of work on the data, compressing it losslessly like a ZIP file for example). As you say, raw files store the full dynamic range of the image (not the 8 bits of JPEG) and also allow you to put off several choices until post-processing. Most notable of those choices is the choice of what white balance and tone curves to apply.

Setting white balance on the camera makes no difference to what the per-pixel data in the raw file are. It just sets a data word in the file suggesting to the raw processing software that maybe it should start off by treating this image as if it were daylight balanced (or whatever). So it is just setting a switch in the metadata, which will enable you to change your mind in post processing, either because you cocked up, or because you want to do something else for dramatic effect.

Raw also allows you to get the benefit of all that extra dynamic range and decide exactly which bits of the range you are interested in. You can then map the linear response of the sensor into a file suitable for viewing by humans on computer monitors by an appropriate choice of tone curves. If you shoot JPEG, you usually control that through a choice of scene file (“natural” look, “saturated” look, etc.) But that information gets “baked in” to a JPEG, along with the white balance choice, and with only 8 bits of range, if you get the choice wrong, you’ve probably thrown away any chance to change your mind, see a bit more detail in the shadows, etc..

I would recommend anyone serious about their photography to shoot raw these days. In the early days of the site we shot in JPEG, which seemed to make sense at the time as storage space and card space was relatively expensive and the dynamic range benefits were not so marked for older cameras anyway, as they didn’t have such great sensors. But with Terabytes of data storage available for less than a hundred pounds, 16 GB cards routinely available, and the much better sensors in modern cameras it makes no sense to throw away information until the very last step in the processing chain.

One of the things I’m really hoping for over the next few years is the continuation of this trend to video capture. Our new video camera is lovely, but it is kinda crippled by being limited to shooting 8 bits with baked-in white balance and scene files- essentially the equivalent of shooting JPEGs, and JPEGs with pretty low quality settings at that. RED have produced a moderately affordable (for “buying a swanky new car” values of affordable!) system which records to something a bit like RAW for video, and I’m really hoping that they and their competitors keep developing this sort of technology until it is available in a more sensible package. (Or that the recession finally ends, people start spending again, and we can maybe look at hiring an actual digital cinema system at least for major video shoots… 🙂 🙂 🙂 )

Cheers, Hywel

Thanks to Hywel and Lurker both for their informative comments!