The Last Light, Last Night...

Photo by Andrew Kufahl

The concept behind this photo came to me while I was thinking about a layout for a photo. It started as a guy sitting on a bed blowing out a candle. Just a really simple serene image. The phrase "The Last Light" popped into my head, and had a nice ring. Oftentimes, I like to make the titles for my images have a catchy feel to them... sometimes I'll have harsh consonants, sometimes I'll use softer words, sometimes a little bit of rhyme or alliteration. So I thought about the scene and decided to add "Last Night" to the end "The Last Light, Last Night"... perfect. But then I started to think about what was the "Last Light". At face value it is the candle... but what if I take it just a bit further... Technically, light has to travel from point A to point B. So wouldn't it be interesting if you could take a photo of a candle being extinguished, and your timing of the shutter was so precise that you captured it where the candle was out, but the last bit of traveling light was still illuminating something (in this case, the subject's face). The final image was how I wanted it to be, but I would have loved to explore further a method for showing that last bit of traveling light. I think there might be a way to illustrate it afterward with some graphical work in post-processing. Or, if this scene were painted or drawn I could also think of ways to depict it. But for now, I'll consider this a "scratchpad" concept, and how I've captured it and titled it will be in my portfolio to review at some point in the future.

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Day 355 of 365 - The Overflow Room At The Brenisher Museum Of Art

Photo by Andrew Kufahl

This is probably one of my favorite "trick shots" that I've done with long exposure techniques. The picture on the stairs is a picture of me, but the picture actually doesn't exist. No, I didn't photoshop myself onto that picture, I was actually standing/squatting just in front of the stairs. When the shutter opened, I manually fired the flash (which was gridded to only illuminate me), which then superimposed me onto the black piece of foam core that is on that picture frame. Then I quickly got out of the shot, and let the ambient light burn in the rest of the scene for the next 30 seconds. So it really is a single-take image, carefully engineered to take advantage of how darks and lights render when mixing flash with ambient light.

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Day 283 of 365 - Decisions...

Photo by Andrew Kufahl

This was a very fun shoot. Although, the mosquitos were NAS-TEE! My assitant and I walked around through the woods looking for the perfect size tree to use in this. The tree needed to fit between a normal-sized human's legs comfortably... not too wide, not too narrow. We lucked out and found this one right next to the path (which is what I was hoping to have). I get the general framing and composition figured out, then we setup a reflector on the left to highlight the runner's arm and leg on the shadow side.

My first goal is always to get the "standard" shot. The "standard" shot, is the simplest form of the final image that I would accept. In other words, even though my ultimate goal in this shot was to have the earbuds and water bottle flying, my first goal was to just get a good shot of the runner smacking into the tree without those other elements. Just getting that "standard" shot is all I need to know that technically I am done, and everything we do beyond that is experimentation. But hopefully, the experimentation is successful and ends up with the ultimate shot.

The breakdown of this shot is as follows... The runner is sitting on a stool behind the tree. A tiny bit of the stool was sticking out, and was easily post-processed out. Behind the runner, my assistant was crouched down and threw the earbuds when I told him to. The assistant was also slightly sticking out from behind the tree, so he was post-processed out as well.

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Day 281 of 365 - Night, By Door...

Photo by Andrew Kufahl

There's nothing I enjoy more than the challenge of modifying existing lighting. Especially when it's really crappy lighting that you cannot move (like street lights or lighted business signs). It took me a while to get things setup to look the way I wanted them to look. One of the bigger challenges was getting the red interior light to be the intensity I wanted it to be. After all, my two most significant light sources (the red interior light and the outdoor spot light) are both constant light sources and are both governed by the shutter. So, I had to move the diffusion panel closer/further from the light source to achieve the correct balance.

And of course, right when I nailed my "hero shot", I realized that the neighbor had come outside and their motion-light went on, leaving a wonderful specular highlight on the windows of the door on the left. And of course, the timer on their motion light was set to 10-minutes, so I just stood there doing nothing until it finally went off.

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Day 280 of 365 - About Falling Off Wagons...

Photo by Andrew Kufahl

Every so often I do a complete shoot, tear it down, and then end up having to set it all back up and re-shoot it. This is one of those. After reviewing the first round of images, I thought it would be funny to have Little Johnny pointing back at me and laughing (as shown in the final image). However, while setting everything up the second time, I realized that the original camera angle wasn't going to show Little Johnny's face as much as I would have liked it to. It seemed as though the whole composition would have to be re-thought, but I wasn't much in the mood because Little Johnny had enough already. So, I just shot it like this and left it.

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Day 277 of 365 - The Final Presentation of False Emotions

Photo by Andrew Kufahl

I was anticipating getting this photo complete in the early afternoon, as I had great natural light coming in through the window, and had worked out the framing and composition. But, I had to pick my son up from school. I didn't want to have to reconstruct the "scene", so I put masking tape everywhere to mark the position of the table, chairs, tripod, etc... that way if Little Johnny moved them when he got home I could move them right back. I wasn't able to re-visit this shot until later in the evening, so I had to figure out how to get light similar to what I was getting through the window earlier in the day. It took a little while to get it squared-away, but it wasn't rocket science. The biggest challenge of this shot was getting the knife at the right angle so that it's edge was highlighted. Ultimately I wanted the whole blade highlighted, but liked it much better with just the edge.

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Day 273 of 365 - Distorted Point of View

Photo by Andrew Kufahl

This photo has been mulling around in my brain for a number of weeks. I've had lots of different versions of what I wanted to attempt, but couldn't really focus on any one idea in particular, so I just left it stew in my head for a while. About a week ago I decided it was time to acquire a mirror so that I would have it available for whenever I decided it was time to do the shot.

(I'm going to sidetrack for a second and talk about mirrors and photography... I highly recommend that when using a mirror for photographic purposes that you stay away from the mirrors that have beveled edges. Bevels cause a lot of problems because they show things along the edges of the mirror that aren't in the composition. I'm not saying you CAN'T get them to work, I'm just saying they can cause a lot of frustration that's just not worth dealing with.)

I still didn't really have a good solid idea on the day I decided to use the mirror. I mean, I had kind of whittled it down to one or two versions, but neither was necessarily better than the other. In the end, the final shot wasn't really any of the top contenders that I had floating around in my brain. In other words, the session was more improvisational than anything... which I'll talk about in a minute.

Breaking a mirror... I'm a somewhat skeptical and cautious person. So when it comes to breaking a mirror, I'm not necessarily thinking about "how" to break the mirror, I'm thinking about "what could go wrong" as a result of breaking the mirror. So the first thing I decided to do was search the internet to see if anybody out there had advice about breaking mirrors. The first tip I found was to duct tape the back of the mirror. I was pretty sure that needed to be done, but this was good confirmation for my skeptical nature. Without the duct tape the pieces will all be loose and will just fall out all over the place. The duct tape keeps it all together. Outside of that, I really didn't find anything else on the Internet that pertained to my situation. It took me about 30 minutes to duct tape the mirror (because god-forbid the pieces of duct tape not be properly aligned). First I ran strips side-by-side vertically across the back of the mirror, then I did the same horizontally just in case. The next biggest struggle was deciding where I was going to hit the mirror. It was actually quite frustrating, even though it seems quite simple, but where the mirror is struck could play into what the story of the photo is. For example, if I was going to punch the mirror I would probably have the main break in the middle, or if I wanted it to look like I hit my head against it I would have the main break higher. But, as I said before, I hadn't really decided what the story was going to be, and that's why it was a struggle. You have to remember too, that once it is broken it is broken... you can't do it over without going and buying another mirror. So in the end I decided to put the break a little higher, and I would just make it work somehow. The physical act of breaking the mirror was more difficult than I expected. I thought just a firm tap on the back with a hammer would do it, as I wanted to make sure I didn't put a hole through it... but it ultimately took quite a whack to get it to break.

Once the mirror was set I just needed to figure out what I was going to do. I went through a series of setups, but none really inspired me until I did the fist-punching one. I spent probably 30 minutes figuring out the hand, elbow, body, head, and eye positions in the composition. I use visual cues to help me line-up consistently each time, and it usually works pretty well. For example, I always put my feet in the exact same spot, I place my knuckles in the same place, I close my right eye and just use my left eye to look at a particular crack in the mirror and make sure I can see the camera lens line up a certain way in relation to that crack. I got a couple keeper (safe) shots, so I moved on to doing shots with more facial emotion, such as laughing deviously, yelling, etc... Again, I got a couple keep (less safe) shots, so I moved on to one more idea I wanted to try. I grabbed a bowl of sugar and proceeded to use my right hand to throw a small amount at my left hand immediately before the shutter released. The hope was to make it look like a little bit of mirror debris was flying through the air. It actually looked decent, but I wanted more variety in the size of the debris, so I used some purple crushed glass. That's right, I said "purple"... it's all I had available. Looking at the preview on the back of my camera, I decided not to stress about the purple crushed glass, because it was the only purple in the photo and I figured I could adjust the color of it in post-processing (which is exactly what I did). The diffcult part of throwing the crushed glass isn't the timing, because I've done enough throwing of stuff in my 365 that I kind of have the hang of it. Instead, the problem I ran into was that the physical act of throwing something made it very difficult to keep my head position steady so that my left eye was in an intact area of the mirror (that is, that my eye wasn't landing on a crack). But in the end, once I realized this was a problem and focused on trying to stay still while throwing, it only took a handful of shots to get some keepers. So I decided I had enough, and it was time to wrap it up for the night. I took a photo of the lighting setup, then headed to the computer to select an image and process it.

Post-processing was actually very straight-forward. I don't think I did any blemish correction on myself or anything in the scene. The brunt of the post-processing work was really spent getting the colors the way I wanted them to be, and making some adjustments to shadow areas so that things looked good from a contrast-perspective. Then, of course, I had to deal with the purple crushed glass... so I added a "hue/satuation" layer, set the color I wanted to affect to "magenta", adjusted the range of magenta I wanted to affect, desaturated it, lightened it, and shifted the hue slightly until I had something more neutral (gray/white). I didn't need to mask anything off in order to change the crushed glass color, because (as I had mentioned earlier) there was nothing else in the image that was purple. I did sharpen the photo a little heavier than normal, as I wanted to cracks in the mirror to really pop and look sharp (literally), but overall the post-processing didn't take very long at all.

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