Here’s a short wrap up on how far I’ve come to date. I now actively use my home built opal plastic tube thingi that some of you have seen and I want to thank Ted who gave me the idea (the round shape that was). Also a big thanks’ to all of you that gave suggestions and comments in my “HELP ME” post – for you that missed it, please visit and read. Great comments!

On the right is my original sketch of how I thought the opal stuff could be used and my setup right now more or less looks the same, although I only use three light sources – One from beneath as the picture show and one from the left and the big soft box from right, tilted 45 degrees. So it’s not exactly as the sketch but very close.

Here is the video I made that shows how I built the box.

And yes, it’s very irritating that the video size came up wrong – Mom looks fat! :D I tried to use the built in uploader within ScreenFlow – but as you see it doesn’t cope well with my wide screen iMac. I better export using x264 in the future as well.

I also try to eliminate the need to paint those rings – and by painting I mean using the curve tool and then paint in Photoshop using the brush – which you need to do if you have bad reflections – and with this setup I more or less eliminated any unwanted, unfriendly reflection. The thing that looks like a light source is actually a white paper thing that I put inside to give a shape. (Clive). I’m still experimenting.

In order to make it look as goldish as possible I needed to see gold because these rings are all made out of different materials – and has slightly different tones of metal color – kind of goldish but often not so I have to work on each to make them look kind of the same. Although I do feel that I over did it some on these below. I used this shot / illustration as gold model.

All images developed and edited using Photoshop Lightroom 3 and Photoshop. No painting this time – I might do that with the final thing but I’ll try to avoid it as much as possible. ISO100 used. Might change back to ISO50 as it’s MUCH denser to work with.

I have some left to do, but something tells me that the hardest part is behind me now.

Here’s a second movie about the set in action. :)

I now tried so many different setups – and I’m still not satisfied with how my ring shots come out. I do make one or two images here and there that looks perfectly ok but as soon as I change ring with a different shape everything has to be changed / or lots of work in post (PS) has to be done. See video for more info on what I want from you, you could help me more than you think. :)

The opal plastic sheet that I have is 1.5 x 2.5m (about). I have four flashes that I can use, although I think two or three around and one below shining through somehow could be the best solution. (I need it to be a really white background).

Watch it in HD please. :) Also, for my Chinese audience. I have 500MB per week to upload in VIMEO and my limit for this week is up, I will try to post stuff there as well so that you can see videos. If you want any video (like the videos from last post and post it on some chinese version of youtube, then please mail me and I’ll send those to you!.

Now I moved so much away from my initial setup that I feel that I will show you a picture or two of what my current setup actually looks like. Woohoo! I will post some in the comments section.  The above shot is slightly cleaned up – the gold surface was slightly scratched and some dents so I repainted the middle reflection and the bottom left - but other than that it’s the original photo – I’m now very satisfied with how reflections works – and if I change ring reflections still look beautiful. I must say that the pure IQ that the Sigma SD15 gives is extremely high. I’ve been looking at other photographers works with jewelry and once you go closer it just doesn’t look good. This shot is available in full size as well. A bit too full really. :)

This time I didn’t use anything else than LR3 and PS5. The only thing left now is to continue with OOF – and see where I should stop before text is readable. This shot is ISO50, 105mm, f11, 1/160s.

I noticed that it’s more or less impossible to get correct focus at more then one ring at a time (at f7.1) – so I took three shots and combined them in PS.. :)  It’s really late too, I should go to bed. hmm.. This is a Lightroom 3 conversion of SD15 file, not bad – but not as good as from SPP.

I’m pretty much set now with my setup – this last shot had no changes, no painting except taking away a little dust – although getting the background WHITE is time consuming when there is so much blur to deal with. The foremost black corners will also be a little bit less black – one white foam infront of camera is missing.

Final capture for day four: We had a long talk today, me and the jewelry guy. He wanted the text within each ring to be unreadable so we decided that taking each text away using PS would take way to long, but using a wider aperture could work instead. I had to move the light quite a bit (I used lowest power at f20 on those last shots) and now I had to use  a semitransparent white circular reflector in-between the softbox and the “set” . I finally got a working F8. I could go all the way down to f5.6 but then it was hard to see anything exept one or two diamonds in focus.

I also wrapped the whole sets bottom in golden reflective material – and it seams to work pretty nicely. There is a 3000px version of the below image.

Slightly older part, posted this morning: Today I wanted to try something real and off went Linns ring. I told her to clean it carefully because of all the dirt seen by the mighty 105mm Sigma lens. But wow, we didn’t expect this much scratches to be there – and thanks to photoshop and my great painting skills I was able to partly save her ring. :)

This time I added the Sigma 530 DG, snooted from the right – and the big softbox as always from the top, slightly tilted so that I can reach with the Sigma SD15. Developed using Sigma Photo Pro 4.1 using vivid color mode.

After:

Before:

Also, here’s another shot, another ring, this time a fake one – just trying different ways to reflect. This time I’m holding a long hard, white paper above the ring, infront of the flash. Creates a light, pretty OK looking thingi. And don’t look too close on this one, at 100% size it looks horrible!! Sooo much dirt. (although I didn’t upload the full size of this one).

Another wedding session, and I’m happy to announce that DP1 is a great b camera! :D Linn had hers with her all the time (she assist me) and she took quite a few really nice shots. I used mine as well and I got more keepers from the DP1 (compared to amount of shots taken) than with the SD14. More time to think? I think one or two of Linns are among these too.

My workflow has slightly changed and looks like the following. I make the basic adjustments from SD14 and DP1 RAW in SPP 2.5 Windows. After adjustments are done I import all into a new project in Apple Aperture.

In Aperture I use the new plugin called Viveza to further adjust certain spots – add light to face or simply to enhance black and white images. I also use Aperture to dodge and burn, crop and straighten, add vignetting and my little watermark. I don’t apply vignetting to all but to many shots. So don’t judge lenses because of my images. hehe..

During all this I also add stars to my favorites, this I later use when publishing to the couple and the very best here on my website. I ended up with 44 images in this post and 133 to the couple, I started with about 300 from SPP and around 700 in total from field..

The two above shots are DP1

DP1

There is all in all 44 images in this post. Click each image to view the full size image. Remember that this is copyrighted material.

DP1

DP1

DP1

DP1

Linns shot, 10-20mm

DP1

DP1

DP1

DP1

Linn is pretty active in some Chinese photo-forums and they have these missions that they give eachother. This time it’s about coffee and well, I became assistant! Nice. :D These are two of the resulting pictures, the rest can be seen over at Linns blog – put together in a very Chinese fashion with texts etc. We did that i Apple Pages.

Oh, and in a couple of days my USB sound card will arrive and I can do a screener with RD. I’m thinking about making a series. My problem so far has been that I can’t use my Hackintosh because no mic in. there is one but not supported. So a USB sound card will solve this and make everything much more fun.

AND one last thing. Jeff Sickel has begun the hard work with a Quicklook plugin for X3F files and all I can say is WOW! I had a chance to try it and it works better than I thought. Thanks Jeff. It will become public when Jeff is done. Update! Jeff is DONE! :D see http://www.rytterfalk.com/2008/01/22/apple-quicklook-x3f-plugin/

Latest update above – just to let you know I’m alive. ;) Can’t give you bigger for the moment (I want to give you the original at 12800px) but for copyright reasons I can’t. The biggest problem has really been to make these look ok on a white bottom and ina sort of square angle. You know, everything boringly straight. :)

[Edit: It's easier to help if you know what I'm doing so here's what I've done. I tried many different ways and I do have another flash that I can use if needed. The tent is 90x90cm. These examples are taken one by one with the 105mm lens. Can't go shorter. Need them to be possible to place as seen on the picture and I tried 7 different lenses and found 105 to give the "right" feeling. Even tried the 120-300 hehe /Edit] .

Right now I’m currently working with product photography for a company that creates concept for modern interior design. Really nice stuff. Started today by buying tools needed for the task (Tent, glass table etc). There’s about 500 products that I’m going to take pictures of and they all need to have transparent backgrounds. Tricky to get it right. So I’ve been fighting to get the best possible light, with a background that’s easy to extract. (using PS CS3). Products are mostly quite small, pretty square and often white, some glossy. Which makes it a bit tricky. :)

If you have any tips and tricks I’d love to hear it. :)

My little sister has some pets, they’re growing fast and soon their tails are gone. (or built in) so I had to take these images tonight, at least she wanted me to. So here goes. Small mini tiny frogs. Five close ups.

Camera Sigma SD14 – Lenses 50mm and 105mm Sigma Macros.

I underexposed by mistake (hard to use flash when something is this small) bounced to some paper that I asked Linn to hold and as I moved she had to move too. Not very easy. So these are much brighter than my originals. Lucky me I shoot RAW! :D


Look at bigger Black and White version.

Open 100% crop of this last frog. (it’s crop as above, slightly more time spent in photoshop to get it perfect).

Link broken, take a look here for some of them: http://www.pbase.com/rytterfalk/minority