First, I had the sensors cleaned on the D90 and D7200. Pretty reasonable price and they did it while I was there.
Next I wanted to see what the Nikon 200-500 lens really looked and felt like. I did. Yea, I could have bugged the store people about it at any other time, but on Saturday I could bug the Nikon Rep. It's bigger and heavier than I thought. What I found out is I need to include in that purchase price a mono-pod. The lens is coming in at around 5 pounds, its not a real mobile thing. Good information. Still in the running.
I'll get to the walking shoes.
I also needed to chat with someone about lighting for the downstairs studio, aka Grandpa's (Munster) laboratory or dungeon. In the first effort with the walking shoes (Walking Shoes) I thought the subject was OK, but the environment was not. I was mostly concerned with correcting the shadows cast on the backdrop. The first thing I could correct was moving the backdrop back a bit, and that's easy to do. But that might not be enough, I needed to get to the light source. So I needed to chat with someone about the dungeon lighting.
Seriously, I'll get to the walking shoes.
I found a sales rep for Westcott, a seller of studio lighting materials. Condensing the story, he said I had everything pretty much all wrong. (I take things like this well, as I hear it a lot.) I had used two table lamps on the previous walking shoes photo. The light was OK - but I did get unwanted shadows.
The sales rep's suggestion was to use the modeling light on one of my White Lightnings into an umbrella to expand the light source and see what that does. Go down to one light? Less is better, right?
I was all for that - I already have the stuff. No extra $$$s necessary.
Now to the walking shoes.
I set up the environment so the backdrop was more relaxed and back off the subject. I used one overhead light with the full power of the modeling light into an umbrella.
I used a nine shot photostack. I changed the defaults on the Helicon program to take two shots per focus step instead of one. More is better, right?
And one other teenie weenie change, I returned to processing RAW files. (I was playing with JPGs earlier because in the stacking learning curve, I didn't want to confuse any issues.)
On the previous project, the light temperature from the table top lamps came out pretty close to what I would want. In this new set up, not even close.
Looks like a bizarre autumn warming filter was used. There's some heavy tungsten temps. Maybe some white reflection from the umbrella as well. For reference, the backdrop is black. Seriously.
Maybe I've lived under a rock for most my photographic journey, but I've never really had to play with white balance before. I remember trying to find a neutral spot on photographs and identifying it to Lightroom in hopes of making a difference I couldn't see. But in this case, I need to do something. So in PS raw editor, moved the WB from AS SHOT to AUTO. Bingo! I was in the ball park. It was that easy.
After I hit it with the WB change, I applied a custom color profile file I created for the studio.
So, here are the vitals: I used the D90 with a 50mm prime lens. ISO was set to 200, Aperture was f/2.8, speed was 1/6 second. I used Helicon Remote to calculate and manage the shots. I used Helicon Focus to merge the nine shots.
I hit it with a bit of NIK's HDR filters and Glow. (Hey, it's still me.) On the original file, you can increases to 100% and it is tack sharp everywhere, even in the color transition areas. I attribute that improvement over the previous version of Walking Shoes to doubling the number of shots per focus step in Helicon Remote.
The walking shoes set up was a fun learning experience. This project is closed. Time to move on.
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