Andriy Zolotoiy Photography Blog

Recently I received a request from an interior designer to shoot few rooms in a fairly large house. The only quirk was that owners didn’t want to have any lighting equipment on the premises (go figure why?), and I had about one hour shoot everything. In situation like this the only possible solution is to use bracketing feature in the camera since most of the interior shots would exceed dynamic range of digital SLR. So I pack my D700 along with 16-35 f/4, tripod and shutter release cable. Cannot get any stealthier than this.

I set camera to Aperture priority f/14, ISO 200 and fire 5 bracket shots at 1-stop intervals. Here is one mid-frame as it came out of the camera:

Frame is not good enough on its own, definitively needs some work. After loading all 5 bracketed frames into Photoshop HDR Pro things start looking better. After fixing some geometry photo becomes more useable.

This particular room was the most challenging as most of the light was streaking through a small opening in the window and walls projected quite bright orange color onto everything

The master bedroom was the easiest one due to its size and color palette.

I tested last night native tethering support in LR3 against Nikon Camera Control Pro. What can I say, good folks at Adobe done pretty amazing job. LR tethering works about twice faster than Nikon’s own software, and although you cannot control camera settings via Lightroom itself, you can see current aperture, shutter and ISO. File management could have been better to allow date folder selection but it will do as it is. The most important factor is stability and here LR performed really well with my Nikon D700. I used 2 meter USB cable with gold plated connectors (my old audio equipment hobby taught me to always use good cables) and took about 200 frames in short bursts. Didn,’t encounter any dropped or corrupted images. Two meter cable would be sufficient for product or food photography but I intend to test next the limits of USB connectivity. Will report on that later.

Posted from WordPress for Android

Was shooting a fashion story at Scarborough Bluffs other day. We were going for mix of retro and gothic looks and it was planned to be in b/w. Promised rain never happened that day which was good but sky was going from clear to overcast all day long. The images are the mix of natural light when clouds covered the sun for a softer look and some hard light with AB800 and 8.5” high efficiency reflector to get that edgier look. Full set is here.

ClientSelects v 1.1 is available now, it addresses multiple search fixes and adds support for searching in collections and collection sets.
Download latest version of plug-in here.

I shot these images for a young singer Tiana’s promo campaign. The edgy looks achieved with one AB800 with 8.5” reflector. At the beginning of the shoot wind toppled my strobe with umbrella; luckily strobe survived but umbrella went to dump. This wasn’t an easy shoot and we weren’t getting the right looks for quite some time but finally our model relaxed a bit and we’ve got the expected results.

I just finished first version of LR plug-in that closes the hole between virtual order and Lightroom cataloging. When client sends you list of selected photos you have an option now to automatically mark them in LR for processing. Manual process of matching names is quite slow and prone for errors, so you might want to give it a try. Download and instructions here.

Check out this unlucky wedding photographer who was carried away, so to say.

Wedding Photography Fail

While wondering in my photo archives found this photo of Giselle. Somehow I didn’t pay attention to it initially but now I like it. Strange …

She’s been with us for a while now and she usually keeps it to herself. Rarely would she let to pet her, and nobody remembers when she sat on somebody’s lap. But she definitely can strike a pose.

I’ve managed to find one episode of Double Exposure on the Internet since these series not aired in Canada. I’ve read mixed reviews about this TV program but wanted to see it myself. I really like all behind the scenes stuff, preps, shooting info and creative discussions. Luckily, all talks are not overlaid by sound tracks so you can actually hear what’s going on the set. And Markus talks very funny when he is upset with Indrani. Highly recommended material for photographers.
Looking at these high-end shooters one might wonder what kind of business plan they had when they just started out.

Posted from WordPress for Android