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Bridging Tech and Creative Photography
Bridging Tech and Creative Photography
Creating the Photograph

Creating the Photograph: Travis Singleton’s “There’s light in the dark side”

Chris Gampat
No Comments
05/04/2017
4 Mins read
20161228_20two19_Create_edited_413_legolights__DSC3475

Creating the Photograph is an original series where photographers teach you about how they concepted an image, shot it, and edited it. The series has a heavy emphasis on teaching readers how to light. Want to be featured? Email chrisgampat[at]thephoblographer[dot]com.

In the early 90’s, photographer Travis Singleton got his hands on a Minolta XD-5 35mm film camera. then he took a break from photographer and went digital. Born on a small farm in rural Nova Scotia, he grew up on the east coast of Canada. Even during his younger days, he had an interest in photography. “As I didn’t have the money, I would buy the rolls of film to take pictures but often didn’t get them developed.” he tells us in an email. “Or I would put the roll aside to get developed later, only to forget.”

Fast forward way ahead to 2015, and his company, 20two19 Photography, started to get noticed through social media by local businesses, and has now worked with a number of businesses and professionals in town including the Shawn & Ed Brewing Company, Dundas Museum, Dundas, WIllow Salon, The Red Door Cucina, the Dundas Farmers’ Market, Jax Sweet Shoppe and others.

Besides all of Travis’ commercial work though, he still manages to get creativity; and sometimes he finds the inspiration in his adorable daughter. When the family went to go see Star Wars Rogue One recently, he was inspired by the film to create this pretty awesome photo.

Here’s his story. Be sure to follow Travis on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Website.

The Concept

Our family had gone to see Star Wars- Rouge One before Christmas of last year (2016) and my daughter was super excited that she had received Poe’s X-Wing Fighter Lego set as a gift. She loves building lego sets and this one was no different.

The Gear

  • Sony a7 (mark i)
  • Sony Zeiss 16-35mm f4 ZA OSS len
  • 2x Godox TT685S flashes with X1Ts trigger
  • Westcott Tripod that came with my Apollo Orb
  • Flash Gels

The Shoot

Setup:

  • Godox flash with blue gel on tripod to camera left, high pointing down.
  • Godox flash with red gel directly behind subject head.
  • Camera hand held

Camera Setting on final shot:
ISO 200, 1/200 sec f/11 at 21mm. Flash power not recorded.

I wanted to capture this moment in a more creative way with off camera flash. So I grabbed my Sony camera and one flash on a tripod. To set the mood I place a blue gel on the flash and tried to keep the power lower for better color effect. I also set the white balance to Tungsten for more blue in the look. I took about three shots this way and decided it just wasn’t enough.

At first it was just a few basic shoots with blue light but then I decided to add a second flash with a red gel and place it under the table she was working at in our living room. I kind liked the effect and shot a number of photos (12) from above trying to get all the table where she was working. See concept 1 & 2 photos.

While there were pretty cool, I just wasn’t loving the photo.

Next, I switched to sitting on the floor shooting at her level and moved the red gel flash to behind me from the right to oppose the blue gel flash still on the tripod. Better. I was liking the angle better and the effect the blue light was having on the lens, almost causing a flare.

Still not there, the whole photo was too bright, so I changed the aperture from f4 to f11 and this presented a better mode for what I wanted.

It wasn’t until I moved the red flash directly behind my daughter’s head that the photo popped for me. Her messy morning hair backlit with red light, and blue light on the rest of the scene. In total it took 36 images to get the final shot.

Post Production


I use Capture One Pro Sony Edition. I usually start from the top and work my way down in CO1 Pro and adjusted the white balance to a little more cooler, from 2700 down to 2100. I brought the exposure up almost 1 stop and did very minor tweaks to contrast and brightness, no saturation. I always play with the highlight and shadow sliders and pushed down the highlights to 78 and the shadows came up to 50.

A minor adjustment to the Luma Curve brought the shadows down and highlights up just a touch. A couple of adjustment were also made to the red & blue levels sliders. The red bottom highlight slider was lowered to 242 from 255. The blue slider has a few more adjustment on it. Top shadow slider up to 4, mid lower slider to 0.10 and bottom highlight lowered to 248.

Clarity was also punched to 25 and 50 for Clarity and Structure.

Sharpening was punched to 700 but countered with Halo Suppression to 100. Luminance Noise

Reduction was increased slightly from 50 to 56.

One of my favourite tools of Capture One Pro is the Colour balance wheels and I always tend to add blues in the shadows, I increased the blues midway on the wheel and lowed the luminance almost all the way. Mid-tones were giving just a hint of blue. I also like the Colour Editor tab, I punched the magenta (top slider) just a bit (+7) in saturation and gave Blue (+25) and Red (+20) but dropped the cyan colour almost all the way (-70). Dropping the cyan allowed the pages on the lego direction to remain white as they had a colour cast to them. And the final touch was -1 stop with an Elliptic Vignette. A lot of times, I make use of the Local Adjustment brush, but I did not in this case.

Before/After

Unedited
Edited
capture one flash gels image rogue one sony star wars There's light in the dark side travis singleton tungsten
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Chris Gampat

Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.
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