I’ve been trying to master the art of lighting using flash for quite a while now. Flash is great not just to provide more oomph for situations with low light but even in situations with enough light you can use it to add more depth to the image. A common technique is to light for the ambient, drop about two stops down (letting less light onto your film), then aim your flash at the subject. Now you have two sources of light that you can independently manipulate: your background which you made darker by lowering your exposure by two stops, the foreground which is lighter due to your flash. This way your subjects will really pop off the background.

Working with flash is a whole ‘nother ball park in terms of dealing with white balance. Different light sources have different color temperatures and your whites will look different under each light. For example tungsten is warmer and white will appear more orange, while fluorescent light is colder and tends to be more green. Your flash has another color temperature so you have to correct for that if you want all your whites to really show up as white. Although your eye is very good at balancing all these different color temperatures, your camera isn’t. So when shooting under fluorescent light I put a green gel in front of my flash to make it match the color temperature of fluorescent and set the white balance on my camera to fluorescent.

Simple right? Of course it can’t be that easy. It turns out they now make fluorescent lights in all kinds of color temperatures some even close to tungsten. Also fluorescent light runs at 60Hz and depending on where on that sine wave you take your picture your color shift on you too. What a headache!

Today I got to practice this technique at a shoot I did for an open house at the Upenn Haptics Lab headed by the wonderful Dr. Katherine Kuchenbecker. In the picture below there are three light sources. The fluorescent overhead lights provide the ambient, there’s a little lamp that lights the CNC milling machine in the background and I’m holding a flash dialed down at 1/32 in my left hand to light Will and Joe. So all three of these light sources can be manipulated independently. I exposed for my background two stops down which is why the background is darker, my flash lights the two handsome young men, and the little lamp lights my other subject (the CNC milling machine).

I’m pretty happy with this picture as the difference in light creates a lot of depth to the picture and really pops the subjects off the background.

Other pictures of the haptics open house after the jump:
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I went to Lisboa last week for a beautiful wedding of my good friends Emilie and Gabriel. The wedding was at Pousada de Palmela, a 14th century convent built inside a castle. Pretty pimp. Since they had a professional photographer taking care of the usual wedding shots I tried to shoot pictures that were different. I didn’t see a point in taking the same photos that their professional photographer was taking so I chose a more journalist style and set out to find those special candid moments.

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My lab was invited to come to India to exhibit our CKBots at IIT Bombay’s Techfest. Below are some snapshots as a teaser to the full photo essay. There’s just too much to write here. Some keywords: pollution, technology, Taj Mahal, robots, lasers, traffic, Lake Powai, Sachin, people, lots of people, globalization. To see all the pictures of my adventures and read some of my thoughts I wanted to share please download the full photo essay.

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The XPLR art jump is set to happen tomorrow!

I’ve found out we’ve been featured on Allison’s art jumping blog as well as on Uwishunu! Sign up here.

Sunday, January 18th, 2009

2PM
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Get your friends together. Find a painting you like. Become so excited by what you see that you have to jump! Take a picture.

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The ODG gallery was packed at the opening of GROUP SHOW. I just wanted to thank all my friends for stopping by. I deeply appreciate you coming out and hope you had fun. If you were unable to stop by, but still would like to check out the art, the show will be up until the end of January Monday through Friday. They will also be having a Sugarcube and Third Street Habit clothing sale in our gallery space in mid January. Join their facebook group for upcoming shows and event. Here are some pictures (most are from their FB page). Also my ugly face is on the front page of 215 magazine‘s webpage today (a sliver of my photograph can be seen in the back!).

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I’m displaying one of my photographs at 222 gallery! Opening reception is tonight at 6PM. I did a quick google search and found the show to be featured in several blog/news outlets such as Philebrity, High Snobiety and Uwishunu. Woohoo!

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This post is long overdue as we did Rooftop Movie Night almost a whole month ago, but nevertheless, here it is finally! Rooftop Movie Night involves taking a video projector and speakers, climbing onto my neighbour’s rooftop and then projecting Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas”  onto my other neighbor’s wall. The white canvas screen we hung was 16ft. wide by 9ft. high. Hopefully we will show more movies in the next year when it gets warm again. What better place to watch a movie then outdoors on a roof, six stories high with the Philadelphia skyline in the background? We picked this movie since it was the weekend before halloween. Feel free to suggest movies for future events. Rooftop Movie Night is a project I did in collaboration with Andreas Lyder.  

The Roof
::Cinema de Lux::
1722 Spruce Street, Studio C3

proudly presents

Tim Burton’s

The Nightmare before Christmas

Fri, Oct. 24.

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Discover Magazine listed our Self reAssembly after Explosion demo as the 81st of 100 top technology stories of 2008.

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jan/081

We beat bulletproof paper (#83) but lost to self-healing rubber from oil and pee (#80).

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Last Wednesday at 9.30PM terrorists simultaneously strike several luxury hotels and tourist hangouts. They open fire and injure hundreds, then proceed to take scores of hostages. In an editorial in the NYT, Suketa Mehta writes:

The terrorists’ message was clear: Stay away from Mumbai or you will get killed. Cricket matches with visiting English and Australian teams have been shelved. Japanese and Western companies have closed their Mumbai offices and prohibited their employees from visiting the city. Tour groups are canceling long-planned trips.

But the best answer to the terrorists is to dream bigger, make even more money, and visit Mumbai more than ever. […]

So I’m booking flights to Mumbai. I’m going to go get a beer at the Leopold, stroll over to the Taj for samosas at the Sea Lounge, and watch a Bollywood movie at the Metro.

I am scheduled to go to techfest in January which takes place in Mumbai to present my lab’s work and show off our robots with our infamous Self-reAssembly demo. I’m not sure what the techfest status is now but if the powers that be will let me I intend to join Suketu Mehta and have a beer at the Leopold. Those powers being the techfest organizers, my professor, and my mom. I would say the latter will be the hardest to convince as she has been giving me updates hourly with reasons why I should cancel my trip. She also likes to write all her emails in all capital letters as if that’s more convincing.

But in today’s global world do you think you are any safer in New York? Terrorists can strike anywhere. It’s probably safer to be in Mumbai right now than before. The bombing has already happened.

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The new XPLR website

The website for XPLR has had a much needed make-over. I hope you like the new design. Check it out for yourself at http://www.xplr-club.com.  Next item on the agenda is putting together our portfolio. Putting all the bits in one document should be a good way to celebrate our one year anniversary! I get a little nostalgic going through all the pictures that we’ve taken the past year and remembering all the trips and the good people.  I took the time to put some numbers to our accomplishments. This past year more than 1000 pictures has been uploaded to our flickr group, more than 20 photo rides have been undertaken, and over 60 miles has been covered. We’ve had two gallery parties. They were attended by about a hundred people and we now have 60 members on our yahoo group. Number of XPLR’ers that moved out of Philly? Too many! I miss all of you.

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