I’ve been on Tumblr for a little while now, but only recently have I really figured out how to use it properly. So if you’re interested, you can find me there. I post all manner of little tit bits. I’m calling it my digital scrapbook and personal blog. Because I’m pretentious like that.

99media.tumblr.com

You may not know this, because I have put none on my site. But trust me when I say I do. Like black and white photos, lomo strips photos back to their composite elements and makes them a study in light shape and texture. But what lomo has over black and white photos is lots of surreal colour and distortion effects. Plus a nice healthy dose of vintage nostalgia.

So you may be like me here. You love the look and feel of lomo photography, but you own a DSLR that takes very modern super sharp images. Maybe you don’t own a Holga, or maybe you need to create a lomo inspired photo, but you need to be absolutely sure of what you are creating with creative control over each element. Whatever your need, you will unfortunately need to know some little technical details about lomos and how they take puctures, and what efects we are trying to simulate.

For this tutorial you need a modern copy of Photoshop or Gimp; I’m using CS4. I won’t be giving exact details on this tutorial, but a general idea of how to create the effect and why we do it, so you can replicate it and tweak it to your own needs. Let’s get started…

Let’s look at some traits of lomo photography first,

1. Lomo cameras were invented during the 70s in Japan as an inexpensive way for poor people to be able to take pictures. The cameras were built cheaply with plastic bodies AND plastic lenses. They had poor quality components and finish, often having areas that were out of focus, and over time they would leak light too. Their users hated them, but photographers found merit and charm in the poor quality images.

2. Today a ‘good’ lomo camera is as poor quality as the original cameras. If you spend more then £10 on one, then it is too good! Put it down… The word ‘lomo’ is short of ‘lomography’. the word was coined by the manufacturer of the popular Lomo Cameras during the 1980s. The name has become synonymous with the technique and visual traits of lomography. Much in the same way everyone started calling vacuum cleaners ‘Hoovers’. in this tutorial, the word ‘lomo’ is used to mean ‘lomography’

Lomography has some common traits which we are going to try and simulate. Let’s go through them one by one,

1. Exposure

Having small plastic lenses and poor quality film, the exposure range of lomo cameras is typically very low. To stop overexposure, the user may have to expose for strong highlights in a scene, and this gives us deep shadows and crushed blacks.

2. Color

The strange colouring we get in lomography is caused by a number of things, but largely it is caused by improper white balance, and cheap or wrong type film stock. Sometimes cross processing is used in the dark room to produce  strange, stripped back colour treatments.

3. Blurring

Any blurring that is not motion blur is caused by the poor quality plastic lens. Sometimes these would be out of focus, and would create areas of blur spotting in the photo.

4. Light Leak + Vignettes

As mentioned already, over time the body of a Lomo would wear down and light would leak into the film box. This creates areas of intense streaks and flares across photos. Vignettes are darkened areas around the edge of a frame caused by either lenses being in the way, or a filme stock too large for the camera being used. More on that later.

5. Lens Types

Often a lomo was given either a 50mm lens, or a fish-eye lens. Lens type is not something we can digitally simulate unfortunately. If you want a fish eye effects on your photo, simply shoot with a fish eye. 50mm lenses are used because they simulate the natural zoom of the human eye, so places and people look completely natural and not distorted.

6. Multi-shot

7. Multiple Exposure

8. Flash

Again, not something we can really simulate unless you have used a front facing flash attachment for your image. Often images would be shot through flash filters to give then strange colour casts, and even different colours during multi shot exposures.

9. Noise + Dust

The noise in lomo is normally caused by low quality film stock, or having to use a high ISO for shooting conditions. The dust is created by dust either on the lens or the film stock. Dust on the lens is out of focus, and any on the film is seen as specks of colour.

10. 35mm adapted

Sometimes, a photographer will decide to retrofit their camera with 35mm to get a bigger frame. The result is a rather pleasing effect where the entire film roll including the sprocket holes is exposed on, instead of just a square portion.

When taking a photograph using any camera, you are aiming to get a good and even exposure out of an image. The settings on your manual camera allow you change how much light enters your camera, and how it falls on the CCD chip. The light is gathered on the CCD chip, and turned into an image. So lets go through your settings;

ISO

The ISO number changes how sensitive your CCD chip becomes to light. The lower the number, the slower it is to react to light falling on it. So using a high ISO  (around ISO 1000) allows you to take pictures in very low light. Great right? Well no, it comes with huge draw backs. The higher your ISO is, the more grain you’ll have in your final image, especially in very low light. In fact, you should always shoot with the lowest ISO possible for the highest quality image.I personally never shoot over ISO 400, which is ok for lit indoor surroundings. Most of my work is shot at ISO100, which produces the nicest images. Unfortunately, the lower your ISO, the longer your exposure needs to be.

Shutter Speed

Shutter speed is measured in seconds. So why do some of the numbers looks so confusing? Well the shutter speed is often so quick that it is measured as a fraction of a second. Yep. And when you start seeing numbers like 0″5, this means it is half of a second. So 2″0 is a two second exposure. ‘B’ or ‘BULB’ means the shutter will stay open until you release your finger from the button. So why do we set the shutter speed? Well the shutter is simply setting how long light is going to be thrown onto the CCD chip. The shorter the shutter speed, the more light the CCD will needed to be able to have a good exposure. A long shutter will increase your chances of getting motion blur.

f Number / Aperture

The f Number and Aperture are normally used interchangeably. Setting your f Number changes how big the hole that you are letting light through is.That hole is called the Aperture. The Aperture controls how much light is being put onto the CCD chip at ANY ONE TIME. It is not a period of time, like the Shutter speed is. Ok so things get a little confusing with the f Number here. The smaller the f Number is, the bigger the aperture is. The bigger aperture obviously lets more light in then a small aperture size.

Depth of field (DoF)

Your depth of field is the distance of an image that is in focus. Simple enough. There is not a setting for depth of field, and it can get complicated because a number of factors determine how much DoF you have.But your DoF is controlled by what f Number you select. The smaller the f Number, the smaller the DoF range will be.

1. Colour Balancing – Is fixing colour and tone issues created by shooting. It is trying to get the cleanest image possible, taking care to erase cast and exposure issues. You would also be fixing skin tones, and preparing the image for a colour grade later on. You are essentially trying to recreate how the eye perceives a scene.

2. Colour Grading – Is creating a colour ‘Look’ for a piece. We’ve all seen these…A good example is the really ‘Orange and Teal’ look of the ‘Transformers’ films. Or the Neo Noir of ‘The Matrix’ series. The purpose of these casts is to help to tell the story, and to elicit an emotional response from the viewer.

Before we start we have to go over some theory that you have to understand to be able to Colour Correct properly.

In the digital video world, colour is shot in RGB and measured in numerical values, from 0 to 255 in each colour channel. RGB stands for Red Blue and Green, which are the names given to each colour channel.The darkest areas of a scene are referred to as blacks, which have a value of 0. Pure whites have a value of 255. The midtones (also known as the greys, mids, and medium tones) have a value of around 127.

Let’s get started,

You will need, After Effects with a copy of Color Finesse

Open up the footage you want to edit in After Effects. Create a new comp with it, select your footage then go to Effect>Synthetic Apeture>Color Finesse. You’ll see the settings appear in your effects window. If you can’t see your effects window it’s probably hiding behind your project window. For this tutorial, I’ll be working in Color Finesse (CF) 2. Go right ahead and click on ‘full interface’ and let it load.

Well doesn’t that look waay too complicated?

No fear. Well you may have noticed that Colour Finesse is broken up into three main areas. Luckily it’s layout is inspired by AE, so you can expect to find setting where we would find them in AE. Lets talk about the tools for a bit.

The Histogram (also known as Levels)

You can view these values on a histogram, which is a very basic visual representation. The histogram flows from left to right, with the blacks at 0 on the left, and the whites at 255 on the far right. Midtones are the middle arrow, which can be moved around as required. The height of the histogram is determined by the frequency of that value in the image. EG, the more black there is in a scene, the higher the ‘blac’ bar will grow. If we have a lot of white in the scene, the white values will shift higher.

Video Scopes

Every aspect of your video is laid out in a visual graph on Video Scopes. Each Scope represents a different aspect of your image. For example hue, saturation, luminosity ect. We will only touch over briefly the 3 we will be using for this tutorial, but you can read more about them in detail here. The info is for Final cut Pro, but the Video Scopes work the same in all software. We’ll go through them one by one from left top to right bottom.

Waveform Monitor

The Waveform Monitor shows the chroma and saturation of a clip. It images is projects directly correlates with the image on the clip being displayed. Any dip in colour is displayed as a dip on the graph.

Vectorscope

The Vectorscope shows the colour in a clip in a circular wheel which mimics a colour wheel. It is divided up into different colour ranges. Tones without colour are positioned in the center of the wheel. These are blacks, greys and whites. Heavily saturated colours are found on the wheel’s edge. Each colour area has a box on it. These box guides are ‘broadcast safe’ guides. Any colours in these boxes or beyond will not be viewable on a broadcast monitor. The Vectorscope ahs a neat trick up it’s sleeve too. See that line between R and Yl? That’s the skin-tone line. All skin colours, no matter race or creed, will fall onto this line if the scene is colour corrected properly. Part of the primary colour correcting process is ensuring that skin tones are portrayed accurately. We’ll use it in an example soon.

Curves

This displays our histograms in an easy to read format. This example shows only the master line, but as we edit each colour channel individually, a corresponding line will appear on the chart.

So let’s take a look at the shot we’ll be using for this example.

Terrible. I mean, it’s a nice shot and all, but it has some severe problems with color casting, crushed blacks, dark skin tones and low white values. Which is why I chose it for this tut. Luckily, the footage does no look ruined, and so is easily saved in the edit. Now lets take a look at it’s vectorscopes…

Well as you can see from this screen grab alone, the shot is completely out of balance. Just looking at our example image above we see that it has a very prominent orange cast on it. We can see this in our histograms without even looking at the actual shot. We can see that our blue is very low down, and red fills up most of the colour range. We can see from the luma value too that the shot is underexposed. We know this because the max value is only at 193, when it should be at around 150. So how to fix this then?

Lets open the RGB section on the bottom panel. It will give us the controls to manipulate our RGB Histograms seen above. What we are going to do is manipulate the numbers to give us a good exposure, with no colour cast. How do we do that?

Lets fix our red channel first. Each histogram has a set of controls underneath that will manipulate it. So for the red channel we can tweak it using ‘gamma’ ‘pedestal’ and ‘gain’. Moving the pedestal figure around will move the whole histogram. Use this to give us a ‘Min’ number of 10. Then we change the gain, to give us a ‘Max’ number of 145. Then we use the gamma control to give us a value of around 105. I’ll discuss these values in more detail in the next section. Repeat these stpsfor the green channel, and lastly the blue channel. You’ll find the Luma channel will correct itself. Magic!

So this is what your histograms should now look like. Obviously your exact figures that you dial into the sliders will be different, but your Histogram figures should be more or less the same. So what now? Well now you have to fix your skin tones. Lets open up that curves editor we talked about. Remember that we have to try and co-erce our colours to fall across the skin tone line. Obviously not all our colour should lie on this line. In fact we don’t want too much to straddle the line. All we are doing is nudging the colour into the right area so that the actors look healthy. So we do this by grabbing around the middle of a curve – NOT the Luma. Lets grab the middle of our Red Curve, and slide it very gently upwards to give our skin tones a boost, keeping an eye on the vector-scope and histograms the whole time. Do the same with the Green and Blue Channels. And that is almost it. Now any corrections we do to our image has to be by eye. But you should find that your image is a very good exposure and Colour balanced, and ready to sex up with a nice Colour Grade. Lets look at our before and after shots.

Pretty good huh? Not bad for 15mins of work. Oh, and you’ll breeze through this as you get used to the numbers.

So why did we put in those odd values on the histograms instead of the Min and Max values possible?

Remember I said that the lowest value was 0 and the highest was 155? Well why did we go for a 10 Min and a 145 Max? Quite simply we don’t want our blacks to be crushed and our whites to be peaking. Not everyone’s computers are as high spec as your awesome Mc.Awesome computer, so they can’t display full colour ranges properly. The odd values act as a buffer for these bad monitors. It also gives us a nice flat tonal range which means we have more control over our colour grade when we apply it.

My next tutorial will detail how to Colour Correct footage for a Digital Composite with CGI and live action.

So where do we go from here? Leave it as it is? What if the predictions are wrong? We don’t want to end up up with any more then 10 billion people. How about birth control? Pretty totalitarian right? I’m just glad I’m not making these decisions – It confuses the hell out of me.

I just wish there was some kind of colourful video which could explain this all to me like some kind of dumpy toddler. Oh cool, there is!

[vimeo width="500" height="400"]http://vimeo.com/31373691[/vimeo]

Digital Domain VIP

Today I had the privilege and honor of having my final piece ‘Mother’ screened at the BFI London. There was a lot of talent in that room, and some fantastic pieces were made by students all around the country. It was my first time to the Southbank too, which is a really interesting piece of urban regeneration. So I advise going. If you’ve never been.

I love you. WILL U MARRY ME?

’50 years ago, the world took notice of Park Hill – Sheffield became a destination for designers and housing officials from around the globe seeking inspiration as they grappled with their own urban housing problems. It became talked about, studied, revered, loathed and loved and still divides opinion. It is a unique, internationally-renowned design classic – there is no other Park Hill in the world. We’re proud to be helping write a new chapter in its history and I’m hope I’m still around to see its centenary.’

Visitor interaction was of upmost importance too, as Rationale have a number of social networking accounts and groups that they post too. What I decided would be great for rationale would be a single button on the site that subscribes a s user to everything that Rationale is ding on their Social Networking accounts. So when a user hits that subscribe button, they are subscribed to the Rationale Facebook group. The group is set up so that all of their activity goes through the feed. So that is YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. A neat, simple fix for a potentially messy problem.

The visual cues of the site come from just talking to the members of Rationale. The site has a sense of urban professionalism, but is very grown up with sleek gradients and dark textures. I wanted a sense of determination to come across to viewers of the site. So what was my main source of inspiration for this website? Well this music video actually…

[youtube width="500" height="405"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fhMC9zrUaI[/youtube]

But enough talking about the site, you should go over their and check it out

www.rationale.org.uk

‘Set in a future where all air on the surface has become toxic, forcing men to build cities in caverns underground. Persephone is the first of these cities.

Three engineers find the air is still toxic, and are sent in to work on a solution. Something goes wrong.

Down here. No light, chasing shadows.’

‘Mother’ takes it’s inspiration from greek mythology and sci-fi classics.

This short is my final project, for a Film and Visual Effects course at Sheffield Hallam University.

Read more about it here;

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