The Great Tennessee Flood of 2010

I live in Williamson County which is the county just south of Nashville and we received our share of the tremendous rains this past week-end (May 1 & 2) that led to the massive flooding in Middle Tennessee.

We are very fortunate that our house is well elevated and we received no damage from flood waters. I did have a good amount of gravel was away from our driveway, but others suffered so much more. The cul-de-sac and street we lived on looked like a river with all the water and debris coming off the hillside and there were a couple of good size cascades where the water was pouring into the cul-de-sac. The creek that runs through our subdivision rose to unprecedented heights and the road into our neighborhood was closed a good portion of Saturday and Sunday due to the high water.

Yes, this would have been a great chance for some impressive photography, but I was sleeping… I got hit with cold/flu symptoms on Friday and spent most of the day Sat. laying on the couch in a cold medicine induced slumber. I did manage to take a few brief video clips out our window on Saturday and during a brief walk around the neighborhood on Sunday after the majority of the rain had passed.

Here's some brief scenes from our neighborhood showing some of the water: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8B0pz7yzcA

My thoughts and well wishes go out to those that suffered much more than we did during this is disaster. There are some amazing photos out on the internet of scenes from around Nashville.

First Greenscreen

Shareece & James - Photo by Blackburn Images

My son and his girlfriend were going to a prom recently and I’d offered to do some photos for them. I got the idea to try my hand at some greenscreen (chromakey) photography. This is where you photograph the subject in front of a green or blue chromakey background and then replace the background with an image. In this case the prom theme was “ red carpet affair” so I thought it would be cool to show the couple on a red carpet with paparazzi in the background.

I ordered an inexpensive green background, received it the day before I “needed” it, and went about trying to achieve some respectable results. A quick search on the web showed that the main elements to successful greenscreen shots is a wrinkle-free background, very even lighting on the background, and keep the subject a good distance away from the background to avoid getting green “spill” light back onto the subject.

In my first tests, I used only one off-camera flash (SB800) to try and light the background. My goal was to light it, but not so much that a lot of light reflected back off to the subject. I couldn’t get very even coverage with the SB800 so I tried a single strobe (White Lightning x800). Again, not very even coverage so I opted for two White Lightning x800 for the background through white umbrellas to diffuse the light. My flash meter said I was pretty evenly light across the background. I light the subject with another x800 with a 30x40 softbox directly in front of the subject and as high as my eight foot ceilings would allow it go. I set the main light to be about 1.5 stops brighter . My tests shots were still showing some green spill onto the subject, but I had to background lights down to their minimum power and the subject as far in front of the background as I could with my limited space (6 feet from subject to background).

The shots of the “real” subjects (4 couples) came off pretty well. I still got more green spill than I wanted on the subject. I used Photoshop (select/color range) to select the green background to drop out. I still had to do a good bit of “clean up” around the edges (layer/matting). I also tried the OnOne Mask Pro plug-in (Plug-in Suite 5) to see if it did a better job. I was a little disappointed with the Mask Pro results, but that was probably due to my haste in not defining enough drop colors and keep colors. I had some of the pixels in the black tuxes masked out.

Just like everything else in photography I’ve tried you can get results pretty quickly, but to really master a technique takes time, study, and practice.