Wyatt Ryan 8/23/22 Wyatt Ryan 8/23/22

Using Black Lights for Portraits

I think most people have a fascination of the effects of black lights, being exposed to their color twisting effects in places like bowling alleys, laser tag, and arcades. Like most people, I found it interesting how certain colors would just pop and seemingly glow. I’d seen a couple photographs over the years showcasing these effects, but none of them were interesting enough to truly peak my interest to try it myself.

Face paint glowing under the black lights, with a yellow highlighter in front of the face glowing bright. — Fujifilm X-T3 - Fujinon 50mm f/2 @ f/3.6, ISO 3200, SS 1/125

Since I was taking a couple photography related classes for my college degree, I pushed myself to try some techniques I hadn’t done before, one of which ended up being portraits under black light. I knew I wanted bright and colorful makeup that would hopefully pop like I’d seen in bowling alleys, so I reached out to a couple people who were makeup artists. I rushed over to the local WalMart to pick up some black lights after a little bit of research, and was ready to go within a few hours.

Silhouette of a person with blue, green, and orange face paint glowing. The paint swirls around from the neck to the forehead, with blue and orange swirls and green dots interlaced within. — Fuji X-T3 - Fujinon 50mm f/2 @ 1/125 SS, ISO 3200, f/3.6

I set up the black lights as best as I could, and had a makeup artist by the name Bella come over with a friend of hers to try out a couple different looks and get some hopefully great photos. Bella brought some of her most colorful palettes of makeup, and worked on applying them. I then began the lofty task of blocking out all of the light from my entire apartment, to get the best possible chance of capturing the glow from the black lights. I hung blankets across every window, closed doors where I could, and closed the blinds as best as I could at 2pm on a Saturday. For the most part, it worked pretty well, but there was still a tiny bit of light creeping in. That would end up being the least of my worries.

Once we got started shooting, we quickly realized that the black lights weren’t doing what we thought they would do. Vibrant greens and blues were turning grey, somehow being washed out instead of lifted by the lights. We scrapped our original plans and ended up using a little bit of a fill light to not completely put the look Bella had created to waste. The photos turned out okay for the first look, but the green being washed out by the black lights really put a damper on things.

Portrait illuminated by a soft light above and to the left of the model, with rhinestones and green makeup surrounded the eyes. The black lights caused a blue background and slight bleed of blue onto the models face and shoulders.

The fill light definitely helped to bring back some color in the makeup, but overall the look ended up not working out. We turned off the fill light, and put Bella’s makeup palette right next to the lights, discovering that basically all of them turned to grey under its effects. We were at a loss. After talking it over a bit, we decided to try some different paint I had (not very skin safe, but it did end up working somewhat decently.)

Orange paint around the eyes being illuminated by black lights with shimmer glitter on the eyebrows glowing bright blue.

The orange paint I had laying around certainly popped more than the green eye shadow did, but its effects were still pretty minimal. The shimmer glitter on the eyebrows popped incredibly, though I’m not sure if they were glowing because of the black lights, or just reflecting the light from them towards the camera. None the less, it seems to be working better, so we were happy with the results. We ended up doing one more look, with slightly more orange paint, and it ended up just being more of the same.

Rhinestones and orange paint above the eye in a wing shape. The orange paint has a slight glow under the black lights, while the rhine stones have some very minor reflections coming off of them. The red and black tie dye shirt glows the brightest. — Rhinestones and orange paint above the eye in a wing shape. The orange paint has a slight glow under the black lights, while the rhine stones have some very minor reflections coming off of them.

At this point, we felt defeated with the entire attempt, being thwarted by the lights and the little effect they had on the makeup. Bella and her friend left, and I went to figure out why the hell it hadn’t worked the way we thought it would. After doing a bit of research, I came to discover that there were multiple different types of black lights, determined by the nanometer wavelength they had.

The lights I bought were 395nm black lights, which is on the absolute edge of the UVA spectrum before they are no longer considered black lights. Around 400nm, the light will emit a violet hue, which mine very obviously do. A true black light will emit no visible light, which is around 365nm and below. 365nm seems to be the industry standard when it comes to true black lights, as they create the most visible pop of color that we associate with them.

Many companies will market lights as black lights, when it reality they are simply violet lights, and have very little resemblance to actual black lights in effect. If you’re looking to buy some, find ones that say they are around 365nm in the light spectrum, otherwise you’ll encounter similar results to what I did. They are typically more expensive, but in this case, I think you’re getting a better product and the actual product that you’re looking for. Knowing what I knew now, I scheduled another photoshoot with a girl in my class by the name of Liv, and told her what did and did not ultimately work so we would have a more successful shoot.

A model wearing a white tank top with glitter stars surrounding their eyes, blue light wrapping their face and shoulders. — While still emitting a more violet light, the shimmer glitter starts pop exceptionally well, being illuminated very brightly along with the models white top.

After learning from all the previous issues, my shoot with Liv was going amazingly. The star glitter glowed around her eyes perfectly, and the white glow from her top looked incredible. The blue light wrapped around her and lit up my paper roll behind and gave the photos a somewhat otherworldly feel to them. While the top, glitter, and earrings did glow very nicely, the white paint she had used only showed a slight glow, showcasing the issues I had with the first go around in my black light portrait attempts.

I’m still not sure if the glitter was actually glowing or reflecting from the black lights, but they do look the way I originally imagined they would. We did a couple more photos and applied some of the stars and glitter to me, and enjoyed the success of my second attempt at the shoot.

Another black light portrait with blue light wrapping around the model, the stars glowing around their eyes and their hand to their chin. — Only slightly different than the portrait above, Liv’s tattoo offers a really nice connection to the earrings, and a contrast in the glow the earrings offered.

Overall, shooting portraits with black lights was incredibly fun, but also incredibly challenging as I didn’t quite understand how they worked going into it originally. I would love to continue shooting portraits like this, but would need to invest in a true black light with a 365nm wavelength to get the effects I was originally aiming for and imagining. Feel free to buy me this one from Amazon, as I think it would really help me explore this niche area even further and get better results overall.

I highly recommend explore this niche too if it interests you, but please learn from my mistakes (or don’t) and avoid the downfalls of misleading advertising and barely black light black lights.

Wyatt Ryan 3/4/21 Wyatt Ryan 3/4/21

Light Painting 101

I took the time the past two weeks to take a shallow dive into what light painting is, what it’s used for, the pros and cons of using it, and why you should learn how to use light painting to advance your photography!

Wyatt Ryan 4/17/20 Wyatt Ryan 4/17/20

FINALLY Made a Video During the COVID-19 Pandemic!

Well, the day finally came. After shooting dozens of videos for the videos I was originally going to create, I scrapped the whole idea and decided to start much, much simpler. The following video is essentially a slideshow of my favorite photos I’ve taken the last few years, with a little video of me at the beginning to describe what you’re about to see.

Once I’ve shot a few more rolls of film through my newly acquired Leica M3, I’ll post a video review of the camera in general and some of the photos I’ve taken with it!

In the meantime, please feel free to leave some advice about what I could do better or videos you’d like to see in the future!

Wyatt Ryan 2/24/20 Wyatt Ryan 2/24/20

Old Photos

DISCLAIMER: I wrote this at the end of February, so before all of the insanity of COVID-19 was around.

For the past couple months, I’ve been thinking about going through and editing old photos to bring them up to my current standards and editing style. For the first couple of years with my digital camera, I was exporting images in the wrong color profile, which would wash out the colors, making them look dull and lifeless.

DISCLAIMER: I wrote this at the end of February, so before all of the insanity of COVID-19 was around.

P.S.A - There will be a much larger difference between photos if you look at them on a mobile device compared to a computer. sRGB photos will be on the left/top, and ProPhoto/AdobeRGB with be on the right/bottom.

Now, not to go too much into it, but the world, for the most part, uses sRGB; it’s the standard. Tablets, phones, laptops, and any other mobile device, is able to see the sRGB color spectrum, with computers typically showing a bit more into the other color spectrums.

There are many different color spectrums you can physically work in, but there are three main ones; ProPhoto RGB, AdobeRGB, and sRGB. ProPhoto gives you the widest range of colors, sRGB gives you the least, and AdobeRGB is smack dab in the middle.

Because I was editing and exporting photos in ProPhoto RGB, most of my photos ended up looking washed out on mobile devices, but fine on my laptop at the time. For nearly two years, I dealt with whatever strange phenomenon was happening to my photos. I’d bring the photo into Instagram to post it, and all of a sudden the colors were absolute trash. I’d have to re-saturate the colors, boost the contrast, and hope I was close to what I had edited it like beforehand.

Now that I’m on one of my infamous social media breaks, I’ve actually had the mental energy and time to go through and find those old photos, and edit them like I would today. And more importantly, export them in the right fucking color space. I dug out my old hard drives, plugged them into my computer, and got incredibly lucky when they still worked. All good, photos weren’t gone, but I did have to go through and find the damn things.

I sucked at color back then, but I was abysmal at sorting my photos. It took me about 30 minutes to actually find the photos I wanted to go through. I knew the month and the year of taking the photos, but ended up combing through every single folder on the drives to find them. I had two specific trips I wanted to re-edit; my trip to Glacier National Park, and the trip we took to Canada for Miah’s first birthday.

Each of those trips had hundreds of photos, so I restarted the culling process (think picking and choosing photos to work on) and found some keepers I had for some reason ignored back then. I went through the Montana pictures, and honestly, I have no idea how I walked away with any keepers at all from that trip. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, and missed focus on multiple shots that would have been amazing. How do you miss focus on a mountain? I have no clue how, but I somehow did on at least a quarter of my shots. That was disappointing, but I’ll just chalk that down to being young and ignorant. It doesn’t happen that much anymore.

So, even after missing focus on a ton of shots, I then ruined the good ones by exporting them incorrectly. I have known for years, what kind of potential the photos had, but was either too busy or too lazy to really try and tackle the issue. I’ll admit, it did take a lot of work. I spent a good 10 hours over the weekend editing the photos again, but I’m glad I did. I no longer cringe at photos whenever I see them.

This whole process has taught me a couple different things:

I’ve come a long way in what I know, and what I’m capable of doing with a camera,
Proper storage and organization of photos can be incredibly helpful if and when you need to go back to find them,
And lastly, editing photos with a fresh eye can help find those photos that you once glanced over.

A photo I glossed over from Miah’s birthday trip to Canada.

A photo I edited with newly learned skills to improve the original, which I had cropped significantly to get rid of unwanted things in the frame.

That’s pretty much all I’ve got to say about this whole matter, so I’ll just throw a bunch of other comparison photos for the rest of this and hope whoever is reading this can learn from my mistakes.

Wyatt Ryan 12/30/19 Wyatt Ryan 12/30/19

A Year (almost) With the Fujifilm X-Pro 2

This is going to be my first foray into reviewing a digital camera, as I’ve mostly shot film for the last two years. Specs will come first, because anybody can simply look them up their own, so I’ll keep it quick and easy.

I will be drawing comparisons between the Fuji and my old Canon 5D Mark II throughout the review since it’s the only other digital camera I have used.

Specs

24 Megapixel X-Trans III ASP-C Sensor (1.5x Crop)

Weather Sealed

Mirrorless

Hybrid Optical Viewfinder + Electronic View Finder (OVF/EVF)

Dual Card Slots - One UHS II compatible

Well, that’s enough of that nonsense.

Handling & Useability

Coming from a Canon DSLR was a weird transition. Canon is renowned for their phenomenal grips, something Fuji has only addressed in the X-H1, GFX 50S, and GFX 100S. Most of their cameras come with grips that are seriously lacking security while in the hand. I love the feeling of a solid grip, so I ended up buying a used grip from Fuji (pictured).

The grips on Fujis aren’t great by any means, but the feel of the camera in your hand is very reassuring to the build quality. It eeks quality the moment you pick it up, and people are always surprised how heavy it is.

Fuji has done a phenomenal job of putting everything you could possibly need, right on top of the camera. Aperture is controlled on the lens. Shutter speed, ISO, and exposure compensation are all on the top plate.

I do with that the aperture ring on the lenses were a tiny bit sturdier, as I’ve accidentally bumped it onto something else on numerous occasions. The shutter speed dial is solid and out of the way while taking photos, and locks when in A.

Colorado Springs, Colorado. My Harry Potter glasses are on the side of the road if anyone wants to go look for them.

The exposure compensation dial definitely needs to be more stiff, as I’m constantly bumping it and changing it. Fuji really needs to make it a locking dial, as it’s something I tend not to change while I’m shooting. It would also be advantageous for it to be recessed more into the body like the shutter speed dial. It’s a pain in the ass, but nowhere near as bad as the ISO dial.

Now, onto the infamous ISO dial. It’s supposed to be a throwback to the film cameras with a similar method of setting the ISO, though I’ve never personally had one like that. To change the ISO, you lift up on the collar around the shutter speed dial, and twist it. I shoot with my left eye in the viewfinder, so this is basically impossible to do with the camera up to my eye. I was hoping they would get rid of it on the X-Pro 3, but alas, it’s a no go.

Other than those gripes with the dials, the camera feels great in the hand, and it’s light and small enough that I can take it just about anywhere without a second thought.

The hybrid OVF/EVF is what most people are looking for when they purchase the X-Pro series. Both the OVF and EVF have their benefits and negatives, and I’ll cover the most blatantly obvious ones to me.

The Optical Viewfinder is nice and clear, provides frame lines for the associated lens, and shows whatever information (you pick it out in the menu) you want along the sides of the frame. That information is displayed pretty small, and not always the easiest to see in brighter conditions. You are able to see outside the frame lines, so capturing a moment should be easier since you can see things lining up. Manual focus isn’t possible with the OVF, as it’s the first thing I tried to do when I held the camera in store, though it’s super easy with the EVF and the focus assist turned on.

The Electronic Viewfinder is of decent quality. EVF’s benefit from the fact that you’re seeing exactly what the photo is going to look like when you click the shutter. Change any setting on your camera, and your EVF will show you how that changes the photo. The EVF inside the X-Pro 2 tends to have a lot of trouble with high contrast scenes, and doesn’t always show you the most true representation of what the sensor is capturing. I tend to either use the OVF or live view on the back of the camera. Newer mirrorless cameras apparently have phenomenal EVF’s, showing better contrast, detail, and with faster refresh rates.

Switching between the EVF and OVF is simple enough, just flick the switch on the front of the camera with your right trigger finger. A huge issue I have with the X-Pro 2 in general concerning the EVF/OVF, is the mode button next to it. It gets accidentally pressed, changing how the viewfinder works. Sometimes it blacks out the LCD screen. Sometimes it blocks off usage of the viewfinders. It would be a million times better to have that buried in the settings (which they did on the X-Pro 3) instead of having it’s own button. If you ever turn your camera on and the LCD doesn’t pop up, try cycling through the modes and it’ll probably come up.

Image Quality

It’s good. It’s super good. The Fuji files in combination with Capture One blow me away every time. Bringing up the shadows reveals good detail, with little noise at most ISO’s. Images are easily useable up to 6,400, something that can’t be said for the Canon. The Canon’s limit is right around 1,600, and anything higher than that starts to degrade quickly.

Unprocessed files have a lot of potential if needed, but I’ve found the colors and contrast just need a tiny boost to be at a level I like. Reds seem to pop the most, but the sensor gives a really good baseline for editing. This next photo, I barely had to change anything, partially do to the fact that the light was damn near perfect.

I like contrasty images, so I left the road darker. I could have pulled up the shadows a bit and therefore showed more details in the road, but I didn’t feel it added to the photo at all. Like I mentioned above, I typically just boost the contrast and saturation a bit, and leave everything else as is.

The more I shoot with this camera, the more comfortable I get shooting with the optical viewfinder. I typically shoot in Aperture Priority (set the aperture, let the camera choose shutter speed) and set the exposure compensation to -1 or -1.5 to preserve the highlights. I know I can draw the shadows up easily if need be while not blowing out the highlights. This next photo is a great example, as Miah was just a dark shadow before I started processing the file.

The shadows tend to have a lot of information in them even when underexposed by 2 to 3 stops, which I can’t say for the highlights. I’ve found that I can recover a bit of information in the highlights, up to 1 stop over exposed, but beyond that, you’ll blow them.

Early Fall. Root River Park outside of Rochester, Minnesota.

I was able to pull back the highlights in the sky to reveal more a bit more blue on the right side of the image. If I pulled them back too far, the sun stopped looking like a sun, and more like a random orb in the sky. Pulling back the highlights in the sky too much will give it a fake look (which some people like). If the sun is going to be in the photo, you should try and make it actually look like the sun.

Pahrump, Nevada. Martin the Old Man Manual Mazda. Death Valley off in the distance.

Overall, I really do love using this camera, though I still much prefer my film cameras for more serious work. It is great for everything from snapshots to more serious work, though I don’t think you’ll see anybody shooting with it in a professional studio environment. I actually bought a flash and some studio equipment to learn more about lighting, taking some interesting self portraits in the process.

Now about four years old, it’s definitely still a very capable camera. Though I have my issues with it (like anyone will with any camera) I do enjoy using it and I’m glad I picked it up to become my new main digital camera. I’ll probably trade it for a Fuji X-H1 eventually, as that camera has a much larger grip, which is something I would prefer over the measly grip of the X-Pro 2. Until then, I’ll keep shooting with it and enjoying it while I can.

NOW, onto more photos.

Monterey, California. Just north of Big Sur.

Chloe, Eye Autofocus - On. Twin Cities, Minnesota.

Cedar Cultural Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Also somewhere in the middle of California.

Miah’s Birthday, Interstate State Park, Minnesota.