Photo by Just Fab using a version of the do-it-yourself scrim.

It’s senior portrait season, and that means people are looking for easy ways to take better portraits outdoors.  Direct light is the double-edged of outdoor portrait photography.  On one hand, it produces beautiful, rich, saturated backgrounds.  On the other hand, it produces harsh shadows on the face - a big no-no for proper portrait photography. For better portraits, you want diffuse directional light.  This is the purpose of using a soft box indoors - you’re able to use a bright light while softening it to eliminate its harsh qualities.  But how to you diffuse the sun?

Enter the do-it-yourself scrim, which lets you shoot outdoors in direct sunlight while softening the sun enough to produce sharp portraits.  The best part?  It can be produced for under $30.

Here’s what you need to purchase:

• 3 ten foot sections of PVC Piping
• 4 T Connectors
• 2 90-Degree Connectors
• White Nylon Shower Curtain

That’s it.  Cut two sections four feet in length.  These will serve as the two, perpendicular horizontal parts of the frame.  Then, cut two five foot sections for the side of the frame, two 16-inch sections for the legs and four nine-inch sections for the base.  You end up with something like this:

This should give you enough support for the frame to be freestanding.  The shower curtain you purchased will act as the diffusing material.  For an inelegant solution, you can simply drape it over the frame.  Or, if you’re nitpicky, you can cut and tack it so it looks a little more professional.

How do you use it?  Position your subject so they’re facing at a right angle to the sun.   Stick your new do-it-yourself scrim between them and the sun.  The shower curtain acts as a diffuser, casting softer shadows across the face and improving the quality of the portrait.  At the same time, the background is still bright and saturated.

For better results, use in the early morning or evening - the so-called “golden hours”.  This will keep your background from being washed out from a bright sun and the sun is at a greater angle, making your scrim more effective.

Be sure to come back and post your results!  This will be a great addition to the toolkit for parents looking to take senior photos, and might save the need for hiring a professional.  Good luck!

The do-it-yourself scrim was refined from an original concept by Just Fab.  Thanks for the inspiration!

This week’s photo assignment:

The idea is to photograph, converging, diagonal, horizontal or vertical lines. There are some lines that make your eye go into the infinite or to some determinate place or object. Find them. Due on Monday, the 24th of September, at noon GMT+1.

Post your results by Monday to the Cheapshooter Flickr Group and I’ll feature them here on the site.

Photo by Nuno Correia

Image by Pedro Pinheiro


Image by Joao Rechena

Next week’s assignment looks promising: fire.

Don’t burn your fingers, cameras, or even your house on this one! Creative (literal or figurative) views on fire and/or smoke. Due on Monday, the 17th of September, at noon GMT+1.

As always, add your pics to the Cheapshooter Flickr Group by Monday and I’ll feature them on the site.

Still no takers for this week’s photo assignment from Photoassignment.net in the Cheapshooter Flickr Group but the guys from Portugal came up with some cool ideas to illustrate the concept of stillness. Check them out after the jump.

Check out photoasssignment.net for more. This week’s theme is night.

The only rule is, the photos must be taken at night. The main goal isn’t taking photos in your cellar at night time, the purpose of this assignment is to capture the life, color, movement, mystery and behaviors surfacing after the sunset.

I’d love to see some entries in the Cheapshooter.com Flickr Group this week. Post an image along with how you shot it and I’ll feature it along side the Photoassignment guys on the site next Monday.

The crew over at photoassignment.net shot details this week. Here was the assignment, from their site:

Photos of aesthetically interesting details of anything, big or small, organic or not, but which at first sight doesn’t make the viewer recognize what they are part of.

Check out a few of the best after the jump.

I was really impressed by the quality of the images in this week’s assignment - all the shooters on Photoassignment seem to be quite adept at macro photography. Pedro Pinheiro’s image of the spiral plant that led off this article shows nice, subtle lighting technique and a cool allusion to the shape of a DNA molecule. The technique he used wasn’t cheap.

I took this photo with the Canon EOS 5D and a Canon EF 85 f/1.8, ST-E2 emitter, and a 550EX flash from the left with a Lumiquest portable softbox.

That’s about $3500 worth of equipment right there. But contrast that with Pinheiro’s next shot, taken with a budget digital camera with a piece of tissue paper over the flash to diffuse the light.

It’s interesting that Pinheiro was able to produce great light with both expensive and budget kit. To be sure, the photograph of the plant would have been a lot more difficult to take without the more expensive, off-camera flash, but there are still a lot of different ways to light an image well with just a point-and-shoot digital camera.

Nuno Correia’s shot of his bicycle tire shows a nice subtle control as well and does perhaps the best job of living up to the assignment’s instructions that the subject not be immediately obvious on first glance. I like that both Correia and Pinheiro used black as the background color in their images. Isolating a macro object against a white background is the cliched - and easier - technique, and I think a black background can be more impacting.

This week’s assignment is stillness.

Represent in any way the concept of Stillness, to be still. Something not being disturbed by any means.

As always, you are invited to follow along with the assignment, posting your results to the Cheapshooter.com Flickr Group. I’ve started threads in the group to discuss both this week’s results and some ideas on how to illustrate stillness. Please join in, and add any macro photos of your own into the pool.

This was a lot of fun, and it’s a great concept. Having to shoot four photos (or three, in my case) of a single theme is a great way to force yourself to be creative and figure out new ways to approach a topic. That’s something any photographer could appreciate.

Here’s are the results from this week from myself and Photoassignment.net’s Nuno Correia. I plan to follow along with their assignments each week, posting my results to the Cheapshooter.com Flickr Group. If you haven’t joined yet, add some photos to the pool here. We’d love to have you.

View the results after the jump.

From the Photoassignment.net site, here’s this week’s assignment:

Photos of aesthetically interesting details of anything, big or small, organic or not, but which at first sight don’t make the viewer recognize what they are part of. Due on Monday, the 27th of August, at noon GMT+1.

Get to work and post on Monday to the Cheapshooter.com Flickr Group. Check out Photoassignment.net if you haven’t yet.