Celebrity portraits

[gigabloke]

I like to do portrait and street, and have too little time for either with my XE-1. But I found a way to shoot famous celebrities in my own home -- off the TV.
This one is of Kate Winslet looking very lovely in Titanic, on an old CRT set. Sometimes there will be banding in the image as with this one, but sometimes none appears.
An LED or LCD TV monitor would probably give better IQ...
View attachment 794

 

[joeradza]

Just make sure sure shutter speed is 1/30 or lower to eliminate the banding. I've been shooting super heroes, monsters, etc. off tv using a Polaroid SX-70 for many years. Its been great fun.

Joe

 

[gigabloke]

Thanks for the shutter speed tip Joe. I will try it.
Best,
Max

 

[joeradza]

I think I picked up that tip from Modern Photography magazine probably 40 years ago.

Joe

 

[Richard]

Forty years ago the explanation would go like this:

For a CRT display the shutter speed you need follows from the local broadcast frame rate. For America the frame rate is 30 frames per second, so if you choose a shutter speed less than 1/30 you aren't giving the display enough time to scan through all of the 525 lines which make up the TV frame. The grey bar in the picture above is a good example of that, and because the bar is grey rather than black it suggests that one field of the interlaced signal has been completed, but the second one has only got as far as the top of the grey bar before the shutter closed (two interlaced fields make one frame).

The reason you don't always get a grey bar is that occasionally the missing lines will occur in the vertical interval (vertical flyback period) of the display, so you're not missing anything, in effect.

As I say, that's the traditional explanation. But it's all different now with the advent of progressively scanned HDTV, and flat screen displays which don't rely on glowing phosphors to maintain an image on the screen.

-R

 

[gigabloke]

Excellent explanation Richard! Thank you.