Photography Masterclass

How to Shoot in Natural Light

Andrew — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 11:05:08 +0000

Shooting portraits using natural light is sometimes a challenge.

The best situation is when the sun is behind clouds and your model is lit with very soft and diffused light. This type of light is non-directional and it produces an effect of subject wrapping. There are no strong lights or shadows, therefore no details are lost. The unpleasant shadows under the nose and eyes are almost invisible. If the light is too soft, your model will lack any light accent and in that case you can use a fill flash.

When positioning your subject please remember that you never should have the sun poiting directly into your subject’s eyes. It is the worst position. You should do exactly the opposite, have the sun come from your subject’s back. That way it will nicely highlight your model’s hair. And if you use a fill flash to light the model’s face, you will have a great exposure.

Even when your subject is facing the sun covered with clouds, use just a little bit of fill flash to brighten the eyes.

In front light situations there is no depth, no textures, and the details are washed out. In harsh direct sun ligth it is advisable to use a lens hood to protect your lens from sun rays and elliminate lens flare (the bright little circles or hexagons that appear on the image when you take photos with front lighting) and reduced contrast. When the light is hard, using a reflector will help to bounce some light back to the model’s face and that light will not be as hard as directly from the sun. There are 5-in-1foldable reflectors that you can buy for about $30. Alternatively you may use a simple plain white board of a sufficient size.

Another way to take pictures under direct hard sun light is using a diffusion panel that usually comes in 5-in-1 reflectors. Naturally you will need an assistant who will hold the panel for you blocking the sun light.

Digital cameras offer much less dinamic range than film cameras. So in order to get your image without blown out areas in the bright day light, just go into shade.

It is a good idea to shoot in Aperture priority mode but pay attention to your shutter speed as well because it may increase when the sun is getting down and your photos may become blury. If you see your shutter speed going over 1/60th of a sec, increase the ISO or switch to Shutter priority mode.

There are three elements that a photographer must understand when taking pictures: light, composition and subject. Every image has its appropriate light. If the light is not good, the photo will be a failure.

Side lighting can be used for separating the subject from a background. This trick can turn a common photo into a winner. The three-dimensionality of the subject: shape, texture, shadows, it all becomes more obvious.Similar Posts:

Beauty Dish for Portraits

Andrew — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 07:40:18 +0000

A beauty dish is a photographic lighting device which uses a parabolic reflector to distribute light towards a focal point. The light created by a beauty dish is between that of a direct flash and a softbox, producing a more abrupt shadow edge transfer than a soft box. It gives the image a wrapped, contrasted look, which adds a very dramatic effect. The combination of focussed and diffused light allows a photographer to sculpt the light and create shadows on edges of the face, which serve to bring out the facial features. The intensity of the light falls off really quickly, creating drama when it’s needed, but not overdoing it.

The video shows different kinds of light that you can get from a beauty dish: with or without a reflector, using grids. The difference can be easily seen by the shape of the model’s shadow.

Beauty dishes are great for portrait photography, especially for showing up good skin texture, good bone structure and producing sexy shots that ‘pop’ in fashion and glamour photogrpahy. However even the cheapest one will cost at least $100. There are a number of DIY tutorials teaching you how to make a beauty dish from inexpensive materials on your own. Check this one. You can also use your external flash with a handmade beauty dish.Similar Posts:

How to Shoot a Reportage eBook

Andrew — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 18:52:56 +0000

Enzo Dal Verme, a well travelled photographer, has written a structured and inspiring manual on photography reportage.

It is mainly aimed at those photographers who want to enter the publishing market and produce quality photos that editors are likely to buy.

His manual “How To Shoot A Reportage” covers a variety of topics designed to help photographers to create impactful images with an eye to the publishing market. There are about 70 pages in the ebook with lots of illustrations (Enzo’s own images).

Even professional photographers will find some useful tricks for their next shooting trip.

You need to produce a story with hot subjects. It will be helpful if you get inspired by the subject and do some research prior to the shooting. Try to choose a unique theme that can easily be sold to editors. If the story you have in mind is too complicated to do at the moment, put it in your wish list for a future job. These are some of the topics that Enzo covers in his ebook. It also explains the technical stuff: travel preparations, photo gear, photography tips, scheduling your shoot, delivering your work, etc. What I like about this book is that it is so well structured and it aswers almost all questions I used to have.

Read more about this ebook and purchase it here: www.enzodalverme.com/blog/2010/12/how-to-shoot-a-reportage-the-manual/ [It is not an affiliate link]Similar Posts:

TTL Metering and Exposure

Andrew — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 14:02:12 +0000

TTL means “through the lens”. This is the method of metering the light that comes to the camera’s sensor through the lens. Any digital camera has a built in light meter which is used to set the correct esposure (shutter speed and aperture settings) at a given ISO. It is a reflection light metering system, i.e. your camera measures the light that is reflected from a subject, a house for example. The meter gets all the light and blends it to an 18% gray. You can change the way your camera mixes up the received light in order to produce 18% gray.

Main metering modes:

Spot metering. Your camera uses a very small spot of the frame to calculate the exposure. Usually a central spot of 1-5% of the whole scene in size. Some cameras allow you to move that spot off the central position. This mode is used when you need to focus on one specific area of the scene, for example if there is a strong back light, you cannot use the whole frame as your subject will be too dark. So it is quite an advanced metering mode.
Partial metering. It is similar to teh spot mode but the area used for light calculation is bigger, usually 10 to 15% of the frame. It is also used when you need to exclude some really bright areas of your image, the sun for example.
Average metering averages the whole scene to produce 18% gray and often it does not work well. If you have the sun in one corner, this mode will make the whole image underexposed because it used the bright sun for its calculations. Camera manufacturers know about this disadvantage of the average mode and they created a Center-weighted average metering, which covers a centrally located area of 60-70% of the image.
Matrix or Evaluative metering. Modern cameras with powerful digital processors have this mode. The frame is split to several zones and the processor computes how these zones are lighted. If one zone is overlighter with the sun for example, the computer knows that it should not take this brightness for its calculations. This mode is recommended for those who strat their photography.

The metering system is not too sofisticated and can be fooled by very dark subjects, if you photographing a group of people in black suits, your image will be overexposed because the camera does not expect the black color, it expects 18% gray. The same is true when taking photos of snow, it will be underexposed. The camera does not expect all that white color, it expects middle gray and it reduces the amount of light that comes to the sensor.

You can use exposure compensation or a light meter to correct your camera’s mistakes.

Exposure compensation range of adjustment goes from +2 to -2 EV in 1/3 steps. So you can adjust the exposure measured by the light meter by telling the camera to allow more light in (positive exposure compensation) or to allow less light in (negative exposure compensation).Similar Posts:

History of Photography

Andrew — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 13:05:45 +0000

“Photography” is composed from the Greek words photos (”light”) and graphein (”to draw”). Scientist Sir John F.W. Herschel was the first one who used this term and it was in 1839. Photography means a method of recording images by the action of light on a sensitive material.

Pinhole Camera (aka the Camera Obscura)
Photography history begins from Pinhole cameras. There are different opinions on who was the first inventor of pinhole. The first mention of the principles behind the pinhole camera, a precursor to the camera obscura, belongs to Mo-Ti (470 BCE to 390 BCE), a Chinese philosopher. Alhazen (Ibn Al-Haytham), a great authority on optics in the Middle Ages who lived around 1000AD, has natered the pinhole camera further. He was able to explain why the images were upside down. Around 1600, Della Porta reinvented the pinhole camera. Apparently he was the first European to publish any information on the pinhole camera and is sometimes incorrectly credited with its invention. Johannes Kepler was the first person to coin the phrase Camera Obscura in 1604, and in 1609, Kepler further suggested the use of a lens to improve the image projected by a Camera Obscura.

The First Photograph
On a summer day in 1827, Joseph Nicephore Niepce made the first photographic image with a camera obscura. Joseph Nicephore Niepce’s heliographs or sun prints as they were called were the prototype for the modern photograph, by letting light draw the picture.

Niepce placed an engraving onto a metal plate coated in bitumen, and then exposed it to light. The shadowy areas of the engraving blocked light, but the whiter areas permitted light to react with the chemicals on the plate. When Niepce placed the metal plate in a solvent, gradually an image, until then invisible, appeared. However, Niepce’s photograph required eight hours of light exposure to create and after appearing would soon fade away.

In 10 years Louis Daguerre was able to reduce the exposure time to 30 minutes. It was the first practical use of photography and he named this method: the daguerreotype. Daguerre’s process ‘fixed’ the images onto a sheet of silver-plated copper. By 1850 the daguerreotype became popular in Europe and US.

Negative to Postive Process
Fox Talbot is known in History of Photography as an inventor of the three primary elements of photography: developing, fixing, and printing. Although simply exposing photographic paper to the light produced an image, it required extremely long exposure times. By accident, he discovered that there was an image after a very short exposure. Although he could not see it, he found he could chemically develop it into a useful negative. The image on this negative was then fixed with a chemical solution. This removed the light-sensitive silver and enabled the picture to be viewed in bright light. With the negative image, Fox Talbot realised he could repeat the process of printing from the negative.

Wet Plate Negatives
In 1851, Frederick Scoff Archer, an English sculptor, invented the wet plate negative. Using a viscous solution of collodion, he coated glass with light-sensitive silver salts. Because it was glass and not paper, this wet plate created a more stable and detailed negative. It was not convinient to use this method in the field.

Dry Plate Negatives & Hand-held Cameras
In 1879, the dry plate was invented, a glass negative plate with a dried gelatin emulsion. Dry plates could be stored for a period of time. Photographers no longer needed portable darkrooms and could now hire technicians to develop their photographs. Dry processes absorbed light quickly so rapidly that the hand-held camera was now possible.

Flexible Roll Film
In 1884 Eastman patented the first film in roll form to prove practicable; in 1888 he perfected the Kodak camera, the first camera designed specifically for roll film. In 1892 he established the Eastman Kodak Company, at Rochester, New York, one of the first firms to mass-produce standardized photography equipment.

Color Photographs
In the early 1940s, commercially viable color films were introduced to the market. These films used the modern technology of dye-coupled colors in which a chemical process connects the three dye layers together to create an apparent color image. At first color prints were not stable because organic dyes were used to make the color image. The image would literally disappear from the film or paper base as the dyes deteriorate. Kodachrome, dating to the first third of the 20th century, was the first color film to produce prints that could last half a century.

Film Speed (ISO)
An arbitrary number placed on film that tells how much light is needed to expose the film to the correct density. Generally, the lower the ISO number, the finer grained and slower a film. ISO means International Standards Organization. The slower the film, the more light is needed to expose it.

How cameras developed

By definition a camera is a lightproof object, with a lens, that captures incoming light and directs the light and resulting image towards film (optical camera) or the imaging device (digital camera). All camera technology is based on the law of optics first discovered by Aristotle.

After years of pinhole cameras use, George Eastman invented the Kodak camera. For $22.00, an amateur could purchase a camera with enough film for 100 shots. After use, it was sent back to the company, which then processed the film. The ad slogan read, “You press the button, we do the rest.” A year later, the delicate paper film was changed to a plastic base, so that photographers could do their own processing.

Andrew Heafitz applied for and received his first U.S. patent for the camera shutter.

As early as 1905, Oskar Barnack had the idea of reducing the format of film negatives and then enlarging the photographs after they had been exposed. As development manager at Leica, he was able to put his theory into practice. He took an instrument for taking exposure samples for cinema film and turned it into the world’s first 35 mm camera: the ‘Ur-Leica’.

Polaroid or Instant Photos
Photography history won’t be complete without Polaroid photography. It was invented by Edwin Herbert Land. Land was the American inventor and physicist whose one-step process for developing and printing photos created instant photography. The first Polaroid camera was sold to the public in November, 1948.

Disposable Camera
Fuji introduced the disposable camera in 1986. We call them disposables but the people who make these cameras want you to know that they’re committed to recycling the parts, a message they’ve attempted to convey by calling their products “single-use cameras.”

Digital Camera
In 1984, Canon demonstrated first digital electronic still camera.

Flashbulbs
The first modern photoflash bulb or flashbulb was invented by Austrian, Paul Vierkotter. Vierkotter used magnesium-coated wire in an evacuated glass globe. Magnesium-coated wire was soon replaced by aluminum foil in oxygen. On September 23, 1930, the first commercially available photoflash bulb was patented by German, Johannes Ostermeier. These flashbulbs were named the Vacublitz. General Electric made a flashbulb called the Sashalite.

Very detailed history of photography up to 1920 can be found here: www.rleggat.com/photohistorySimilar Posts:

How to Find a Model for Photoshoot

Andrew — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 18:32:07 +0000

If you are a beginner in photography and your interest is portraiture, you need to have a model to photograph. Of course you can use your family members or friends but sometimes it is not possible and you need to find a stranger model.

This video shows how two guys were out on a shoot and how they invited girls to model.

Models’ websites and Facebook groups can be a source for local models. Try to use a local website if possible.
Make a portfolio to show a model, at least a few pictures that tell what kind of photography you do.
Aim at those models who need to build up their own portfolio.
Seek TFP or TFCD models. It means that neither a photographer, nor a model is paid any money. The model receives prints or a CD with digital images in return for their time.
Obtain a model release which will allow you to use the photos you took. Download model relase (PDF).
Ask a model to send you some of her photos to see what her strenths and weaknesses are beforehand.
Be polite and business like with a model. Try to establish a good rapport with them and make the whole process easy and enjoyable. Do not touch a model!
Inform the model of the location, costumes, make-up that you have planned.
You need to agree beforhand on who pays a studio rent and a make-up artist costs, if any. Or whether you share these costs.
Once you have done the shooting, act in a professional way to deliver your model what you have promissed (prints or a CD).

Similar Posts:

What are Strobes, Flashes and Speedlights

Andrew — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 14:52:20 +0000

First of all about terminology, flashes, strobes and speedlights are just different names for the same thing.

A flash consists of three parts:

the head with the actual flash tube. It may be rotating horizontally and vertically;
body with electronics, sensors and batteries;
foot with electrical contact points that you attach to the camera.

Your camera has a flash shoe and its trigger contacts match those on the flash foot so that the camera and the flash can speak to each other. When you press the shutter button, a comman is sent from your camera to the flash to trigger it.

There are three ways how your camera can be connected to an off-camera flash:

via an electrical cord with PC connectors;
via optical connection;
via radio connection.

If your off-camera flash has no PC terminal to attach a cord to, you need to use a PC to hot shoe adapter. The same goes for your camera, if it has no PC port, get one of hot shoe to PC adapters and you will be able to use a cord to connect the camera body and your flash. The cord’s length may be 2-4 m.

For optical connection, you can use infra red or light triggers that are attached to the flash using the PC terminal, in case your flash is not equipped with an optical trigger system. It is better that using a cord but still has some limitations like your camera and flash must be positioned in the direct visual sight. If there are other photographers using strobes, your off-camera flash may be triggered by their cameras.

A radio trigger system is the most expensive but most convinient one as it allows much greater distance and is protected from being influenced by other cameras. You attach a radio transmitter to your camera and a receiver to your flash.

Off camera flashes need a light stand which is high enough depending on your shooting situation. You also need an umbrella adapter to attach the flash to the light stand. It allows to set various anges of your flash direction.

There are many creative options for reflecting, diffusing, blocking and filtering your flash light. There are shoot-through umbrellas that are postioned between the subject and the flash. It produces a nice looking glow. Another option is using a reflective umbrella that sends the light back to the subject. The flash is directed in the opposite way, from your subject.

It is important to correctly install the umbrella adapter and the flash so that the light is directed into the center of the umbrella and when you change the position, both the flash and umbrella are moved in the same direction, without changing the angle between them.

There snoots and grids that you can use to produce a narrow light beam.

You can place a plastic color filter in front of your flash to change the color of the light for correcting a white balance or creating special effects.

Flags are used to block some portion of the light which may cause lens flare or when you need not light some part of your subject.Similar Posts:

Five Ways to Protect Your DSLR Camera

Andrew — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 10:24:52 +0000

As you already know photo gear costs hundreds and sometimes thousands dollars, especially high-end lens. If you decided to shell out and make such an expensive purchase, it is a good idea to protect your investment for at least these two reasons:

Your photo equipment will last you longer
Less value will be lost when you need to sell it in the future

I will give you an overview of what you can do to protect your camera, lens, strobes, etc. The video above demostrates a free DIY solution to protect your camera from rain and snow using simple plastic bags.

First of all let us review camera bags.
There are many manufacturers and hundreds of models starting from very small to weel based cases. Think Tank Photo Bags [www.thinktankphoto.com] may be worth your consideration for their ultimate quality and durability. It is not uncommon for a photographer to change bags as he or she expands the variety of photo gear. The bag you are buying today may not be enough for your needs in a couple of years.

Lens protection
For lens more expensive than $100 it is highly advisable to use a protective UV filter. It is so easy to scratch your lens’ front glass and if it cost you $1,500 it may be a disaster. A cheap UV filter from Canon or Nikon (or any other producer) will save you from damaging your lens glass. In the worst case you will just replace a $20 filter. Since it is transparent to visible light and filters out higher ultraviolet wavelengths, the UV filter is useful in a sunny weather condition. There is a dispute of whether or not to use it [see http://photo.net/equipment/filters/] but by all means it will act as protection to your expensive lens. And do not forget that lens loose much less value over time compare to camera bodies, so when you sell your lens its condition will highly affect its price. Check Hoya and B+W for UV filters.

Next comes camera screen protection
These small LCD screens are easy to scratch. Therefore a film or plastic cover can save you from damaging it. They are priced from $2 to $10. Check various options here: www.thefind.com/electronics/info-camera-screen-protector-protective-lcd

Memory cards cases
Cards are very sensitive and if are not careful enough with them, contacts may get dirty which will result in a faulty card. Using a simple case or even a small plastic bag will solve the problem. Check here for ideas: www.bhphotovideo.com/c/buy/Memory-Card-Carry-Cases-Accessories/ci/3688/N/4289945363

Finally camera armor or skin
If you plan using your camera in wet or rainy or dusty condition, try the DIY solution in the video above or buy a special armor case or so called camera skin that seals your camera. This does not mean you will be able to drop your DSLR into water but it will give some extra protection from short exposure to negative environment conditions. Check these options: www.bhphotovideo.com/c/buy/Digital-Camera-Skins/ci/12670/N/4294538488

Photos by Cybjorg, Peter E. LeeSimilar Posts:

Secrets of White Balance

Andrew — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 16:43:40 +0000

What is White Balance?

Basically it is the light colour temperature. A low colour temperature shifts light toward the red; a high colour temperature shifts light toward the blue. Different light sources emit light at different colour temperatures, and thus the colour cast. With digital cameras, we can simply tell the image sensor to appy a colour shift.

This is where the concept of “White Balance” comes in. If we can tell the camera which object in the room is white and supposed to come out white in the picture, the camera can calculate the difference between the current colour temperature of that object and the correct colour temperature of a white object. And then shift all colours by that difference.

Although there are built-in white balance presets, you can manually set the white balance. It is very simple, point the camera at a white or gray card (angled so that it is reflecting light from the room) as a neutral reference, filling the screen completely with it, then pressing the White Balance button (or set it in the menu), the camera does its WB calculation. Now any picture taken will have its colour temperature shifted appropriately. When the lighting situation changes, you should adjust the custom white balance accordingly.

There is a number of add-on products available on the market that help you set the White Balance manually. They are based on two methods:

Reflective-Style White Balance method (meaning that you measure the white balance with a gray card or other remote object that light leflects from)
Incident TTL-Style White Balance method (meaning that you put a special cap on your lens and capture the white balance through the cap)

This article gives a list of products to choose from: www.outdoorphotographer.com/columns/solutions/white-balance.html

When using a gray card, ensure the card is not in shadows, but illuminated by the artificial light in the room. If you are bouncing light off the walls, ensure the card is reflecting the bounced light.
In mixing artificial lights situations, it is advisable to use RAW and adjust in post processing for each light.
Beware of fluorescent light: since fluorescent light does not contain all the spectrum of light, you may obtain unexpected results.
Pictures of snow scenes typically reproduce the snow not as white but with a bluish tinge. Sometimes, the blue adds to the mood of the picture, but at other times you may want to remove the blue.
If you are taking landscapes, and it’s early in the morning or late in the evening, or you are not too sure of which WB setting to use, try it in RAW.

Preset White Balance

If setting your custom white balance is too much of a pain to you, cameras provide preset WB settings such as, Tungsten, Fluorescent, Cloudy, Sunny, etc. Such WB presets can improve on a picture, especially under indoors lighting.

Besides custom WB and WB presets, digital cameras are equipped with an Auto White Balance (AWB) function. Usually AWB works very well in sunny and cloudy outdoors, and fine for most indoors situations (a little orange or bluish cast does sometimes contribute to the mood of the picture anyway, e.g. the warm orangle glow of a candle). In most cases Auto WB does a pretty good job in diverse situations, outdoors and indoors.

RAW File Format

When you save an image in RAW file format, you are saving it the way the image sensor sees it — without applying any adjustments (including white balance) to it. In fact, the camera ignores any WB setting you dial in. If you opt for shooting in RAW format rather than JPEG and you have an image editing software with the appropriate RAW plug-in, you can convert the RAW image to JPEG, and apply any colour temperature shift. This editing can be done again and again until you are happy with the color temperature in your photo.Similar Posts:

Creativity in Setting Aperture and Shutter Speed

Andrew — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 12:17:13 +0000

Bryan Peterson explains how to achive creatively correct exposure with your dSLR. He shows an example of shooting a man who jumps up. When he chooses the correct exposure with f22 to f3.5 the subject comes out blury because the shutter speed for the correct exposure is way too slow to capture a fast moving object. He is trying to convey that the pair of F stop and shutter speed will always give the “correct” exposure for the current lighting situation. However, when we are shooting the jumping man for instance, we do need the shutter speed to be around 1/500 to get the man sharp in his action. This is what he calls creativity in selecting your parameters for the right exposure.

When you plan taking a photo, ask yourself what you want to achieve. If it is a waterfall, you may way the water to be blury. Then you need to increase the shutter speed, as oppose to the example with the jumping man where you prefer him to be sharp.

The other side of the exposure selection is choosing what deapth of field you need for the shot. If it is a landscape, the F stop should be 16-22 because you want everything to be sharp from a few meters distance to far away. When making a portrait, it is another story, usually a model is highlighted by making the background blury. That way all attention of the viewer is focussed on the model. In this case your F stop should be 4 or less, depending on the lens you are using. It may go down to 1.4 or 1.2.

Don’t forget anout ISO setting that may help reduce the shutter speed if necessary. It increases the sensitivity of your camera and it can shoot with faster shutter speed at the same aperture. It is often vital for taking a photo in low light environment, handheld because there is a limit to the shutter speed which you can use without a tripod not having blurred images.Similar Posts: