Photo Technique | Time and Time Photographer

Oct26 2

Get rid of glare

A week ago I did a little video about using a polarizer and that you needed to have the camera at a 90 degree angle to your light source for maximum effect. The other day I came across another good use for using a polarizer and that is to cut down on glare. The source images come from 2 different cameras position about the same location, the first is from my Droid X. It has an amazing camera in it and I have no complaints, but it’s not a DSLR.

Lots of glare from shiny surfaces

The second is taken with the DSLR using a polarizing filter and you can see that the glare from the Sun bouncing off the water and shiny surfaces is greatly reduced.

Specular highlights and glare have been reduced

I’m not saying that you have to get rid of the glare and specular highlights in every image. But if you don’t want them in your image, a polarizing filter can help you. This is one of those things you can’t easily “fake” in post processing, and it’s so easy to do it in camera.

Oct24 3

The Photography Tip of the Week #084

Posted by Philip in Photo Technique, Podcast

Far Flung Flash
084 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

One thing I always find amazing at nighttime events in large stadiums is the flash of hundreds or thousands of cameras. Even though the light from the flash travels a tremendous distance, the effect it has on your subject from the nosebleed section of the stands is so minuscule that it’s basically zero. So asking the question, “How far does the flash travel?” is a misnomer. The light from your flash can easily travel an extreme distance. The real question is, “How far can your flash effective light your subject.” The inverse square law describes this quite well mathematically. But I promised several weeks ago I wasn’t going to explain things using math, so I’ll use a set of photos.

Brick is great for doing test photos. You have a regular pattern to see the effect of your test. In this case you can easily see the pattern of the flash, and how much light the subject would have hitting them based on how many bricks away they are from the source. Up close there is a lot of light, but as you get further away, the amount drops off very quickly.

Let’s say you have your subject at position 1 but you want to double the amount of light. The reason to double the amount of light is to increase your aperture by one stop. In order to double the amount of light you would have to bring them to position 2 which is half way closer to the light. If that wasn’t enough you would have to bring them in half way again to position 3 to further double the effect. That is the basics of the inverse square law for the light from your flash. If you want to double the amount of light either take the light half as close to your subject or move your subject half as close to the light.

The same holds true no matter the size of your light source. In this case I’m using a shoot through umbrella to make the light bigger. This creates a softer, more diffuse light. But there are several things you should notice:

Even though the light is bigger it’s not as strong as the bare flash and doesn’t effectively light the brick at distance.
Since I’m using an umbrella, there is a lot of light that bounces back.
The same inverse square law holds true. Even though the subject at position 3 isn’t being illuminated nearly as strong as the previous image, if you want to double the amount of light, you have to move them to position 2 which is half in as close.

I hope that this visually explained the inverse square law and how it pertained to the flash of your camera.

Oct19 0

Oh the thing’s I’ve learned

Posted by Philip in Old Photo Critique, Photo Technique

Just because one uses a point and shoot camera, doesn’t mean they can’t take really great pictures. Let’s turn the wayback machine to 6 years ago and my Olympus D40. I had that camera, because film and processing cost a lot and digital was going to save me money. But sometimes I went photography brain dead because I could hit that shutter as much as I wanted and all it cost me was a few batteries a month.

This photo has several problems but not all of them can be corrected.

Red Eye.
Clutter in the background.
Photographing downward instead of being on the same level.
Not much in the way of composition.

All in all, this is a snapshot that only immediate family would care to look at. But the next image is much better.

This photo, taken a few days later, is much better and probably worth a bit of time to make a print that even people outside the family would enjoy.

Nice and sharp.
Catchlight in the eyes.
On the same level.
Could probably darken the background a bit to hide the person there. Might even make a great black and white.

Thursday I’ll show the adjusted versions of these images and list what I’ve done to make them better.

Oct17 1

The Photography Tip of the Week #083

Posted by Philip in Photo Technique, Podcast

Fill Flash

083 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

Do you need a flash on a bright sunny day? Many people will say, “No, a flash is completely unnecessary on a sunny day.” That is absolutely wrong, and I’ll show you why. The initial reaction is to think that if you have a large and powerful light source such as the Sun, that a flash wouldn’t have any affect on your image. But like many things in photography it’s not the capability of the tool, but how you use it. My little flash can’t overpower the sun, or can it? For this image I’m going to put my subject looking away from the Sun. With the Sun behind them you don’t have to worry about them squinting or strong shadows on the face. You also get their hair to light up and glow depending on the angle of the light. But if you take a photo without a flash you get something like the following image.

Even though the image is sharp, it’s washed out and has a yellow-orange glow about it. There is also a noticeable lens flare, which isn’t a bad thing, but in conjunction with the other problems it adds to the overall blandness. But wait we can fix it in post, can’t we? Camera RAW and Photoshop can fix anything! But this isn’t a quick fix. Generally I don’t like spending more than 2-3 minutes on a single image unless it’s a wedding, fashion, or a final image for publication. Just to get the photo to a reasonable level took me about 15 minutes of selective adjustments and it’s still washed out. Granted it’s easily 10 times better even if the coloring of the skin is still a bit odd.

Now let’s look at an image made just a few seconds after the first using the same settings for ISO, Aperture and Shutter Speed but with a flash pointed directly at our subject. Both the original and this image are uncorrected so there is no post processing trickery here. The flash brings a richness to colors in her dress that are hidden in the original image. Her skin isn’t washed out and the sunlight making her hair glow is much more noticeable and doesn’t get lost. The lens flare still exists, but now becomes part of the image especially with the way she is gesturing.

So you can see there is a definite advantage to using a flash on a bright sunny day. It immediately brings balance and makes the scene look more like what you remember seeing and not what settle on capturing. I hope that this has shown you why you need to use your flash in the daylight. You will make a better photo instead of taking what you can. It can also save you an incredible amount of time in post processing and gives you more keepers.

Oct14 2

Follow-up to What Did I Do?

Posted by Philip in Follow-up, Photo Technique

I had a couple good guesses, but the answer was I used a polarizing filter. A lot of people feel that a polarizing filter is a magic outdoors in the direct sunlight filter. It’s not. You have to know how to use the filter and make sure that the light is at a 90 degree angle to your camera for maximum effect. Below is my first foray into doing a video tutorial. I thought it would be nice to show using the polarizing filter in live video.

Oct10 1

The Photography Tip of the Week #082

Posted by Philip in Photo Technique, Podcast

Flash Freeze
082 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

When you are using a constant light source, be it room lights or the sun, the faster the shutter speed the more you freeze the action and the less light you bring into the sensor. However when you are using a flash, shutter speed no longer follows the same role as when you are using a constant light source. As soon as you put a flash on your subject, the flash is what controls freezing of the action. The main role for shutter speed is in how much ambient light hits your sensor.

There is a rule of thumb that when you are photographing hand held in available light, that your shutter speed should be 1/60 sec or faster to achieve a sharp image. In the right conditions you can possibly get to 1/30 sec, but to be safe 1/60 sec is best. This is to help ensure that your image does not pickup any motion blur from the movement of your camera. In the above image I had the shutter speed too slow at 1/20 sec. You can easily see the streaking from the motion of the subject and most likely my camera. All-in-all hand held photos taken at slow shutter speeds without flash will be blurry.

Model Nikki Craven looks nice and sharp with the motion frozen by the flash even though the shutter speed is slow.

Now lets look at an image with similar settings. In this case the model is indoors with less available light, however since I’m using a flash the image is sharp and there is no motion blur. This is the one thing that confuses many photographers especially when they get a handle on how shutter speed, aperture and ISO all work together. As soon as you add a flash it seems like all the rules completely change and you no longer have control. When I hear someone say that they only photograph in available (or natural) light, I know they haven’t figured out this aspect of using a flash.

Having the shutter too fast is like having a censored section of your image.

So when you are using a flash, your shutter speed can typically be between 1/200sec and 1/4sec hand held. The flash will freeze the subject and you won’t have to worry about motion blur. With a shutter speed faster than 1/250sec your camera can’t sync with most flash units and you get a black bar at the bottom of your image. This black bar is the shutter of your camera caught in action. In order to fix this you need to slow down the shutter. If you want to go slower than 1/4sec you will start to pick up some motion blur again, mainly from light sources, so you’ll have to mount your camera on a tripod.

When I use a flash with my camera I set my aperture to f5.6, shutter speed to 1/10 sec and ISO 100 as a starting point. I’ll change aperture first then adjust the shutter speed to give me a good exposure. I hope this will help you when using a flash.