Photography Tip of the Week #092
Conserve Power
092 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)
- Turn off the LCD. The LCD is the single biggest drain on battery power. Many digital cameras will allow you to turn off the automatic preview of the image you just made. I probably look at 1 in 10 photos in the field. Generally the preview isn’t up long enough for me to make any real judgements in the first place. So it does me no good to have it on and I suspect if you really think about it, you are the same way.
- Use your fastest memory cards. Memory card have a speed rating, either in “so many times” or MB/s. This is a rating of how fast (on average) you can transfer data to and off the card. The faster you can do this, the faster your internal memory buffer can clear and your camera can return to a resting state. One positive point about being in the cold, the cold is the best conditions for the memory card, so they will be at their maximum normal transfer rate.
- Rotate batteries. Batteries, like most people want to be warm. In the cold they lose the bulk of their chemical reactivity and rundown really fast. But if you keep a spare with you and close to your body, when your other battery runs down swap them. Even as the first battery warms back up it will regain some of it’s potential and you can rotate them again to continue making photos.
Photography Tip of the Week #091
The lights how they twinkle
091 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)
For many people, we are an a season of festivities and decorations. We want our festive photos to look their best. Many of those festive photos will include small lights, and I have a tip on how to make those lights twinkle. This requires the ability to control your aperture, so it’s not something you can readily do with a point-and-shoot camera unless you luck into the right setting automatically. It’s really simple, you have to run your aperture up to f22. Let me show you the difference in various aperture settings on some Christmas Tree lights. These are all using the same lens and the same fixed focal distance.
Let’s start out with f1.8. This is a wonderful aperture for creating a soft background, great for portraits and really creating a sharp focus on one part of your photo. But in this case the subject doesn’t really benefit from the soft background and the lights don’t twinkle.
Our second stop will be the f6.3 aperture. After quite a bit of testing this particular lens is sharpest at f6.3. I rarely use it at that f-stop, since I have other more flexible lenses that are sharp at that aperture. You can easily see that the image is sharp and nothing really stands out as spectacular even though there is a slight twinkle.
Finally f22. What we’ve done to the lens is to create a pinpoint aperture. The light for the entire image has to go through a very small section of the glass so there’s a slight prismatic effect, that is enhanced by the longer exposure. This give you the star-burst or twinkle effect. This effect even works with larger lights at a distance.
Photography Tip of the Week #090
PhotoBlock Challenge: 365+1
090 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)
It is our custom to offer a challenge every tenth episode. Each challenge is designed to help you better your photography skills. This challenge is a doozy. You may have heard of a 365 project. I propose a similar project, but with a simple twist. The standard 365 project is to simply “take” a photo each day. That takes a certain level of commitment, but it has the downside of not giving you much of a direction. You can get photoblock or even worse, get in a rut. So I offer up the following alterations to help you, and myself along on this photographic journey.
1) You need to make a photo each day. You don’t have to post everyday, but you need to have some sort of mechanism of posting a single photo from each day. In my case I’ll post all of my photos to this blog for the day the photo was taken with the tag 365+1. By the way, you don’t have to use the same camera, you can use your cel phone.
2) Here’s the big twist, you need to have a common element or subject for each photo. In my case I’m going to use a small stuffed animal. It’s very portable and it’ll be nice to see how the animal weathers and changes through the year. It can almost become a photographic Where’s Waldo.
3) If you miss a day (you don’t want to) you have to start over. But if something happens to your subject item, pick something similar and continue.
And finally I have something I’d like for you to do for (or to) me. I’d like a list of places, looks, or themes you want me to do for my challenge. Just reply to this posting with your ideas. I’m not a world travel, so don’t state a specific place, but general places like “driving a car” or “in the woods” is fair game. Ideally I’d love to have 365 great ideas so I’ll be challenged everyday to try to make a photo for each concept you post. Don’t forget to tell your friends and see if you can come up with some really interesting ideas.
Oh, by the way, I’m starting today. I see no reason to wait until the first of the year. I never believed in New Year’s Resolutions. If there’s something you need to do or change, there’s no need to wait, start now. What will you pick for your subject? I’m really excited to see what challenges you will send me.
The Photography Tip of the Week #089
Modify Flash
089 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)
This is my last tip in my series of the basics of flash. In many respects this should have been the first tip, however I thought it best to be last. If you’ve kept up with my previous tips you know several ways to modify the flash, I’m just going to give you some more. It is rare that the basic flash attached to your camera will continue to give you great results in every lighting condition. Even as advanced as our camera bodies get, the flash doesn’t give you a lot of creative control as is. So you have to modify the light. Here are the common ways of light modification. Keep in mind, unless you add more lights to the scene, modifying existing flash units will reduce the amount of light hitting your subject. So you will have to take that into consideration when modifying your light sources.
- Light diffusion – This includes anything you put over the flash to change the look from a simple napkin, to a colored gel or munchie bag, to an umbrella. These all diffuse and/or modify the color of the light.
- Light direction – This includes any positioning of the flash with respect to the camera from bouncing the flash off the ceiling or remotely triggering the flash.
- Light shaping – This is anything you do to change the size or shape of the light. This can be done by using an umbrella or lightbox to make the light bigger to wrapping something around the flash to keep it from spreading.
I’d like to give you a quick example of light shaping. This first image of our vase shows using an umbrella off the side to create a diffuse light source. This in effect makes the flash bigger and allows the light to wrap around the subject. This is a very nice light and great for portraits or anything you want to light relatively evenly but still show some dimension.
But with a single sheet of paper and gaffers or painters tape we can quickly change our flash into a shaped diffuse light source. In this image you can see the possibilities. The light will be very different depending on the length of paper, color of paper, or even areas you black out on the paper.
You can simply use the flash to the side to make a light source that creates a strong sense of dimension. The amount of light that comes through the paper is far less than what would come through an umbrella, so you will have to compensate for that with flash power or distance.
Or you can put the flash overhead for a very dramatic effect. There are a great many possibilities in just a single sheet of paper and appropriate light placement.
The Photography Tip of the Week #088
Get a Slave (Flash)
088 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)
This tip is one of the best kept secrets of photography. In fact is such a big a secret I often forget it more than I remember. For under $30 you can get a flash that automatically fires when it sees another flash. A slave flash. It doesn’t have a lot of complicated controls, you just turn it on and go. It works with every camera that fires a flash, even point-and-shoot cameras. I often use it behind my subject as a rim light or above as a hair light. It’s also great for illuminating a back wall or any dark area in your scene that just needs more light.
In this second image there is a slave flash behind the model about a meter or so pointed up at about a 45 degree angle. This fills in the background to complete the wrapping effect and make the subject standout. This added separation allows us more flexibility in the photo. It’s a pretty reasonable image as is, but now the subject is more defined we can do a few quick things in Photoshop. In order to do the darkening and blurring of the background in Photoshop took me about 30 seconds. A simple selection was all I needed to separate the subject from the background.
Even if you don’t want to do editing in an image manipulation program like Photoshop, slave flashes are an inexpensive way to add lights throughout your scene.
The Photography Tip of the Week #087
Munchie Bag Flash
087 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)
Ok, here’s the scenario: It’s after twilight and you with a bunch of friends are sitting around a campfire. You want to take a few photos to remember the occasion, but you have to use the flash since there’s barely enough light to focus. The first image you take is great, you freeze the action and you have no motion blur, but the flash makes everything look strange. You don’t have the nice warm glow from a campfire since the flash made everyone look like surprised ghosts. You adjust your flash power, but no matter how you change your settings either you get a flood of unnatural white light, or really blurry people. So what do you do to balance so you can get the best of both worlds.
Surprised by the white light of the flash. There are hard shadows and the glow of the campfire is barely noticable.
In order to make the photos you want, you have to color your flash. There are many ways to do this, some rather expensive and some not. Before you go out and buy color corrected gels for your flash, try what I call the munchie bag gel. Many bags that have snack foods are translucent and quite capable of coloring the light of your flash. This is inexpensive, available in abundant colors and a way of using those bags. They will even work for point and shoot cameras, because all you have to do is cut enough of a bag to cover your flash.
Cut part of the munchie bag and put it in your difuser or if you don't ahve a difuser use some gaffers tape or blue painters tape to tape it over the flash.
It takes some fiddling to get the look you want. The translucent material is a filter after all and you will need more power to get the light through. It may not be the most professional looking way to color the light from your flash, but it does get the job done on a budget and can yield some surprising results. Here’s a photo from that same campfire using a bag of Chester’s Puffcorn.
A nice natural look with only some minor color correction, there's no need to use Photoshop to colorize the image.
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