Podcast | Time and Time Photographer

Nov07 0

The Photography Tip of the Week #086

Posted by Philip in Photo Technique, Podcast

Reflect the Flash
086 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

Last week the flash tip was about bouncing the flash off a ceiling and a bounce card which is great if you are photographing on the run. If you have a bit more setup time, get something that you can position close to your subject to reflect the flash. The local hardware store has large styrofoam sheets that have a silver reflective surface for about $10. They are light, reasonably sturdy and if they get messed up it’s not a big loss. The basic and most often use is to have your reflector just out of frame. Remember that inverse square law? You don’t want the light from your flash to have to travel too far to reflect back on your subject. The idea here is to have enough light surrounding your subject to fill in the dark shadows. The reflected light won’t be as powerful so you don’t have to worry about the flash doing even lighting everywhere.

My first image has the flash on the right with a reflector on the left. In this case the flash was stopped down to -2. There was enough ambient light that all I needed the flash to do is fill in the shadows.

The second image is what’s typically called clam shell lighting. You often do this with two lights, but if you are using a reflective surface you can easily perform the look with just one flash suspended from overhead. This creates a nice rim light and creates a classic beauty look.

This final image shows that you don’t have to use the reflector to encompass the whole scene. You can use the edge to create a dramatic look. In this image I increased the power of the flash to overdrive the ambient light since we were in a well lit room.

I hope that you’ll reflect a bit on this and start reflecting your flash a bit more.

Oct31 0

The Photography Tip of the Week #085

Posted by Philip in Photo Technique, Podcast

No Flash Forward

085 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

You hear it like a broken record with photographers, “Get the flash off the camera!” But what happens if it’s impractical or even impossible to pull your flash off the hotshoe? This could be for many types of indoor events like receptions, dinner parties or other gatherings where people are moving around. Setting up a photography station or having an assistant carrying a lighting rig is awkward, not to mention there will be quite a few moments you’ll miss while trying to get lights situated. So you have to be mobile and unencumbered. The best place to put your flash may be the hotshoe. You can use a bracket and a TTL cord to get a little distance, but if you are in a bind point your flash up.

Why up? Most indoor facilities have a ceiling, if not they would be outdoors. A lot of those ceilings are white. When your flash hits that white ceiling it becomes a large diffuse light source. Depending on the height of the ceiling and the power of your flash you will have fairly even light that surrounds your subject(s). This will get you a more natural look than just having the flash pointed forward as well as get rid of harsh shadows and dreaded red eye.

But this may not be enough. Pointing the flash up or even back will still make your images seem a bit flat. Some of that light still needs to go forward to add definition to your subject. But if your flash is pointed up, how can it go forward as well? More expensive flash units have a bounce card built in. If you have a less expensive unit, you can easily make a bounce card even if it’s not very convenient. Use a white index card, photo paper or just plain paper and attach it to your flash unit. Add gaffers tape to attach it to your flash or if that’s difficult to come by, blue painter’s tape can be found at most hardware stores. This tape is sticky but doesn’t leave a residue behind when you peel it off within a few days.

You will have to get used to using your flash this way. In essence it turns your single flash into two light sources, the big overhead light and a small forward facing light. In most cases you’ll have to increase the power so it can light up the scene. Remember last weeks tip about the inverse square law? That definitely applies in this situation. But once you master this technique, you should be able to photograph many indoor events with ease.

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.

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.

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.

Oct03 0

The Photography Tip of the Week #081

Posted by Philip in Photo Technique, Podcast

Why O Red Eye

081 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

For the next few episodes we’ll be doing some Flash Basics. I know you may have learned some of these from a teacher, mentor or some homeless guy on the side of the road. But I’ve always been a proponent for understanding why something works instead of just how it works. So I hope to give you a more in-depth understanding of using a Flash, without the math. So why o why is there red eye in so many photos? You know it’s because of the flash, but what’s actually going on that brings out the demonic look in all of us?

Simply put the red eye you see is the light reflecting off the blood vessels on someone’s retina in the back of their eye. It may sound gross, but you are making a photo with blood in it. Here’s a photo of the retina of an eye… one of my eyes to be exact. You can see the blood vessels going through the retina. The over all red-orange color is the color you would see if you shined a light directly into someone’s eye.

Why a flash makes red-eye. (Image not to scale)

So now you know where the red comes from, why do you get red-eye in your photos? When your major light source, in this case the flash is in line with the lens of your camera, anyone looking directly at the lens and flash will allow you the opportunity to capture the red of their retina in your image. This greatly depends on the angle between the flash, the eye and the lens. But for the sake of argument, any flash that is on the camera and pointed at your subject has an extremely good chance to create red-eye in your image. There is no exact number to the angle, so creating a math equation is pointless.

Ways to remove red eye:

Increase the angle between your lens,the flash and your subject’s eye. In some cases this may be a difficult notion. If you are using a built-in flash either on a DSLR or a point and shoot camera, you may not be able increase this angle easily. You will have to turn off the built-in flash and use an external light source. If you hear photographers saying to get the flash off the camera, this is one reason to do so.
Point the flash another direction. You can’t always do this but many high-end flash units will allow you to rotate the flash around and point it in a different direction to bounce the flash off a wall or ceiling. Alternately you can put something over the flash to diffuse the light a bit like a paper towel or napkin which can reduce the effect.
Red-eye reduction mode. This is a feature on many point and shoot cameras. The idea is to blast your subject with lots of annoying flashes so their pupils close and create a natural shield to the final big flash. Hopefully this won’t get you punched for annoying your subjects too much.
Red eye removal in post production. Almost every image manipulation program has a red-eye removal. All this does is paint the red section black. This most often looks unnatural, but if you are in a bind, it’s quick and easy.

Of course the best way is to not have the red-eye in the first place. Now that you know where it comes from you can either move your light or position your subject to eliminate this problem. In some cases I just tell them to look at my shoulder or instead of having them face me directly I’ll have them at an angle and look to the lens of the camera, which in many cases is all that you need to do.