The Photography Tip of the Week #080

Posted by Philip in Photo Technique, Podcast

Photoblock Challenge

080 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

As is the custom here every 10th photography tip will be a photo block challenge.  This one will be a bit different, because I’m not going to give you a photographic task.  I’m going to challenge you by asking what did I do to make the following couple of images.  In each case the effect is done “in camera,” no Photoshop work or digital effects.  It’s also extremely simple and doesn’t really require any special equipment, and can be done with any type of camera.  I really would like to know your theories as to how this effect was achieved.  I will give you the answer later this week in a followup podcast/blog post.  And just so you know, I stripped the metadata from the posted images, so that won’t give you any clues.

The Photography Tip of the Week #079

Posted by Philip in Photo Technique, Podcast

Tilt those glasses

079 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

Studio style portrait photography is a lot of fun and can produce outstandingly sharp portraits that far exceed images made with “found light.”  This is why portrait photographers are sought after for those special events in people’s lives.  The added light of a studio style session (I say style since these can be done outside an actual studio) is what makes it easy to create the sharp photos with that special look.  The bright highlight of a shoot-through umbrella reflected in the eyes of your subject gives the photo depth and life.  But just as easily as that light makes the image, it can also take it away if your subjects wear glasses.

It’s common to look straight at the camera and with the light source designed to light your subject’s face and eyes, you will often get that highlight on the glasses just like you would get the highlight in their eyes.  There is a trick that most people do to get rid of this problem and that’s to take the glasses off.  But with a lot of individuals that rely on glasses and don’t or can’t wear contacts, the portrait just doesn’t look right unless they are wearing their glasses.

Many established studios have several glasses frames that you can choose from to “simulate” the wearing of glasses.  This will produce a technically good image, but not having the lenses in the glasses just seems to be a bit off to me.  So what can you do to reduce that glare?  The simple way is to have your subject tilt their head down or up slightly to have the reflection pointed another direction.

In this zoomed image you can see where the flash gives that nasty highlight that obscures the eye.  There is enough information there to clean it up in post processing to tone down or even remove the highlight, but that will take time.

In this image the glasses are tilted down very slightly, not even enough to notice that they are tilted, but the effect is to completely remove the glare on the glasses that would otherwise obscure the eyes.  Keep in mind it doesn’t take much, just a slight tilt and the glare is gone.

The Photography Tip of the Week #078

Posted by Philip in Photo Processing, Podcast

Ho Hum to Hmmm

078 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

Is every photo a masterpiece?  Can any photo become a great work of art?  Is beauty in the eye of the beholder and if so what do they behold?  I see similar questions to these on various photography forums from time to time.  They are basically asking if they should keep every photo and if they do, what should they do to make them worth keeping.  So for this tip I’m going to give you a basic process to bring out the best in any photo.  This isn’t going to make every photo a masterpiece, but you may find a few treasures you didn’t think you had.

Before I begin I must warn you that this will require some post processing techniques that I feel photographers should have, but many probably don’t.  It’ll also require the use of some software that’s more than what you get with the camera, but programs like Lightroom, Aperture, Photoshop Elements and even free image manipulation software can handle these steps. Here they are: Crop, Correct, Concentrate.

I recently entered some photos in a local contest and one of the categories was insects.  I generally don’t do a lot of macro photography and I don’t have a gallery of insect photos.  But I did remember that I did photograph a butterfly recently.  When I looked at the photos they were all “Ho Hum.”  So how do you make a Ho Hum photo into one that makes you go Hmmm.

Original boring photo. You could even miss the butterfly.

Step 1, Crop.  This is pretty straightforward and I’ve had tips on how to crop before.  Simply get rid of the background cruft and make your subject large.  That’s one of the beauties of having lot’s of megapixels, you can often crop more than 50% of the photo away and still have plenty of information to make a great image.

Step 2, Correct.  You want to do a color correction based on your subject.  This color correction can include extra saturation and contrast to make your subject pop. Don’t worry too much about the surrounding information, we’ll handle that in a moment.

Step 3, Concentrate.  Finally you want to concentrate the viewer’s focus on the subject by making the surrounding information less colorful, visible or sharp. This is an artistic decision, but I’ve found that you don’t have to be extreme.  Even subtle changes can make the subject stand out.

Much better. Obvious subject and it only took 2 minutes to do.

So these are my 3 steps to convolve a ho hum photo into a more interesting photo that makes you go hmmm.

The Photography Tip of the Week #077

Posted by Philip in Photo Processing, Podcast

Same Time Color Correct

077 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

When post processing your photos one of the most common tasks is color correction.  If you are using a pro photo product that does the color correction for you, then this tip does not apply to you.  However, if you are manually correcting the color of a photo, then you need to pick a time of the day that you perform your color corrections.  The goal is to improve your consistency, so it’s important to have not only the same environmental conditions, but for you to be physically in a similar state as well. I like to do my portrait color corrections about a half hour after I get up in the morning for these reasons:

1. I’m well rested, especially my eyes are well rested.
2. My office is on the west side of the house so I don’t have the morning sun streaming in through the windows.
3. I don’t have a lot on my mind yet, so it’s a more relaxing time of the day.

I wanted to put this to the test  so I performed color correction to the same image at different times of the day over the period of a couple of days just to see what the difference would look like.  The point of this exercise was not to make a value judgement as to which is the better image, but to see what the difference is between the images from different times of the day.  I had to do them several days apart so I wouldn’t accidentally remember what settings I used previously.

Testing manual color correction at different times of the day.

As you can see there’s a big difference.  Even though I did attempt to make the environmental conditions the same. I wanted the same amount of ambient light and made sure I calibrated the monitor before performing each color correction. There’s a pretty sizable difference.  In my case the morning version prints much better on my printers than the afternoon version.

I know you don’t always have the option of picking when you post process all of your images.  But if you can create a habit or build it into your schedule to do this work at the same time of the day under similar conditions, you will achieve more consistent output.

The Photography Tip of the Week #076

Posted by Philip in General, Photo Philosophy, Podcast

The Photography Tip of the Week #075

Posted by Philip in Photo Philosophy, Photo Technique, Podcast

That’s a Sweet Brick Wall

075 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

There are many things in life that have a sweet spot and photography is no exception.  For this tip I’m interested in the sweet spot of your lens, specifically which aperture is the sharpest all around. It’s a very simple test and only requires a few minutes with each lens you want to test.  I call this the brick wall test.  You don’t have to use a brick wall, as long as you use something that has lots of detail.  Some people will put a newspaper on the wall, but I prefer to do this outside and newspaper blows around very easily.  So here’s my setup:

1. Use a tripod about 10 feet or 3 meters away from the wall, because you want all of your images to be almost exactly the same.
2. Set ISO to 100 or 200 and shoot during a sunny day.
3. Aperture priority mode.  Shutter speed doesn’t affect your sweet spot.  You will start with either your largest or smallest aperture and photograph the exact same image on each aperture setting.
4. Autofocus.  It shouldn’t matter how the focus is set since you aren’t moving the camera, but if you must set it, just center focus will be fine.
5. Using a cable release would be nice, but not overly necessary.

Once you’ve made all your images, load them up in a program where you can look at the centers of each image at 100%.  This becomes a value judgment on your part.  Cycle through the images until you determine which one is the sharpest.  Since you have locked down most all the variables and the only variation is the aperture you should be able to determine which f-stop is the sweet spot.

Here’s the images of various apertures side by side from my test.  As you can see they could all be the same image.  There is very little difference in coloring and overall look.  You can be fairly certain that the only measurable difference now is just the aperture.

Now let’s look at a section of the images at 100%.  You can see that f8.0 is noticeably sharper than either f4.5 or f22.  I’ve scrutinized over all my aperture settings for this lens and know that f8.0 is the sharpest or the sweet spot.

With this knowledge you now know that if you want to get sharper images, you will want to get that aperture as close to your sweet spot as possible and adjust your other settings to match.