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.
365 Project Followup
For those of you working an a 365 project below are a few general ideas to help you along with your project. One thing that is most important is to set goals and rewards for achieving your goals. I know what you are thinking… I already have a massively difficult goal of taking a picture each day. That’s all well and good, but what is the reason for taking on a 365 project? You want to better your photography skill set.
1) Pick the thing that you have a hard time with and work on that. If it’s flash or depth of field, use the project as an excuse to learn about something you have a difficult time.
2) Do a weekly or monthly theme. This could be shapes, colors, or lens.
3) Duplicate photos you have already done with you “big camera” with your cel phone.
4) Yourself. You are a photographer, why can’t you be in the photo as well?
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Self Standing Umbrella
Necessity is the mother of invention. Last weekend our town had it’s big Christmas parade and we were blessed (cursed or whatever) with snow. A lot of times photographers don’t think much of snow because it doesn’t instantly get your equipment wet. But you should protect your equipment during snow just as if it were raining. I’m not that fond of covering up my camera with plastic, so I take the umbrella approach. But if you don’t have an assistant to hold your umbrella for you over the hour and half long parade, fasten your umbrella to a light stand using gaffers or painter’s tape. Fortunately I have a “broken” regular umbrella that’s missing it’s handle so this was extremely easy for me to do. You probably don’t want to use your studio umbrellas for this task.
Transportable Lightroom Adjustments
I love Lightroom. I can do 95% of my photo adjustments in it. But the one thing I’ve had issue with is transportability of the adjustments. I don’t always want to open Lightroom to quickly look through photos or to export a jpg from one of my RAW files. Bridge is great for that sort of thing and I don’t have to keep a massive library of all of my photos. But there’s one trick (setting) you have to do in Lightroom to make you adjustments visible to external applications like Bridge.
Go to your Catalog Settings under the Metadata section and turn on “Automatically write changes to XMP.” This will write any adjustments you make to the .xmp sidecar file but more importantly if you convert your RAW files to .dng, it’ll write that data to the actual file. This way Bridge will see all of those adjustments with out having to Open Lightroom. I’m amazed that this setting isn’t on by default, it doesn’t take hardly any extra time and it ensures that any adjustment I make stays with the file, even if I want to open a file I adjusted on the desktop from the laptop.
Quickie light panel
Ever wanted to do a quick product shot and just didn’t want to pull out a bunch of equipment? I wanted to photograph a couple holiday ornaments. They’d be great for greeting cards or something similar and I wanted a white background. so I could get the following images without a lot of Photoshop time:
These are quick, I spent almost no time in Photoshop and this was the quick setup I used. Just a paper towel roll wrapped around a soda bottle and a remotely triggered flash behind the paper towels.
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.
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I am a top photographer in the Mocksville, North Carolina Professional Photographers guide on MarketingTool.com.
