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:

1. Even though the light is bigger it’s not as strong as the bare flash and doesn’t effectively light the brick at distance.
2. Since I’m using an umbrella, there is a lot of light that bounces back.
3. 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.

Follow-up: The thing’s I’ve learned

Posted by Philip in Follow-up, Old Photo Critique, Photo Processing

I wanted to do my retouching on the photos I posted a couple days ago as quickly as possible.  The temptation is to spend a lot of time on post processing, especially when you are “trying to prove a point” so I had to time myself.  I decided to not take more than 5 minutes on either picture.

There’s not a lot one can do to correct the first image.  These are the things I did:

1. Red eye removal
2. Crop tight
3. Remove  clutter from background with content aware fill.
4. Clear a few spots from face.
5. Warming filter.

Cropping in tight helps to get you more engaged in the image, but since this was a 4MP image in the first place, the cropped images is only really of a reasonable size to display on the Internet.  I can’t make a decent print larger than a 4×6.

The second image I spent every moment of the 5 minute time limit and did:

1. Brighten eyes
2. Increased iris saturation
3. Saturated pink shirt.
4. Light skin smoothing (to reduce noise mainly.)
5. Darken background using a curve adjustment.
6. Add a warming filter.

So what do you think?  Is spending 5 minutes on an old image worth the time?

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.

1. Red Eye.
2. Clutter in the background.
3. Photographing downward instead of being on the same level.
4. 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.

1. Nice and sharp.
2. Catchlight in the eyes.
3. On the same level.
4. 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.

The Photography Tip of the Week #083

Posted by Philip in Photo Technique, Podcast

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.

Go back and fix the past

Posted by Philip in Old Photo Critique, Photo Processing

From time to time you need to go back to some of your old photos and see what a couple minutes with the new tools can do for them.  Nine years ago I got married and honeymooned at Disney World.  Since tomorrow is our anniversary, I took the first reasonable photo from the trip taken with an Olympus Point and shoot camera to see what it looked like.

Taking a close look at the image the color looks a little flat.  It’s likely because it was an over cast day, and there was some noise in the image.  So taking the editing capabilities of Camera Raw, I knocked out the noise, warmed the scene and added a bit more blue to the sky with a touch of negative clarity.  All-in-all a much better image.  If I knew then what I know now, I could have taken several shots from the same location and easily cloned out the people, so it would look like we had the place to ourselves.

What else can/should I do?

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.