How to get sharp fireworks images

Posted by Philip in Photo Technique

It’s that time of year here in the States where we set things on fire so we can watch explosions and burning metal while losing our hearing.  Yes, it’s time for some fireworks.  Fireworks is a great time to practice your manual shooting skills.  There is no single perfect formula for getting the photo, but there are a few guidelines I can offer.

1) Use a tripod.  Get in a spot that has a relatively clear view of the sky and make sure you set your tripod up as high as possible to insure you get above as many heads if you are in a crowd.

2) Use a wide angle lens.  If you got something like an 18-55 that’ll work great.  It doesn’t have to be extremely fast glass but you want a wide angle lens unless you are miles away from the display.

3) Manual, manual, manual.  You have to do everything manual here.  Manual focus.  Don’t worry, you can just rotate the focus to infinity and that’ll work just fine. You’ll also have to set all other settings on your camera because the automatic settings are expecting a bright scene and you want yours to be mostly black.

4) Lock your ISO down to 100 or 200.  These will give you the least noisy images on most cameras.

5) Shutter speed and aperture will be a balancing act depending on the look you are going for.  If you want most everything in focus, you’ll need an aperture between f/8 and f/11.  You really don’t want to go higher than f/11, because that’ll make your exposure really long.  For me I think the exposure is more important than aperture, so I’d set my exposure 2 or 3 seconds and see what aperture is required to get the shot starting at f/11 and working down.

6) Use a wired or wireless shutter release.  When you hear the mortar fire, press the shutter.  The firework takes about half a second to detonate and then displays for about a second.  If you go longer you get some really interesting streaky fireworks, which may not be what you want.

7) When you get to the end of the display, there will be a lot of fireworks all at once which will brighten the sky.  Keep your exposure at whatever you had been shooting with the night and close your aperture beyond f/11 to f/16 or f/22. Hope this helps.

For this post I’m displaying some photos  of my friend Mark Schaffer.  Take a look at his site at http://knowsphotos.com.

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The Photography Tip of the Week #067

Posted by Philip in Photo Processing, Podcast

Some place to go

067 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

Occasionally you will take a photo that you really want to recompose. These are often when you have your subject in the dead center of the frame. There’s nothing wrong with having the subject in the center of the frame, but depending on the image it may lack interest. Simply recomposing the photo will make it much better. But if you didn’t do it in the field, you’ll have to do it in post. This is the one benefit of high megapixel cameras, the ability to crop an image without losing the shot. Below is a photo I took where I liked the overall look, but it seemed to be missing that little bit extra to make it a truly nice photo.

With this image there are so many possibilities for cropping, but in most cases you will want to use the rule of thirds for recomposition. The rule of thirds simply put says to place your subject on a horizontal or vertical line one third in from the edge. But for this image there are still many possibilities. I have two of which shown in blue and red. We could even change the aspect ratio to landscape, but for this we’ll leave it portrait.

So what is one to do? Which crop is the best. Well you need to look at what story are you trying to tell with your subject. For this type of portrait, is it “some place to go” or “where have we been?” For a nice stroll on the beach I think some place to go is more important. It speaks to the future instead of the past. So I want to have more photo in front of them instead of behind. And I’ll choose a crop close to the red option. Many times your image will have a very obvious crop once you decide. If not keep your thirds line either through the eyes or through the body. With two people in the photo like this, I’ll keep a line through the eyes since the eyes are on the same level and the vertical line between the people with the edge going down their side. This mimics the crop of the image as if I was cropping in tight.

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Step by Step Adding a cloud as a background texture

Posted by Philip in Follow-up, Photo Processing, Texture Photo

This is a step by step instruction on how to perform a similar look as the photo I enhanced a couple days ago.  First start out with your model photo.  Clean up the background or any blemishes on the model you may want to remove.

In this case the original background color is very important since that’ll be the base color the clouds will take. Overlay the clouds and change the blend mode.  In this case I used Linear Light to achieve the rich coloring.

Now we want to bring the model back to the front.  So make a selection of the model and make a new layer with a mask.  Actually we’ll need two of these.  Your selection doesn’t have to be perfect.  Since all we are doing is blending with the original image, if anything is out of place it’ll be difficult to find any errors.

The top most copy will need a little fiddling, but we’ll worry about that in a moment.  This is just the cutout of the model on top of the blended background.

Most people would stop there but it lacks some punch so the next thing to do is to make the top most copy of the model black and white.  In this case I’m going to use the top copy to enhance the lower copy.  So I don’t want the black and white to be really strong.  Just enough to heighten the shadows.

Now we change the blend mode between the two copies of the model.  I used Hard light in this case to give her a more bronzed look.  This will better match the background.

Finally you just turn all the layers on and adjust opacity as you see fit to balance things out.  To the side is all the layers I used and what I set their blend modes to if it wasn’t normal.  You can easily bring through some of the cloud texture on the model by adjusting the opacity, but in this case I didn’t like the effect.

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I Don’t “Get” Grunge

Posted by Philip in Photo Processing, Photo Technique

It could be my age, it could be that I have a different ascetic sense, but I don’t “get” grunge.  I’ve seen so many tutorials all over on how to get a grunge look and how to use lots of plugins and filters.  The steps are sometimes very complicated and time consuming. I don’t want to spend all that time working on an image unless I’m trying to clean it up. But did you know you can do grunge in-camera, sorta.  When I’m asked to do a grunge look, this is what I do:

1) Use enough light to blow out the subject.  Yes this creates and Image you would normally trash.  But this is grunge after all, it is trash.

2)  In Camera Raw/Lightroom/Aperture re-expose as far down as you can go.

There are some other sliders you may want to over-drive, but that’s it really.  Once you have the image on your machine it takes 10 seconds.  No need to load into an image manipulation program unless you need to resize or remove some clutter.  I’m sure I’m missing the point of grunge, but does it have to be anymore difficult than this?

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Selective Coloring

Posted by Philip in Photo Processing

Two ways to perform a selective color, one in Photoshop and one in Lightroom.  This isn’t necessarily just bringing out a single color against a black and white image but making a single object pop against a muted background.

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