The Photography Tip of the Week #068

Posted by Philip in Photo Philosophy, Podcast

Sensor Check

068 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

When you have a nice warm summer day and the sun is high in the sky, it’s a perfect time to check your sensor for dirt and dust. This isn’t like having to deal with airport security. You aren’t going to get raked over the coals if your sensor is dirty. But it is valuable information and will help you have the sharpest images possible. So here’s what you do. Get a white sheet of paper and take it outside and put it on the ground in direct sunlight. This will be the whitest this sheet of paper will ever get. White balance isn’t all that important, but aperture is so put your camera on aperture priority and set it to f/22. Set your ISO to 100 so you’ll have the least amount of noise and focus on the corner of the paper. With the focus locked, fill the frame with the bright sheet of paper and take the shot.

That’s a wonderful masterpiece you have there now. In some cases if you have really nasty spots you’ll see them immediately. But in most cases you’ll have to load the image in an image manipulation program and play with the levels. What we’re looking at here is a sensor I haven’t cleaned on one of my older camera bodies. You can see from the level histogram that it is displaying mostly white which is good. If it isn’t like this, you may have a serious problem with your sensor.

When you change the levels by moving the black level toward the white, you may see spots and debris on the image. Some of this may be on the lens. You can use multiple lenses at the same settings to compare and determine if the spots are on the lens or on the sensor. If you only have one lens, clean the lens between shots and compare those images. Any difference will most likely be sensor dust.

Now let me show you what a clean lens and sensor looks like. The regular white shot is as you would expect. Mostly white and a true masterpiece if you like photographing polar bears in a blizzard.

When you move the black point here, you will start picking up the inherit noise of the sensor and the grain of the paper. No spots and splotches here. If you do feel that you need to clean your sensor, do this test first to determine if you really need to. If you do, clean the sensor and do the test again to see the difference. I wouldn’t suggest using glass cleaner or anything other than a professional sensor cleaning fluid and brushes. Even though you are actually cleaning a piece of glass protecting the sensor, non-specific cleaning products can leave the sensor with more streaks, spots and dust than what it started with.

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Essence of Time

Posted by Philip in Photo Processing

I have a “photo recipe” coming up next week.  Going to do a 2 or 3 part segment on time lapse photography.  Here’s my test time lapse I made to make sure I had all of the pieces down and in place.  This time lapse does do one of the big no-no’s tho.  I shot it in aperture priority.  But since that was the only automatic setting in the entire setup, it works especially for a sunset.  If you are in a “stable” lighting condition, you should lock every setting down.

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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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The Photography Tip of the Week #065

Posted by Philip in Photo Technique, Podcast

Photography Tip Rewind – Get in Closer

065 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

Every now and then I feel it’s important to rewind the clock to reiterate, re-stress and remind you of some of the more important tips.  These tips are often so important you will hear instructors say them over and over.  The rewind for today is “get in closer.”  When you compose your photo you need to get in as close as possible.  Here are several reasons why getting in close is so important.

1. The subject of your photo becomes very clear.  It’s hard to mistake the subject when it’s the only thing visible in the frame.  Now if you have to have something in the background that you want to focus on as well, that’s fine.  That’s a different type of photo where location of the subject is as important as the subject itself.  But when that’s not the case I’ve seen so many photos that have too much going on around the edges and this is distracting and sometimes confusing to the viewer.

2. The subject of your photo becomes very clear.  There is a sense of becoming when you get in really close.  In a digital sense, I believe that this becoming is related to how many pixels are used to create the image.  This is why cropping in tight around your subject is not the same as getting in close with your subject.  The closer you get the more pixels you have and the less of a distraction any one out of place pixel will be to the whole.  So getting in close changes the image from a bunch of pixels creating the image to a bunch of pixels that have become a photo.

3. The subject of your photo becomes very clear.  For most photos the background will naturally go out of focus when you get in close and the only thing that remains clear in the photo is your subject.  You can of course tweak this with setting your aperture as low as possible to change the depth of field.  This isn’t the only way to change the depth of field, but it is by for one of the simplest.

And one more thing: The subject of your photo becomes very clear.  This is your photo, and you need to stress your artistic sense.  If you can’t interact and get in close to your subject while you are photographing it, it really isn’t your subject, is it?  If you can’t interact with your subject and end up photographing from a distance, how do you expect anyone else to do the same when you show them your photo.

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