Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Tubby Portrait 1
Can you see a personality? I'm trying to capture his personality. Any guesses as to what it may be?
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Impromtu Photo Session.
My wife had taken our son to his music class and our daughter's class didn't start for another hour yet. What should we do to pass the time?
I pulled out the umbrella and popped one of the chairs from the kids table set in front of the heavy dark brown curtains in our living room. Mikayla was right into the posing for this session. I have found with kids it's hit and miss. If they are into it you are in luck and you're going to come away with some great shots.
Here are a few of the ones I really liked.
I pulled out the umbrella and popped one of the chairs from the kids table set in front of the heavy dark brown curtains in our living room. Mikayla was right into the posing for this session. I have found with kids it's hit and miss. If they are into it you are in luck and you're going to come away with some great shots.
Here are a few of the ones I really liked.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Tech Tip - Exposure Compensation.
Exposure Compensation. What is it and when would we use it?
What - The ability to have the camera pick what it thinks is the correct exposure then telling it to adjust it lighter or darker by a determined amount.
When and why - Today's camera meters are pretty good at getting your exposure correct but they are still fooled by bright scenes like snow, sand or even lots of grass or dark scenes with lots of blacks or night scenes. In these situations, it will over or under expose your images. If you are after a certain lighting such as dark night with just the street lights lighting the scene, the camera will probably over expose the scene and wash out all the nice dark areas. Using exposure compensation you can compensate for the built in meter.
Keep in mind though this is only for use in one of the priority modes. Either shutter priority or aperture priority. It will not work in manual. But if you are in manual, you may still want to think about what the little needle on the meter is telling you is correct exposure. It still thinks the same way.
Now, how do we go about doing this? Well as for the physical way to compensate please refer to your camera's manual. Now as for the effects of it and when to use it, read on.
Shooting in brightly lit scenes such as snow, sand and even fields of grass. Let's use snow for an example. It's winter here in Edmonton and we have lots of the white stuff.
In this first photo, I placed a pop can on some nice white snow. But the camera tried to make everything a nice middle gray. It succeeded. Everything is gray. The camera set the exposure at 1/400 sec with my aperture of f/5.6 and ISO 100. Under exposed and made the snow look gray.
What - The ability to have the camera pick what it thinks is the correct exposure then telling it to adjust it lighter or darker by a determined amount.
When and why - Today's camera meters are pretty good at getting your exposure correct but they are still fooled by bright scenes like snow, sand or even lots of grass or dark scenes with lots of blacks or night scenes. In these situations, it will over or under expose your images. If you are after a certain lighting such as dark night with just the street lights lighting the scene, the camera will probably over expose the scene and wash out all the nice dark areas. Using exposure compensation you can compensate for the built in meter.
Keep in mind though this is only for use in one of the priority modes. Either shutter priority or aperture priority. It will not work in manual. But if you are in manual, you may still want to think about what the little needle on the meter is telling you is correct exposure. It still thinks the same way.
Now, how do we go about doing this? Well as for the physical way to compensate please refer to your camera's manual. Now as for the effects of it and when to use it, read on.
Shooting in brightly lit scenes such as snow, sand and even fields of grass. Let's use snow for an example. It's winter here in Edmonton and we have lots of the white stuff.
In this first photo, I placed a pop can on some nice white snow. But the camera tried to make everything a nice middle gray. It succeeded. Everything is gray. The camera set the exposure at 1/400 sec with my aperture of f/5.6 and ISO 100. Under exposed and made the snow look gray.
In the next photo, I set my camera's exposure compensation at +1 stop. The snow is much brighter and whiter. I could have gone another 1/2 or 2/3 stop brighter but I think you get the idea. It was hard to tell outside in the bright light if I got it right. I can bring it up a bit in post if I wish. The camera set the shutter speed at 1/200 sec for this with the same aperture and ISO as the previous example.
Now for the other direction.
In this photo the camera set the shutter speed at 1/15 sec with my aperture of f/5.6 and ISO 400. The seat is a bit to bright for my liking.
So I compensated down 1 stop. Which adjusted the shutter speed to 1/25 sec with my aperture and ISO the same as the above example. It darkened down the seat enough but did not affect the apple too much.
The apple is not really the best example. I would use this technique when shooting in a low light environment that I wanted to keep the exposure darker. Such as a dark room light by a fireplace that I wanted to keep the feel of the scene.
I hope this helps clear up the exposure compensation feature on these amazing DSLRs we have at our disposal.
Friday, January 8, 2010
Off Camera Flash And One Light Portraits.
I've been getting into off camera flash photos lately. It's a crazy, confusing and intimidating topic. All this talk of ratios, flash power, stops of light, the inverse square law and everything else is very confusing at first. Note I said at first because once you get it, it all falls into place.
I was quite thrown by the concept that your shutter speed controls the ambient light level in the scene and the aperture controls your flash exposure. I said "What the hell does that mean". I remember losing 10 more hairs over that one. Haha.
Then it hit me, of course that makes sense. The ambient is controlled by the shutter speed. Just like with available light photography, the longer you expose, the more light you get. That made sense to me but what does it mean when we hear that the aperture controls the flash exposure? Well, the duration of a flash pop is very, very short indeed so the exposure of it would not be affected by the length of the exposure. The aperture would make a difference there by letting more of that short duration light enter the camera for the exposure. Ok. That started to make sense to me now.
Flash power and stops of light are the same. As you turn the power down on the flash from Full to 1/2 to 1/4 to 1/16 to 1/32 well those are each a stop of light. My light bulb went on there. Combine that with ISO and Aperture and we can move the light all over the place to get the exposure level we want.
Now what is this inverse square law? In a nut shell the inverse square law says is that an object that is twice the distance from a point source of light will receive a quarter of the illumination. Hmm. I still say WHAT?! So I found an explanation by Geoff Lawrence that makes sense to me. But, even understanding it I really didn't know why I needed it. Then I borrowed Zack Arias's OneLight Workshop dvd from a friend and he explained how the law affects the contrast ratio from one side of the photo to the other. Not a big deal if you only have one person but a big deal if you have more. I will not even attempt to explain that yet but the farther you have your light source away from the subjects, the less the contrast from side to side is but the light level is also lower. I'll deal with that more when I start lighting more than one person at a time.
So, now that I am gaining more of an understanding of how this all works, I started to take some experimental shots. I decided to not even try to get the ambient in the photo as it's more to worry about. Instead, I decided to kill it with a very fast shutter speed. I went to the maximum sync speed of my Canon 50D. 1/250 of a second. In my basement that killed the low light so all I had to worry about was the flash exposure. Here are a couple of experimental photos I did which I have already posted elsewhere on this blog but will reuse for the sake of this post.
All the light in both of these photos came from my Canon 430ex flash reflected by my 46" convertible umbrella, my new favorite toy. One thing I really like about reflecting the light into the umbrella is that it spreads it out quite a bit and will wrap around your subject. I used only the one light source here. No fill at all. I'm quite happy with the results. I can't wait to work on some more.
Chris.
I was quite thrown by the concept that your shutter speed controls the ambient light level in the scene and the aperture controls your flash exposure. I said "What the hell does that mean". I remember losing 10 more hairs over that one. Haha.
Then it hit me, of course that makes sense. The ambient is controlled by the shutter speed. Just like with available light photography, the longer you expose, the more light you get. That made sense to me but what does it mean when we hear that the aperture controls the flash exposure? Well, the duration of a flash pop is very, very short indeed so the exposure of it would not be affected by the length of the exposure. The aperture would make a difference there by letting more of that short duration light enter the camera for the exposure. Ok. That started to make sense to me now.
Flash power and stops of light are the same. As you turn the power down on the flash from Full to 1/2 to 1/4 to 1/16 to 1/32 well those are each a stop of light. My light bulb went on there. Combine that with ISO and Aperture and we can move the light all over the place to get the exposure level we want.
Now what is this inverse square law? In a nut shell the inverse square law says is that an object that is twice the distance from a point source of light will receive a quarter of the illumination. Hmm. I still say WHAT?! So I found an explanation by Geoff Lawrence that makes sense to me. But, even understanding it I really didn't know why I needed it. Then I borrowed Zack Arias's OneLight Workshop dvd from a friend and he explained how the law affects the contrast ratio from one side of the photo to the other. Not a big deal if you only have one person but a big deal if you have more. I will not even attempt to explain that yet but the farther you have your light source away from the subjects, the less the contrast from side to side is but the light level is also lower. I'll deal with that more when I start lighting more than one person at a time.
So, now that I am gaining more of an understanding of how this all works, I started to take some experimental shots. I decided to not even try to get the ambient in the photo as it's more to worry about. Instead, I decided to kill it with a very fast shutter speed. I went to the maximum sync speed of my Canon 50D. 1/250 of a second. In my basement that killed the low light so all I had to worry about was the flash exposure. Here are a couple of experimental photos I did which I have already posted elsewhere on this blog but will reuse for the sake of this post.
All the light in both of these photos came from my Canon 430ex flash reflected by my 46" convertible umbrella, my new favorite toy. One thing I really like about reflecting the light into the umbrella is that it spreads it out quite a bit and will wrap around your subject. I used only the one light source here. No fill at all. I'm quite happy with the results. I can't wait to work on some more.
Chris.
New Blog! By The Day.
I've been inspired by a Flickr contact, Billy Fairchild aka 28Photos, to create a seperate blog for my photo a day projects. By The Day is its name and can be found here. I still plan to post to this blog but it will slow down as my photo a day will be moved. Here I plan to talk about tips and techniques and business as I get more into that stuff.
I hope you check out the new blog and follow along with it too.
Chris.
I hope you check out the new blog and follow along with it too.
Chris.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Photo Of The Day - 6.365 - Jan 6 2010 - Worlds Best USB Drive.
Wednesday January 6 2010.
I saw this guy at Best Buy and just had to buy it. Pop off Darth's head and you have a 4 gig USB drive. I could have gotten a larger drive for the same price but it didn't come in this cool case!
I saw this guy at Best Buy and just had to buy it. Pop off Darth's head and you have a 4 gig USB drive. I could have gotten a larger drive for the same price but it didn't come in this cool case!
I'm Hooked On Off Camera Flash.
Yes, you heard it. I'm hooked. I think I will have light stands with umbrellas permanently set up in my house now. Just kidding but it's not far from the truth.
I was messing around with my Canon 430EX and my 46" umbrella last night and was amazed at how sharp my photos were. I was basically experimenting to see how much of the ambient light in our basement I could kill with the highest sync speed when I noticed how sharp the photos looked.
I was messing around with my Canon 430EX and my 46" umbrella last night and was amazed at how sharp my photos were. I was basically experimenting to see how much of the ambient light in our basement I could kill with the highest sync speed when I noticed how sharp the photos looked.
This photo is with my 50mm f/1.8 at f/2.8, 1/200 sec and ISO 100. This photo above is the worst of the bunch and is still one of my better photos. I was blown away at how sharp it was. Never mind killing the room light anymore (which I had done, all the light here was from the umbrella). I now wanted to look into this sharpness thing. I know what the deal is here. Lots of good quality light and a nice fast shutter speed. But wow, I love it.
This one too, at f/2.8 is so sharp. I had enough depth of field to keep her face in focus yet throw her feet and the playhouse in front of her out of focus.
This one of me, done hand held with my arm stretched way out, it nice and sharp too. Using my Tamron 18-270 f/3.5-6-6.3 at 35mm, f/4 for 1/250 sec I got a great shot. This is not the sharpest lens out there, it's my all purpose walk around lens, but I am very happy with the result.
I think there will be a lot of artificially lit photos in my stream from now on.
Photo Of The Day - 5.365 - Jan 5 2009. Keeping Notes.
Tuesday January 5 2010.
Some shallow DOF on my note pad today. Shallow because that's how my outlook is on a Tuesday.
Some shallow DOF on my note pad today. Shallow because that's how my outlook is on a Tuesday.
Monday, January 4, 2010
My Favorite Photo From 2009.
This is my favorite photo that I took in 2009. I thought it would be easier to choose. I took almost 12,000 photos in 2009! I narrowed it down to 150 favorites then one from each month then thought long and hard and decided on this one.
What is your favorite from the 2009? Can you narrow yours down to just 1? It was hard.
Chris.
What is your favorite from the 2009? Can you narrow yours down to just 1? It was hard.
Chris.
Photo Of The Day - 4.365 - January 4 2010. Somebody Help Please.
January 4 2010.
Can somebody please help me eat these. They are addictive and I just don't need the calories!
Can somebody please help me eat these. They are addictive and I just don't need the calories!
B&W Monday.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Photo Of The Day - 2.365 - January 2 2010. Best Birthday Ever.
January 2 2010.
Today is my 42nd birthday. It's shaping up to be the best ever. We went tobogganing. All 4 of us. We had a blast. It was the first time the kids have gone. They did great. It will be a common thing for us now.
Check my Flickr stream for more from the outing.
Today is my 42nd birthday. It's shaping up to be the best ever. We went tobogganing. All 4 of us. We had a blast. It was the first time the kids have gone. They did great. It will be a common thing for us now.
Check my Flickr stream for more from the outing.
Friday, January 1, 2010
Photo Of The Day - 1.365 - January 1 2010. Smelly Thing.
Friday January 1 2010!
We have this neat little smelly thing on our ledge above the sink. I really like the look of it.
We have this neat little smelly thing on our ledge above the sink. I really like the look of it.
Photo Of The Day - 365 of 365. Last Photo Of The Year - New Years Eve Spread.
Thursday December 31 2009.
We had a small get together for New Years Eve this year. What a spread my wife prepared. It was delicious.
We had a small get together for New Years Eve this year. What a spread my wife prepared. It was delicious.
Resolutions For 2010. And Other Plans.
2010. That's a big number. Where has the time gone? 42 is literally just around the corner for me. Tomorrow. Hmm. What do I want to accomplish this year and did I accomplish all that I wanted to in 2009?
Well, let's start with what I'd like to accomplish in 2010. In no particular order.
That's a pretty basic list. I'm sure other things will pop up as the year goes on. I hope I can do all that. I'd really like to start the new decade off on the right foot!
Chris.
Well, let's start with what I'd like to accomplish in 2010. In no particular order.
- Blog more.
- Lose 40 lbs.
- Start my own photography business.
- Finish the NYIP photography course I'm taking.
- Read more. Novels not just photography magazines and blogs.
- Participate more in the Flickr groups I'm involved in.
- Go on some photo walks here in Edmonton.
- Spend more time out of the house with my kids.
- Spend more alone time with my wife.
- Save more money.
- Pay off my debts.
- Get better at photography.
- Purchase some more lighting gear.
- Learn how to use the above lighting gear better.
That's a pretty basic list. I'm sure other things will pop up as the year goes on. I hope I can do all that. I'd really like to start the new decade off on the right foot!
Chris.
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