What To Do With Mid Afternoon Light?

What do you do with mid afternoon light that is just very uninteresting and a bit boring? Why, make an HDR out of it of course!

I took this photo during lunch today. Just to get out and make some photographs.

It's a bit boring but I still liked it. It makes sense to me what it is but it's really not all that interesting. So, I exported 3 versions of the image at and exposure of -2, 0 and +2 and created an HDR from that.

Much better! Interesting color and detail. There we go. Mid day lighting issue solved.

Chris.

How To Photograph Your Own Kids.

Sounds simple enough. They are my kids, they will do what I say right. Well every parent know just how wrong that is. Oh, how wrong. It's a rare child who will do what the parent asks without a fight. They just have such a mind of their own. Especially when the get to be 4 years old and older. Forget about it.

So what are we to do? There are many different things you can do I suppose but here is my approach. I just let them do what they are going to do. They are happier, I'm less stressed out and usually I get photos that are much better than I had planned on.

Now, that said, I'm pretty lucky. My kids have had a camera in their faces since the day they were born. They are used to me and my cameras. My daughter is destined to be a model I'm sure. She loves to pose. But, if they are not in the mood for my antics they will not cooperate at all.

Here's some of the attitude I get.....

Wont even look at me. Barely a smile.

The 'are you gone yet' look. Although it was cute. Still it took 5 minutes for her to look my way.

Now, once I decided to stop directing them my photos of them got better. No forced smiles, no stiff posture, just a much more relaxed look and feel to them.

All I said to him here was 'Hey look at me' then he turned to me and gave me such a nice natural smile.

For this one we were outside doing homework with my son. He was reading to us. I had my camera up and she just looked at me with such a happy smile. Snap, there it is.

Quite often, I just follow them around when they are playing. I get some great candid stuff when they are just being themselves. I much prefer to see photos of kids as they are. Not sitting at Sears or Walmart. Those are not my kids, those are the ones who are mad at us and have decided not to cooperate. Here are some following around candid shots...

Setting up his Hotwheels track not paying any attention to me at all.

On the swing. Saw me at the last second.

Climbing a boulder in the desert mountains of southern California. I was waiting for him when he looked up to see where I was.

That's my approach to taking photos of my kids. Simple. Just be where they are and keep the camera up and ready to go all the time! But keep in mind, sometimes it's nice to just sit and be with your kids. If you are addicted to photography as I am this will be tough.

Chris.

Should You Purchase That Gear Or Travel To That Place?

I've been thinking about gear and travel lately and exactly what I need/want.

There is a pile of gear that I want.....really want. Like the new Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II. Oh man, would I like that. But it's expensive. The last price I saw here in Edmonton was $2600.00CA. That would pay for my family's return flight to California! Add to that the price of the Canon 24-105mm f/4L IS at $1500.00CA and that pays for our hotel rooms. And the Canon 1D Mark IV at $5100.00CA, well that purchase alone would pay for the whole trip.

What is more important a couple of lenses that will still be available when my kids are older, or that family vacation while the kids still want to do those kinds of things? Sorry gear heads, I must go with the family vacation. The gear I have is more than enough. A Canon 50D, the Nifty Fifty and a Tamron 18-270mm are perfect for any photography I plan to do for the near future. My kids will only be kids for a short time.

It's funny, I've been thinking about this the last few days and today I read a post from the Digital Photography School about this very thing. It's entitled Buy Less Gear: Travel and Experience More. Funny how karma works isn't it. Photography isn't about gear it's about vision. Sure the gear is part of it but seeing the light and visualizing the photograph you want to make is much more important that the gear. Knowing your existing gear inside and out and knowing the basic techniques of photography will go a lot farther by far than any new camera body and lenses will ever take you.

Sorry Canon, I won't be getting those 2 lenses or the 1D Mark IV just yet but one day I just may. Of course if you would like to donate them too me I would do my best to use them to their full potential. :)

Chris.

To HDR Or Not To HDR? That Is The Question.

I've been noticing a huge increase in the number of HDR images showing up lately. Some are very surreal and some are much more natural looking. I've been thinking about trying it and have been convinced that I need to by my Flickr friend The Bruce. Bruce has been dabbling in the HDR world lately and I've really liked the images he has produced. So I thought I'd give it a go. Why not.

So, I downloaded a trial of Photomatix and started to experiment. I used a single photo and outputted a normal exposure, -2 and +2 to simulate the bracketing. Hard to bracket when the wind is blowing so hard.

I took this photo of my kids on Canada Day and I like it but it's missing so much of the contrast that was there for my eyes to see. I'd like you to see more of what I saw.

The first one I completed was this one but the white flags went to gray. I love all the detail in the clouds, leaves, and the kids clothing but the flags really turned me off.

I opened it up in Lightroom and used the adjustment brush to increase the exposure on the white areas being very careful to use the auto mask feature and not bleed into the surrounding areas too much.

This one I really like. Look at the detail in their clothes. All that was lost in the original even though I used my flash. The range just was not there.

I think you can expect to see more HDR work in my Flickr stream from now on. I really like how this turned out.

Chris.

Understand The Risks.

Photographing kids can be risky. Yes, you read that right. Risky. Personal and equipment harm is a real possibility.

Take these photos from my son playing some tee ball out at the lake this past weekend for example.....

Great hit, I'm safe 50 feet away aren't I?

Just before it took my hat off. I guess I wasn't safe even at 50 feet away!

He hit the tee. The ball went straight up but the tee, well it came after me with a vengeance.

It quickly crossed the 15 or so feet to me tumbling end over end.

Just after this it decided to smash into me. Hitting right on the end of my lens. Good thing I never take the lens hood off!

See, personal and equipment harm could happen just like that! But then, I knew the risks going into the shoot. :)

Chris.

Does The Eye You Shoot With Affect Your Creativity?

I've been thinking about this question lately. It's known that the left side of your brain is more logical. Science and math type of thinking. The left side of your brain also controls the right side of you body, including the right eye. The right side of the brain is more creative. It likes music, art and 3D shapes. It controls the left side of your body, including your left eye.

Does it matter which eye you look through the viewfinder to compose your photo? Would you get a more artistic composure using you left eye or a more technically correct photo using your right eye?

I'm a left eye shooter. I like to think that I'm tapping directly into my creative mind while I'm composing my photos. It may explain why I failed to notice the branch creeping into the photo in my last post! While I'm thinking about my shot and setting it up, I'm using both eyes so I hope my left brain is helping me with my technical issues but once I put that camera to my eye, it's all right brained baby.

I'd like to show some examples of my left eye vs right eye shots but I never shoot with my right eye so I don't have any! I will try to take some shots with my right eye though to compare. In the mean time, here are some of my favorite "left eye" photos.

Chris.

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.

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.

Chris.

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.