1.4 lens, open

Posted on September 30, 2009 by Michael Willems

I have many times recommended 50mm f/1.8 lenses, and I’ll try to inspire you once more to go out and get one right now. Most manufacturers have a cheap lens like this:

As you will have heard me say many times, this lens is cheap, small, light, fast and sharp.

Ideal for portraits or for low-light subjects or images where you want to dramatically blur the background. If this lens is not in your kit yet, I recommend you add it immediately.

As you will have seen in the previous post, I shot Prof Dawkins yesterday with just sich a lens (my 50mm f/1.4).

Dawkins

Posted on September 29, 2009 by Michael Willems

I photographed Richard Dawkins tonight. In the sold-out Bader theatre in Toronto, where he introduced his new book to an enthusiastic crowd:

Usually, theatre lighting is quite simple – if you get to sit in the right place. Since my son Daniel and I sat in the very front row, today was no exception. The background is dark but the subject is lit brightly:

I did not need more than 400 ISO, which gave me 1/100 sec at f/2.8. In manual exposure mode, of course.

“No flash“, the slightly inept people from the publishing house (who did not believe I had talked to their colleague on the phone earlier – Simon and Schuster Canada, you lost out on some free shots!), said time and time again. (The Dawkins web people aren’t very responsive either: four attempts to contact them. to multiple email addresses, offering free coverage – and zero responses: instead, I helped their own shooter, who was an ’emerging pro’ and asked for some advice).

No problem!

The only problem was focus. My 50mm f/1.4 lens front focused on the 1Ds MkIII by at least 6 inches, which is disastrous. I had to adjust it to a setting of “+17” (out of a possible 20!) in the ten or so minutes before prof Dawkins arrived. The 35mm f/1.4 and 24-70mm lens would not properly focus at all in this light (they were consistently way off), so while I switched many times, I kept coming back to the 50mm lens with +17 adjustment.

One day Canon will make a camera that focuses well. Perhaps. I am not holding my breath.

Anyway, I got some nice shots. Photojournalism is never easy, but sitting about 10 ft away from Richard Dawkins makes up for a lot.

(A few more shots here)

Fire tips

Posted on September 29, 2009 by Michael Willems

I have no idea why today reminded me to write something about photographing fires.

All I did today was do a very pleasant workshop presentation to a packed crowd at Kraft Canada about “making better photos” – 50 enthusiastic people in a room for 90 minutes to look at pictures and talk about photography – and tonight I shot people at a business seminar in a Burlington hotel for West of the City magazine. That shoot presented the usual issues (I get there and the seminar is about to start, so only a minute instead of the planned hour for pictures).Fun, though: I love shooting events.

But how does that get me to shooting fires? No idea. But fire tips it is!

Tip one: avoid them.

Tips two and on: if you do shoot a fire, be careful and follow authorities’ orders. And also:

Shoot firemen against the smoke
Catch flames
Be upwind of the fire
Also consider wide lenses to capture the smoke

I shot this recently when I got the a Burlington fire way before the authorities did, so I was in the inner circle, while other photographers who arrived moments later were unable to get there:

These were used in The Hamilton Spectator.

Background shapes and curves

Posted on September 28, 2009 by Michael Willems

In composition, if you can spot opportunities to use shapes and curves, your portraits will benefit.

S-curves in particular are pleasing, like the gentle curve of the background beach coastline here on Toronto Island during the model shoot a week ago, last Monday:

The trees too provide a useful counterpoint to the lovely model.

Now, not that I want to compare my work to that of great artists, but does that background remind you of something?

It does me. No coincidence of course:I recognised the possibility of the nice background because I have been trained to see it by being exposed to great art.

Which goes to show that the way we react to composition has not changed much in the last few centuries. If you want to learn about composition, go visit a museum.

3D

Posted on September 27, 2009 by Michael Willems

How do you make an image three-dimensional, like this?

Israel, August 2006

This is very simple and needs only two things.

Use the widest lens angle (in my case here, 16mm on a full frame camera, so that means 10mm on a crop camera like a D90 or 50D)
Get close
If you want the blurry background, use a wide aperture (small “F-number”, like f/4). Else use a small aperture (large F-number, like f/16).

That’s all. Every time an object “jumps out of the page”, it’s wide angle.

Street

Posted on September 27, 2009 by Michael Willems

I am always happy to see the streets of Toronto. Especially in summer (ish).

When you look, you always find things to shoot. Like funny signs (notice the recurring blue?)

Or like nice people. It is amazing to me that in North America, when you see young women in the street, they are always sooo happy to smile at the camera. I mean amazing in a nice way: isn’t it nice to see nice smiles? Isn”t that nicer than anger and hatred and war? Call me a hippie but a snap like this makes my day.

These young ladies were hosting a Toronto Hydro Clean Energy event.

And all that was during a very short walk from A to B.

What lens was I using? The 35mm f/1.4 on the 1Ds MkIII. But at f/4 – f/5.6, so every camera and kit lens can do this.

The moral of the story: always carry your camera.

The art of the dramatic portrait

Posted on September 26, 2009 by Michael Willems

So how did I use the softbox I showed myself holding yesterday? Or rather, what picture did I get in the end?

As a reminder, I was using a Canon 1Ds MkIII with a 580 EXII flash on the camera in TTL master-slave mode in group “A”, and a 430EX II flash in my left hand as slave in group “B”. The “B”-flash had a Honl speedstrap and a Lumiquest Softbox III on it. The E-TTL A:B ratio was set as 4:1, so the handheld second flash fired two stops brighter than the on-camera flash.

I was in Aperture Priority mode (Av), and to darken the ambient light and the sky I used an Exposure Compensation setting of -2 stops.

Because my friend has dark skin and was wearing dark clothes, I also used flash compensation (“FEC”) of -1 stop. Otherwise he would have been overexposed (the camera would have tried to make him “18% grey”).

The result:

(I left the softbox and my reflection in his glasses deliberately, of course, since I was showing him the use of this softbox. Else I would have moved his head to camera left and down a bit).

Finally: his face is a tiny bit distorted because of the 35mm wide angle lens. I could have used the 50mm lens instead, or even the 24-70: but I think this look flatters him. h

One more sample:

Shot of the day

Posted on September 25, 2009 by Michael Willems

..is me shooting my friend Dal yesterday on the Lakeshore in Port Credit:

As you see I am reflecting in his glasses (with brightness enhanced to show me, not him, of course). I am using my 1Ds MkIII with a 580EX Flash on it, and a 430EX in my left hand close by, fitted with a small Lumiquest Softbox connected to a Honl speedstrap.

That softbox (held at about the same distance from the face as its size) gives nice soft light, which is very important for someone with darker skin. You can see my favourite Domke camera bag in the background.

And yes I tend to wear a tie.

And I’ll show you the photo tomorrow.

Motion a drag?

Posted on September 25, 2009 by Michael Willems

…only if you drag the shutter. You may have heard this expression, “dragging the shutter”. What does it mean?

It means taking a flash picture and then letting the shutter stay open for a while longer, so it “drags”.

Why? To capture more light. Not more flash light – that comes and goes in a thousandth of a second or less. No, it is ambient light we’re after. Dragging the shutter means the backgrounds get some light, instead of being dark. So we get better flash pictures.

There is a danger, of course: the danger of motion during that extra extended shutter time. And a very particular kind of motion:

MVWS1197

What is happening here? The flash lights up the foreground, and the flash is 1/1000th of a second, so that is frozen in time. But the background is lit by ambient light so is affected by hte long shutter speed. A very recognizable “ghostly” kind of look.

How to drag the shutter?Turn on your flash and:

On Nikon cameras, activate “slow flash” and use shutter or aperture mode.
On Canon cameras, simply use Tv or Av mode.
Or on either, use “night portrait” scene mode (but you don’t use scene modes, do you?).
Or use “manual” and select a slow shutter speed, like 1/15th second.

Have fun trying. This takes a bit of practice, and everyone has their own limit as to what they will accept.

Ask!

Posted on September 24, 2009 by Michael Willems

I notice that a lot of my students ask questions, and every time they ask one, I think “hey – that would make a great blog post”. I then promptly forget.

So here’s my request: send me an email, or respond to one of these blog posts, and ask. I’ll answer in a blog post with illustrations, and will email you when it’s done. That way we all benefit.

Michael

SPEEDLIGHTER.CA

The "Go-To" Instructional Photography Blog, by Michael Willems

Monthly Archives: September 2009