Monthly Archives: March 2010

Flash and ambient exposure

Posted on by
Reply

What factors affect your flash exposure? There are four:

  1. Aperture
  2. ISO
  3. Flash power
  4. Distance from flash to subject

Two that do not affect flash exposure, or affect it to a lesser degree:

  1. Shutter speed
  2. Distance from subject to camera

What factors affect your “ambient” (available light) exposure?

  1. Aperture
  2. Shutter Speed
  3. ISO

Several that do not affect your ambient exposure, or affect it to a lesser degree:

  1. Flash power
  2. Distance from flash to subject

So you can see that by altering shutter speed, you only affect ambient exposure, while by altering flash power you only affect the flash exposure.

A rose by any other name

Posted on by
5

I took this “grab-shot” at the Kodiak Gallery the other day with a Canon 7D and 50mm f/1.4 lens:

Canon 7D, 50mm f/1.4 at f/1.4, 1/250th sec, 800 ISO

This shows that with the right lens, you do not need flash. You also do not need a macro lens every time. You can use what you have, if you keep your eyes open.

Also note:

  • The secondary subject blurred in the background
  • I used exposure compensation (+) to ensure the white background showed as white, not gray
  • I am not afraid to go to 800 ISO or beyond to get the right fast shutter speed.
  • I am using off-centre composition, rather than Uncle Fred’s “subject in the middle”

Simple. Just keep your eyes open.

Seniors

Posted on by
Reply

Yesterday night I presented a custom version of my popular “Travel Photography” workshop to the Oakville Seniors’ Photography Club.

I have seldom met a nicer bunch of people. They were also very engaged : in fact my one-hour version was so well received that it became a two-hour version, and no-one left. I have a feeling I could have done the full three hour version and they would still all have stayed.

Photography is a great hobby to take up -any time, even when you retire. Modern, and in particular digital, technology has added fundamentally to what we can do in the following ways:

  1. Modern cameras can do more!
  2. Modern flash (with TTL metering) is easy to use.
  3. Photography is now cheap – it no longer costs $20 every time you use it.
  4. So your money can go to lenses, instead
  5. And finally the most important one: we get instant feedback, to see if what we did worked. You can now learn something in an hour that would have taken a year, back in 1975.

All you now need is training. Please get some, if you haven’t yet. It is amazing what a short course can do to enable you to use this technology properly!

A big camera... but your point-and-shoot does the same!

And then, once you know how it all works, you can move on to producing art.

And that’s where seniors, with their life experience and available time, have an edge. Everyone can learn, but when you have those two, you can put that learning to good use.

C? F? No, K.

Posted on by
Reply

K for Kelvin, that is.

If you find that your white balance setting still leaves your pictures yellow when taking pictures in tungsten light even when you set the white balance to Tungsten, try a Kelvin value if your camera supports that. I find, for instance, that in my bedroom 2700K is about right.

If your camera does not support that, use a Custom white balance setting after you shoot a white sheet of paper.  Your camera’s manual will help in this.

Of course if you shoot RAW [corrected]  this makes no difference, but I still recommend doing this: it reduces your post-production work, plus your back-of-the-camera previews look better.

1D Mark IV need-to-knows

Posted on by
Reply

Here again are two important tips for 1D Mark IV users:

  1. Disable ALO (Automatic Lighting Optimisation) and Peripheral Illumination adjustment.  Otherwise your RAW images will be underexposed!
  2. Focus-point linked metering does work when using evaluative metering (Canon do not tell you this, but evaluative metering is biased heavily towards the selected focus point). But unless you disable most of the 45 focus points and just use 19 of them, it does not work when using spot meter, even if you have enabled the focus-point linked spot metering function.

These are two small but important gotchas, wouldn’t you say? I thought they wewre important enough to point out again separately.

Snow snaps

Posted on by
2

In preparation for an upcoming two-day Country Photography Workshop I am organizing with a colleague on 3+4 April (ask me about it!), I took a few snaps in the snow yesterday with the 1D Mark IV. Interestingly, it meters more accurately than the 1D Mark III: I needed less exposure compensation since even evaluative metering was biased more towards the selected focus point. (This is odd since focus-point tied spot metering works less often).

Can you tell I like wide angles?

Snow tips:

  • Set exposure carefully for most images, emphasizing background saturation. Use a grey card or spot meter off treees, or off the sky, and adjust starting from that.
  • Bring a spare battery.
  • Careful bringing the camera into the house afterward: use a plastic bag.
  • Meter carefully and use the “highlights” view and the histogram to ensure you are not blowing out the snow – but you are getting close.
  • Use flash to light up close objects (see how I did it?)
  • High-speed flash is needed if the time exceeds 1/250th – it can be left on since the camera will only use it when needed – but it will cut effective flash power by at least 50%.
  • It is very hard to see  your images: bring a Hoodman Hood Loupe and let your eyes acclimatise.

One more snap and it’s back to the order of the day:

Again, flash and careful exposure gives it that nice saturated look.

Always carry spares

Posted on by
Reply

When you are shooting for pay, always make sure that you carry:

  • A spare camera battery.
  • Spare batteries for your flash.
  • Some Alkaline AAs.
  • Spare memory cards.
  • A spare flash.
  • Spares for essential cables (e.g. to connect your flash to your camera or pocketwizards).
  • Even, if at all possible, a spare camera.

That way you can offer your customer peace of mind, and you can rest assured that the price you charge is worth it – “Uncle Bob”, after all, does not carry the spares above.

I have been saved more than a few times by the spares above – yes, all of them.

The KISS principle

Posted on by
Reply

Means “Keep It Simple, Student”.

Meaning, you can often use simple equipment. Like when you are lighting and instead of using many flashes, you use just one. On the camera instead of off camera. Like in this recent fun ‘desat’ shot:

Using  simple speedlite bounce-light.

I explain this technique in my workshops, and use it often. Key is to:

  • Be in a small room with white walls (a light box)
  • Use Flash Compensation (usually of +1 to +2 stops)
  • Think “where should the light be coming from” – 45 degrees above from the subject’s head
  • Then draw a virtual dotted line from the head in that direction
  • And where that hits the ceiling or wall is where you aim your flash.

It really can be that simple.