Author Archives: Michael Willems

My Flash pic is too dark!

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I am using a flash and my image is too dark! What’s wrong?

It could be any of several things. The top ones in this handy checklist:

  1. You are too far (especially when bouncing). Increase the ISO or open up the aperture, or get closer.
  2. You are shooting a reflective object. Avoid shooting directly at a reflective object: bounce, or move it.
  3. Your Flash Exposure Compensation (“FEC”, symbol lightning rod and +/1 symbol combined) is set to “minus”. Set FEC back to 0, on the camera and on the flash.
  4. You are shooting a white scene. Set FEC to plus, eg +1 to +1.7
  5. Your flash is set to commander mode. Set it back to normal TTL, using the commander/remote button or menu.
  6. Your flash is set to manual mode. Set it back to normal TTL, using the “mode” button.

Now try again!

 

Going black for the day

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In continued protest at Facebook and its prudishness, its heavy-handedness, its terms of service, its rude suspension of my account from its monopoly service for a perfectly OK image (see yesterday’s post), and its “no questions, no appeal” process, I am going black for the day.  As far as I recall, this is the first day since I started this blog that I have had no post.

The Economist warned in an article last week that things like this would happen, and that Facebook had better be careful (I paraphrase) – regulators will increasingly look at them, and users will increasingly dislike them. Even in a monopoly situations, having your market dislike you is not a great idea.

So here’s today’s image of the day:

See you all tomorrow (and for my Facebook friends, in a few days time).

 

Banhammered

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From where I stand, Facebook has the morality, or the sad excuse thereof, of a Taliban mullah. I have now been banned for three days for “abusing facebook features” for posting an entirely innocent image, much tamer than many I have seen.

It was the following, funny in my opinion, set-up shot, made in honour of another photographer who shot the same model in a similar shot some years ago:

Um, and now, it appears, I am “abusing features”?

It is hard to describe the contempt I feel for these morons.

Now, when I log in, I see this:

The only section in there that seems even remotely to offer a reason for the ban is this:

That to me is not nudity – nothing showing. It is definitely not not pornography; it is also certainly not sexual, let alone “inappropriately sexual”. if they think this is sexual, they are sick.

The dictionary I just consulted says that nudity means the state of being nude, which they say means this:

“nude  (njuːd)  — adj 1. completely unclothed; undressed 2. having no covering; bare; exposed”.

That does not apply here, so I must conclude that Facebook has redefined nudity as “anything remotely hinting that there may be nudity somewhere”. The Taliban, in other words.

So am I being ungrateful to Facebook? They are providing a free service, after all?

No way.

  • First, I am not getting a free product: I *am* the product. Facebook is worth billions because there are millions of advertising-consumers like me earning them money.
  • Second, Facebook has a monopoly on social interaction. The only way I can find and stay in touch with people from my past, customers from my present and prospects for the future, is Facebook.  Google+ has almost none of the people I am interested in on it. I do much business via Facebook. There is no alternative.

“Noblesse oblige”. If you are a monopoly, you have to be careful not to abuse that. You will be held to stricter standards. Facebook will find, one day, that its value is limited by its behaviour.

In the mean time, let me express how sorry I am for my American friends who have to live in a land ruled in part by their equivalent of the Taliban.

And censorship does not work. You can now go look at many more images – and these are NSFW, and do contain nudity – on my Tumblr page, here. Tumblr is not ruled by Taliban.

POST EDIT: Thanks to all my photographer friends from SPS, who have been universally supportive (and annoyed at FB’s prudishness).

 

Warm backgrounds

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I took this shot of jazz great Peter Appleyard, the wizard of the vibraphone, back in 2009:

So how did I do this – what was behind my decisions?

Here’s my thinking and execution:

  • This called for a “situational” portrait; an environmental portrait showing him at work, as it were.
  • I therefore used a 24mm lens on a full frame camera (in fact it was the 16-35 f/2.8L set to 24). 24mm is nice and wide, but not so wide I get crazy distortion in the subject (provided the subject is small in the image).
  • I bounced my flash behind me to the left, off the ceiling.
  • Since the venue was dark, and I wanted a lighter background, I used not my normal “400-40-4” settings, but 400-30-2.8 – ie a stop and a third lighter in the background. 400 ISO, 1/30th second. f/2.8.  (Since I am using a wide lens, f/2.8 gives me enough DOF. Since I am freezing the subject with flash, 1/30th second is fast enough).
  • I used “off-centre” composition (using the Rule of Thirds).
  • I focused on Mr Appleyard, using one focus point, then recomposing.
  • I stayed ou t of the way of the audience as much as possible.

This is the thinking that goes though a photographer’s mind quickly. Practice the same – think about things like lens, light, exposure, and composition. You will see you will get quick at this just by asking the right questions.

 

What lens should I buy!

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Boy, that’s a tough question. And I get it a lot.

Today, student Dave asks:

[POST EDIT – CORRECTION MADE TO THE QUESTION]

Michael – I have been researching lens for my D800. I currently own three FX lenses – 60mm 2.8 Macro (we used this for the portraits on my D90) , 105mm 2.8 macro, 70-200 2.8. My other lenses are DX – I will end up selling some of these. Is Kijiji the best?? I have a great 12-24 F4 G DX lens.

I am debating between (1) a mid-range zoom and (2) a good wide-angle zoom and a fast 50mm prime. I am thinking about going with (2) – getting the Nikon 16-35 F4 G with VR (gets great reviews) and a 50mm 1.4 G. The 24-70 2.8 would be about the same price in Nikon as the two other lenses. However, the Nikon lens does not have VR. Tokina has just announced a forthcoming 24-70 with their version of VR. It won’t be available for a while I think.

Also, some commentators say that mid-range zooms aren’t that useful – use your primes, and wide-angle and tele-zooms (and your legs if you need to!). However, I must admit I find I use my mid-range for my DX quite a bit.

So, a little confused. Advice?

So. First, like many pros I do like the mid-range zoom. In a shoot yesterday with talented Make-Up Artist (MUA) Anastasia, as so often I used my 24-70 f/2.8L lens.

It goes wide-ish like this:

And it goes longish like this:

So that makes it very versatile for “I’m not quite what I am expecting” shoots.

Both the Nikon and the third-party 24-70s are fine, and you do not really need VR/IS on a widish lens like that. On a long lens (the 70-200 range) it is essential but on wider lenses you can easily live without it.

So the idea of “the Nikon 16-35 F4 G with VR (gets great reviews) and a 50mm 1.4 G.” is a good one. My 16-35 f/2.8L lens is a lens I totally love, as is a fast 50.  So: my vote is for the wide lens and the fast 50, and keep your existing 24-70 lens.

That said – these are personal choices, I love the wide lens for newspaper work, for travel, for landscapes. My six lenses, by the way, are:

  • 16-35 2.8 zoom
  • 24-70 2.8 zoom
  • 70-200 2.8 zoom
  • 100mm f/2.8 macro prime
  • 50mm f/1.2 prime
  • 35mm f/1.4 prime

All are EF lenses, meaning they fit on any Canon body (none are EF-S lenses, which are like Nikon’s DX lenses).

So if you shoot a lot of things that need wide, I strongly recommend it – a wide wide lens (10-20 for crop bodies; 16-35 for full frame sensor bodies) is my strong recommendation for everyone. IS/VR is not that important until you get beyond 70mm.

But whatever you choose will be right – just tune your shots to the lens you have at hand (eg do not do headshots with a 16-35mm lens).  And remember to shoot prime whenever you can: quality, consistency and speed will thank you.

Does that help?

 

Expose brightly = decrease age

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Ah.. who does not want their face and skin to look smoother and younger? I thought so.

So here, from a Flash class I taught at the School of Imaging the other day, is a simple example. All of you can do this – simple camera, simple lens, and simple flash, in a small room with white walls and ceilings. To ensure that only flash light shows in your image, set the camera to manual, at 1/25th second, 400 ISO, f/5.6.

First, let’s do it wrong (sorry and apologies to my volunteer): aim the flash straight up at the ceiling. Result: dark circles under the eyes, many wrinkles: ouch. Do not do this at home!

Instead, when close to your subject, aim the flash behind you, up 45 degrees. That gets you a much better image:

That’s a nice portrait. But now look at this: let’s “overexpose” it by one stop: to do this, set your Flash Exposure Compensation (FEC) to “+1.0”.

Aha, that is better! We have taken years off the subject’s age just by lighting brightly. These images, basically straight out of the camera, show very clearly how you light and expose well: now go try to do it yourself!

Flash rocks, once you know how it works. This post shows just one small sample of what I teach you in my Flash courses and coaching.

 

Tilt-Shift

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You may have heard of “tilt-shift-lenses”. These are lenses that.. well, tilt and shift. You can tilt the lens to the right or left (or up and down), and you can shift the entire lens up or down (or left and right).

Today, I am using the Canon TS-E 45mm f/2.8, a lens I borrowed from my friend Kristof, a very talented photographer. You can see that lens reviewed here, on The Digital Photographer: I shall not bother to add to that.

What I will briefly explain is this. A tilt-shift lens is not just used to bring converging verticals back to vertical. Yes, that too: but as many people point out, you can do that in Lightroom or Photoshop too. Same, I suppose, with the crazy weird “dollhouse” focus effects a Tilt-Shift lens can give you.

What you can not do in Lightroom or Photoshop is this: focus in a plane that is not perpendicular to your camera.

I mean this. Let’s look at a picture of some of the spices and condiments I use when cooking:

They are lined up front to back… the back is farther away from me. So at f/2.8, the back is way out of focus (click to see large: you will see by how much). Even at very small apertures like f/11 or worse, I would still see this effect (because I am so close); plus, I would lose the blurred background I want.

So here is where Tilt-Shift comes to the rescue! When I tilt the lens to the left (so it is more perpendicular to the desired plane of focus), I can shoot with everything sharp. In this case, a shift to the left of just 2.5 degrees did it:

Problem solved – all sharp where I want it to be, even at f/2.8.

So why not use Tilt-Shift lenses all the time? Well, for one, they are expensive (partly because the larger image circle needed means more glass). Also, they are manual focus lenses: no autofocus. And you need to take the time to get the effects right, and to focus accurately. You will want to use a tripod, and you will want to take your time.

But for many shots there is no substitute – like portraits where you want both eyes sharp, but the background blurry; architecture; and many types of studio product shot – even the shifting comes in handy there since you can shoot up or down without converging/diverging verticals.
 

Direction is everything

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In yesterday’s class at The Granite Club, I emphasized that you can do professional artistic pictures with very simple means. Any DSLR camera; a normal lens, slightly wide to slightly long, and one on-camera flash in a small room. That can get you shots like this:

The secrets:

  • Shoot in a small room with white walls and ceilings.
  • Shoot long if you can – avoid wide except when you have to in the small room.
  • Try to “fill the frame”, and use good composition (e.g. the Rule of Thirds).
  • Camera on manual – say, f/5.6 at 1/125th sec and 400 ISO.
  • Try to include props – perhaps special clothing, sunglasses, anything interesting.
  • Simplify your shot – take things out that do not belong! You can do this by positioning, tilting, and even by post-shoot cropping.
  • Expose high: use Flash Compensation (“FEC”), to a positive setting (perhaps +1 to as much as +2). Light bright = smooth skin.
  • Especially: aim the flash accurately “where you want the virtual umbrella to be”.

That last point is illustrated by me here. Look carefully:

Can you see how I am holding the flash, and aiming it accurately behind me? You can see the white ceiling – where my flash lights it up, i.e. the “virtual umbrella”) right in front of the model.

(Cool shot, no? I am lucky to have a regular good model, and all the equipment – but with a little practice, we can all do this, with any model and any camera and lens. Learn the technique – then develop your eye.)

 

Demonization

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Society’s demonization of photography continues. As a photographer, I am more than a little bothered by this.

Take this example. My son’s school just sent a press release email to all parents. It read, in part:

Dear Parents/Guardians,

The Halton Regional Police Service has arrested and charged a man after he was seen following and believed to be photographing two teenage girls. On February 2nd and again on February 6, 2012, just after 3:00 p.m., the two girls were walking home from school in the area of Monks Passage and Oak Meadow Road when they observed a man following them.

The man was driving a white Cadillac and appeared to be photographing them.

The girls were able to obtain the licence plate of the vehicle and subsequent police investigation led to the driver being identified.

 

The letter then went on to give some common-sense safety advice (play safe and play together; walk together, and so on).

What bothers me is not the way in which authorities watch over out children’s safety (I have kids too). What bothers me is the “…and believed to be photographing” part. As though that in itself is bad; the implication is that photographing is a step worse than merely following and harassing.

Photographing someone is no more illegal or wrong than looking at someone or speaking to someone. Both are perfectly legal. And both can, when done in a harassing manner, be wrong.

Yes: it is legal in Canada to photograph anyone and anything you like, in a public place. Of course there are limits: harassing is wrong. But that is the harassing – it has nothing to do with photography itself. Imagine if the press release had read:

“The Halton Regional Police Service has arrested and charged a man after he was seen following and is believed to have spoken to two teenage girls”

or perhaps

“The Halton Regional Police Service has arrested and charged a man after he was seen following, and is believed to have looked in the direction of, two teenage girls”

Or maybe

“The Halton Regional Police Service has arrested and charged a man after he was seen following, and is believed to have listened to, two teenage girls”

That would sound silly – but photography – oh, that is bad: it steals people’s souls. Worse if he was using a long lens – never mind that an iPhone has lots of megapixels too, but a long lens makes you extra evil.

I am not exaggerating. Last summer, a fellow newspaper shooter I know was interrogated by police after “he was seen photographing children with a long lens” – and two cars, not one, were sent to intercept this photojournalist, who was merely getting a “weather picture” for the Oakville Beaver, our local newspaper.

Can I suggest we use slightly less incendiary language? As a photographer who carries a camera at all times, I do not want to start being seen as a threat – thanks. Photography is not sinister and it must not be turned into anything sinister. It does no harm – and the pictures teens put up as Facebook profiles are, I am sure, more revealing and provocative than anything you could capture in the streets.

Oh, and I received the 2008 Halton Police “News Photograph of the Year” award.  Which I captured with, yes, a camera.