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).

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:

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

Let there be light

Posted on September 23, 2009 by Michael Willems

..and let it be managed.

I have talked about this many times before, and I will do it again. When you add light, and manage it, massage it, and work with i, you get drama, cheerfulness, whatever you like. So when you make the light, you make the mood.

Case in point. In the model shoot I did Monday on Toronto Island, here’s the light the way it might look to a casual observer, and the way it might appear in a properly exposed photo:

Fine. Nice. Pretty young lady (Miss Halton, incidentally) on the beach.

Now let’s work with that. That background is a bit bland to my taste, so let’s darken it. The colours on the model are OK but I’d like them to stand out more.I want drama, and I want the model to stand out, not to be just a thing on a beach.

So first I turn down the ambient exposure. Two stops.That will make light blue into dark dramatic blue. Then I add a flash, on a light stand – shot through an umbrella to get soft light. I fire that from my on-camera flash using E-TTL II IR technology. I turn the flash up or down as needed.

I now get the result I had in mind.

That’s better.

And more importantly: that’s entirely different. And that is the photographer’s task, to make things the way he or she wants them. You can say you like, or you don’t like – but you can’t say it isn’t different!

How I rate photos in Lightroom

Posted on September 22, 2009 by Michael Willems

It occurs to me that it may be helpful to share my “rating”-workflow in Lightroom. I go through the following sequence:

Import everything as 2 stars
Go to grid view and step through them, and reject any that are technically bad (e.g. out of focus or badly exposed, or the subject is blinking). They get an “X” marking. I exclude X from my view.
Go through them again and rate any that “could possibly be used” as 3.
Go through the threes again and rate any that are “great in this shoot” as 4.
Go through the fours again and give any that are “great and can be used even outside this shoot as portfolio shots” a five rating.
Then I select just the 4 and 5 stars rate them all as PICK.
Then I step through the 3 stars and decide with of them I want to use; I rate those as PICK also.
Then I check for doubles and unpick those.
Then I do any post on my picks.

Done.

Here’s a couple of (unedited) 4-star images from yesterday’s Toronto Island model shoot:

(70-200 f/2.8 IS lens on 1D MkIII, manual exposure -2 stops from ambient and key flash though umbrella, fill flash on camera.)

What time is it?

Posted on September 22, 2009 by Michael Willems

When photographing a watch or clock, it is always nine minutes and 31-and-a-half seconds after ten. As in my watch the other day:

That way, watches look most appealing. Look for it. Almost every watch is photographed at this “rule of time” position.

yet another one of the ten thousand tips that make a photographer!

And can you see that I used a 35mm f/1.4 lens in available light?

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