Checklist: Aye Aye

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Back when I spent a lot of time flying airplanes, I would never have dreamt of leaving without going step by step through a detailed checklist. Much as you know, without the checklist you’ll forget that fuel tank selector once – and once is all it takes.

Photography is less critical – but not much. So I propose that you use a checklist much of the time.

This checklist depends on what you are shooting. I usually start from standard settings for snaps:

Focus:

  1. Lens (and camera if it has a setting) on AUTO
  2. Select one focus point
  3. Mode: One-Shot/AF-S

Exposure:

  1. Mode: Aperture, set to f/5.6
  2. ISO: 200 outdoors, 400 indoors and 800 in difficult light
  3. Exposure Compensation: Off (Zero)
  4. Flash compensation: Off (Zero)
  5. Meter: Evaluative/Matrix (“Smart”)

Other:

  1. White balance: Auto
  2. Shutter release: Single

Then I vary from there.

For indoors flash pictures, for instance, it would be as above, except:

  1. Mode: Manual
  2. ISO: 400
  3. Aperture: f/5.6
  4. Shutter: 1/30th second
  5. Flash: On, pointed 45 degrees behind me

You can make your own, and I encourage you to. One of my flight instructors once told me: every item on the checklist is there because that feature has killed several people. And for photography, every item is there because it has ruined someone’s wedding pictures.

Easy Portrait Tip

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An easy portrait tip (or two) for you today.

Uncle Fred puts every subject dead in the centre. You, of course, will not do that, since it leads to an unbalanced image. You will use off-centre composition instead. In a portrait, you will put the centre point (the eyes) a third of the way from the top:

Able Assistant Matt

You will also:

  • Ensure there is a catchlight in the eyes.
  • Focus on those eyes.
  • In a formal portrait, use f/8 (or at least f/5.6 – f/11, in that range).
  • Light from one side, or straight on, but in any case from 45 degrees above.

Like I said, simple – but very effective. Try!

A Lightroom effect

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You all saw my silhouette pictures recently, and some have asked “how do you do that”.

Sometimes these are fortuitous. Sometimes, as in my case, they are my standard process for a picture where the flash failed to fire (becasue someone else just fired it). In those cases I know I can get a contrasty silhouette out of it.

I use Adobe Lightroom for this. In Lightroom, an underexposed picture from Sunday’s shoot necessitated adjustments in the following order:

  1. Set white balance
  2. Set exposure to +4 stops (!)
  3. Set Fill Light to +13
  4. Set Blacks (a key adjustment!) to +17
  5. Now set Brightness to +103
  6. Set Contrast to +50
  7. Select “B&W” (Black and White) mode
  8. Curve adjustment: darks down, brights up
  9. Noise reduction

That resulted in this pretty good, if I say so myself, image:

Kassandra Silhouette

Of course I could have removed the “grunge”, as the model put it, on the floor and on the right, but no I like it. It’s part of the fun.

Remember, a good image makes the viewer do some work, “trying to put it all together”.

Lightroom post note

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So you have a nice image – now you need some post-production work done, since the image out of camera may well need a little bit of need cropping and other adjustments. But you want to do these adjustments quickly and well.

What adjustments? Well, let’s take this example out of the camera. I shall show you how I do one.

Here, an image from last Sunday’s workshop. Model Kassandra lit using available light, and using a paper backdrop. First I crop, and then here is the image:

I am after a high-key look to make her eyes stand out. But it is a little dark, because the model was pointed the wrong way (available light comes from a direction, in this case the camera’s left side), and because my camera told me the wrong exposure (yes, I should have probably done this in the camera, but even when you do, the RAW file can turn out different from the camera’s histogram).

So using the histogram to guide me, I dragged the white area to the far right. And here it is, with exposure corrected (up half a stop):

Now the next adjustment: using the HSL/Color/B&W tool, click on B&W to make it black and white. (Important tip: ensure you set white balance correctly before you do this).

Mmm. That is “vanilla” black and white. But now the trick. Go into the B&W adjustment in Lightroom, and drag the luminance of orange and red (but mainly orange) up to, say, +20 or more (in my case here: +39, and red to +20). This gives clearer, smoother skin:

Now use the healing tool to cleak a few skin blemishes on the model’s left knee (and I turned up the exposure just tad more):

And there we have it, in a few seconds, an image that was a bit dark has been made into a great black and white image.

Softly softly.

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In keeping with yesterday’s post, one more post on lighting humans, and why a”softly softly” approach is good especially in glamour and art nudes photography.

In Sunday’s “The Art of Photographing Nudes” workshop, we shot a lot of the images using available light. Images like this:

Model Kassandra relaxing

In a shot like this, you take a “soft” approach in various ways.

  • You use soft light, especially when shooting females. Available daylight from a north-facing window is good. That is what we used here.
  • You also use bright light, Bright, high-key light makes skin softer and smoother. Everyone likes that.
  • You take an easy approach with the model. Calm, take your time, do not rush and do not over-direct. If a model has an idea of her poses, some light instruction is all you will want to do. Else, the shoot will be less relaxed and your images will suffer.
  • You go easy on explicitness. Keeping things hidden is often a way to make a picture more interesting and more alluring.
  • You go easy on complexity: keep it simple. In nudes especially, the emphasis is on the human body, not on the backgrounds. I like using very simple backgrounds for much work, like the image above.

Those simple tips will help you get the most out of any portrait session. In our next workshop on this subject (which we will do in the next few months, probably in March) we shall do more.

Warning: bodies here

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Today marked the first “The Art of Photographing Nudes” workshop that Joseph Marranca and I held in Mono, Ontario for photo enthusiasts.

Kassandra, grunge James Bond nude silhouette

In this workshop, students learned about such things as:

  • Background of the nude photograph
  • Types of nude shots
  • Challenges
  • Equipment/technical
  • Model: interaction, finding, putting at ease
  • Men vs Women
  • Light: how to keep it simple
  • Colour vs Black and White
  • Composition
  • Do’s and Dont’s

Many practical tips made this a very useful way to spend a Sunday, and everyone went back with lots of shots.

When you have a great model like Kassandra, your task shifts slightly from directing every shot to “setting up the shot, then taking lots of images, then selecting the ones you like best”.

We shall be holding another one in March – let me know if you think you might want to be one of the students. Two expert photographer instructors, one cook (thanks Michelle) and no more than ten students at the most.

After the click, another few shots.

Warning: those of you that are offended by the sight of the human body (I am sorry if in 2011 you are: we all have one – and  if you want to be a photographer you had better get used to that fact!) – that there will be unclothed human bodies after you click here:

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Snow Tips

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Snow. The many inches I got here in the last day or two prompt me to write you a quick post about snow pictures. And how to take them safely.

Pics like this:

Snow scene outside the driveway

The things to keep in mind are:

  • Exposure: expose to make the snow bright. If you are using a semi-automatic mode (like A/Av) or an automatic mode like P, you will need to use exposure compensation: usually +1 to +2 stops. Use the histogram to verify.
  • White balance. On a sunny day, snow is blue. Setting your white balance to “daylight” minimizes this problem.
  • Camera safety. When going back inside to where it is warm, your camera will mist up. To avoid this, wrap it inside a tightly closed ziplock or ordinary plastic bag, and let it warm up in there. No condensation!
  • Flare. Use a lens hood to avoid flare.
  • Lens safety. if it is snowing, use a filter on the lens to avoid water getting in.
  • Battery. Carry a spare, because your camera’s battery will not last all that long if it is cold. Put a warm spare in and warm up the cold battery, and you will be fine.

Simple tips that make the difference between missed opportunities and nice pictures.

And yes that is a snowmobile in the picture. Ontario. Snow. Cold.

Open wide

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Wide angle lenses tend to be under-appreciated by amateur photographers. “Surely to get a good photo you need to have a long lens: the longer the better!”

No, not so. A wide angle lens (say, a 10-20mm lens on a crop camera, or a 16-35mm lens on a full-frame camera) allows for interesting pictures.

Wide lenses are great for creative reasons:

  • You get depth, three-dimensionality – we call that “close-far” technique.
  • You get leading lines, strong diagonals.
  • You can make great “environmental” portraits, with a person surrounded; enveloped, as it were, by their environment.

And for technical reasons:

  • It is easy to focus “everywhere:”: depth of field is extensive.
  • It is easy to use slow shutter speeds without motion blur (rough guideline: a 15mm lens can be used at 1/15th second, while a 200mm lens needs 1/200th second).

If I were to have to choose one lens (admittedly this would have to be with a gun to my head: life is not that simple) – but if I had to choose one lens, then I would choose the wide angle zoom as my lens of choice.

The Hood

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Nope, not the neighbourhood, but the lens hood.

Look at this picture of a group of students here in Mono, Ontario at a recent workshop:

See what I see? Apart from the fact they are all quite rightly aiming their flashes behind them onto walls, I am struck by the fact that they all have their lens hoods on.

  • A lens hood means you get more contrast, since no stray light gets in from the side.
  • If you use a filter, this is especially noticeable.
  • Less flare too (the worst case of contrast loss).
  • And finally: a lower chance of damage when you knock your lens into things (as you will).

So my mini-lesson for today: always use the lens hood that comes with your lens. It has to be that one – the shape is designed to avoid vignetting, i.e. dark corners.

Oh. Yes, it can increase the circle of shade that you get from the lens when using your popup flash. But you do not use that popup flash anyway, do you? Please tell the speedlighter that you don’t!

Smiiile!

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OK, so – no, don’t ever say that to a subject. The command “smile” is like saying “look weird”, “look unnatural”, “assume a pose”. And not only to young children.

Instead, tell stories, say something funny, get the subject to relax. This picture of me was taken by a student a day or two ago:

Michael Willems - smiling

And I never smile. But, mention certain subjects and I smile naturally, not because I am told to smile – that never works.

This is one reason portraits can take time to make. Getting a subject to relax cannot be done in a hurry.

How did we light this?

  1. Expose for the background. Ensure the background light does work as “fill light” for the subject.
  2. Use an umbrella-mounted speedlight (shooting through the umbrella if you can), connected via pocketwizards.
  3. Position the umbrella somewhere 45 degrees above the subject, and for a male, 45 degrees to the side if you like.
  4. Set the flash power according to the exposure you worked out for the background. Use a light meter to verify that.

Bob’s your uncle: Practice that technique and you will do much better when shooting portraits. And remember, never say “smiiile”.