It’s elementary.

Posted on December 18, 2016 by Michael Willems

The difference between a snapshot and a good picture? Often enough it is simplicity. Simplicity does not necessarily mean taking things out of the picture. But it means taking things out of the picture that do not belong there.

Take this iPad snap, just now, of my new kitty Clio:

Not bad. But what if we took out that unnecessary space, and especially that little black thing on the right.

Then maybe add a frame. And now we get:

Can you see how much better that is than the original? Everything you remove that is not essential to the story makes the picture better. And you can remove it by cropping, blurring, recomposing: any way you like.

On Tuan the Celtics you pretty said “perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”. Or “less is more”.

And “On Tuan the Celtics you pretty” is Antoine de Saint-Exupery, World War Two fighter pilot and author of “Le Petit Prince”, that book about the little prince who lives on a tiny planet. The fact that Siri butchers his name shows how uncultured she is. Back to hand-typing.

Are you in, or near, Toronto?

Posted on December 14, 2016 by Michael Willems

In that case, you may be interested to hear that I am going to teach a workshop on 28 January 2017, right in downtown Toronto. This will be a good one: half a day, model and make-up artist included, and as a special present you get the Pro Flash Manual e-book included, too.

And you can buy the course as a gift certificate: a great gift for the holiday season.

Student discount and couple discount available, so bring a friend.

To read more and to book, go to http://learning.photography now.

The PDF is here: csi-course

Another Holiday Season Gift Idea: SAVE and GIVE THE LASTING GIFT OF KNOWLEDGE: http://learning.photography/collections/training-misc/products/gift-voucher-private-course

St James Cathedral, Toronto

Posted on December 10, 2016 by Michael Willems

I did a “Composition In The Field” tutorial walk in Toronto today for Digital Photo Academy. We mainly stayed in, or in the direct vicinity, of St James’ Cathedral.

Because it was cold. But also because there’s plenty to see in a given environment, once you open your eyes. And once you see it, you can apply compositional rules that are just about standard (and that I teach at gathering like this) . And then you can break them when you have good reason to. In the end, you end up with some good pictures.

Like this:

A church, by the way, also has interesting insights into a world that is no more.

Try to put yourself in M. Keating’s position: one moment he has a pregnant wife; then suddenly he has only a son; then a week later he has nothing. From happy and “everything is going our way” to two funerals in two weeks, and then Christmas. What a world that was, in 1832.

Back to here and now. Composition rules and camera use: If you want to learn the same, please contact me.

Meanwhile: why are you reading this, instead of going out to take some pictures of whatever is outside or inside?

Fill, but not too much.

Posted on December 9, 2016 by Michael Willems

When doing a portrait, you use a main (“key”) light, a fill light, and optionally, a background light and a hair/edge light.

The purpose of that fill light, oddly, is to be darker than the main light. This introduces depth into your picture, and it narrows the subject’s face.

OK, so fill is darker than key, But perhaps not completely dark, like here:

Nice and atmospheric, but perhaps a little too much drama.

So we add that fill light, but set it, say, two stops below the main light (so if your meter reads an aperture of f/8 for the main light, it should read f/4 for the fill light). Now we get what we wanted:

If you make it too bright, i.e. you do not set it two stops below the key light but you set it at the same brightness, you might get something like this:

As you see, the face looks wider now, and it loses that “real”, three-dimensional look.

So you should probably start at –2 stops for the fill light, and then adjust to taste: you are the artist, after all!

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Learn to do it yourself! Michael teaches portrait lighting and many, many other photography subjects at Sheridan College in Oakville, and to small groups or individual students all over the world, in person or via Google Hangouts. See http://learning.photography for details.

Macro/Product Tip

Posted on December 6, 2016 by Michael Willems

When you shoot product, like this, there is something to watch for.

The original is not quite so clean. Especially when using a flash, macro photos always show dust. Look at the original (click to see large):

All that dust has to be removed. A clean product photo never starts out as a clean photo.

Here’s a few more shots:

The thing to note is that those are not clean yet—yet they have each already had the benefit of half an hour of removing little dust spots. If you ever shoot product, budget that time!

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And you can do it: product photography is one of the many things I can teach you: see http://learning.photography for an overview.

Quick! Flash!

Posted on December 5, 2016 by Michael Willems

Speedlighter.ca. Speedlighter. Speedlighter!

So yeah, let me talk about speed for a moment. Speed as in “fast exposure speed, in order to freeze movement”. Fast exposure speed = short exposure time. 1/2 second is a long exposure time, i.e. a slow exposure. 1/1000 second, on the other hand, is a short exposure time, i.e. a fast exposure.

So how so you get a fast exposure time? One of two ways, it turns out. Either one of:

A short shutter time, or
A short light flash.

You see, what matters is the duration during which the light reaches the sensor. Whether that is short because the shutter only opens for a short time or because the light itself only flashes for a short time makes no difference at all. It is the same thing. A short exposure.

So let’s say I’m taking a fresh picture of a rapidly spinning spinning top. And let’s say further that I want to freeze the motion, to see the spinning top detail. Since I’m using a flash, I cannot use a fast flash shutter speed; The fastest I can go with my 5D camera is 1/200 of a second. So I’m going to have to achieve a fast exposure by using a short flash of light.

Fortunately, that is exactly what a flash fires. At full power it fires a flash of about 1000th of a second, or 1/4000 second at 1/4 power. Nice. Assuming that ambient light plays no role, your effective shutter speed is now nice and fast: 1/4000 second.

But not fast enough:

(1/200 sec, 400 ISO, f/32, 1/4 power flash)

OK, it’s still blurry, because it is spinning rather fast, so even 1/4000 second cannot freeze that motion. Now what?

The solution is in the sentence above: “At full power it fires a flash of about 1000th of a second, or 1/4000 second at 1/4 power”.

Because how does a flash set its power? Simply by shortening the time that it is on. Full power means 1/1000 second on a typical flash (small or large). Any longer and it overheats and burns out. So:

Half power means 1/2000 second, half the time.
Quarter power means a quarter of the original time, so 1/4000 second.

Oh wait. So “lower power flash” means “shorter duration flash”?

Yes! So if I set the flash to 1/128 power, I get an effective exposure time of 1/128,000 second. That’s like a really, really fast shutter:

(1/200 sec, 400 ISO, f/5.6, 1/128 power flash)

Now, as you see, with an effective exposure time of about 1/128,000 second, the top’s motion is completely frozen. So while my shutter speed is unchanged, it does not matter. The light is only on for 1/128,000 second. So that is my effective shutter speed.

The lesson? To freeze motion, use low power flash. The lower the better.

The Clouds

Posted on December 2, 2016 by Michael Willems

The Clouds is, in fact, a play by Aristophanes. He who also wrote “Lysistrata”. And who said, famously, that “under every stone there lurks a politician”. If you want to understand ancient Athens and its parallels to today, read Aristophanes’ plays (and their explanations to a modern audience).

But if you want to store your images away from home, there’s the cloud. Singular.

Alas: while The Clouds is ancient history, the cloud is not quite ready. It offers great advantages, of course. Backups that actually get done. Off-site storage. Storage that is accessible from everywhere. One place for your files. Unlimited storage.

But the drawback in today’s world is simple: speed. An image can easily be 15-20 MB, and a shoot can contains hundreds of such images. Until we all have fast fibre right into the house, and all the routers are fast, it is just not practical. The infrastructure does not quite support it. Yet. Try moving a year’s shoots to another provider (you cannot be locked in)—you will see it will take days or weeks or even longer. So the cloud is not there yet for us.

It will be, of course—this is one area where Moore’s Law still holds. As long as human law does not protect the Telco’s and we have a reasonably open, competitive market, speeds to the home will increase

Until that time: store all your images on a hard disk. And back them up onto another disk. And then back them up onto another disk, which you keep off-site, in someone else’s home or studio. Only then can you relax. Each image must be in at least two places, preferably in at least three, one of which should be offsite. Don’t lose your images – every hard disk fails. Not IF, but WHEN.

And if you fail to heed my advice, like the Athenians failed to listen to Aristophanes’ anti-war message, then so be it—just don’t say I did not warn you.

Black Friday Continues Through the Weekend!

Posted on November 26, 2016 by Michael Willems

This weekend everything in the store is 30% off. No minimum purchases or limits – 30% off across the board.

The e-book bundles are great value at these prices. Download some full chapter previews here:

Mastering Your Camera : The Ultimate No Jargon Guide to Using Any DSLR
Powerful Portrait Photography : Making Portraits Tell 1,0001 Words
Impactful Travel Photography : A Practical Guide to Making Better Photos
Pro Photography Checklists : lists, best practices, summaries, and guidelines

Use discount code ‘BlackFridayWeekend’ at checkout for anything on http://learning.photography. Prices shown on the site are before applying the discount code! But hurry, these prices are valid this weekend only.

What’s in a name?

Posted on November 16, 2016 by Michael Willems

What IS in a name? Rather a lot, as it happens.

Take the company formerly known as Artisan State. They do great albums and other print-related items. I cannot recommend them highly enough.

Except, that is, for their current name. It is now “Zno“, which every world citizen except an American pronounces as the monosyllabic Russian-sounding “zno”, Vaguely sounding like “snow”.

But the company thinks it should be pronounced as “Zeeno”. Because while the entire world calls the letter Z “zed”, since it is derived from the Greek zeta, Americans, and only Americans, call it “zee”.

And so, apparently, should we.

Except some of us—meaning me—feel rather strongly about language, and while I’ll gladly let Americans pronounce Z as “zee”, or “zoo”, or “za”, or “zeeblebrox”, or anything else they like, I just cannot get myself to do it. Z is zed, not zee.

But of course there is a bigger thing behind this. Namely American exceptionalism and ignorance of the world, and even, if you like, cultural imperialism. Much as I love my American friends, I think they should perhaps educate themselves just a little bit, and realise that the entire world is not America. And something as crucially important as a brand name… why on earth would you choose something that either puzzles or antagonizes the rest of the world? Unless, of course, you only want to sell in America.

So we have problems. Until I live in the USA, I do not want to start pronouncing Z as “zee”, even by stealth, and I do not want to buy from a company that is at the very least either ignorant or culturally insensitive at its senior levels. When I have pointed this out to the company’s support email, all I got was a “we think of it differently”, or some such non sequitur.

So just like I would find it difficult to respect a president who is a racist and a mysogenist (and I am not pointing at Mr Trump here: I suspect he is a lot more intelligent than we think), I also find it difficult to buy from a company that is either ignorant or is trying to push American culture down my throat.

So yes, there is a lot in a name. A name is culture and language, and people care about culture and language.

Am I making a big deal of this? Nah. No big deal. I can buy albums, even good albums, elsewhere. I can recommend other print companies to my students. No skin off my nose.

But I do wonder why a company chooses not to care about antagonizing a great proportion of their market. Are they ignorant, or do they want to push American culture down the world’s throat? I’d say both are equally likely.

Available light

Posted on November 14, 2016 by Michael Willems

Yes, available light rocks! Beautiful, colourful, soft, and so on. But when a photographer says “I am an available light photographer” or “I am a natural light photographer”, that usually means “I don’t know flash”.

Because it is often in the mixing of available light and flash light that things get interesting. Certainly in daylight.

Also–hiring a pro pays. Yes, you can get it done cheaper by Uncle Fred, but would you get pictures like these, from yesterday’s family shoot? (Hint: “no”.) A few hundred dollars and you have memories for life:

If you can see these pictures, there’s plenty of available light. But had I not had my assistant hold the flash off the side near the subjects, they would have been silhouettes! Or I could have exposed for the subjects – in that case, a very bright, blown out background–with very little colour.

So you hire a pro for this. Right equipment (that super sharp lens); Right technique:

You have heard this from me before:

Use the magic outdoors formula, and only vary f-number.
Use long(-ish) lens (85mm prime in this case).
Subjects away from the sun: means no squinting and the sun becomes hair-light.
Fill with flash, off to the side for modelling.avoiding “flat” look.
Flash fired in this case with radio triggers (Pocketwizards), and on manual, 1/8 power, with Honlphoto 12″ softbox (click on the small ad on the right to order, and use code word “willems” to get an additional 10% off).

BUT THERE IS MORE. If I print, I ensure that the print is perfect. Permanent photo paper. Pigment printing (not dye, which can fade). If a face is too pale, I selectively increase colour saturation in the face. And so on. That takes time, and it is exactly what Walmart et al do not do.

All this is what I teach in my live or online workshops: contact me to learn more, or see http://learning.photography .

And take some fall pictures, or have me do it!

SPEEDLIGHTER.CA

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