Learning tip

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Here’s a learning tip.

When you take a course or read a book (such as my e-books), you get all sorts of ideas. Great ideas that make you think “I must do that, next time I shoot”. Especially when travelling, the ideas can be very useful. Ideas like the use of negative space:

Or of using a close-by object (“close-far”) to introduce depth:

Great ideas. But you forget them, right?

So here’s the idea. Re-read your notes, or the book, and write down the 20 most important learnings. Make a list, whittle it down to about that number. Then write those 20 things down in shorthand, i.e. in simple form, on a piece of paper not much bigger than the size of a credit card. Have that laminated with plastic so it  lasts. Then carry it on you and before you shoot, look at the card for 20 seconds. Just 20 seconds. More is impractical: you’ll never do it. But 20 seconds is doable. That way, you refresh your mind when it matters. Namely, when you are about to shoot.

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I made the first shot above in January at Zabriskie Point, Death Valley, California, using my Canon 1Dx camera and my 16-35mm lens set to 35mm. I was at 200 ISO, 1/400th second, f/11.

The second shot was the same except for the focal length (here, 16mm) and the shutter speed (here, 1/100th sec).

 

 

Shake it up

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As you know, I was talking recently about shaking it up. And I constantly do:  From “drama” to “flash plus lots of ambient and large apertures”, as in this recent picture of the make-up artist and hair stylist at a shoot:

And you need to keep changing styles, or you ossify. I was recently told by a young person that people of my generation (i.e. people older than 30) could not possibly know anything about art. We like that boring grandmother stuff, like sharp subjects and blurred background. Today’s artists produce actual art, meaning edgy, shaky, unsharp, under- or over-exposed, real, imperfect pictures.

I refuse to believe that.

But I do believe that every generation brings in new ideas, and that if you do not shake things up, you will lose out. So while I am not asking you to expect unsharp pictures from me,I do think you will continue to see development.

As you should bring development into your own photography. Force yourself, if you must. Your comfort zone is a, well, comfortable place to be; but it is not where you should aim to spend all your time.

So here is your assignment  for next week: what is the technique, equipment or light you like least? Use that exclusively.

 

That red jacket

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The reminds me. When I was shooting the red jacket, the red jacket ended up, well, not red, at the bottom. More purplish. Look:

The reason: overexposure at the bottom, specifically of the RED pixels, when I expose enough to get the top lit. The model was too far from the window, so the light hit mainly her bottom half. Hard to see in person, but easy to see in the camera.

The solution: In Lightroom, in the DEVELOP module, go to the HSL pane; select LUMINANCE, and drag the RED Luminance slider leftward (minus). Now you get this:

Now that I am not blowing out the reds, I get a red coat!

Then the last step: I brighten the top with a graduated filter with exposure set to +1 stop. Now I get the final result:

This is all a matter of simply recognizing what is wrong. I was not able in time to fix it on site, but I knew I had enough leeway in my RAW files to fix it later. Sometimes, that is how it works.

 

 

An interesting observation

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I am wrapping up my 13-week winter “The Small Photography Business” course tonight, at Sheridan college. And one subject we discuss in this course at length is production and pricing of images, books, prints, and so on. For all purposes, weddings, graduations, events, fashion portfolios, etc.

But.

Modern people, like the young woman above, do not do what older people did. Each generation finds this out, to their consternation.

As an example, I love to make beautiful albums, like the ones I produce at artisanstate.com. Beautiful, metallic paper, hard pages, covered to make them invulnerable to spills and fingerprints, that fold fully flat, hand-bound: super stuff for little money.

But one young person, when shown this type of album, just told me “I hate that. It’s like a small kid’s picture book. Quality doesn’t matter, how many people will look at it anyway. I’d rather have more pictures and lower cost”. She would rather have a crappy book with horrible pixelated pictures, printed on the equivalent of toilet paper, because it’s more modern, cheaper, and less like what grandma had.

And the cost of an album is considerable. An album may only cost me $300 to buy, but by the time my time is included, which can be a day or two, it’s going to be $800-$1200. Which is good value, in my opinion. But I am not the market!

Kodak made the mistake of thinking they could dictate what the market should want. No, best not to make that mistake. Please do not undersell yourself, but also please do not engage in wishful thinking regarding market desires.

Makers of albums and wristwatches, watch out.

 

New Beauty Light Technique

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I have illustrated many lighting techniques here, from “Terry Richardson Amateur” to “Studio traditional”. Let me add one I use. I call this “bright-bright-blur”.

What I do here is use a bright room with reflected light. I then use settings, and flash to achieve three things:

  1. Bright ambient light
  2. Bright flash light
  3. Blurred backgrounds

I do that by first, setting my exposure so that the meter reads +1 stop. Yesterday that meant 800 ISO, 1/125th second, f/2.0. I wanted f/2 to blur the background. I wanted 1/125th sec to reduce motion blur. That gave me the need for 800 ISO.

Then, I put on a flash, aimed it behind me 45 degrees up, and adjusted Flash Exposure Compensation (FEC) to +1.3 stops. That gave me added flash to the already bright picture. That flash fills any of the darker areas. Great skin; great beauty light!

The pictures now look like this:

That is basically straight out of the camera.

Clearly, this is light suited to glamour and beauty, more than to my usual corporate headshots. The point is: it is yet another light type you can use; another tool in your creative toolbox. Master it, and then decide for each shoot what light type to use. photography is talking emotion. The more you master light, the more you can tell stories with your photos.

 

Shampooey Goodness

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You have heard me talk about this many times. Without “shampooey goodness”, a standard executive portrait can look a little lifeless. This is straight out of the camera (“SOOC”) from yesterday’s executive headshots session in Toronto:

Add a hair/rim light and it becomes much more lively:

In these portraits, the main (“key”) light is on our right:

Fill light and hair light are on our left:

Now, it is important how you add that light. Very important. Aim it a few millimetres too far over and you get much spill onto the cheeks, as  you see in this test shot of my assistant:

For reasons of skin smoothness, I generally prefer to keep it on the hair:

That aiming is best done by an assistant, who fires the flash by means of the test button to see where the light hits the head.

And one more thing: when someone has no hair, you call it a “rim light”!

 

Closer

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“If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough” (Robert Capa)

You have heard me on this theme many times. Getting close can often make your images better. You get close and intimate with the subject, your images have more impact. Like in these two, from that recent shoot:

Now of course you can do this by getting close. But be careful: closer than a couple of metres means you distort faces.

A better way is to use a longer lens. My favourite lens for this work is the 70-200, therefore. That has the additional benefit of not forcing you to be “in your subject’s face”. Yes, you have to have space, but that’s the entire point!

An alternate way is simply to use a somewhat long lens and then to crop for the rest. Those two were taken with the 85mm lens and cropped afterward. That is why you have all those megapixels, after all.

Next time you shoot anything, do yourself a favour and shoot the way you would normally shoot, but also shoot closer. Then when you look at the results, consider carefully which ones you like better. Where you like the close-up better: why? Where you like the wider view better: why? This is how you become a better photographer.

There’s still space on tomorrow’s Travel Photography session in Oakville, Ontario: 10AM-1PM, Sat 12 April 2014. $125 and it’s virtually private tuition!

What lens?

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My current love, as you all know, is the 85mm lens. The Canon 85mm f/1.2L lens, to be precise, on my full-frame Canon 1Dx camera.

I love this lens for many reasons. One is that f/1.2 is great when I want to shoot in a classroom without using a flash or going to very high ISO values. As a bonus, I get great separation between foreground and background.

As in these three very recent shots of students:

This lens is the perfect length for half body shots like this; and it is long enough to get blurry backgrounds even at f/5.6. Witness this, at Yonge-Dundas Square in Toronto (see here for the whole story):

If I move farther back, it is usable for full body shots too, of course:

Because it is a prime, it gives me the consistency I love: f/6.3 is f/6.3, and 1/100th sec is 1/100th sec. (With a zoom, on the other hand, you have to get used to motion blur effect and blurred background effect being different at every zoom setting.)

With this lens, I need to remember to move back and forth, and to leave enough space. But the point is that you can do that easily enough.

If you use a crop camera, a 50m lens would give you a comparable effect.

OK, and as a final shot, a screen shot from Sun News TV that aired two days ago, with the two Topfree Rights women and me taking photos of them:

Cheers!
Michael


Travel Photography Opportunity

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This Saturday, 12 April, 10AM in Oakville I present “Travel Photography”. A three-hour workshop about, um, travel photography.  Go to www.cameratraining.ca/Booking.html to book: seating is strictly limited: no more than five people. This is your chance to learn how I do it, and to immediately improve your photography. What to bring? Composition tips. People tips. Technical requirements. Lens choices. Storytelling tips. All this and more!

Here’s Fremont Street, Las vegas; January 2014

Night shots mean that you either carry a tripod, which you probably will not, or you:

  • Expose carefully and know how you are doing it. Night is not always dark!
  • Carefully handle the differences between light and dark, which can be extreme.
  • Use wider angles if you want to keep things simple (you will learn why).
  • Stabilize yourself (I will teach you some techniques).
  • Choose an appropriate ISO value.

All these are simple things once you know how, and night shots are often essential to really capture a place. Do not put your camera away when the sun disappears!