The Exposure Triangle and all that

I have posted about this before but as it is the core of what we do as photographers I feel it is worth giving it another airing. Exposure is the gathering in of the correct quantity of light so that our images are neither too light or too dark. Our controls are the aperture and the shutter plus the ISO, these work in conjunction with the light meter in the camera. Understanding this relationship and the impact ut has on your images is fundamental to being a photographer. This article from Digital Photo School is pretty good at explaining this so have a look. If you would like to understand more you might be interested in our DSLR courses or one of our 1 Day DSLR Workshops

Macro Flower Photography: A Tutorial in Focus Stacking

This tutorial by Harold Davis explains how you can use Photoshop to achieve crisp focus throught a macro image.

“The closer you get in macro flower photography, the fussier focus gets. Since “fussy” is not a technical term, let me explain. Because focus is inherently shallower as you get closer to your subject, slight variations of distance between camera and subject throw you out of focus very quickly, and even fully-stopped down you may not have enough depth-of-field for your entire photo to be in focus.

Certainly, stopping your lens down to its smallest aperture, observing whether you have the in-focus areas you want, and seeing if there is any way to position the camera to improve the amount that is in-focus is a good way to start. But bear in mind that stopping down a lens comes with some downsides: optically your lens may not perform best at its smallest aperture, and when the aperture is small you can’t use a shutter speed fast enough to stop motion.

An approach that often can surmount these obstacles is to use focus stacking: shooting at a number of different focal points and combining the images in Photoshop to create a hyper-focal image that has an extended area that is in focus.”…MORE

Blurb Books – The Photo book

I can’t believe you do not know about photobooks, they have been around for a few years now and the quality and range keeps improving. I have made books using different suppliers for a number of years. My first was an iphoto book, later I tried a Photobox book, then an Aperture book and recently YourPhotobooks. I have moved around with suppliers to get an idea of the quality they produce and the ease of book assembly. This week I completed a second book on my trip to Laos over Christmas and the new year and this time I went for Blurb Books. It is possible these are the market leaders although I am not sure how you could work that out. Their overall quality is excellent and their technical sophistication, explaining colour space, providing icc profiles etc far exceeds those of the other suppliers I have tried.

Blurb Books a photography book by Keith Barnes about Laos

If you are interested to look inside my book click on the cover and it will take you to the Blurb site where you can preview it’s content.

I decided to go for the largest size available and as I had shot rather a lot of images whilst away it has a lot of pages. I tried using the templates for pages supplied but found this didn’t suit the layout I wanted. One of the very nice things about Blurb is that you can create your own page templates and save them so it is possible to define something unique to your purpose. Not only do you have choice of book sizes but also cover types, hard or soft back, wrap around or dust jacket, there are about 5 different paper types you can select also. This really is as close to a bespoke service as you could want.

The cost reflects the service, I always budget about £1 a page for an A4 photobook, this is pretty cheap if you think you can get several images per page. I probably have about 200 images in my Laos book and even at the cost of £70 for the 150 pages that is still only about 40p per image and many are full A4 in size. I decided not to try to make a profit on my book but Blurb allows you to set your own price and make profit on the difference when someone buys it. You can also put your books in their library for the world to peruse and choose to buy if they like your work.

Why am I telling you about this, well I have always thought of photography as something that has a point when it becomes physical. Viewing on screen on line is OK but if you want to collect your work into something that actually reflects your portfolio then prints or books are a must. You will be surprised at the reaction from family and friends when you show them a book(s) of your work and you will always have something to hand to show, no need to boot up the computer.

 

Typical Digital Image Management Workflow

I am often asked what work flow I use, the question is really how do I import my images, what software do I use to sort and edit and how do I archive, back up and output my work. This isn’t rocket science, a good understanding of the software, Aperture and  Lightroom being the most popular but there are many more, Bibble, ACDsee are two I have enjoyed using. My preference now is for Lightroom, I got fed up with Aperture falling over, maybe Apple sorted it out in Aperture 3 but my version of 2 was a dog.

The basis of work flow is what logically works for you, how do you think. I import to an external hard drive and then immediately back up to a second. Then I rate my images and create a set that will require final editing down but at least I have the best one or two from every set or scene. I then go through image prep. adjusting density, colour, cropping etc. Finally I out put to tif. my preferred images and depending on final use may also prepare jpegs. This works for me, many people have a more intense relationship with their work flow and need to tag and keyword images. Anyway this very useful article By Jason Row on 9 Jan 2012 in Post Production via Lightstalking has much good advice, here is a taste of this long article

“Until a few years ago, workflow was a virtually unheard of word. Now it is the mantra of nearly every professional photographer but what does it mean? Well, put simply, its carrying out the day to day work tasks in a consistent and hence efficient way. Following on from my last article on Digital Image Management I want to talk about my workflow for ingesting and organizing images.”

As mentioned before, there are a number of image management programs out there, my personal choice is Apple’s Aperture, mainly because I am Apple orientated and like the way the program interfaces with the rest of the Apple operating system. I allow Aperture to manage my library, meaning that I do not import my images separately to a folder then catalogue; I import them directly to Aperture and allow the program to deal with filing them.

So, for efficiency, start as you mean to go on. Get into the habit of uploading your images every time you return home. This way you can clean your cards, and start afresh next time you go out to shoot. It also means you are cataloging whilst things are still fresh in your mind.

The first thing I do when returning from a shoot is ingest my images into Aperture. As most of my images are travel based, my cataloging hierarchy is date and place related. My images are organized into projects by year, into folders by month and into individual shoots by albums. Typically I would return from a shoot and create a new album called for example 2012-01-01 Odessa. This album would reside in a folder called 2012-January inside a project called 2012-Images. Upon importing, I would batch name each image 2012-01-01 Odessa-(Sequential Number) Most image management software allows you to batch name your photographs in various ways. Before importing, I also add any keywords that are consistent throughout the shoot and most importantly add my copyright and date information to the metadata. I then import all the images.”……MORE

 

 

Choosing a photobook supplier

I always make books, since photobooks became possible I saw them as the perfect way to present my images. I use them for trips away, days in the country, friends and family get togethers, I work on a basis of £1 a page and as I can sometime have 4 or more pictures per page this is not expensive. There are many options of who to use, I have tried, the Mac options with both iphoto and Aperture and Blurb and Photobox.

This article on Presets Heaven has additional views

“For each long trip to another country, I make a photo book containing most of the photos I’ve taken. I’ve tried multiple services for this purpose. Some of them are better than the other.  A while back ago I used Snapfish to process my photo books. They were the best alternative for me at that point. I was working on a stationary PC and Snapfish had special client for PC-users to take advantage of. Today, more and more services are available and with even more options to chose from (paper quality, number of pages, hard vs. soft cover etc.).”.…more

The Exposure Triangle and How it Affects Your Photos

Last night I completed part 2 of our Understanding Your DSLR Camera course, this is the stage where I teach about exposure and use the exposure triangle to explain the relationship between aperture, shutter and ISO. This article on the ever brilliant Lightstalking site will do it for those of you not in my class last night.

Getting a new DSLR can be quite an overwhelming experience for a new photographer. All the knobs and buttons seem to do a thousand different things (and they do), but the dirty secret of photography is that at its core, knowledge of the exposure triangle is what will make your new DSLR really sing. If you know how the exposure triangle works, then you essentially know the basics of how your photographs will turn out and you can build your skills with the manual functions of your camera from that solid basis.

The biggest benefit of having an advanced DSLR is that they allow manual control over most elements of the photographic process in terms of what’s happening in the camera. But having that control means that it is of great benefit if you know what elements you need to control and what they do. Let’s take a look at the three absolute essentials that make up the exposure triangle – ISO, Shutter Speed and Aperture.

Click Here: The Exposure Triangle and How it Affects Your Photos

Why Lens Speed Varies or why does my lens have different apertures at different zoom lengths

In class when teaching Understanding Your Digital SLR camera I am often asked why does the zoom lens I bought with my camera say f3.5-f5.6 and why does it vary when I zoom. There is a simple explanation to this but this answer on the digitalphotography lifetips site says it all so if you want to know have a look here

Understanding depth of field and showing some self control

This is a really useful article from Jim Harmer at Improve Photography. Regularly in the classes I teach I find people who are so absorbed by shallow depth of field that they fail to see that some of the most important parts of their image are out of focus.

“I get it.  Depth of field is fun to play with and makes our pictures look amazing, but I’m here to say that more of a good thing is not always better.

Look at the image featured on this page of my beautiful wife, Emily.  The depth-of-field adds to this image to make her stand off the page; however, this image suffers from too shallow depth of field.  The depth of field was only about two inches in this picture because I used an aperture of f/1.8, a 50mm lens, and I was only two or three feet away from the subject.  You can see that part of her face is out of the plane of focus, and that is a bit distracting.  What I really wanted was to make her completely in focus and just blur out the background.  You might not be able to tell this on the small preview of the image, but it’s obvious if you click to make it big.  This post is for those of you who always crank the aperture down to the lowest number available.”…interested?...more

Too shallow depth of field – Jim Harmer’s mistake

Understanding the light meter in your camera

You may not be fully aware of the metering opportunities your camera offers and how making the right choice can significantly improve your images. This well written article by Gerry van der Walt of Photo Africa gives a simple basic explanation of how you can do better. Gerry runs photography workshops and safaris in Africa so if you are thinking of a trip check out his site

Here is a link to his page with the metering tutorial

Shooting portraits and weddings in harsh sunlight

I came across this tutorial on the Pictage site by the Youngrens. I think it is spot on with regard to dealing with harsh sun light, not something we are currently experiencing here in Oxford. I couldn’t find the site address for this tutorial so it is reproduced here in in full

 

If you think about it, wedding days are totally against us as photographers, particularly when it comes to light. I mean, who has two thumbs and ends up shooting bridal parties at high noon in July? For four weekends in a row? This girl.

One of our most frequently asked questions at The Youngrens is “How do you shoot in harsh sunlight?”

The short answer? We don’t. We find shade. Any kind of shade. Shade from a tree, a building, a cloud, a doorway, a diffuser – anything. As much as we humanly can, we try to avoid harsh sunlight.

Which brings me to our second most frequently asked question.

“Ok, but what if there’s no shade to be found? Anywhere.”

Fair question. We’ll start with the basics, then throw out a few tips.

Side Note: Avoiding harsh sunlight is a part of our particular photographic style. Others may welcome harsh sunlight as a part of their artistic eye, or some may use artificial lighting to overpower the sun and create high-fashion looks. Those are both great styles, but we’ll be outlining how we stay within our particular style in harsh, mid-day situations.

Shoot in Manual
The only way you can properly expose skin tones in a harsh sunlight situation is by putting your camera in manual mode. As smart as cameras are these days, there will be a lot of light bouncing around your subject and your light meter won’t give you an accurate reading.

You will have to be smarter than the camera. So take a deep breath and make the leap into manual, if you haven’t already.

Widen Your Aperture
Harsh sunlight is undesirable because it creates hard shadows on the skin that highlight little facial details (ie blemishes, pores, imperfections, discolorations, wrinkles, etc), which is totally unflattering.

So your overall goal as the photographer in a harsh sunlight situation is to soften the light on your subject’s skin and create a more pleasing skin tone.

We typically shoot between f/2.0 and f/2.8 for most of our bride and groom portraits, because a wider aperture particularly helps in harsh sunlight situations to soften skin tones.

It’s important to note, however, that when shooting at such “wide open” apertures it’s increasingly difficult to maintain a sharp focus on your subject(s). So slow down and take the time to focus properly when shooting with these settings. Otherwise you’ll be angry at me.

So throw your camera into manual, widen your aperture, then…

Put their backs at an off-angle to the sun
High noon is the only time of day that there will be absolutely no angle to the sun, but if you’re at least 30 minutes on either side of that, you can take advantage of what sun angle exists.

Since you’re trying to soften your subjects’ skin, you don’t want harsh sunlight to directly hit your subjects’ faces. So put their backs at an angle to the sun so that their faces are completely shaded. You will get a rim light of blown-out highlights around their heads and bodies, so minimize the amount of blown highlights that you show in your frame. Recover what you can in post.

Use spot metering
In order to create a soft, pleasing skin tone, you will need to expose properly for the skin. Switch your camera to spot metering so your meter won’t lie to you – as much. With spot metering, your light meter will expose for the small area in the center of the frame instead of trying to expose for the entire photo. Here’s a great explanation of spot metering.

So you have your camera in manual, you’ve widened your aperture, you have your subjects’ faces shaded, and you’re spot metering just for their skin. Now what?

Overexpose for the skin
Your camera will try to underexpose whatever you’re focusing on because there is so much light bouncing onto the meter and it thinks it needs to make things darker. But because you’re in manual you will need to override your camera’s meter and slow down your shutter speed enough to create bright, fresh skin tones.

(In fact, we like to overexpose our images to create brighter, cleaner skin tones quite often –not just in harsh sunlight situations.)

Sometimes you will need to overexpose by just a little to get great results, but other times you’ll be overexposing by several stops. It all depends on the particular situation.

Those are some basic techniques to shooting in harsh sunlight, so once you master those, try these extra tips that we use quite often:

Use your couples to shade each other
Get rid of sun blotches on your bride’s forehead by having the groom shade it for you with his head. It may sound weird, but bride’s love being taken care of by their grooms.

Don’t look at the camera
Avoid those terrible under eye shadows by never having your couple look at the camera in high noon sunlight. Crop in close to their faces and have a second shooter or an assistant use a diffuser on their skin or wait until you can find some shade to get that necessary “looking at the camera” hero image.

Take advantage, grab some flare
Get artistic and use the sun to your advantage. Grab a little flare, wash out your lens, or use the lines of harsh shadows in your composition.

Disclaimer: Only do this if it reflects your style.

Go inside
Not feeling the high noon outdoors? There will be a lot more sun coming through interior windows during this time, so go inside and take advantage of it.

Use a doorway
Use the bright and lovely fall-off light in doorways. This kind of soft, even light makes skin look GORGEOUS.

Got a question that you would love for us to write about? You can ask it here or vote for ones that you’d love to see us answer in an upcoming article.

Hugs,
Erin

Written by Erin Youngren

Jeff and Erin Youngren are international wedding and lifestyle photographers running one of the fastest growing boutique studios in the competitive Southern California market. Although based in San Diego, their deeply emotional style and passionate partnership has taken them from the streets of San Francisco to the canals of Venice to the family suburbs of Chicago to photograph extraordinary weddings and incredible couples. As leaders in the photographic community, they are passionate about helping other photographers build viable, authentic businesses, while building a photography community built on integrity and honest leadership.