In yesterday’s post, what you saw was an example of using hyperfocal distance to my advantage. Go ahead and read the wikipedia article. I’ll wait.
Now, why do we care? If you can grasp this concept, then it’ll drastically improve the depth of your landscape images.
What does this mean to us when shooting? (more, after the jump) Click to continue »
I promise, I’m not a shill for Tony Sweet. Really, I’m not. But I do get asked about where my ideas come from, and right now I’m gaining most of them from different existing photographers. Sometimes it’s Joe McNally, Moose Petersen, or Jim Goldstein. When it’s flowers, it’s usually Tony Sweet.
Tony doesn’t have that many books out there, and his style isn’t for everyone (is anyone’s?). I will say that I really like his Visual Literacy: Photography Workshop
Looking for more flower ideas? Grab his Fine Art Flower Photography
Some other day, I’ll write about his other books…
Below you’ll see a pic that’s more of an abstract than anything else. You’ve seen this treatment from me before, but I think this has far better results. I call this the “Sweet” treatment after Tony Sweet, who shows this technique in his Visual Literacy: Photography Workshop
The basics and the pic itself, after the jump… Click to continue »
Cream in my Coffee
Similar to the in-home studio the other day, I shot the photo to the right. This was not nearly as difficult to take as it might appear, although it does require knowing a bit about your camera and strobes.
So the setup: similar to before, although with different items for proping up the flash. Flash was still to camera left, but this time it’s firing against the background. The background was black before, but this time it’s solid white. In fact, it’s the same piece of paper that I was using as the reflector in that previous shoot.
Overall settings: to capture moving items, you need a fast shutter speed. Here I’m running at 1/200th of a second. To regulate light, I had to mess with the f-stop and the flash. I expected 1/16th power at f/9, but it turns out I was just fine with 1/32nd power at f/13.
Timing? There’s no magic – just take a ton of pics. In this case, I took almost 70 pics, out of which maybe 5 were gallery-quality (timing-wise, that is). This was the best.
Go ahead, click through to Flickr. You’ll see incredible details on the larger version!
A glade by our campsite at South Rolly
To the right you’ll see a picture of a glade. It’s similar to this one: (link to flickr), but with a big difference. No post-processing. This was all done in-camera.
The technique is pretty simple, and I’m not going to take credit for it – I read about it in Tony Sweet’s Fine Art Flower Photography. To pull this off, you’ll probably need an SLR of some sort: in my case, a Nikon D200. You’ll be messing around with menus, and you’ll need to find how to take a multiple exposure photo. On the Nikon, it’s a menu setting (and a pretty basic one). You set it to take two exposures, and when set:
In post processing, I did add some contrast and a light sharpening to the leaves at the bottom. But coming right out of the camera, it needed nothing else.
Eagle behind bars
Along the lines of yesterday’s post: what about the times that you can’t quite get the bars to blur out? The only answer is to use them in the composition. Take the photo to the right: I could easily use this to make a point (the U.S. national emblem behind bars? Ooooooh, low-hanging fruit!).
The technique here is no different than the last two days: getting close to the bars, using a long zoom, using as small an f/stop as you can, and hoping for the best.
The cage for these birds is… well, far too small in my uneducated opionion. There certainly wasn’t enough room to blur out the bars.
Wolverine running around his cage
No, not drinking places. Although that would be an interesting experience, too. Shooting through bars in cages is what I’ve referring to. The technique is similar to shooting through glass: you still want to get close to the bars, use a wide-open f/stop… But here’s the rub: it’s much more relative. The closer you are to the bars and the further the subject is from them, the more they’ll blur out.
Witness the wolverine to the right: you can’t tell that there’s a metal fence between us, but you can see the far end of the cage behind this fellow. In this case, I was already about 3 feet from the fence, but this guy was an easy 40 feet away (possibly further – I’m lousy at gauging distances). I didn’t have a top-of-the-line zoom lens with me, but the distance is such that it didn’t matter – Even at f/5.6, the bars are gone.
Alaska Zoo - polar bear
When taking pics of zoo animals (and “taking” is the only word: you don’t “make” them, you “take” what you can get, barring intimate access), there’s a constant struggle with glass, fences, etc. The question then arises: how do you get around the things that interfere with the picture?
As an example, look at this post. This is from the Seward Sea Life center, and there’s a decided green cast. Moreover, there’s low contrast (and what little is there has been amplified in Photoshop). Compare that to the picture to the right: looks like there was nothing in the way whatsoever.
The difference? Technique.
In the latter case, the F/stop has been deliberately held to a wide-open margin, and the camera is close to the glass. Did I say glass? I meant multiple panes of glass with a large barrier in between. Yes, plenty of detail-losing, color-skewing glass. All made irrelevant by a combination of factors.
To pull this off, I got as close to the glass as possible (in a low-defect/not very dirty area). I then stopped down the aperture as wide as I could (f/5.6, in this case). The closer I am to the glass, the less aperture matters. I stepped into manual focus (keeps autofocus from accidentaly grabbing the glass), and shot away.
Or rather, I waited until this guy stopped pooping. Seriously, it was disgusting. I ended up with this one shot.
When we talk SLR, I’m a Nikon shooter. That means that I have the capability of doing pretty cool things with my flash. While yesterday’s photo may have been a bit on the weak side (it was a spur-of-the-moment photo), it was made possible in the first place by Nikon’s remote flash system. How I pulled this off:
I was in a hurry, before the backlighting on the flowers left (lots of clouds), so I only had time to grab one flash. This was an sb-600, and I slapped on a flash-mountable softbox to keep light from spilling away from where I wanted (note to self: use barndoors in the future). This was positioned to camera left, about 8 inches from the flowers. I’m standing facing the flowers, and the sun is behind the flowers, leaning towards camera right. This gives me backlight, but the tree itself keeps lens flare away.
So, if I’m at 6 o’clock and the flower is at 12 o’clock, the sun is roughly at 2 o’clock and the flash is between 7 and 8 o’clock. It’s a light sandwich.
The flash is an sb-600. Set to channel A, it’s at an even 1:1 manual power setting. No choice: the light is cut in half (to 1/2, so literally) by the softbox. If I kick into high-speed sync (which I needed, as it turned out), then it’s going to be much weaker – like 1/16, effectively. The camera: a Nikon d200 with high-speed sync enabled. The sb-900 is mounted as a flash to control the sb-600, and I have the 105mm macro lens mounted.
Start by setting f/stop. I know, it’s a little backwards – but I kinda need it for controlling the flash. Tighten down the iso as far as I can (100), and move the shutter speed up until I can control the backround. Once I get the clouds looking OK, I then speed up the shutter until they’re coming through extremely dark. I I’m at f/9 and 1/4000th at this point.
Fire off a shot. Pretty dark, but that’s expected. Open up the f/stop, ending at f/6.3. Find that it works, as a balance between depth of field and letting in light from the flash. Still on the dark side, but OK.
Thank you photoshop! Using post-processing, bring up the light on the flowers slightly. Quick pass of sharpening, and I’m done.
A 9-frame HDR image of my neighborhood
The picture to the left I originally posted to Flickr on Sunday. It’s had an interesting response: not overly popular, in fact. The stretching of the angles (due to extreme wide angle) and the evening out of the extremes makes it almost look like a model instead of real life.
Well, this is most definately a photo of the neighborhood, but from an unusual angle: my roof. And despite it not getting the love that other photos get (abstracts or B&W images seem more popular, unless the HDR has a ton of contrast), it has triggered more people to ask how I did it.
So here’s how to take the shot, from a technical point of view (I’ll gloss over the software details, but if you want a good example of that, then check out Trey’s Stuck In Customs tutorial). Steps:
DVD).So that’s it as far as taking the photo. There’s still some software work, but that will be saved for another day.