Digital Photography Guide

The ability to control white balance, even changing it from one shot to the next, is one of the greatest advantages of digital over film. Sure, with film you could shoot negatives and let some machine or lab technician do color corrections for you. If using slide film however, once you loaded a roll, you were stuck with that film’s color balance until you finished it and loaded the next roll.

It’s not hard to find advice online for understanding the various white balance settings found on most digital cameras. For the most part, these settings are pretty self-explanatory and most moderately experienced photographers (that would include practically all DPS readers) can figure them out simply by playing with them.

Most people approach white balance with the mindset of getting true color representation. That makes sense. You want your whites to be white and all your other colors to be true representations of the original scene as you shot it.

There is a case to be made for deliberately setting the “wrong” white balance to achieve artistic effects. For example, when at the beach on a perfectly sunny day, you might set your white balance for cloudy or even shade. This tells the camera that the ambient light has a slightly blue cast to it. The camera will compensate by adding a bit of a bronze (red/orange) tone to offset this supposed cast. The result is that your subjects get an instant suntan!

Be warned that this may not work for scenes in which the sky is visible as the color manipulation may be quite obvious in your final images.

Conversely, when photographing an icy scene, perhaps you should try setting your white balance to Tungsten. This tells the camera that the light is slightly orange so it will introduce more blue to offset that. The result is an image that simply looks “cold”.

For even finer control, it pays to develop a bit of understanding of the Kelvin scale. Many cameras will allow you to directly set a Kelvin temperature for the ambient light. Tricking the camera by claiming that the light is warmer or cooler than it actually is can allow you to very finely tune the adjustment, thus giving you the ability to make the effect more subtle. (Or more garish, if that’s what you’re after.)

Tags: White Balance

I’ve been a fan of photographer Joachim “Kim” Guanzon for sometime. He’s one of those photographers that has a bag of tricks that is as deep as a canyon, always leaving me with the “how did he do that” feeling.

I recently saw some of his product photography work and decided to get the answers straight from the source. The technique in question this time around is “How do you shoot highly reflective objects?” For those experienced with studio lighting, you know this is not an easy thing to do. If you do it wrong it’s like holding up a magnifying glass to an acne-ridden teen’s face. Ok that’s a bit graphic. But, if you get it right, it can be as smooth as… something really smooth.

To start us off lets show an example. Here is a shot of stainless steel he did for a client:

Ok, did you really LOOK at the photograph? See if you can break down the lighting before he gives it away. Hint: Where is the light coming from, where does the light go, and what is the quality of the light he is using. Let’s pick his brain and see if we can get some straight answers.

Q: What got you into product photography?

Kim: I started photography back in 2003 when I read about Lomography (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lomography) at boingboing.com. At this point I was just shooting casually (mostly with my camera phone) and publishing stuff to flickr. When I moved to Utah my curiosity with Lomography peaked when I happened stumble upon an open box Lomo LCA kit from a used furniture store (yeah, of all the places!). So with my first vintage camera I began playing around with film photography while the rest of the world was going digital. I found myself going back in time, collecting vintage cameras from TLR’s to German “Robot” spy cameras. Eventually I got tired of scanning film, cleaning up dust from scans. I bit the bullet and got a Canon 20D, and from there I gradually accumulated professional camera gear and studio equipment.

I got my big break into product photography back in 2007 when I was asked to take some product shots for XanGo. Since then I have been building my portfolio which includes work doing food photography, product photography, editorial, executive and even the occasional wedding photography.

Q: What are the most challenging products to shoot?

Kim: One difficult subject to shoot we all deal with everyday is stainless steel (or pretty much anything similarly reflective). My solution is always to think up of ways to get the right reflections back from the subject and avoid any undesirable reflections (this includes seeing the camera & photographer in the reflections).

Q: Is your technique something you learned from others, or one you arrived at through trial and error?

Kim: My technique has mostly been countless hours of trial and error as well as reading a lot of lighting cookbooks, lighting blogs and product packaging blogs like The Dieline. I look at a lot of product photography online and try to decipher what tools were used to create the final shot. Most of the time you can see through the reflections what light modifiers were used to create the shot.

For example, let’s take a look at a shot that I tried to dissect from The Dieline website.

I can tell that they used a long vertical diffusion panel camera left lit by a very large stripbox with eggcrates. There is also a large white card coming from camera right to add fill.

Q: Impressive. What are stripboxes? Sounds kinky.

Kim: Stripboxes are long softboxes that create a strip of light. I use them quite a lot with bottle shots. Here’s a similar shot that I took with the same technique and a couple stripboxes:

If you notice the thin reflections running along the edges of the bottles, that’s coming from a stripbox. I placed the stripboxes behind the subject and a little of the stripbox goes below the plexiglass to create a seamless catchlight. Check the diagram below to get an overview of the setup:

Q: Ok, walk us through the studio setup. Sounds like lighting is the most important consideration. Where do you set up your lights and what kind of lights do we need?

Kim: My gear consists of an assortment of monoblock strobes, varying sizes of softboxes, beautydishes, century stands, regular lightstands, booms, grips, diffusion panels, white formica for nonreflected shots, colored plexiglass for reflected shots, sawhorses, etc. I know it sounds intimidating, but that being said, all those are just tools to manipulate light. Once you understand the basic science behind how light works, you can use that understanding and apply it to your shots. I highly recommend reading the book “Light: Science & Magic” by Fil Hunter and Paul Fuqua. That book is pretty much my lighting handbook. You can learn everything from “the family of angles” to dark/bright field lighting.

Q: Do you have a particular preference in how you trigger your off camera strobes?

Kim: I use a combination of Pocket Wizards and optical slaves (only in the studio). Pocket Wizards have been the industry standard and I have never had a misfire since I started using them.

Q: Looking at the sample shots, how did you get the light to fill the inside of the steel cups?

Kim: It’s crazy that you mentioned that. Honestly I didn’t even think about lighting the insides of the cups because they were too small to make a problem. Basically, these cups were shot individually and then I composited them to create the group shot that I submitted to the client. I lit each cup with the exact same lighting shown in the diagram below:

Q: Is getting started with product photography going to break the bank? What are the bare essentials?

Kim: A barebones setup would be a cheap light tent big enough to fit your products, a couple strobes, and materials to control the spread and spill of the lights (flags, gridspots, gobo’s). I’ve seen a lot of these modifiers built using DIY methods and are documented at different websites online. Fortunately time is not as expensive as camera gear so be creative and you’ll be surprised at the results you can get.

Q: Ok, last question. How many hours of Photoshopping does it require to arrive at the final image?

Kim: Most of my clients request photos in white backgrounds. Luckily for me this makes editing easier and only takes me a few minutes to clean up and deliver the final files. More complicated files that require compositing can take up to 4 hours to edit.

Hopefully this article helps you better understand all the work that goes into seemingly simple photographs you see when flipping through your favorite catalogue. It’s inspiring to see he started with limited photographic skills and was able to excel a relatively short time. If you’d like to see more of his work, his site is www.kimguanzon.com and his flicker photos are here http://www.flickr.com/photos/jowchie.

Tags: Product Photography

Let’s look at the sequence of events when combining flash with long exposures. When the flash fires during exposure, the normal sequence looks something like this (note there may be some slight variation among different camera brands or flash modes):

1. Press shutter button.
2. Curtain A opens.
3. Flash fires.
4. Frame is open for some period of time (as determined by your shutter speed).
5. Curtain B closes the frame, ending the exposure.

This is the normal sequence and doesn’t really have a name, except to help differentiate it from our next scenario. With Second Curtain Synch (also sometimes called Slow Synch) the sequence goes like this:

1. Press shutter button.
2. Pre-flash fires so the camera can measure and adjust the intensity.
3. Curtain A opens.
4. Frame is open for some period of time (as determined by your shutter speed).
5. Flash fires.
6. Curtain B closes the frame and ends the exposure.

To understand the significance, imagine you are taking a picture at night in which moving lights will be visible during the exposure. During the exposure, the lights move across your frame and you are not panning.

During the first (normal) exposure, the flash illuminates the subject on one side of your frame. The lights then form streaks across the frame right over top of the subject, resulting in a weird looking image.

In the second scenario, the shutter opens and the lights record their streaks. Then the flash illuminates the subject. The streaks from the lights lead up to the subject, giving the illusion of speed and creating a generally cool effect.

Depending on the speed and direction of movement and the intensity of the lights, it doesn’t always work this way but one of the great things about digital is that you can review your results and try something different if you didn’t get what you were expecting.

It bears noting that you can’t precisely control exactly when the flash fires when using second curtain synch. So it’s possible in our example scenario that the subject could be out of the frame before the flash goes off. Second curtain synch requires some practice, a bit of finesse and sometimes luck to use well.

This post is an excerpt from Jeffrey’s book Photography Basics.

PS: Check out these Amazing Examples of Slow Sync Flash

Tags: 2nd Curtain Sync, Flash, lighting, Slow Sync

In this post naturalist, photographer, and computer scientist Steve Berardi from Photo Naturalist shares some tips on how to photograph Hummingbirds.

Hummingbirds are amazing little creatures. They’re the only birds capable of flying backwards, and their wings flap between 15-200 times per second! However, their incredible speed and small size make them extremely difficult to photograph.

There’s no one secret, but in order to photograph them, you’ll need to learn their habits, have a great deal of patience, and of course know what settings to use on your camera.

Here are a few tips for photographing these amazing little birds:

Know your subject

You need to know your subject for any kind of photography, but it’s most important for wildlife photography (when you have a completely uncontrollable subject), and it’s absolutely essential for photographing hummingbirds.

You don’t need to become an expert on hummingbirds, but you’ll need to learn a few basic facts:

• Name of the species you’d like to photograph
• Where can you find them (their habitat)?
• What time of the year are they most active?
• What’s their diet like? Where do they get their sweet nectar from?
• What do they sound like? (be able to recognize their song and the sound of them flapping their wings)

Knowing this information will help you be in the right place at the right time, instead of wandering aimlessly hoping to encounter a hummingbird.

Being able to recognize their song is probably the most useful tip, because their small size and rapid speed make them difficult to notice if you’re not concentrating on one spot. About 80% of the time I find hummingbirds, it was because I first heard their song and then started looking around more carefully.

Be patient

Once you know where to find hummingbirds (based on their habitat, where they get nectar, and their most active time of year), you’ll need to position yourself in their habitat and simply wait. Find the type of flower they sip nectar from, setup your tripod, and wait for a hummingbird to arrive.

This will require patience. Sometimes, lots of patience.

I actually had a bit of luck in getting the photograph above, of a female Anna’s Hummingbird. But, I still needed a bit of patience. I was sitting on a rock along one of my favorite streams in the San Gabriel Mountains, when I noticed a bunch of hummingbirds diving towards the water, taking a quick sip, and then retreating to a nearby tree. I watched them from about twenty feet away, and only having a 200 mm lens, I knew I had to get a lot closer if I wanted to photograph this amazing spectacle.

Since I knew the behavior of these hummingbirds pretty well (by watching them closely), I knew one key trait of theirs: initially, they’ll retreat from approaching humans, but if you wait, they’ll come right back.

So, I decided to get closer to them–about four or five feet away. This, of course, scared them all away at first. But, after about ten or fifteen minutes, they returned and continued to drink from the stream. Then, I started shooting photos.

Use continuous focusing on your camera

Most SLR cameras have an autofocus setting that will continue to refocus the lens as the subject moves. Enabling this feature will help keep the hummingbirds in sharp focus as they dart through the air.

It’s also important to setup your camera to use the center AF point only, and then to keep this center point on the hummingbird at all times. This will prevent the focus from searching and drifting away into the background.

Use a fast shutter speed

Because hummingbirds flap their wings so rapidly, you’ll have to use an extremely fast shutter speed to “freeze” the action of their wings (the slowest speed you can get away with on a sunny day is 1/800 sec). Here are a few tips for getting a faster shutter:

• Use a higher ISO (try 400 or 800–anything higher will have too much noise)
• Use a wider aperture (as long as you can still keep the entire bird in focus)
• Underexpose your shot (this only works well if you shoot in RAW)
• Use an external flash unit (this is the only way to really freeze the action of their wings)

As an example of how important shutter speed is, here’s a photo I took at 1/800th of a second:

Notice how the wings are still a little blurry, even with such a fast shutter speed. If you really want to completely freeze their wings, you’ll need to use an external flash unit. Personally, I prefer a little blur to show motion.

It will also help if you know how fast the particular species of hummingbird can flap their wings. This varies from 15 to 200 times per second, so for the slower ones you won’t need such a fast shutter.

Take lots of photographs

When shooting wildlife or any kind of fast moving subject, the only way to get a nice sharp photograph is to simply take lots and lots of shots.
I took over 400 photos in ten minutes to get the three photos in this article. They were the only sharp photos out of the four hundred I took! Hummingbirds move so fast that most of my shots were blurry, or didn’t even have a hummingbird in the frame!

Once in a while though, you’ll get a hummingbird to stand still for a split second, which is how I got this photo:

You may also want to consider shooting in JPEG, instead of RAW. With RAW, you’ll be severely limited to how many photos you can take in a burst (one right after another), but with JPEG you can usually double the amount of photos you can take in a burst before the camera needs to pause and write the photos to the memory card.

Use a ballhead with your tripod. You won’t have time to lock in your ballhead for every shot, but you can still use the tripod to provide a little support for your camera. Just set up your tripod and keep the ballhead moderately loose. This way, you’ll have freedom to follow the hummingbird with your camera, while still getting some kind of support.

If your lens has some kind of image stabilization feature, I would still recommend turning it on, even thought it’s often said to disable it when using a tripod. Since you’re not really using the tripod entirely (by not locking the ballhead), the image stabilization will help keep the camera even more stable.

Summary

Wildlife photography isn’t easy–it involves an uncontrollable subject that is almost constantly moving. This is especially difficult with photographing hummingbirds, since they’re so small and so quick. However, if you know the habits of hummingbirds and have a little patience, you’ll be on your way to photographing these amazing little birds.

About the Author : Steve Berardi is a naturalist, photographer, and computer scientist. You can usually find him hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains or the Mojave Desert, both located in the beautiful state of California. You can read more of his articles on nature photography at the Photo Naturalist.

Tags: Bird Photography, Birds, Hummingbirds

Happy Valentines Day! In celebration we thought we’d publish this post on the romantic topic of Candlelight Photography!

Have you ever tried to photograph a candle lit scene with your digital camera?

The results can be stunning with the warm glow of flickering flames reflecting off your subjects face (can you feel the romance?) but the shooting in such a low light environment make it can make it a challenging situation.

Here are a few tips on how to get that perfect candle light portrait!

1. Turn off Your Flash

Lets start with the obvious ones and work our way back. We’ve all taken shots using a flash in low light situations and have been disappointed by the way it totally destroys any ambient light in a shot. If you want to get the warm glow of candles it’s essential that you switch your flash completely off. There is of course an exception - see point 15 below.

2. Use a Tripod

Stating the obvious again - but shooting by candlelight means you’re shooting with very little light which in turn means you’ll almost certainly be shooting with slower shutter speeds that increase the impact of camera shake on your shots. Make sure your camera is as secure and as still as possible during shots by using a tripod and by considering the use of a remote shutter release to take out any vibrations from hitting the shutter.

3. Extra Candles

The biggest challenge with candlelight photography is the lack of light you have to work with. Using more candles will obviously produce more light which gives you a little more flexibility when it comes to shutter speed, ISO and aperture settings.

4. Spread Your Candles

Using a single candle or positioning multiple candles all closely together in one position will cause there to be harsher shadows cast upon your subject’s face. This might be the look you’re going for, however in most cases you’ll want a more even spread of light on their face. This can be achieved simply by spreading the candles out a little. I would still recommend more candles on one side than the other as this will create a nice side lighting impact - however don’t get the sides too uneven unless you’re after a pretty dramatic impact.

5. Natural ‘Reflectors’

The few times that I I shot by candlelight I made an accidental discovery that has been helpful since. I noticed that those times I shot my subject sitting at a table with a white table cloth that the shots were better exposed than those without a white table cloth. Obviously the table cloth reflected light back up into the face of my subject. Similarly white walls and ceilings can have this type of effect also (it’s slight - but everything helps when you’re shooting in such low light situations).

6. Fast Lenses

If you’re shooting with a DSLR and have multiple lenses choose the ‘fastest’ one you’ve got as this will allow you to use a larger aperture and let more light into your camera. My personal preference for this type of shot would be one of my 50mm lenses (f/1.8 or f/1.4). I would then generally shoot with the fastest aperture setting possible (or close to it) which enables a faster shutter speed and lower ISO. Keep in mind however that the larger your aperture the smaller your depth of field will be and the more spot on you focussing will need to be.

7. Zooms and Aperture

Keep in mind that when you’re shooting with many zoom lenses that the maximum aperture changes throughout the focal length range. ie shooting at the widest setting on many zooms will give you a larger aperture than when you zoom in. As a result it might be better to move in closer to your subject with a wider angle focal range than using the zoom.

8. Context and Backgrounds

Compositionally I like to keep these types of shots as uncluttered and simple as possible. I will generally shoot in front of a white background (keep an eye on harsh shadows cast by your subject and consider one or two behind them) and with minimal props. It might be appropriate to include a glass of wine and some basic table settings if you’re going for a shot at a table - but the less distractions that you have in the shot the better.

9. Shutter Speed

An obvious way to let more light into your camera is to choose a slower shutter speed. Keep in mind that as you decrease shutter speed you increase the chances of capturing any movement (both of your subject, the flames of candles and movement of your camera). If the environment is completely still (so flames are not flickering) and with a subject keeping as still as possible you might set your shutter speed as slow as 1/15th of a second - but any slower and you might be asking too much of your subject.

10. ISO Settings

Another way to compensate for low light environments is to increase the ISO settings on your camera. Of course the trade off of doing this is shots with more grain (noise) in them. Attempt to keep your ISO under 400 if you can and you should get reasonably clean shots. Any higher and you’ll start noticing the noise - especially if you’re blowing shots up to larger sizes.

11. Expose

If candles are in the shot, your camera will usually underexpose the shot as it’ll see them as such a bright spot. You might want to try overexposing by a stop from what the camera recommends. Don’t beef up exposure too much however or you’ll end up with your candles being burnt out spots in your image.

12. White Balance

It is well worth experimenting with white balance when shooting by candle light. Candles emit a very ‘warm’ light - something that you’ll want to include in your shots as it creates a wonderful atmosphere. However your camera may want to get rid of this warmth if you have white balance set to ‘auto’. Try different settings to get the right level of warmth (I find ‘indoor’ or ‘tungsten’ settings can work). Alternatively shoot in RAW and you’ll have a lot more flexibility with white balance in your post processing.

13. Composition of Candles

There are two main ways to deal with candles in a compositional senses - you can include them in the shot or leave them out unseen out of the frame. Both alternatives can create lovely shots so experiment with both.

If you’re including candles in the frame remember that they’ll impact the settings your camera wants to us (see section on ‘exposure’ above) but that they’ll also create points of interest in your shot that can potentially draw the eye of those viewing your image - competing with your main subject. As a result you’ll want to position your subject in a prominent position and consider placing candles in a way that doesn’t distract too much.

If candles are in the frame you’ll also want to make sure they’re nice ones. Smaller details matter in portraits and ugly candles might prove to be a real distraction.

14. Other Light Sources

Sometimes candles just won’t product enough light on their own. If this is the case and the above techniques still don’t leave you with enough light consider adding a little extra from another source. You might have a lamp or a dimmed light that you can use for example. For best results try to give your extra light a warm glow by using some red or orange material to drape over it (be careful of heat).

15. Using a Flash with a Colored Gel

In point number 1 I talked about turning off your flash to help you get that warm glow from the candles rather than a bright flash blowing out the image. The only exception that I have seen people use for this using some sort of a warm (red or orange) gel over your flash. This dims the impact of the flash and gives it a warm light. You might also want to decrease the output of the flash manually if you have control over this. Experiment with different color gels to get the color just right.

OK - so now it’s over to you to experiment with Candlelight Photography! Post your results over in our forum’s Share Your Shots section.

Tags: Candlelight, Candles, Low Light