BetterPhoto Instructor Insights

Flower Photography in Good Light

By Jim Zuckerman

My feeling about shooting flowers is that the lighting is best when it's cloudy. Contrary to what most people think, flowers look the most beautiful when they are photographed in diffused lighting. Cloud covers act like a giant studio softbox, and softboxes or white umbrellas that studio photographers use actually are made to simulate an overcast sky.

I shot these wildflowers in the mountains of Switzerland recently, and they were taken during the middle of the day when the summer sun is the most intense. There were no clouds at all. The picture taken with the direct sunlight isn’t terrible, but it's not ideal. Compare it to the one where I leaned over the flowers and used my body to block the light. The contrast is less and the colors are beautiful. In essence, I created open shade with this simple technique. I used the next best thing to a cloud cover and softened the light on the tiny flowers.

In the picture with direct sunlight, notice the very dark shadows throughout the image. They interfere with the graphic designs of the flowers and almost compete for attention. In the shaded image, there are still shadows, but they are softened and they add dimension without being obtrusive.

There was a slight wind blowing, and I had to wait for the air to become still as I shot these. Wind is the enemy of macro photographers.

Understanding The Shutter

By John Siskin

So last week I tried to explain the concept of a stop. This week we’ll talk about the shutter; among other things we’ll see how stops are used to control the shutter. But first a quick explanation of the shutter in all DSLR cameras and many of the fixed lens cameras the shutter is a physical object that moves over the sensor. It is important to remember this, since it explains some of the limitations of the shutter. There are two curtains on a shutter, one uncovers the sensor and the second covers it up again. Both must move at exactly the same speed for the entire time they are moving over the sensor or your exposure will be uneven. It is really quite amazing how well shutters work, considering the difficulty of the job.

Each full shutter speed is separated by one stop from the one on each side. So if you have a one second shutter speed the speed with one stop less light will be 1/2 second and the speed with one stop more light will be 2 seconds. That makes sense, since as I said last week one stop more light is double the amount of light you had and one stop less is half the amount of light you had. The same principal applies at the higher shutter speeds one stop more light than a 1/250th of a second is a 1/125th of a second and one stop less light is 1/500th of a second. Modern shutters also have 1/2 stop intervals so you would actually see speeds in this order 1/125, 1/180, 1/250, 1/350, 1/500. There might be an advantage in memorizing these numbers, but I don’t know what it would be. It is pretty easy to double or halve a number is you need to know what the full stop change will be.

The change in the shutter speed affects the way the camera sees time. A short shutter speed, say a 1/250th of a second freezes time and a long shutter speed, say a second blurs time together. So for shooting sports you almost always want a high shutter speed to capture the action. If you are shooting waterfalls, you may want to shoot a different shutter speeds in order to get the look you want. Next week I’ll post information about hand holding shutter speeds.

Tar Creek Falls © John H. Siskin All rights reserved

Buckhorn Canyon, Angeles Forest, California © John H. Siskin All rights reserved

Tar Creek © John H. Siskin All rights reserved

Shooting faces in open shade

by Scott Stulberg

One of my favorite light sources for shooting people is one that many people don’t really think about too often. Open shade more often than not, can produce beautiful light that can make the skin incredibly soft and even seem to glow.. Many times, the light can mimic nice studio lighting and it is one of the easiest light sources to shoot with.
Open shade is found just inside where the sunlight stops hitting the subject…under a tree is usually a good place to find open shade…..on the side of a building…..anywhere where you can see that the sunlight is not hitting the subject directly. It is right where the shadow and sunlight meet on the ground. The photographer can be in full sun if they want as long as the subject is just outside of the sunlight, and in the shade. This means that you can photograph at almost any time of day and not have to worry that it isn’t early morning or late afternoon light, which is usually the nicest time of day to shoot in. Sunrise and sunset lighting give you the nice warm glow on the face, because of the low angle of the sun and the way it is diffused through the atmosphere at that low angle. But to get that similar feeling while shooting in open shade, all you need to do is use a soft / gold reflector to bounce light back in on your subject to give them that soft sunlight feeling. By doing this technique, you can shoot anytime of the day and get soft light from open shade on your subject and also bring in some beautiful warmth of the sun from the reflector to brighten up the face even more.
The results can be pretty amazing and in my Eye to Eye: Capturing the Face class here at Better Photo, I am constantly surprised by the beautiful open shade shots that my students send in so often.
The following shot is one I took a week ago of my friend Lucinda in open shade with her brother holding the reflector not in front of her but behind her to the side to reflect the light on her hair. I wanted to bring some beautiful sunlight to her hair which was missing in the open shade, so I showed him how to move to a spot where there was some sunlight poking through the trees to bounce onto the back of her hair. All of the hair on the left side of her head is from the reflector bouncing it back in. I took this shot in a parking lot…. I shot her in close with my 50mm macro lens and the aperture was f 2.5. I use a macro all the time for nice face shots……but I will talk more about that in another blog…….
Open shade can give you gorgeous shots all the time…..and bringing along a reflector gives you even more possibilities!

Photographing in the Fog: In Search of Color and Graphic Design

By Kerry Drager

In the Summer, fog and the California coast just seem to go together! Foggy seascapes often translate into beautiful and moody scenics, of course. But the soft light also offers opportunities for photographing other subjects too.

After multiple days of misty shorelines on a recent trip, I started looking for small scenes along the streets of Central California's coastal towns. One morning, I discovered a row of rental surfboards lined up outside a surf shop. To my eye, the repetition of the boards had a particularly appealing graphic design quality. More shooting thoughts:

- I chose a telephoto perspective (via my 80-200 zoom), in order to give the appearance of compressing space - i.e., making the subjects look closer together than they really were. A slight tilt of the camera helped create a diagonal composition.

- Tight framing put the emphasis precisely where I wanted it - on the lines, colors, etc. - without the sidewalk, background wall, pedestrians, or other distractions.

- A polarizing filter helped minimize much of the glare, in order to make the already bold blues even bolder.

- When shooting stationary subjects, I always experiment with composition - i.e., zooming in, zooming out, and trying both formats (horizontal and vertical). Two versions are pictured below.

More info:
- Check out my BetterPhoto.com online photo classes: Creative Light and Composition and Creative Close-ups
- BetterPhoto.com's digital photography school
- Online photo sharing at BetterPhoto.com.

Surfboard Repetition 1 ... (c) Kerry Drager
Horizontal Version; f22, 1/4 sec., 80-200 zoom at 185mm; polarizing filter;
tripod & cable release; 100 ISO; Nikon D2X

Surfboard Repetition 2 ... (c) Kerry Drager
Vertical Version; f22, 1/4 sec., 80-200 zoom at 155mm;
polarizing filter; tripod & cable release; 100 ISO; Nikon D2X

Making Santorini perfect

By Jim Zuckerman

I recently returned from Santorini, Greece. A client of mine has asked for pictures from this beautiful island, and I’d never been there so I decided to go. This client sells my photos on canvas to many chain stores across the U.S., so I thought it would be a good investment in my time. I was asked, though, to add color to the blue and white island-scapes. The fine art market loves color, and the typical blue and white color scheme doesn’t have enough punch for the mass market.

In addition to shooting architecture, I spent a lot of time photographing individual flower pots, window boxes, and gardens. Before I arrived in Greece, I was in Switzerland and I took pictures of a lot of the beautiful flowers on display there, too. The picture you see reproduced here is one example of where I cut and pasted flowers into the typical blue and white Santorini architectural theme. It took a lot of time in Photoshop to select the bougainvilla flowers from their original background. I used the lesso tool and the pen tool, and once that was done I saved the selection with Select > save selection so I could easily load it again and then paste it into a different background.

To make the vase look like it was really there, I also used the burn tool to add some shading at the bottom of the ceramic piece. Even on an overcast day, shadows are cast. They are subtle, but they make or break a composite. Finally, I added a brooding sky because I thought that added more interest than a straight blue sky.

Back to Basics

By John Siskin

I was talking with a few old friends who are also photographers. Both of them were complaining about younger photographers who don’t know anything, as they would have it. Now neither of the guys teaches or interacts with new photographers in any regular way. One of them explained to me that you couldn’t really learn Photoshop without experience working in a chemical darkroom. Now I am older than either of these guys and I don’t believe any of this. The reason is that I actually interact with new photographers all the time. Teaching here at BetterPhoto will do that.

I haven’t had the time to check into the blog in a while and so, inspired by my old friends, I want to go over the basics. Cameras, regardless of whether they are digital or film share some characteristics, these are like the language of the machine. For instance whenever you m use a variable size aperture in a lens, what we refer to as an f-stop, you introduce changes in the amount of distance that is in sharp focus. We call this depth of field, not really a very good term.

Speaking of bad terminology I will start with the word STOP. Now we all know what that means, but not moving has nothing to do with the term in photography. In photography it means a relative change in exposure: if you have twice as much light in your shot as you did previously you have one stop more light. It doesn’t matter if the change is caused by changing your aperture or shutter speed or because the sun cleared the horizon, if you have twice as much light that is one stop more light. If you have four times as much light that is two stops, well you only doubled the amount of light twice. If you have 1/8th as much light you have three stops less light, maybe the sun just went under the horizon.

I know that a lot of people don’t want to talk about math, but it is the key to controlling the pictures you take. You can take all the pictures you want on automatic, but if you want to MAKE pictures you need to understand the controls on the camera.

Denice Alvarado Minus 1 Stop © John H. Siskin All rights reserved

Denice Alvarado Normal © John H. Siskin All rights reserved

Denice Alvarado Plus 1 Stop © John H. Siskin All rights reserved

Each of these images is a one stop difference in exposure. This was done in Adobe Camera raw. One of the great advantages of this program is that you can manipulate exposure.

Next week: The Shutter!