A few words about Auto Focus

A good friend of mine recently got a new camera.

 

 

It's a real beauty.

 Although any camera you have can capture really good focus, automatically, most of the time, understanding your equipment will always give you the results your looking for.

Now, I'm not good enough, nor by any means, a 'professional' photographer, to critique other peoples work, but, if this person asked me what could be improved upon, I would tell her this: Learn how to change your auto focus points. Most digital cameras have multiple focus points. Mine has 9 (pictured above). That's not a lot, compared to more expensive cameras...Some have hundreds!!

 

The common type of autofocus is contrast detection. If I don't explain it well, check it out on the internet. (there are people dying to tell you all about it) Basically, the camera looks at the scene, assumes that whatever the highest contrast is, is the thing you want to focus on. If it was a guy in a tuxedo, the sensors closest to the black tie/white shirt, or the white shirt/black jacket would be given all the attention. If it's a hairline/face or light purse/dark dress, that sensor would get the attention. MOST of the time, this is a dead accurate system. But, when the contrast is not what you want to focus on, you need to pick which sensor you want to use, instead of the camera picking it...does that make sense? 

 

Clearly, in this photo, the camera 'thought' I was trying to capture the closest mic stand, instead of the band. By switching the focus system to concentrate on only the center focus point,(below) a much sharper image is taken.

 

 

 

This method is necessary to pinpoint focus on something. If you're taking a portrait of someone, the eyes have to really be the sharpest thing in the picture. Selecting your own focus point is the only way to achieve this.

 

Most cameras have what's called af lock or autofocus lock. When you activate the center (or whichever) focus point, hold down the shutter release and then you can move the camera to frame the subject. Then press the release all the way.

 

Look in your manual and find out how to change focus points!

 

 

quick portrait lighting

                                                                 Here's a quick one.

 

Bounce lighting has been around for as long as flash has. If you're able to turn your flash toward a white wall, it will be reflected and the size of the light will be enormous. This will soften the light immensely. However, sometimes, there are no walls around, white or otherwise. I've found that if you turn your flash, as if there were a wall, and hold up a piece of white material in your left hand, this soft lighting can be easily achieved.  

 

 

wrong                                                                              right

 

 

Try it at different distances. The results are really noticeable.

 

 

 

 

Broken Ego headshots (for lack of a better word)

  At a recent band practice. I took a few headshots my fellow members. Ever since I started using the inspirations of guys like Peter Hurley and David Hobby, I started to realize how important the headshot is. Whether you're an insurance agent or an actress, everyone tries to out their best foot forward with their headshot.
  I had this vision in my head of a new band poster featuring (of course) the members and (of course) in black and white, so, I had to choose the light. Hard light: which is where there is a hard line drawn between good exposure and heavy shadow, or soft light: which seems to 'wrap around' the subects head, from bright to faded exposure. I chose hard light. It's easier to achieve and hey, this is rock and roll, anyway.
  Unless you walk around with a freight train headlight on your shoulder, all the time, you must have realized that flash coming from your camera ( near the lens) looks un-natural. So a light source that comes from the side, or front-side should be seeked out. For me, the easiest way to do this is to fire an off-camera flash. Not every camera is capable of this, but, with a little planning, it could work on most.

   If your camera flash is non removable, then the short answer is to get close to a white wall, and bounce the flash off of it.
 You'd have to take a piece of paper, or something, and put it in front of the flash, to 'steer' it toward the white wall.

 

(she is really thrilled to be a part of this experiment)

 This really turns out to be soft light, but, you can see, it no longer looks like an on-camera flash.

                                      My method of choice, is to utilize my cameras hotshoe.

 

 As i said, the flash should not be near the lens, so, quite literally, I remove it from the camera. You can buy a wireless trigger to set it off, but, in these pictures, you could have gotten away with a 3 ft. TTL cable that runs from the camera (right hand) to the flash (left hand). At arms length, it was just enough light to get the effect I was going for. These are lit with very hard light.



   In closing, try a few picture with your flash off the camera.
Also, I want you to know that it is difficult  to try and get the 4 nicest guys in the world to look mean, but, they came through.

click here to view the high resoloution photos

lighting bob and laura's portrait

 

    Two really good friends of mine got engaged and asked me to shoot the engagement picture. I was honored and I accepted. As I posted earlier, I have a really strong definition of what a portrait is. Being that I want to make a business as a 'mobile portrait' photographer, I saw on my first real assignment that I shouldn't really draw such a hard line on this opinion.
   In my head, I was thinking 3 ft. between me and the subject(s), 2 ft. between the subject(s) and the backdrop, and 1 ft. to play with. All I need is 6 ft. to make a portrait. Well, after seeing what 6 ft. looked like, I would have rather had 10, but, there I was unpacking, knowing full well it would work. The further distance would have blurred the backdrop perfectly, but, we didn't have it. We tried a white backdrop first, but, the couple preferred the black. I was shooting tethered, so, we got to see our results immediately on the laptop.

It's pretty straight forward, really. 2 similar sized umbrellas with equally powered strobes bounced into both. I was running the flashes at about 1/4 and there were triggered wirelessly.

The backdrop was set upon a bench, behind them. I pointed a 3rd, slave flash (that means it's triggered by the 2 other flashes), at the backdrop. We onlty used that for the white backdrop, but, when we switched to black, we didn't use it.

 

I stood between the 2 umbrellas and made sure to focus on the eyes. Also, make sure the heads are equal distance from the lens. Only 1 of them will be in focus if that happens. Sharpness in the eyes is critical for a good portrait. This gets harder to achieve with the more people that are in the shot.

After we shot about 70
 frames, they looked at all of them and decided that there were lots to choose from that would work well. On the laptop, Laura pick out her favorite 10 (any number of picture can be chosen) and I came home to edit them.

Portrait editing will be a post soon.

Please, let me know what you think and thanks.

 

Congratulations, Bob and Laura!!

 

Clip art wall hanging

  Here is my method for making a really cool wall hanging.

 

First find an awesome picture. The higher the resolution, the better. Right click on the image and select 'savepicture as' and name it something. The computer puts it in your 'pictures' file by default.

 

Open the picture in your photo editing software and convert it to black and white.Any editing software should work. Between contrast/brightness and levels, you should be able to make it a picture with no shadows. just solid black or solid white

 

Once you decide on a size, in this case, mine is 16" by 22", you have to chop the picture up into printable sizes.  

You may have to re-sharpen the picture with a sharpie marker.

 

Lay the template under the glass. The art store calls this stuff 'foto frisket' and it's $3.00 for an 8x10 sheet, but, Target calls it clear contact paper and it's 6 bucks for a 24 foot roll. 

 

 

Cut thorough contact paper and peel off the unwanted portion.

 

 

Once the paper is peeled off, start painting. Oh, yea...make sure the glass is super clean.

 

 

After the light color is dry, peel off the rest of the contact paper and spray the dark color.

 

 

Put it all back in the frame and it's all good. A few points: As you can see, everything is painted backwards, so, make sure to factor that into your photo editing. Please, leave a comment or ask a question.

 

 

 

 

Shooting a band

                                                  How I shoot a band (with a camera)

 

I sat there, watching the opening band, as I always do, and thought to my self; man, I wish I had my camera with me. Then it dawned on me that I've said that to myself a hundred times in the last 3 years. So, I started bringing it to gigs. 

Ever since the passing of our friend Larry Anderson, I really think the musical community got a little closer. I've always enjoyed live music and over the years we've all made some great connections. I'm glad to say, most of the musicians I grew up playing with, are still going strong. I consider myself lucky to play every weekend and reaffirm those connections. That being said, most of the bands I photograph are my really good friends and it gives me great pleasure to see them play.



First Brigade
 

 

Billy Osman

Tim Romanowski

I.s.o.

I know it stands for something, but, I'm not sure what. It simply is the sensitivity of your camera sensor. Low ISO, you need lots of light. High ISO, you don't need as much light to correctly expose a picture. When you turn up the ISO dial or increase the number, the more sensitive your sensor is to light. The benefit of a high ISO number is; you can take pictures in low light without a flash. The drawback is; more visual noise is present. The sensor needs to fill every pixel with something, but, if the light is low, it just makes up the information as close as it can get it. The image is amplified to write data to the sensor, in other words. That's why I usually shot in black and white. The noise just looks like film grain and to me, that's perfectly acceptable, to a point. The noise in a color digital picture is different. If you zoom in a a picture, you can see orange or red specks in the areas that should be black. To me, that doesn't look good. Rick Sammon, http://ricksammon.com/, says, if you notice the grain in a picture, it wasn't a very good picture in the first place. I agree, but, color noise is just not good looking.

Paul Goc

 If your camera has an adjustable ISO setting, try setting it for 'auto ISO'. That means, the camera Decdie's how high it sets the ISO. i you don't have 'auto' try 800, and use the 'p' mode on your camera. If you don't have 'p' than use 'tv' or 's' mode at around a 60th to 125th of a second. Take a few shots and look at them. If the noise is acceptable to you, try it under just one bright light. I it's still o.k., You should be alright.  If you notice a lot of extra noise, try turning a few things off. Canon has a feature called 'lighting optimiser' but most cameras should have some sort of noise reduction settings. These tend to soften, or slightly blur the pixels to make the noise less noticeable. Try all of them off. I

always have all my noise reduction settings turned off.

 

One thing I notice, is when you start showing the pictures on facebook, the bands really appreciate it.

Please, give these methods a try and let me know how it turns out.