Month: June 2019

Photography is a means of building awareness across cultures, communities, and countries. Stunning images that depict a city’s spirit, for example, can speak volumes about a particular place-which parts of the city light up at night, the color of the sky, how the people look-small details that give people a virtual experience of the place. If you love travelling and taking unique pictures of your journey but haven’t mastered the art of bringing your photos to life, here are some tips you can use to enhance the impact of your travel photography:

• Pack light – don’t bring the entire house with you when you travel. Scale down your equipment to what’s really important and pack only the essentials. This way, you can challenge yourself to improvise during tough shooting conditions. Sometimes a masterpiece could be the result of a fortunate “accident”.
• Get up early – capturing early morning routines of the locals and how the place looks like before it gets busy is a great way to start your day and learn more about the place.
• Feel the place – it may be exciting to take lots of photos as soon as you arrive at your destination, but taking pictures for the sake of getting things done might hinder your creativity. Find the time to get to know the place by immersing yourself in the small details.
• Get off the beaten path – while most photographers need to fulfil standard postcard shots, it’s also good to explore non-popular locations. Who knows what you might discover on your path? Don’t be afraid to get lost and wander off to unfamiliar areas. Just make sure safety comes first always.
• Get to know the people – connect with the locals, other tourists, or even other photographers. You can gain new friends and learn new insights about the place. Additionally, each of your photos would have its unique back story.
• Experiment with composition – go beyond standard techniques and try going for different composition techniques. Feeling the place has helped you gain a deeper perspective. Perhaps you can tell a story by breaking a few rules. By all means, rule of thirds, balancing elements, depth, etc. are tried and tested techniques, but you can always experiment with your own.
• Make the most out of the golden hour – whether it’s before sunrise or sunset, be there ahead of time to prepare for the magic hour. Make sure you do your research and ask about the best places to shoot during the golden hour. Remember, good photography is about capturing and manipulating light.

Forget the numbers.

I am going to keep this simple for you so we can move on and actually start doing the cool stuff and not worry about the complete science of everything. Skip this by the way if you are already using your camera on Tv, Av or Manual.

To alter your settings on your camera, you are going to have to turn the dial on top so that it reads (for Canon) M, Av or Tv. If you are using the little pictures on top or the green square your camera is still on auto and will not let you change much. If you have your camera right now, set it to M. Don’t be scared, we are just playing with settings not taking a master class.

STOP! – F-stop – so what’s F/16? or F/5.6 right in the middle of my camera?

This number is a control for your lens (light is measured in stops the same as on a ruler distance is organised in to centimetres, I am not going into the history and science of these numbers here) only and it does two things.

Assuming you have a standard cheap kit lens (the lens they gave you with the camera) it will be capable of giving you F3.5 to F32. Now, it is cheap and due to technical issues it can’t hold these numbers if you set them and zoom in or out – I will go into more detail later on a compare between a cheap lens and a pro lens. Just know for the moment we are going to work on F5.6 to F22 OK.

So clear your head and forget these numbers have odd numbers like F3.5 or F4.0, just know each time you raise this number from its lowest to highest number you are making two changes at once.

We will start with F5.6 to F8. Setting a low number opens a doorway inside your lens allowing light to come in and once you have focussed onto something it creates a more blurred background. This is one of the most popular settings to use for portraits and even landscape photography.

To increase this blurring, zoom in to your subject and take a shot (stand back and zoom in if you have to) and see the result. Although you will get some background blur without zooming in, when you zoom in with a low F-stop number the background magnifies even more. On another article I will go into Bokeh/Prime lens vs a zoom lens later on and more.

So guess what the high number does…

Yes, from F/8 to F/22 you start to increase the depth of field and the photo gets sharper front to back and you are also limiting the amount of light coming into the camera. Again, if you want front to back sharpness don’t zoom in too much!

So forget the numbers, just know that a low number is good for low-light photos with blurring and know that a high number is good for front to back sharpness and limited incoming light. The next trick is balancing the light to control your photo.

The Next Trick

You might be taking a photo on a very bright day but want to use F/2, but your shots are coming out very very bright or white almost (over-exposed). You need a way of controlling the light without changing this number. This is where your shutter comes into play and the shutter also controls two things. It can be slowed down to allow more light to come in which helps with your exposure, but the draw back here is anything moving in front of the camera could potentially be blurred. In this case we are talking about more light in the scene so if your shooting at F2 then push the shutter speed higher and freeze frame the scene.

One way to experiment with this is set your camera to Tv mode (shutter priority) and try some shots on a slow speed and some on a high speed. Compare your photo’s and you will see the camera made adjustments for you to effect the photo because of the shutter speed changes you made fast or slow.

Shutter Play.

Sunset Settings…

When you press that button to take your photo, you here a “click-click”. That is the little door inside your camera (shutter) moving out of the way so the light coming into your lens passes through to your camera sensor (device that records light and ends up on your SD card).

You can control how slow or fast this shutter opens and closes. So the longer you leave it open the more light hits the sensor until you get the desired exposure.

SO!

The camera is sensitive to light which is why sometimes your photos may come out too bright or dark if you’re not in control. Let’s say the photo you want to take take was at the end of a sunset and the light was not very plentiful, but I wanted to shoot it at F/16. Which as you should now know this number limits light coming into the camera but gives front to back sharpness of the scene?

SO... by slowing down the shutter I have given the camera more time enough to compensate for the lack the light of the day (ambient light) and the controlled light coming into the lens and expose the camera long enough to create a balanced photo exposure. If you hear someone saying “I exposed for 5 secs” he may not be a flasher…

Now I say slowing down the shutter, the average normal speed of your shutter is considered to be 1/125 sec. This speed is reasonably fast enough to hold your camera steady to take a photo. I can hold my camera and take a snap-photo at 1/60 sec, anything slower and I will likely have a blurred photo from my own movement. But in this case my camera is on a tripod so I can have more shutter control at my disposal as and when I need it.

Now this is where it starts to come together, let’s suppose I took the same photo with an F-stop of f/2.8. I can’t leave the shutter at 1/4 as so much light would come into the camera the photo would be “over-exposed” and be bright and washed out.

You’re a juggler with intent

So to compensate I would have to increase the shutter speed so that it opens and closes quicker. And this is where I am starting to get to with all this, to get the photo the way we want it we have to learn to balance light. If you make a change of your F-stop, you will need to make an adjustment of another sort elsewhere to compensate for this. As we go on you will hopefully understand this better.

Know that your camera is your tool, it may have lots of fancy processors and metering systems but you are in the hot seat (I would not want it any other way!) and your camera does not know what you’re trying to do or what it is looking at. So as a juggler of light, you will eventually know when to press that shutter button and make that photo.

The other control your shutter offers is a sense of movement or the opposite, complete motion freeze. Now if you need your F-stop number to stay where it is, Tv mode is not for you because in this mode it is going to keep your shutter speed fixed at what ever you terll it to but the auto-ISO and F-stop is going to be constantly changing (take a photo indoors on Tv mode and outdoors and look at its settings – see manual for photo details).

Something to try;

Now for this quick experiment we want to control the speed of the shutter and you can’t do this in Av Mode. Instead M for manual is what we will need here but we are going to leave the ISO to the camera (as we are not talking about the ISO right now, make sure it is set to auto and not a number and we will come to this eventually).

So in manual set your F-stop to F5.6 and then adjust your shutter dial to a slow low number say 1/20secs take a shot (and dont worry about what you shoot) and then set it to 1/200 and take a shot. Assuming you have set it correctly your camera has kept the same photo exposure (by changing the ISO setting in the background) but you managed to keep the F-stop the same whilst making adjustments to the shutter. You can do the same process to the shutter as well by repeating the same experiment but instead change the F-stop number.

Set the shutter to 1/80secs for the moment but instead change the F number to f5.6 and take a shot and then set to F22 and shoot again. So, the same exposure but the same shutter speed too and let’s not forget the lessons of blurring or bokeh as it is also known. So what did we just learn? here is a breakdown;

Photo at Shutter 1/20 – too blurry for hand held but quality of shot is good (ISO)

Photo at shutter 1/200 – Sharp, frozen photo with some bokeh

Photo at F5.6 – Generally sharp for hand hold and background begins to blur from focus point

Photo at F22 – Sharp front to back but picture quality may have been sacrificed (ISO, don’t panic ISO is almost next!)

The Big Freeze

So here is a little bit more of shutter speeds, the faster your shutter speed is, the quicker it opens and closes inside your camera which limits light into the camera. On a bright summer day you can happily take photos at a speed of 1/200secs and get good hand held photos and if its really really sunny you can push this up higher as you see fit. The more you push this number the quicker the photo and the more “frozen” the scene is. Not because its cold of course but movement is frozen in that time. For example pick up any sports magazine and you will see footballers in mid air, sweat drops and footballs in a solid state. The photog that took these shots would have used a fast shutter speed like 1/800 – enough to catch a Formula One car!

Find a fountain and shoot at 1/4000 secs!

If you shoot at this speed on a bright day you can see the water is choppy and frozen in motion.

ISO

ISO-50 on my Canon 6D is the highest quality recording it offers, it is also the lowest light sensitivity setting as well. So let’s recap a second, are you seeing a pattern forming yet? three controls, each does two changes at once and all three controls effect light either up or down in volume. Or do they?

The ISO when set to it lowest number simply records faster digitally and so requires more light to do this and if pushed to its higher numbers like say ISO-128000 its very sensitive to light and is a lot brighter and needs less light to record a photo for you. The ISO settings cannot stop light coming into the camera once it travels through that lens and passed through the shutter, so technically speaking its not a control of light but just keep in mind that playing with these settings does make a change in the camera’s behaviour if you happen to set an ISO at a particular number in Av or Tv modes.

Let’s suppose I am indoors on a bright day and my camera is set to Av mode. If I changed my iso to iso-400 or even 800, this would be sensitive enough with the room light for the camera to auto increase the shutter speed and get you a reasonable exposure hand held.. The down side to increasing this ISO number is it creates more noise in the photo which means decreasing the quality as well. Remember the fountain photo, I shot mine at 1/4000secs in Tv mode and its ISO only went to 640 as it was a bright day on the coast plus it was a white fountain reflecting more light.

Would like to say at this point that ISO-640 is not bad! ISO quality varies per camera or mobile phone. You can shoot a pretty good photo up to 3200 ISO and with noise reduction software can make it look very good.

More about quality in a sec, I want you to understand a little of the impact of your changes in camera are making as as I said earlier – you are a Juggler of light. So here is a little exorcise, like before set your camera dial to Av and set your ISO to 100 and take a photo of something.

Next set your ISO to 800, take a shot and then 3200, Which photo’s worked out better for you? have a look on the back and zoom in using your display screen onto the object you focused on and see if the photos look any different. There are settings recorded attached to each file that the camera adds in every time you take a photo called Exif data (wiki this please). To get to this data varies per camera so look this up but if you get to this data you would see that the camera made adjustments to the F stop and the shutter speed as you changed the ISO.

HIgh ISO is Bad!… and Good!

I am hoping your not feeling to overwhelmed with all this, but if you get your head round these three main camera settings everything else is easier as all the other settings in your camera usually only need setting just once depending on what your doing but exposure is very important.

Usually its good practice to shoot in the best quality possible, especially if there is enough light as after all its our job to get the best capture possible right?. As you saw in the landscape photo with the tree the ISO was set to 50 and noise reduction was applied (more on noise and post processing in another blog). Now, it seems like a terrible thing to shoot in any ISO higher than 800 (I will go into quality on high ISO’s later and how to manage them) but there are situations when a high ISO can actually give a photo an improvement in camera without having to muck about in Photoshop.

It’s a judgement call! When canon released the 24mm to 70mm mkII lens in 2011 (a fast lens) I was lucky enough to be the first few to get hold of one and try it out shortly after buying it. I fired the shot in Av mode (Aperture Priority) at F2.8 and zoomed in at 70mm the widest & tightest it can go to see how it looked. The Canon 550D came back with a photo setting; shutter speed of 1/40s and iso6400. In colour the photo was noisy and even with noise reduction did not look good, but I knew this. I knew the camera in the low light would have to choose these settings, even with a wide aperture (or low F-stop number).

I was looking to make a black & white photo and I wanted to have natural grain in the photo as close to those old black & white film photo’s we used to see from the pro’s. I believe Sir David Bailey shoots digital now but when he does create B&W he shoots film still. So when I processed this photo I made sure no noise reduction was applied and once I added a black and white layer (and there are many to choose from in Photoshop and other filter software) the noise was now an advantage towards the look I wanted.

Types of photo frames.

• Wooden frames, these are perhaps the oldest of the available photo frames, they are made of wood that has been joined at the corners to form a shape that acts as a structural reinforcement to a photo. The wooden types are simple and readily available. The other advantage with them is that they are resistance to damages like breakages and abrasion.
• Glass frames, these are the most modern of the photo frames they are made from glass and often are of limited small sizes due to their weight and fragility. Glass frames offer elegant displays due to the transparent nature of glass creating and a seamless illusion that makes the photo to be the center of attraction.
• Acrylic photo frames, acrylic is a synthetic material that produces glass-like equipment used in different manufacturing processes. In frames, acrylic is the best since they are like glass frames only that they are light and do not readily break. This, therefore, means that these frames are
• Metal frames, these are metallic structures, and they are rare due to challenges like weight and cost. Rarely do people prefer metallic frames unless they intend to display photos outside where weather elements are a factor and require larger displays like billboards.
• Other types of frames include those that are temporarily used as photo frames, such as, the plastic and reed woven structures.

Ideal Frames for Photo Display

From the above-detailed classification, the perfect photo frames are the acrylic frames. This is because they are a classical way to have your photo display as well as they have superior merits over the glass frames. These frames are available in different shapes and different sizes making them the most ideal.

Every photo display should be in a way that it accentuates the focal point, which is the photo in the frames and also protects the picture itself. Acrylic frames do all these, and their prices are pocket-friendly, they can be customized to create more effect to the interior decorations inside the house.

Many people indulge in indoor photography both as a hobby and also as a profession. But it is a very tedious and complicated part of photography as a lot of emphasis has to be given to the lighting aspect. Since it is done indoors, there is a limitation of the availability of the natural light. Below mentioned are certain lighting tips which turn out to be very handy. These are as follows-

• A. The most ideal light for these portraits is the natural light that streams in through the windows. Whatever is the location, it has to be seen that the shots are taken under the natural light when it is at its peak to get that special effect.
• B. Reflectors are the aids which help to increase the existing light thus their placement is of utmost importance. Ideally these have to be placed opposite to the subject( person or the object that is being shot) so as to add on to the quality of the light already present.
• C. Besides the arrangement of light for a good shot, it is advisable to check for the photo length and the aperture of the camera.
• D. For human portraits, the subject selected has to be photogenic for the best result. Correct light will help in enhancing the features and face even more.
• E. For the best effect of light, it is to be made sure that the background is pure black. Black as a colour has a tendency to absorb all the light. If black is unavailable then it has to be some other dark colour for sure. Light coloured backgrounds tend to reflect the light more and hence the end result is pretty hazy.
• F In case of shots where an artificial source of light is being used like a lamp, then its placing will play a pivotal role in getting the required portrait. The lamp has to be placed preferably to the right side of the subject and little above the head so as the entire light falls on the face and down.
• G. The camera that is being used should ideally be placed on the tripod to avoid any type of shaking and also the speed of the shutter has to be fast.
• H. It is always a tip to ask photographers to take different shots from various angles to get that perfect photo. For this varied lighting angles can also be adopted.
• I. Last but not the least, the available light sources in the house can be utilised to get a good portrait. One can avoid hiring other light sources.

Portraits of self are always preferred by celebrities and common people alike. These can be individually taken or can be both couple and family photo type. These are a reminder of what we all value as an individual and that is beauty, commitment and love. Since it involves a lot of emotions, everything has to be just perfect. Once taken perfectly, these can be cherished by the generations to come!

Increased safety

One of the main benefits of opting for drone photography solutions is you can increase your safety when taking photos or videos. Of course, when taking aerial photos or videos going high is much preferred by photographers since they have a better and wider perspective. However, taking photos up in the sky can be dangerous. It gets even worse if you will be using a helicopter. Luckily, using drones in taking photos can be a safer option.

Better maneuverability

Another benefit of making use of drone photography solutions is individuals can have better maneuverability. There are cases when vibration of the engine, safety equipment as well as noise can affect you in taking photos. Apart from that, these items can also obstruct a wonderful view of a city or area. Thankfully, using drones can provide you with the best maneuverability you need.

Easy to set up

The next benefit of drone photography solutions is it is easy to set up. Surely, when taking photos most especially in the sky, you need to make use of different equipment. But, some of these items are hard to set up. Plus, you need to spend substantial time in thinking and setting up. By using drones, you do not need to waste your time since drone photography service providers make sure that their devices are ready to use. As a result, you can immediately take photos.

Environment friendly

When opting for drones to take photos, individuals can also enjoy environment friendly features. For one, you do not need to disturb the nature with the use of helicopters. In addition, drones can reduce or even prevent carbon emissions. Finally, you can also get rid of noise pollution. With all these features, you can take photos without affecting the environment.

Lower expenses

Finally, making use of drones can also help you reduce your expenses. Opting for drone photography services can be expensive. However, hiring a helicopter is more expensive. With regard to expenses in salaries, individuals can also reduce this since they can take photos on their own as long as they have drones.