BOKEH - Blur the Background

Aperture at 3.5, ISO 100, Shutter 250.
Here's the set up and the result:

Simple, but effective.

From Sunshine to Halloween

Sometimes you are forced to shoot in broad daylight when you want a dark, forbidding shot.  You have to improvise.
Here are a few easy steps to create a faux spooky shot.

                                                                        1. The sign.

2. Alter the sign with local Spanish Moss.

3. Desaturate the color, and darken a bit.

4. Gausian Blur.

5. Blend with Multiply.

Done. Quick and easy.

All photos ©2015Kewphoto

NO FREEBIES - A Photographers rant by Kewphoto

Every photographer hears it.  Mostly from friends and family.  Could you shoot my kids?  Will you shoot my event? Please come to my wedding - and bring your camera!

Now, we are not talking about cousin Freddie and his new IPhone.  Or Uncle Ted, who just bought an expensive camera and is confident he can use it to give you some pretty good snapshots.

We are talking about professional photographers.  Those of us who do it for a living.

Consider this:
*We have probably went to school of some sort, we read every magazine and book printed on photography, we take seminars and courses to keep up on our education.  All of which costs money.
*Not only did we pay for all our equipment (and in some cases, rented for that special need) including lights, backdrops, meters, lenses, reflectors, cases, the van, and quite a few cameras.
*All this gear needs insured. I, for one, will not take my main cameras out of the house unless I have a contract with a client.  Insurance companies won't pay if I was using it for fun.
*A normal shoots includes travel to the event (say, half hour), set up (hour) shooting (6 hours) clean up (half), return travel (half), then - editing (at least as long as the shoot). A full day taken away from us, a day which could have been spent earning a living and feeding our kids.

So - no, it is NOT a freebie - it costs us quite a bit of time and money.

Imagine your work.  Whatever you do.  Imagine me coming to you and asking if you would put in a full days work - just for me 'cause we are palls - with no pay.

Yeah, thought so.

Day 10: Shutter Speed Expanded

So. We now know what the aperture does. Set one way, tons of light and shallow Depth Of Field; the other less light and wider DOF.

Now the SHUTTER. Set with the S or TV dial, it is the duration of time that the shutter is open, letting available light into the sensor. Mainly, it controls movement. Here, I have a ceiling fan. The fan is set for it's slowest speed, so I set the shutter for 1/500 of a second.

 Very fast. It captured the blades in mid flight, but still gave a dark image, due to the fact that not a whole heck of light was allowed in Maybe I should have used a slower shutter...

After resetting my shutter to 1/3 of a second, you can see a lot of light came in, but it is overly bright and you can't see the blades at all.
So what can be done?
The S/TV setting allows you to set the shutter speed to whatever you want - within the cameras limitations - to capture movement or stillness.  Just like A/AV setting, YOU set the shutter speed and the camera sets an appropriate aperture base on available light.  But as you can see, the exposures look very different in this example.  Why? Because of the ISO setting.  That will be tomorrows post.

Day 9: Aperature - More

Long post the last few days, so we'll have a short one today. Large aperture shots are not only for portraits. A shallow depth of field can give you very striking images, like this one from the bridge over the Beaufort River I took last week. If I had used a smaller aperture, this railing would have been lost, making a rather dull shot. Thus:

Food for thought.

Homework for today: Have some food. And think.
Tomorrow - Shutter Speed.

Day 8: Aperature - Expanded

Now that we have a rough idea of what the Three Biggies do, and why we would want them to do it, let's look a little deeper into each.
Let's try an experiment.  Find something far away that has lettering on it.  Now try to read it.  If it is far away enough, and small enough, what did you do?  You squinted in order to see it well.  What you are doing is forcing your iris to close enough so everything in the distance is in focus.  Same as you would if you were shooting a landscape with your camera.

The Aperture of a camera is in the lens. Imagine it as your iris on your eye. If you are in a dark room, your iris opens up to giant size, to allow more light in and lets you see better at night. Go outside on a bright day and your iris will close down to a tiny pinpoint to limit light coming in. This is the same with a camera lens. It is measured by the f-stop, where the oddly named word "stop" is replaced by a number - a fraction of the entire diameter of the lens' iris. Since it is a fraction, as we learned in Mrs. Willis's fifth grade math class, the smaller the number, the bigger it is (1/2 is larger than 1/3).

Each lens has it's own range. For instance, the kit lens that ships with most Canon Rebels have a range of f-3.5 to f-5.6. That means the widest you can open the aperture on it is 3.5, at the cameras widest angle (more on that later). Zoom out from 18mm to 55mm (more on that later), and your maximum is now limited to 5.6. On the other end of the spectrum, the smallest aperture on that lens, regardless of zoom, is f-22. So the wider the angle on that lens, the more light it can let in.

A stronger zoom lens, for the same camera, would be the 55-250mm IS (more on that later), with an aperture range of f-4 to f5.6, meaning the largest aperture that lens can allow is one stop slower (more on that later) then the kit lens. You do give up light when you zoom.

So what is to be done? What if you want to devote your life to Portrait photography? What if you want the eyes of your subject in perfect focus, and have it drop off from there? Well, that is where a faster lens would come in handy. The f-stop (more on that later) range is called the SPEED of the lens. The lower the numbers, the faster the lens. So try a 50mm. f-1.8 lens. This lens is a little more expensive, but will give you a super-shallow depth of field (see Feb 1st post). It will also allow so much more light in that it can drastically alter your shutter speed, but that is for tomorrow.

Until then, homework is: Examine your lens. Lots of numbers and such. Must mean sumptin'.

Day 7: Summery - The Story So Far

In one week, we have an OK grasp on what the three amigos do the the camera and to each other,
So, Aperture, Shutter and ISO.

We know what they do. But when and why do we use them?

Well.....

Portrait (Face is in focus, background isn't): Large Aperture (low f-number)

Landscape (Everything from foreground to background is in focus): Small Aperture (high f-number)

Running Athlete (To capture action): Fast Shutter (1/500th of a second to 1/4000th)

Starry Night (No lights, very dark): Long Shutter (1/50th of a second to 30 seconds)

For now we are leaving the ISO at 100.

The first two use the Aperture control to set your exposure. Set camera to A or AV, move the dial so the aperture value goes all the way up or down. The camera will look at available light, and where the ISO is set, and give you the Shutter speed you need for a correct exposure. The second two are controlled with the S or TV dial.

If, for instance, you want to shoot a beautiful landscape of your back yard. Set the Aperture to f-22, point the camera and hit the shutter half way. The camera will meter the light and determine what speed shutter it needs to give you that aperture. Remember, though, that the small aperture allows less light, so the camera may give you a shutter speed of 1/100th of a second. The sad news is, there is no way you can hand hold the camera that long without even a little blur. So, adjust your ISO to the next level. At 200, the shutter may move to 1/250 of a second. Better, but not great. 400? Hand-holdable*, but it now starts to get grainy.

All these factors are determined by the capabilities of your camera. VERY roughly speaking, the newer (and the more expensive) your DSLR, the better it will be at this.

There are other ways to overcome these obstacles, and but they will be covered a bit later. For now, we can live with a little graininess. That back yard will be there for future, better shots.

Homework? Hug your kids.

*My blog - my made up words!