I also didn’t have a model with experience or the patience for me to go through multiple lighting adjustments. Go figure. The image of my daughter with makeup was setup in window sunlight. No other light source was used on my model. I applied all the makeup (I am no makeup artist either, so had to have some fun with this one) and no digital manipulation of color was used. The photo was taken with a Nikon D90 in RAW. The settings included:

Exposure 0.004 sec (1/250)
Aperture f/8.0
Focal Length 105 mm
ISO Speed 200

The image was imported into Lightroom 3.6. I cropped the image in tight and added more exposure (+4) because I wanted the blown out white effect. From there, I softened the harsh light with an adjustment brush , reduced tint, and also added some minor saturation to the eye color and dramatically reduced temperature (original RAW had more skin warmth/yellow), then I did a lot of spot removal because some of the makeup didn’t blend into her skin well. Finally, I reduced the sharpness of her cheeks/nose a touch because I didn’t want to see pores or tiny hairs. Done. Give this a try with various models and makeup. YouTube has a plethora of videos on makeup application to give you some ideas. This process gave me great ideas for more fashion makeup shots using ambient as well as studio lighting.

As an amateur photographer of three years, Joelle Herman loves it all and typically spends a week to a month on a subject.  She also finds that being a part of a local camera club (Frederick Camera Clique) helps in networking, learning and exploring your passion.

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jneo/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/joelleherman
Google+: Joelle Herman Photography

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With great controls comes great responsibilities. Unlike Point & Shoot users who often have the benefit of a Panorama Assist mode, DSLR users have to control everything themselves. This is more work, but allows for greater flexibility while shooting images for a panorama.

The basic principle of capturing a panorama is to ensure utmost consistency between images. This means that focal-length, focus, aperture, ISO, shutter-speed, exposure, white-balance and image parameters all have to match exactly. Other than focal-length, these settings usually have both automatic and manual modes. The key is to lock each setting before shooting. Let’s go over each one:

If you are using a prime lens, then there is nothing to take care of for the focal-length. If you want fewer shots, then zoom out as much as possible. If you zoom in though, more shots will be required but the resulting panorama will have more resolution and can be printed larger. For web use, it rarely matters.

Focus should be set to make sure your subject is entirely in focus. If you are shooting a distant vista, then you can usually go to infinity. Otherwise, you can maximize focus by setting your lens to its hyperfocal distance. Once focus is set, switch to manual (MF) mode. There is usually a slider on the side of the lens or on the camera body next to the lens mount for that.

There are two ways to lock aperture, ISO and shutter-speed. One is to go to Manual mode and set each one yourself. As a general rule, you want a small aperture without going beyond the diffraction limit of your camera, so somewhere between F/11 and F/16 for a recent DSLR. ISO should be kept as low as possible, particularly is shooting from a tripod where camera shake is not an issue. Then, set the shutter-speed to get the right exposure. Take some test shots from the brightest area of your subjects to make sure nothing will be blown out.

The automatic way is to point the camera at the brightest area in the scene and press the AE-L button to lock exposure. Depending on your camera and how it is configured, you may have to hold that button the whole time or press it once before and once after all images for the panorama are taken.

White-balance is locked by any setting other than Automatic. Ideally, you should use Custom White-Balance which is available on all DSLRs. Kelvin or Preset WB work well too. Image parameters are generally locked except for certain automatic features like Adaptive D-Lighting (ADL) and Dynamic Range Optimizer (DRO) on Nikon and Sony DSLRs, respectively. If your camera supports these, use the menu system to turn them Off.

Once everything is locked as instructed here, your DSLR is ready to capture images for a panorama. Just make sure to keep the camera level and leave plenty of overlap between frames while doing so.

More information on how to create a panorama photo is found at Neopanoramic including panorama software and panoramic photography gear like heads, tripods and leveling bases.

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Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/robbie1/1174623/

Halloween brings the opportunity for many things: candy, chaos, getting the bejezzus scared out of ya…just to name some of the favorites. It also brings some chances for some great photos. Whether you’re taking photos of people in crazy costumes, or creating a reminder of your girlfriend’s “sexy nurse” outfit to put in the folder of goodies you’ve hidden on your hard drive, Halloween brings some interesting (and sometimes aggravating) challenges when it comes to photography. Here are 3 quick tips (more reminders really) to make sure you’re getting some good photos tonight.

Lighting

Lighting is always an issue with photography, but it’s even more important than usual on Halloween. You might be amazed at just how completely NON-scary that creepy zombie looks bathed in the artificially suped-up light of a picture taken with a flash or just how funny the colours end up looking i that photo of the kid covered in glow-sticks. Stick to natural light whenever possible, or at least keep the extra light to a minimum to avoid a serious case of “damn, that looked so much better in the dark”.

White Balance

For the love of all that is unholy and ghoulish, set your white balance properly. It’s hard enough to deal with white balance after the fact on a normal day. On a day when the entire point is to have your senses assaulted with strange costume outfits and colours in a dark environment there is no way to deal with white balance after the fact with any degree of accuracy.

Avoid a Sugar High

Depending on the sort of photos you’re taking, you may need to drop your shutter speed down quite a lot to get a decent photo without destroying the creepy/hilarious/whatever effect. That means you may need to hold the camera more steady than usual, and that could be tough if you’re hopped up on sugar too early. If you plan on getting low shutter speed photos that aren’t blurry as all hell, I’d avoid the candy if I were you. Or, if you’re smart, use a tripod and pig out.

Happy Halloween…and please, if you get some great shots tonight, don’t hesitate to drop some links to them in the comments here. I’d love to see ‘em.

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Photo Source: http://flickr.com/photos/billselak/987323495/

Admittedly, I hate using the flash unless it’s absolutely necessary, so I may be biased when I say that I think people use the flash FAR too much. Often to the detriment of the photo they are trying to take. There are exceptions of course, but it’s very VERY rare that you actually need to use your flash under normal circumstances if you’re setting up your shot properly using a combination of the ISO setting, aperture setting, and shutter speed. To me the flash is a last ditch effort to save a photo that cannot be taken any other way, and should be avoided whenever possible.

I have worked as a professional photographer off and on (I will admit, I’ve been “off” for more of less 2 years now), and I am always amazed at just how fast many people will jump to their flash before even attempting to properly setup the shot without it.

Maybe I’m too much of a “light purest”, or whatever you want to call it, but I just don’t like destroying the natural light of the photo if it can in any way be avoided, and I would highly suggest that people only use their flash as a last resort, or as a means to get a specific lighting effect, and not as a be all and end all way of “getting the lighting right” or some other excuse to be lazy with the setup of the shot.

For the sake of natural light everywhere, I implore you, use your flash sparingly, and only when it’s absolutely needed to get the shot you want. You’ll thank me later when you don’t end up with a bunch of photos that are flooded in artificial light and almost certainly ruining at least some of the magic of the original moment. Or maybe you won’t, and you think I’m an idiot for suggesting it, who knows. By all means chew me out in the comments…you might even convince me.

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Shooting in Camera RAW

The "Camera RAW" editing window.

Your camera should have several quality settings, whether they’re called “good, better, best” or “small, medium, large” or whatever, and are usually in some form of compressed image, like a JPEG. Find the setting to change it, and crank it all the way to the maximum, which SHOULD be “RAW”. (NOTE: Some cameras have multiple RAW options, always use the one that leaves you with the least amount of availible photos, and thus the largest file size per photo, for the best results)

This is basically telling the camera to save all the information regarding what it is doing when you take a photo and saving it all, rather than guessing at how you want to deal with it and doing the compression into a JPEG for you…losing potientially valuable information in the process. This extra information is what makes the RAW format so useful, as I will demonstrate with an old photo from a poorly lit New Year’s Eve party.

When you open up a photo in RAW format(I would suggest using Adobe Bridge, but that’s just a personal preference), you have a lot of options to modify and potentially enhance the quality of an image that you wouldn’t have with the usual JPEG formats.

Notice how dark the photo is? Typical party lighting is a serious pain to deal with accurately (especially without blinding everyone with the flash, which I wouldn’t suggest if you want to be invited back). With camera RAW though, we get all sorts of tools to help this photo crawl out of the dark and into much better condition (among other things, like white balance correction and more complex things that will come later). Simply play with the “Exposure”, “Brightness”, and in this case “Vibrance” a little, and you’ll see just how drastically a few simple sliders can improve the quality of the photo far beyond what you could do to a JPEG…without also drastically reducing the general quality of the photo at least. A few tweaks and a click on the “SAVE” button later, and we end up with something more like the photo below.

The enhanced photo. Aprox 5 seconds of work.

The brightness is fixed, the colours stand out more, and there was absolutely no more work put into the taking of the photo. The biggest advantage of shooting in the “RAW” format is the flexibly. You don’t have to get every shot perfect, and can get great results much more easily. The goal of course is to improve enough that you don’t often need to do much (or any) tweaking to most of your photos, but a safety net never hurt anyone. You don’t have to use it every time, but if you aren’t shooting in “RAW”, you won’t have the option when you really need it.

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In photography, like any other art field, original ideas can be hard to come by. Often times newbies like myself tend to take pictures of what is popular and easily available.  Trees, doors, and fruit are fairly easy to come across and photograph. I really have no problem with cliche photographs, though I try to avoid them myself. A lot of beautiful pictures are of things that have been used thousands of times. I have taken quite a few photographs of old worn out themes as I am sure you have too. I even have the dreaded photographer picture; the self portrait where the photographer is shown taking a picture in a mirror.  

One is not going to get popular shooting pictures that people have seen thousands of times. However, to some, reused ideas and themes are classic, and therefore “allowed” to be used over and over. Shakespeare’s themes are used quite a bit (in writing and art)and no one seems to mind the cliché of the stories. So I ask you: are cliché photographs classic, or do they make the photographer lazy?   

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I rely heavily on opinions in deciding whether to change from color or not. I was having a conversation with someone the other day and he asked why I turned photographs from an event black and white. My response was fairly odd, I didn’t like the color of the grass. I always look at whether all the colors play well together. If for some reason I think the colors are off (even after doing some slight adjustments) the picture gets turned black and white. This is really the ultimate thing with me. If all the colors are really strange together (such as bright red and a pale blue), I can’t stand it. In my mind turning the pictures black and white took away the weird color of the grass, and made them better. However to the person I spoke to, the change did nothing to add to the pictures, just stripped them of color. I went through all 500+ pictures I took of the event to find the ones I turned black and white so that I could upload them to flickr in color as well. With the second look through I still thought the grass was an odd color of green, yet not as bad as I originally thought. There were some pictures that definitely worked best in color, and some that there wasn’t much color to them in the first place so black and white was just fine. I still feel the black and white ones are the best of the set, and really in the end it is up to the photographer to decide what they believe works. You can always change your mind.  

Do you like seeing all the colors or would you rather have no color at all?   

Maybe I should have started out saying, I just finished a semester of photography classes where I was not allowed to turn in color photographs, and I learned very quickly to like black and white. I really do like black and white pictures. To me the void of color gives photographs a classic look, when done right. I especially love portraits in black and white.  

How do you determine when to turn your photographs black and white? Do you like working with black and white photography? 

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With my point and shoot I can fit it in my pocket and take it with me EVERYWHERE. I don’t have to worry about a gigantic lens getting messed up, or change lenses for that matter. Something interesting happen–I can whip out my point and shoot and take that picture! Doesn’t matter with a point and shoot whether everything is perfect, just turn it on and shoot, that’s what it was made for after all  Point and shoot cameras can help with DSLR cameras too. I do a lot of test shots with the point and shoot before taking out the DSLR, it shows me an idea of what I’ll get through the DSLR. Heck maybe the point and shoot picture comes out better, ya never know. 

   This was taken with my point and shoot and I’m pretty happy with it.I had my Nikon with me at the event this was taken,but all I had on it was my telephoto lens. I wanted a certain picture thatwith a telephoto lens I was not going to get.So I brought out the point and shoot and got the shot I wanted      

So did you have the problem I had when you started using a DSLR camera? Is a point and shoot included in your camera kit?  

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An issue that often confounds photographers is the amount of compensation they should pay a model upon the sale of a stock photograph. It’s a situation that arises when you want to shoot a spec shot, but, you don’t have the financial resources to pay for the model’s time.

Most models, especially friends, are happy to work with you in exchange for prints. Adding the incentive of sharing some of the profit from the stock sale of the image is good business and usually makes it easier to get a signature on a model release. It also enhances your reputation, and, puts you in a better position to solicit more modeling favors in the future.

The best and easiest way to calculate fair compensation for a model who poses in spec image for you is the 25/10 rule. For every 2500.00 dollars you make with the image, allocate ten percent to your model. So if you have an image that yields a 750.00 stock sale, keep all the money for yourself. But, as soon as that image accumulates 2500.00 in total sales, write your model a check for 250.00.

The same rule applies at the high end as well. If you sell an image for 11,000.00 write your model a check for 1,000.00 which takes into account the first four occurrences of 2500.00 – but does not include the additional 1000.00 which is considered part of the 5th iteration of the 2500.00 mark.

Every time that I present a check to a model I get a million thanks. Even if the amount is only 250.00, the models truly appreciate the consideration. But more than anything else, having a reputation as a photographer that takes care of their talent is worth a hundred times more than the ten percent check you write.

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Informative and humorous. Just be aware, NSFW language contained therein

The first tutorial on distortion, warp and layer effects is here

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