Articles in Shooting and Lighting Tips
HDR Photography is a method of combining multiple exposures into a single image in order to achieve a greater dynamic range in an image. If that sounded a bit complex, let’s break that down a bit more. If I take a photo, the sensor only can capture a given range from light to dark, in a normally exposed image, you may lose some detail in the darkest areas and you may lose some detail in the brightest areas. But if we can take an normal exposure, an underexposed image (to get the detail in the highlights) and an overexposed image (to get the details in the shadows) and combine them into a single image, then we can get a new image that can be the best of all three.
As part of our Photography Basics series we talked about Exposure already and this time we are going to cover the mystery of aperture. Aperture is probably the least understood setting of everything on your camera. While shutter settings are very easy to understand, to long of a shutter speed and you will get blurring, pretty simple stuff. Same with ISO, too high of ISO and you introduce digital noise. But learning how to use aperture properly can kill brain cells faster than a frat house kegger party.
I have been wanting to write this article for some time now… ever since I received a really bad fake SandDisk Ultra II Compact Flash card a few years back. After doing some research online, I found a few others that were getting the same crap cards from their online purchases.
We have done a number of articles with different flash heads but we have never gone into the detail of how to set them up and make them work, this results in emails that we sit and explain all the details to people. So today I am going to go through how to setup these studio flashes and connect them to your camera to get the results you want.
If you have ever shopped for a flash or read a review, you may have noticed a section of the spec called the guide number or GN. While this value is a measurement of power that the flash has and allows you to compare flash models, is this number useful to you at all? In this article we dig into the guide number and see how we can use this number help us dial in our flash and camera settings using some math instead of just guessing and retrying until you get what you want.
This week we sat down with our friend David from Esquire Photography to discuss different aspects of wedding photography. What we thought was going to be a quick discussion turned into almost 90 minutes of everything from technique, to contracts, to workflow, and much more.
It’s the height of the wedding season now and people that are shooting their first weddings or considering shooting a wedding should know a few tips to make sure the day goes as smooth as possible. Since weddings are our primary income here we figured we would pass along a number of our favorite tips and tricks.
For the most part I come home from a shoot and dump the images from the CF cards onto the computer and then do my backups. Once in a while I am gone for a weekend without the benefit of a laptop and I want to make sure I have my CF cards backed up every night. For this reason I picked up a Wolverine Flashpac several years ago and have been using it ever since. Since you should always make backups as soon as possible, I can’t recommend some type of device like this enough.
Today is one of those days that I wanted to take a step back to some basics again. This time I want to talk about the three primary properties of light, and since what we are doing as photographers is recording light, it is important to know how these properties play into getting a good image. While I had studied this before, attending a recent seminar from Ed Pierce made me realize that many reader may never have seen these concepts before.
I have had the opportunity to shoot with a number of other people as both the “second” photographer as well as being the primary photographer. Today I want to talk about my feelings about shooting with other people as my own experience has covered the gamut from extremely enjoyable to absolutely horrible. So while this is not a technical article by any means, it is my own opinion as to how shooting with someone else can be both a rewarding, educational, and enjoyable experience.
If you want to progress in your art you should really consider taking a workshop once in a while. Since I haven’t been able to attend one in a while I was thrilled that Ed Piece’s Captivated by the Light workshop was coming to my town. Be sure and check it out if it is coming to your area. Ed is a master of light and technique. He shows you have to light a subject properly for the most flattering angles.
The home studio has been making amazing progress lately and we did some major work on it today to get it ready for it’s first test shoot. The final width comes in at twelve feet and the shooting area is fifteen feet from the main shooting wall. The back wall was painted with gloss white for high key background that will mostly be used during product shots.
