Digital Photography

Even if you are just beginning to learn about photography you will be aware of the special requirements for capturing subjects that are in the dark or with very low light available. Most people are aware of this when they first purchase a point and shoot camera for everyday use.

Evening cityscapes with the glimmer of thousands of lights require special settings and planning before a successful image can be captured. There are also special methods needed to capture celestial objects like the moon or the stars, and a modern digital camera is the ideal tool for night time photography.

The basic requirement of a digital camera for night time photography is to have:

• A Fully Manual mode (Many automatic settings are too fast to take a proper photo of the night sky)
• Self-Timer (This removes your “hand shake” and prevents blur)
• Tripod (Will help you to take repeat images without blur)

Taking a Few Practice Shots

With a digital camera on full manual mode all of the settings required for ideal photos can be adjusted to allow for exterior lighting or brightness. A digital camera also allows for experimentation and many “retakes” if necessary. Take a few images with the slowest shutter speeds and the aperture fully open, this may allow in too much light, but you will be able to review your photos and make adjustments as necessary. Then it is just a matter of adjusting the shutter speed and/or aperture to get the picture you desire.

Shooting the Paths of the Stars

A fun project in night time photography is to leave the shutter open for greatly extended periods of times, for minutes or tens of minutes, to trace the paths of the stars overhead. This is best achieved by composing the picture to have a focal point, such as a tree or horizon line to heighten the drama in the traveling stars above. A great idea is to put the camera, on its tripod, on the ground with trees and grass surrounding.

Shooting the Moon

Another method of night time photography involves photographing the moon, which is a great deal trickier than it sounds. The moon is best photographed when there is a comparative object, such as a cityscape or tall building nearest to it in the image. The same manual adjustments and tripod usage will have to occur when photographing the moon as when photographing stars in the night sky. Next a process called “bracketing” (or simply experimentation) will be employed to determine the best settings for a good image. The manual focus is set at infinity then the exposure level is determined by using each shutter speed through the 1/1000 setting, while the aperture or f-stop is at 5.6. Film or ISO speed of 200 is recommended for moon photography. Keep checking results on the LCD and soon a perfect image of the moon will be recorded on the camera!

Happy Shooting,
Amy Renfrey

Photoshop allows some essential and basic photographic editing to be done, but even just the most basic processes can greatly enhance images for both amateur and professional photographers. Photoshop is also known for its creative capabilities as well as its aesthetic corrective tools.

Eliminate the Ever Devastating Red Eye

Many group, holiday or special events photographs are ruined by the occurrence of a photographic phenomenon known as “red eye,” which is simply light reflecting back from the wide-open pupil of the subject(s). Some digital cameras have a flash setting meant to conquer red-eye occurrences, but they are not always a guarantee against it. Photoshop has a red-eye tool to identify, diminish or completely eliminate the appearance of red eye in an image. With Photoshop, you can remove all red eyes, even those of your cat or dog.

Create Clearer and Brighter Photos

Another Photoshop tool meant to help clean up an image or improve its appearance is the suite of color enhancing tools that will increase or decrease contrast and hue and brightness. This allows a photographer to manually adjust an image’s color settings to give it the sharpest and cleanest appearance possible, even when you’re starting out with an all too dark image.

Who is that Person in the Background? Crop them Out!

Photoshop also has several tools for cropping an image, or cutting elements out of a picture all together. The cropping feature allows for an image to be resized and enhanced, meaning that a group image taken from too far a distance and with too great of an allowance of background can be cropped down to fill the frame and refocused to be clear and sharp at the new focused setting. Or, if there’s someone in the photo you don’t know or aren’t fond of, you can simply cut them out.

Get Artistic

For more artful experiments, Photoshop allows color images to be altered to black and white or even altered to a whole variety of hues and colors. There are a tremendous numbers of palettes, tools and filters to apply to images to great effect. A color photograph can be cropped or resized, have all of the colors reversed and the hues changed, or filters applied to make the image appear to be textured or created from another medium such as a painting. The experimentation possible with the software program is almost limitless. As both an image repair program and an artist’s tool, Photoshop is a good place to explore photography and photographic enhancement.

Amy Renfrey

In digital photography you’ll find that the 3 main components that make up the success of your images hinge on each other. What I mean by this is that 1. Light 2. Technical knowledge 3. Composition all depend on each other closely to make up a beautiful digital photograph.

It sounds easy doesn’t it? Well it is when you have practiced. But when you are starting out learning how to get better shots with more depth and clarity you can start focusing on the technical but perhaps start forgetting about the artistic side and visa versa.

Its common problem when we first start learning digital photography. We realise that we must drill the technical stuff into our heads so we can improve, and what tends to happen is that we get caught up for a bit. We can forget that photography is artistic. And the artistic side of your digital photo needs perfect composition. So here’s a handy technique that I discovered for myself to getting that perfect structure in my composition that I now want to share with you.

A great way, no a fabulous way to get perfect composition in your digital photos is to practice with your zoom. Start by picking your subject and focusing on it.

Let’s say it’s an apple on a bench. Usually what happens is that people take the angle too far away, getting the distracting background objects in the picture. This takes away the beautiful and freshness of the subject leaving us rather cold as far as an emotional response for the photo.

There are a couple of things you can do. You can remove the annoying background clutter and take the apple as a singular subject against a look of “nothingness”. This can be quite an effective shot. Or you can zoom in a little bit at a time and see what composition works well. This is what I can zooming in increments.

Zooming in on a subject in increments can be a very effective way to practice getting your composition just perfect. You can take several pictures of your apple using different “zoom lengths” to get the right angle.

Be aware that this may impact the light in your photo. Generally how it works is that the closer you zoom in the less light you have to work with because you’re closing in on your subject and reducing the physical space that light falls on an area. This really applies if the subject has no luminance of its own.

In order to compensate for this decrease in light you can change your aperture. This means altering the F stop on your camera if possible. You may start out from 1 meter away from your apple at F 16 for example. Then, the closer you get the more light loss you experience and you might just find that changing your F stop to F8 works well when you reduce the distance between you and the apple, ie instead of taking the photo from 1 meter away, you take it from 10 cm away.

Try this out and see what I mean. Playing around with the zoom can really help you kick start your mind into feeling where the best composition is. And soon enough, you won’t even have to think about it consciously because you’ll just know what works.

Happy shooting!

Amy Renfrey

I’m sure you know that one of the most important key elements to getting beautifully clear and artistic photos is firstly knowing and having a sense of the artistic. This is a very important aspect you need in order to refine your digital photography. The secret really is, combining your natural artistic flare with some precise technical knowledge…explained in layman’s terms. So I’m going to start you off with some good, solid tips about shutter speed, aperture, exposure, how blur can work well (not the accidental type!) and what camera you can use to get goods results in your digital photography.

Shutter speed is one of the first things in digital photography that you must know if you want to excel your skills and get beautiful digital photos. Your shutter speed controls the amount of light coming in to the digital sensor. The speed at with you get your light exposure can really make or break your digital photography.

In basic terms, to help you understand, shutter speed controls light exposure. Think of it like a door opening and closing fast or slow. How fast or slow it opens and shuts has impact on your light exposure onto the digital sensor. The shutter controls the amount of light coming in to the camera via its speed. The shutter can then make your pictures brighter or darker. Shutter speed can also impact the clarity of a moving object for example. You can create shutter speeds that are fast, giving a ‘suspended in mid air’ kind of look. Think of the motion of a fast moving object that’s been suspended in “mid-air” such as a water droplet for example. Shots like this have a fast shutter speed.

So what sort of shutter speeds do you need for a look like this? A good “freeze motion” shot where something looks suspended in time, may be at a shutter speed of 1/2000 just as an example. That means the shutter has opened and closed so fast that you can’t replicate it in sound or description. The shutter has clicked in 2000^th of a second. That’s how a lot of sports photography is done. Many subjects that move very fast can look really good with a fast shutter speed.

Shutter speeds of babies and kids for example have to be taken pretty fast….unless they’re asleep of course. You need a pretty high shutter speed of babies and kids because in photographic terms they move around so fast! I’ve never been more tired after a day of shooting photos of kids and babies. You have to be on your toes because a potentially great photo is gone in an instant of a second, so you have to watch them like a hawk.

On the other hand you can get blurry images using shutter speed effects manipulation. Shutter speeds and artistic blur can work quite nicely together. For example if you want to create that artistic blurred look, (not the accidental smudge look) then some gentle blur in your photos can look beautiful. This involves some adjusting of the shutter speed to get the right look for your shot. I would call it a smudging effect if you want to get technical. You may take the same photo of the kids running, but set the shutter speed exposure to something around the 1/250 or less for example. This range of f stops may create a really nice, soft blur with these shutter speed effects.

Aperture on the other hand is described as F stops. The higher the number f stop, the smaller the opening of the lens and the less light falls on the image. For example, you may find that a dusk sunset shot is rather beautiful and you want to capture the colours as you see them. You may decide to manually change the aperture, or f stop, and open up the lens and let more light in. You may find that on auto your camera has chosen an f stop of F8. You look at the scene on the viewfinder and you find it’s just a little dark for your liking. You then switch the camera to a manual mode and change it to F4, which you find lets more light in and gives you the shot you want. Remember, the higher the F stop number, the less light comes in. The lower the number, the more light comes in.

Shutter speed and aperture in your digital photography must work together closely to create the right blend of effect in your photo. So just try it. Play around with moving objects on different shutter speeds and you’ll see what I mean about the different types of effects you can get.

So what digital cameras can you have complete shutter speed and aperture control over?

Digital Slr’s are by far better as far as controlling the amount of light that comes onto your sensor. It’s a little hard to get this control with an ordinary point-and shoot- digital camera because you can’t control the shutter speed or aperture independently. On a pro-sumer camera it’s bit better because you can change the exposure value, but still, you can’t change the shutter speed alone.

Although on a pro-sumer, you may have a reading called “e/v” which stands for “exposure value”. An “e/v number” is really a measurement of the cameras combination between aperture and shutter speed. I don’t have time to go into great explanation now but if you can change the exposure value or “e/v” you have a little more scope than the point and shoot digital camera. You can still experiment pretty well if you have one of these digital cameras. However a single lens reflex digital camera is the ideal. It allows you to control the shutter speed alone, independently, without affecting the adjustment of the aperture.

To summarise, you can get beautifully artistic shots by having a sense of what works intuitively, then couple that with a good sense of photographic technical knowledge and you are well on your way! So start with trying out different shutter speeds first and then move on to aperture, then try both.

Happy shooting!

Amy Renfrey

An example of fast shutter speed. Picture by Charlie Lawrence.

An example of slow shutter speed.

Picture courtesy of http://www.geocities.com/COKINFILTERSYSTEM/graduated_filters.htm

This week one of my loyal customers asked me a brilliant question about Neutral Density filters. It was so good I just had to answer it via this article. You’ll most likely appreciate this digital photography tip as much as he will.

“A question, I want to get a graduated filter, however, all the one’s I see are graduated grey, are they still ND and will not affect the colour? Very best regards, Pete.”

What Pete’s digital photography question is all about is the common confusion of photography equipment looking like something different to what we first expect.

When choosing a filter for our digital photography its best to first look at them as tools. Firstly in order to maintain clarity about ND filters, firstly think about what you need then work your way from there. Pete’s a fantastic photographer and is ready to move to the next level with his digital photography equipment choices, which is where I come in.

The answer to Petes digital photography question is yes, they are still ND, but like all filters, the colour will be affected. I’ll explain.

ND filters are predominately used to darken a bright sky so that both the sky and subject can be properly exposed. Graduated ND filters have varying degrees of “graduated grey.” The Graduated ND filter comes in a few different types, but can really be broken down into two main categories. They are; hard edge and soft edge.

As the name suggested a Hard Edge is mainly applied when there is a sudden difference in the luminance of the digital photo, such as an overexposed sky over a landscape. The soft edge filter is mainly applied to a digital photo that has less distinct over and under exposed areas such as the same landscape but perhaps taken at approaching dusk when the light is not do hard. A soft filter just gently tones down harder areas of light. It’s less dramatic and can often be used very well in black and white photography to give the digital photo a “boost” of the dramatic.

You can have a variety of ND filters that go from a weak graduated grey to quite a strong graduated grey. The “intensity” of graduated grey is described by numbers. So for example a weak graduated grey ND filter is known as “ND2X”. And the strongest is “ND8X”.

All filters affect digital photography colour whether subtly or dramatically. You can have an ND filter that’s quite soft but still darkens an area of the digital photography image. Even though it’s subtle, anything you put onto that lense will be affected. But it depends what we mean by “affected.”

If we mean the colours disappear and change completely…well a lot depends on that such as the intensity of grey, the colour at the time of day, the seasons etc. If you are using a Full graduation from top to bottom then your colours will most definitely change. They will become darker. However if you are using a less intense ND filter, then you’ll notice the change in colour is not as apparent. You‘ll notice that the lighter ND filters will have more of a polarizing affect, the darker areas being at the top and not so much shading at the bottom.

Graduated ND filters are brilliant in times of excessive brightness coming from the top of the sky for example. You can use an ND filter to darken an overly bright sky and keep the main subject’s luminance the same. It has a terrific influence over evening up unbalanced light. It can effectively tone down over exposed areas in your digital photography.

Happy Shooting,

Amy Renfrey

For sports enthusiasts, there’s nothing more exciting than sports people playing their favourite game. The sight of the field, rink or golf course initiates the thrill and anticipation. This, combined with digital photography, can provide some amazing photographic opportunities. However it’s not a matter of point the camera at the person diving for the ball or puck and snapping away. It’s a lot more complicated than that.

In digital photography ’sports’ can be quite challenging. The sports people do not present an easy task of being photographed because of the amount of high movement. However, you can indeed achieve great sports digital photography. Most excellent sports digital photography requires good planning and execution.

Here are some exclusive tips for gaining fantastic sports shots in your digital photography.

First things first; know your digital camera. I recommend taking note and practicing first all the settings that sports photography needed. You may find yourself going for the faster shutter speed, increased ISO and burst mode. Let’s take a look at all these things on your digital camera and see how they can be applied to give you sensational sports photos.

High shutter speeds:

As with all moving objects, in order to capture the “frozen in time” look in digital photography a fast shutter speed is required. The faster the movement the fast the shutter speed will need to be. In digital photography the general consensus is that the shutter speed needs to be faster than that of the subject. For example if you have a sliding puck across ice and there is a someone about to take a dive for it then its necessary to quickly mentally assess how fast that person might be traveling at. If they are traveling at approximately 50 kilometers (approx 32 miles) per hour then you may find a very fast shutter speed is needed for this digital photo.

A very fast shutter speed in digital photography may be anything from 500th of a second or higher. For high speed movement you may want to consider an even faster shutter speed of 1000^th of a second or something in that range.

Keep in mind that in digital photography a fast shutter speed works to reduce some of the light which is why a higher ISO is often necessary. (I’ll talk about that in a minute.) Usually a if a ball, such as a baseball going at around 145 kilometers an hour (90.09 miles per hour) a shutter speed of around 1/4000 will get you that “suspended ball in mid air” type pf photo. For physical movement, such as someone leaping to catch a football, a shutter speed of 1/500 or over is a good place to start.

Now this is all very well if your scene if well lit. But what if you are taking your digital photography shots indoors at night and the light is not quite enough to provide enough light? In most instances, an indoor stadium an night time will be well lit, but that doesn’t always ensure good digital photos. In sports photography we need to understand that we can only control the artistic value and input of our digital photo and the control of the camera. We can’t control the lighting on the scene being such a public event. In digital photography sports photos we must realize that it’s going to be a challenge to begin with. So here are something’s you can in your digital sports photography to increase the amount of light.

If you have a light tool on your digital camera such as a histogram you can get a good idea of what the light levels are like on your sensor. With this handy tool you can adjust the ISO at the time of your pictures taking.

Increase your ISO: A high ISO in digital photography simply means the sensitivity to light that your digital camera has. In a nutshell the more ISO you have increased the image to, the less light the sensor needs. In sports photography an ISO of 400 or higher can work really well. The downside to this is that it does increase noise. To combat this you can use noise reduction software in the post editing process such as Noise Ninja or increase the LAB mode in the post editing process. Don’t be afraid to try a few shots at 400, 800 and even as high as 1600.

Burst mode:
In most sports digital photography this will be one of the settings you will turn to. Burst mode is also known as ‘continuous shooting’. This ‘continuous’ shooting mode allows you to get a sequence of shoots in succession. You can increase your chances of getting that ideal “split second perfect shot” that you might not be able to get by pre-emption or in normal shooting. This also works so beautifully if your digital camera has a painfully long lag time. I’ve used this so many times to get around the high lag my Sony Cyber shot has got. Some cameras have 3 frames per second and some go up to 12 frames per second. You simply select this mode and hold your finger on the shutter button and it will fire off as many shots in 1 second as it can.

Okay so I’ve been talking about your digital camera and the setting’s used for ideal sports digital photography, so what about any external equipment? If you have been thinking about this you’re spot on. You can take as much time with your settings but there’s not much point if you can’t get close to the action. There’s no point having a picture with perfect lighting and perfect action if the players are like dots on a sheet of paper. You need a good telephoto lens if you can’t get close up. A telephoto lens brings you closer because of its long distance capability. It will get you closer to the action but will need a faster shutter speed.

Many fantastic sports digital photos are taken with an emphasis on a very fast shutter speed, an f stop of around the 2.8 mark to blur the background and focus in on the subject. You may find that if your sportsperson is visually separated from the background and you take the digital photograph with a telephoto lens you’ll have a more shallow depth of field which can give you a more powerful feeling in your digital photo. You can get away with a good optical zoom lens, but you’ll get far better digital sports shots with a proper telephoto.

So what about the artistic side of sports photography with your digital camera? Plenty!

Pre-emption and Emotion is the key to good art.

When taking sports photography you probably won’t find a more public display of human emotion. The emotions of a sports person range from intense anticipation to extreme disappointment or extreme exhilaration. Pre empting when these emotions take place is they key to getting artistic and impressive sports photos. This comes with practicing your digital photography.

SO much pressure is placed on our athletes, expecting them to perform so we can enjoy the show and the investors can enjoy their returns. This is another reason why I say to get a telephoto lens so you can capture the emotions on their faces and their body language. It makes for superb photography. For ideas on ice hockey, have a look at some ice hockey images that are great study tools.

Don’t just look at these digital photos, you must study them. Take on the attitude that studying sports photography will improve your digital sports photos ten fold. You will have a style to emulate and copy to start with then eventually, when you become confident, you’ll start to adopt your own style.

Happy shooting,

Amy Renfrey

To really study digital sports photography check out these sites: http://www.espn.com/ and http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/ and http://cbs.sportsline.com/

Image by Jason Antony

This week, I’ve had the privilege of being very busy with photography. Included in my great fortune was a question by a lovely gentleman by the name of Steve asking about depth of field. He asked me about taking photos of flowers and getting the “perfect depth of field.”

In an email to me, Steve explained “ I like to photograph flowers, very close. OK, no problem if the flower is fairly flat…needing very little depth of field. The problem occurred when I tried to get the outside and inside of a 1 and 1/2 inch flower at about 1 inch away. There is just not enough depth of field! Got any more ideas for me? Thanks again, Steve.”

If I am correct in my understanding, what Steve is asking is about getting a depth of field close enough for digital macro photography shots of flowers but not getting too close where the parts of the flower is in focus and parts are out of focus. Without actually seeing what he is referring to, I beleive I can help.

In digital macro photography and traditional macro photography taking photos can be a fine balance between distance and the camera lens. You certainly can take ideal macro shots but you need to look at the lenses you are using. If you are using a high magnification in your macro lenses then you will find your depth of field is shortened considerably. The more magnification you go in your digital photography lenses the less depth of field you have. The less magnification you have, the more depth of field you have and the more the camera will look further a field.

So what’s the answer? In my experience I have found that the right depth of field was obtained (take this picture for example) by taking off the “flower Setting” on auto, and using macro lenses instead. (You can certainly use the flower setting if you don’t have enough magnification in your lenses.) I used mag x 7 for this one. That means that I used one macro lens that screwed onto the front of my lens with a magnification of 1. I stood up close and realized I needed to be closer in, so I added another lens that was a magnification of 2. Hence magnification of 3. I felt I still wasn’t close enough so I used another lense with a magnification factor of 4 and then I was satisfied with my result. That’s when I ended up with beautiful magnification of 7.rose-2.jpg

Mag 7 is pretty close. The closer you are the sharper your nearest points will be, but you may find the depth of field is very touchy. What I mean buy that is that if you take a flower that’s 5cm across, the first section will be in focus which may only be the first centimeter, yet the rest of the flower will not. This is why you need to remember to experiement with taking the flower setting off and just using different macro lenses to give you the most accurate depth of field instead. The right magnification will create the right depth of field for you.

Don’t forget to use a tripod, or monopod. Outside even the slightest breeze can ruin your flower macro photo. Any slight movement, even you breathing accidentally on the flower, can blur the whole picture.

To summarise, its your lenses and distance of the camera that will provide the most accurate depth of field for your flower photography.

Happy shooting,

Amy Renfrey

About 3 weeks ago I received a fantastic digital photography question from a lovely gentleman named John, on my blog about the Histogram. It was such a good question that I simply had to respond by writing about it. He asked me this question; “I’ve heard people say that it dangerous to just change the lighting because that moves the whole histogram, and thus you lose the some of the colors. What do you think about that?”

I think he is right and I thank him very much for asking me this question. When you are post editing your digital photography via the handy Histogram, it does change the whole lighting components in your digital photograph. This is why it’s important to study the Histogram as you are taking your digital photos so you learn exactly the impact it has.

To really understand what does work in digital photography we first must understand that this is an art form. I’ve always said, and will continue to say that all good photography comes from the photographer, not the camera. On saying that, this is where tools such as the Histogram come in very handy to enhance the digital photos you have taken. I don’t care what anyone says, post editing tools are no substitute for artistic talent.

So let’s look at Johns question in detail for enhancing your digital photography. The way the Histogram works is to indeed reduce the overall light very effectively and decrease it just as effectively. The beauty about the Histogram is that it allows you to do this easily and with more control. As far as the colours go whenever you change the light the colours will be affected, there is no doubt about that. And at the same time, if you have a digital photograph that’s suffering from overexposure you can reduce the light and the colours will be richer. You can also increase the beauty of colours by getting rid of underexposure. Increasing the light by using a Histogram can bring out the real blues and greens in a digital photo.

The Histogram is a tool I love because you can have fun and learn with it. You can learn what overexposure and what underexposure in a digital does, and change the light accordingly. But John is right, if you have too much light or too little light, you can loose colour and definition of colour easily. That’s why the Histogram should be used only when needed and to enhance lighting rather than change colours or affect composition.

Let’s take for example this photo I took a few months ago of Karen. My aim for this picture was a candid picture where I could keep the colours as natural as possible. I was luck to have an overcast day under shelter, which enhanced the beauty of the colours already in the picture. The picture has a lot of blue tones thanks to the overcast light, but is offset by her hair colour and skin tone.

If we increase the light using the Histogram, what would happen?

John is right, we loose colour. So, on the other hand, what happens if we decrease the light?

You can see how the digital photo has lost definition now? This is why I decided not to use the Histogram on this digital photo because I like the light and colour as it is. I felt the natural light was nice so I kept it that way. Most importantly Karen loved it.

Remeber that a Histograms purpose is about regaining the even balance of light.

So whenever you are using any digital photography post editing tools, make sure you are using it for the purpose of enhancement, and learning.

Happy shooting

Amy Renfrey