Jump start to great portraits

A lot of us donot think of limb chops during a portrait. A lovely portait on a carefully chosen background, for only that, arms from wrist is gone or legs from calves are gone or one arm is gone, or sometimes from elbow.

This seriously is not appealing particularly for a lovely portait.

Here is a picture from one of the forums that shows the limb chops that are permitted and not really appreciated. And as the saying - "A picture is worth a 10 pages of explanation", this is crisp and makes so much of sense.

This would be jump start to taking beautiful portraits.

Fun Shaped Bokehs

Its been quite a while I wrote a post. Things are keeping me busy. Not a lot happening on the hobby front.

To say, got a lovely Canon Speedlite 430ex ii as V'day gift and its sickening to my stomach to say this - I have not yet learnt to do it in manual mode.

But got to play with the camera and bokeh for the "attempted vday themed pictures". A couple of them turned out well.

The set up was like this: A dark colored background - preferably black, a bunch of natural light and some holiday lights over the backdrop.

The lens opening is circular and that is why we see circle bokehs of lights in the background. To get shaped bokehs it is simple - one needs to change the shape of the lens opening. For this, all I did was to change/modify the lens opening with a precut piece of paper.

To explain: cut desired shape in a piece of construction paper (not necessarily black). Let it be small - really small - a little smaller than a cent. Cutting it too big would let in too much of light and the result would not be as appealing .

With a piece of cellophane tape, tape it around the lens - nice and snug, that there would not be a gap for any light to enter from anywhere else, but only through the cut shape of the paper. Prime lens should keep things simple since with it you will not have to adjust the zoom at any point.

Now the settings part: by putting a paper in front of the lens and blocking in a lot of light, the images are prone to come out under-exposed. So pop up the ISO to the next level and decrease the shutter speed.  It is all set.

I just have the end result. The ones of the actual setup has gone missing. Means, one more victim due to my 11 pm editing and making copies of images. Also the picture showing the lens with the heart shaped cut out paper pasted to it, is gone too.

And the pictures after very mild editing like straightening and cropping:

 

The above pictures were taken very much next to a window on a nice and sunny day, with abundant sunlight coming in. The mug is lit by the natural light. And I kept the back drop far off - like atleast 3 ft away from the mug so that appears dark enough. Also getting close to the subject makes the bokeh bigger and makes the subject stand out.

The above set tells all about the shaped lens opening and the regular lens opening.

Will soon make a post on the pictures of the spring flowers and my trial and error pictures with the Speedlite on.

The Triangle

For any beginner with DSLR, the first book that will be recommended to go through before trying their hands on manual mode is Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson. This is one book that has never been easy for me to borrow from the library, since the "on hold" due has always been pretty long.  But definitely worth the wait. I happened to read it for the second time recently and this post is on the words ( or close to) of the author of this book.

Shutter Speed, Exposure and ISO are the three key concepts that needs thorough understanding before one starts exploring and experimenting in manual mode. So those three put together is called "The Photographic Triangle" and the heart of the triangle is Light metering. I have always written about these three concepts a lot earlier, but they have never been combined back-to-back to make a lot of sense. So doing it here.

ISO: Ranges from 100 to 3600 or beyond. Setting the ISO to bigger numbers allows more light into the camera, making pictures brighter even with limited lighting. Say for example, inside the house/building, where the light is very low, popping ISO to 200 or 400 adds sense to taking indoor pictures, which might otherwise turn out underexposed.

But it has its cons, the grains. Bigger ISOs brings noise to the picture making it look grainy. Well, that is not a problem these days, since with a lot of ready-to-download free softwares like Noiseware, it doesnt take more than a couple of minutes to fix the noise and making the picture noise-free  and smooth.

Exposure: It is the f stop number. It is all about how big is the lens opening to capture the details of the picture. The bigger aperture (smaller f number), it takes in every detail of a smaller area and the remaining (what we call here as background) becomes all blurry giving a beautiful bokeh. Same way, the smaller aperture (bigger f number), it takes in all the details - from the back to the front making it a no bokeh, all intact shot.

Exposure allows room for the concept depth of field or shallow depth of field. Any F stop that covers all the details in the shot from back ground to foreground has got a good DOF, and anything the makes the foreground - subject stand out from the background makes a shallow DOF.

Also, exposure determines the shape of the bokeh. Say for example a smaller f stop gives perfect circle bokehs ( shape of the lens as such), and anywhere inbetween like f 8 to f 11 gives hexagonal bokehs and anything beyond that doesnt render much bokeh in general.

Shutter Speed: This determines how long the shutter of the lens remains opened and thus says how much light gets in depending on the external light situation. The longer the shutter is opened more light enters and vice verse.

So going by common sense, during low light situations we keep the shutter open for longer time (like 30 seconds exposure or 10 seconds exposure) to allow in more light and during a bright sunny day the shutter speed is high to allow minimal light just enough to light the scene/shot.

After setting the ISO and aperture, adjusting the shutter speed back and forth while holding the click button half way down, the camera usually tells which is the right shutter speed for this kind of specific setting. But as always, there is this concept called "creatively right" shutter speed which might not have to be the right shutter speed suggested by the camera. That is when the room for creativity is squeezed out.

And the heart of the triangle is the "light metering" which is definitely very vast to write in this post.

I would again suggest any newbie to photography who is truly interested to go through this above book atleast once. It definitely throws light on the abcs of the photography with a very simple language and doesnt confuse with fancy terms at all. 

Black and White Vs Grayscale

Black and White and Grayscale conversion are two entirely different concepts, often confused since there is a very thin line segregating the both.

I have been waiting to try my hands on Black and White and have never been happy with the grayscale conversion that Picasa or Picnik or anyother free photo-editing software that is available offers.

Blindly converting it to the so called "black and white" takes away the life of the otherwise beautiful picture when not done prepoerly. Black and White conversion is supposed to add more life or more drama to the scene and should not be taking out the life of the picture.

All the black and white conversion I have done in the past looked either muddy or flat, or too gray or too bland.

And now, by that I dont claim that I have done a great job with this bunch of b&w conversions (disclaimer) and I bet I will come up with better conversions again in another 2 months with the same set of pictures since I am still learning going by the example-  the pictures that I edit this week looks better than the ones that I edited last week.

The basics to get a better b&w shots are:

* Never shoot in B&W mode that is available in the camera settings. Converting them to b&w later is a lot simple than regretting to have taken the shot in color.

* High contrast shots are great for this.

* Lighting could possibly add some drama to the scene.

* Shoot at the lowest ISO

* Like it is always said, shoot in RAW. It works like a charm when taken for editing.

A few B&W conversions that I attempted:







THe order is Original- "do it all for me" conversion, and the "attempted" b&w conversion. I like the drama of over-exposed sky and the sail against the gray water than the overall gray scale found in the second picture.

The following one is definitely going to be easy on the eyes. In the order Original - auto conversion - manual conversion.

With a tight crop to compose the picture + tad bit of increasing the contrast + brightness to B&W pop up worked better than the all auto B&W conversion.  This above formula is very much possible with picnic or picasa too. Just that there is also the "auto b&w" option readily available and more easily accessible just to pamper us.

A few more in the order auto - manual conversion:

And some conversions which were genuinely not attempted anywhere else, but waited and done manually :





On the very last picture, I cringe for not having taken the whole circle and for having chopped off the top and bottom of it. Sigh!

Most of the pictures were taken in RAW (except for 1) and the conversions that I have done with PSE is very much possible to do with Picasa or Picnic too.  It is all about putting the "contrast" to work to pull out a bit of drama into the scene.

Editing is JOY!

Playing with PSE for the past couple of days. It is pure joy to explore it, though it definitely makes me feel like those good old days when I dreaded to come near a computer and explore as a kid.

I am intimidated by the super fancy iMac and adding to it is the PSE. But no, I am giving it a hard time too. Haha.

I just brushed the books here and there and without exploring, going through the books makes no-sense.

Once I started exploring PSE, with a couple of tutorials here and there, I think I am getting a hang of it. I read in so many forums, once you use PS, you would never return back to picnic or picasa. How true, I already feel this even with the "just started" phase.

A couple of pictures that I edited in the order of original followed by edited.

And how I refrained from using my camera in low light situtation and how I cringed about popping up the ISO way beyond 200. Anything beyond ISO 200 was forbidden to me these many days dreading the noise level. But oh wow, with a click, I definitely fixed the grains in the following picture. 

I also was able to fix the tower that stands close to the moon on the unedited pictures which has always disturbed me every time I looked at it.

Editing is a sea on its own and definitely as vast as photography itself. Definitely it is a "learn as you grow and explore" field and has so much room for creativity.

Early Stocking Stuffers!

The Holiday season is here in a good swing.

The long and never ending "wish-list" for my camera bag was partly and nicely taken care during the Thanks Giving Holidays.

Got a bunch of accessories like lens cleaning kit, lens hoods, polarizing filters, remote control and the biggest of all Photoshop Elements for the camera bag. Loved the deal since most of them came on a definitely reduced price. And needless to say the best of the deal was PSE which came for half the price.

And the last but definitely not the least and definitely doesnt belong to the "stocking stuffer" category is iMac. How I love to edit my pictures in this. It shows a lot of details that I fail to notice with my laptop.

Now I have a handful of books and list of websites to go through, learn and practice PSE which definitely doesnt seem to be easy at all. Off to crank the PSE :)

All about Freezing Motion.

Capturing a moving subject allows a lot of room for creativity. It allows one to show a normal scene with a zest.

Well, it is not applicable with a tiny little busy body which is driven by a busy mind, who wont sit or stay still for a millisecond to take a picture. I absolutely donot like it when Sujaya wont pose for me or stay still even to take a candid picture.

Controlling the shutter speed is the key to this.

It is always so much fun to play with different exposure as much as to play with different f stops. A slightly different exposure from the normal ones give amazing effects to an otherwise normal scene.

Taking a picture with a high shutter speed freezes the movement of the subject and this is possible where there is ample light source - be it natural or from flash.

And with slower shutter speed, a blurry, heavenly image is delivered, actually showing the movement to some extent.

A few of the high shutter speed shots from me:









The droplet photograph is one of the most difficult thing I have ever done so far. I had not expected it to be so difficult. The set up was to allow water dripping into another bowl and capture the water dripping, or the crown formed in the bowl - which ever you are lucky to get. With super high shutter speed, not knowing where to focus, chasing crazily the water drops and to the top of all - with super low light condition, it was definitely took out all my patience. But I am glad I atleast got 2 or 3 decent ones of over 250 shots.



The Sun would not look crisp like this without a high shutter speed. With a regular exposure, it will be mostly a white white sky.  No drama.



Again no drama with the moon, without this super high shutter speed. Moon should not be underestimated for its illumination. It sure brightens up the picture. So to capture the craters shoot it up to 200.

And some slow shutter speed shots. This definitely needs a very steady set of hands or better a tripod. I thik tripod works better in my case. (I am still learning to install the tripod - that is a different story)


That is a long exposure shot (30 secs) and one can also see a bit of light trails. The SF city from twin peeks.



Definitely not a great pic, but a good example. With exposure set at 10 secs, the July 4 fireworks from a very wrong spot. I cant stop cringing about this still.



With f at 22 or sometimes at 29 and exposure at about 1/4. Going below this makes no point since it makes the picture over exposed.

One thing that made me feel lucky when I wanted to take pictures of moving water with slow shutter speed is very low sun light or a perfectly over cast day. A normal sunny day means, there is no chance of getting a long exposure shot under direct light. (outdoors). Plain and simple - it blows out the shot thoroughly.





The list of "to try ideas" seems to be ever growing. And so is the camera bag wish list. The second one is literally spurting with the Thanksgiving and Christmas Holidays around.

But I dont dare to touch the camera, because - I cant resist uploading them right away and fixing them then and there. But with this laptop of mine, uploading and editing has become a problem. My laptop starts to suffocate and choke and ultimately hangs in a couple of minutes once I put in the SD card.  So taking it slow. Very slow. :)