Shooting an Event

Slides posted from last week's MYT Photography class below:



I included 3 different types of events as examples:

1) overnight group event (slide 2 and on)
2) smaller group evening event (slide 79 and on)
3) large event like Gracepoint Live (slide 91 and on)

Also there's pointers on how to shoot classroom settings (slide 59 on) as well as how to deal with common obstruction difficulties such as a pillar being in the way.

Some of the pictures I used in the slides are from the Official White House Photostream (found site via Kevan's post). Its very interesting to find out all the exposure information (shutter speed, aperture, ISO setting) for each picture, the lens choice and focal length, whether flash was used, etc. (See slides from Exposure class). From what I can tell, this White House official photographer only uses prime lens (prime = non-zoom) such as 24mm, 35mm, 50mm, 135mm with a very large maximum aperture. To find out all this info, click on the "More properties" link when you get to flickr. You can learn a lot by seeing how this photographer (Pete Souza) composes his pictures, what he decides to leave in, and how he deals with objects that are in the way, etc. Highly instructive!

Further reading:
11 Tips for Better Candid Photography

A Quick Intro to Adobe Lightroom

Hello! For those that don't know me, my name is David Park and I'm a junior in Kairos (was previously in a2f Blue). I've been doing photography for about a year now and I'm going to give a quick introduction to Adobe Lightroom (LR). The purpose of this post is two-fold.

1. Explain my workflow in post-processing (by which I mean everything between taking the picture and making it available to the public).
2. Give some of my subjective feedback on Adobe Lightroom in light of my experience with iPhoto and Picasa (which are free alternatives programs like Lightroom or Aperture).

My Workflow. Lightroom is different from photoshop in that it was created to be more of a workflow and organizational tool than anything else.

You can see on the top right the five modules (Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print, Web). I usually only use the first two which organizes your photos and edits them (respectively). The above screenshot shows the Library module. The folders you see to the left are exactly how the folders are also set up on your computer, which means when you make changes in Lightroom, the changes will be reflected in Finder or Windows Explorer. Lightroom makes it pretty easy to import your images. It's just a matter of plugging in your camera and clicking import.

After importing my images, I make an initial visual scan of all my pictures. The awesome thing about Lightroom is that it allows you to easily flag your pictures either as Pick, Unflagged, or Rejected (using the hotkeys P, U, and X). After going through it once, Command+Delete will delete all the "Rejected" photos, clearing up your hard drive of unwanted pictures. You can already see how Lightroom would help in organizing photos. There are also a bunch of other keywording, tagging, and other labeling options available in Library mode that I don't use.

The above screenshot shows you what the Develop module looks like. The left sidebar has a bunch of presets that come with Lighroom. You also have the option of creating your own presets. Basically if you click on a preset, it changes the sliders on the right to whatever you chose that preset to be beforehand. The sliders to the right are the brunt of the editing that Lightroom allows you to do. They're taken from Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) for those of you familiar with that plugin. From this point on, I'll take you through the editing of this image (I chose a JPEG though I shoot exclusively in RAW. I think a lot of people still use JPEG so I'll work with the limitations of JPEG. The JPEG vs. RAW discussion is another discussion that's worth a whole new post). Here's the original unedited JPEG. In all pictures, I check composition, white balance, and exposure.

• Composition: The question is... should I rotate or crop this photo? In this photo I chose not to do anything.
• White balance: My first thought is "it's good enough." Unless the white balance is really off or unless I'm trying to intentionally make it warm or cold, I sometimes just leave this until after I work on exposure. I may want to make this picture a bit warmer, but for now I'll leave it as is.
• Exposure: When I took this, the baby was in the shade and the background, which happens to be the ground, was in the sun so this left the baby underexposed. I want to increase the exposure to properly expose the baby.

Since the background on the picture is well exposed, just increasing the exposure will completely blow out the background. So instead, I pushed up the fill light slider which lightens up the darker areas. I also increased the "recovery" slider which takes bright highlights (the background) and makes them darker. This results in a very "washed out" looking image since the contrast (difference between darks and lights) has effectively been reduced. To compensate, I increased the contrast slider also.

Changing the sliders can often cause colors to look unnatural and in this case, I wanted to take away some of the color that came in because of increasing contrast. So I lowered the vibrance slider (this would be equivalent of decreasing saturation on the new iPhoto and checking "avoid saturating skin tones." In addition, I increased the clarity, which adds more detail and looks the picture look a bit more "gritty" (this is called "definition" in iPhoto). And with those adjustments here is the final image:

The great thing about Lightroom is that you can take specific edits that you did on an image and save them as a preset. You can also easily do batch editing. For example, if I took pictures of an indoor event and had to consistently underexpose and had incorrect white balance, then I can just edit one picture to correct exposure and white balance and then batch edit the rest, no matter how many there are. Side note: all the edits I did on this picture, I kept limited to edits you could replicate in free programs such as Picasa and iPhoto. I'll write another post later on showing you the edits I did using the more powerful tools in Lightroom which is what gave me this picture: However, I do want to say that I believe the Lightroom basic adjustments work better than either iPhoto or Picasas. That is to say that if you did the same exact adjustments using iPhoto, you wouldn't get the same result. Of course, the saying "you get what you pay for" does stand even in the case of post-processing. I'm really happy with Lightroom and what I can do with it and I "can't go back to iPhoto or Picasa" because I've grown used to it. However, whatever program you use, it's about getting used to that program (iPhoto '09 is actually VERY powerful for a free program). That is all for now!

How do I ... ?

In the beginning of Photography MYT, about half the class wanted to know "How DO I take better pictures??" I think the class on composition especially helped for that. So given that we've gone over EXPOSURE and COMPOSITION now, what's next??

How do I ... You tell me! We'll be posting some useful articles in the weeks ahead for y'all.

Composition Examples

I'm posting the slides I used last Friday for our Photography MYT class. In these slides are many professional photographs so that you can see how the pros do it. They just so it so well as you'll see.

The topic was composition, which is essentially the art of arranging all the stuff that's in your picture. I didn't cover all the composition principles, but there are many in there.

There's over 100 slides, so as you go through them, tell me if you can, which slide or picture did you like, and why did you like it? What drew you to it?



Further reading:
5 Elements of Composition in Photography
5 More Elements of Composition in Photography

Lost your camera manual?

I have a box where I put all my manuals ... from microwave to rice cooker to IKEA furniture. I have my camera manuals there too. If you lost your manual, just download it from the web!

Here's some sites for some of the cameras we're using in MYT: Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Sony and Fuji

For the MYT students, please familiarize yourselves with your particular camera's manual so that you can refer back to it when you need to. Let me know if there's any questions ...

MYT Slides Posted

I'm posting the slides I used last Friday for my students in the Photography MYT (Multiply Your Talents) class.


The main topic I talked about was exposure. Exposure is the total amount of light collected onto your camera's sensor in order to create that picture. An over-exposed picture is a situation where too much light is collected, and an under-exposed picture is a situation where too little light is collected. (In time, we may have our own preferences as to liking a slightly over-exposed or under-exposed picture for a given subject, but in general the leeway is no more than a couple of stops before the photo is neither usable nor simply pleasing to look at.)

In this first example, the photo is under-exposed. The people are in shadow and you can't really tell what colors are what. Note that the background is not under-exposed however. The exposure settings used were: 1/125s (shutter speed), f/7.1 (aperture), ISO unrecorded (unfortunately). This exposure is clearly not sufficient for the picture.


1/125s, f/7.1, ISO unrecorded

For this second picture, more exposure was used. You can clearly see the blue jacket now, and the skin tones are nice and clear. Note the background however: the ocean and the hills have lost quite a bit of detail and are now over-exposed; it was a good trade off since I didn't fill-flash on my Canon P&S (read more on fill-flash here and here). I chose to expose for the people (in the foreground) over the water and hills (in the background). The exposure settings used were: 1/160s (slightly faster shutter speed than the first), f/2.8 (much larger aperture opening than the first), ISO still unrecorded (but unchanged from the first).


1/160s, f/2.8, ISO unrecorded

Got a question? Just post a comment and I'll field them that way so that everyone can learn ...

Now for the more technically inclined, the increased amount of light used in the second picture is almost 3 stops (compared with the first picture). This amounts to almost 8 times the light collected onto the sensor (calculated from this table), which explains why the under-exposure on the people was able to be corrected. In general, you can see that it was the aperture that did the trick (f/7.1 --> f/2.8). In other words, the aperture opening got bigger, thus allowing more light in. The shutter speeds are very close together and not a big contributor to the exposure being corrected (1/125s --> 1/160s).

Higher learning:
Learning about Exposure - The Exposure Triangle
Exposure in Photography

Black Rapid R-strap

Kev pointed me to this strap and i think it's awesome.  It's very nice for a lot of active photography.  I took it to Magic Mountain this past week and it really kept me mobile.  It was easy to move from my hip to take a pic right away and I didn't have to worry about it awkwardly banging into everything.  

here's a video from the manufacturer:

Flash fill-in part2

Just wanted to follow up with Maurice's post with some different scenarios in which i've tried to use flash. A key principle I try to use with flash is that i want to make the shot look like there was no flash. i hate the extra shine and bouncing light that i see from a lot of flash-driven shots. This is the beauty of being able to manually adjust your settings. Again, I don't have a lot of before/after pictures that are identical but I have a few sample shots that show these principles.

Basically there are 2 principles to keep in mind. Actually 4 according to zack arias, but i think these are the easiest to start with.

1. Shutter Speed - controls ambient exposure (background)
2. Aperture - controls flash exposure (how bright the flash lights up the scene)

Setting 1 - indoors with low light. You want to light up the whole scene - not just the subjects in the foreground. You want to include the background. Aperture around f/4 is good. play with it for necessary lighting that you want.

• Lower the shutter speed - like 1/20, 1/30
• the first picture has a shutter speed of 1/100
• 
• the second picture has a shutter speed of 1/30 and the background comes in a lot more.
• 

Setting 2 - outdoors and heavily back-lit. This is right from Mo's tutorial.

• Key here is to increase the Shutter speed and decrease aperture.
• the first picture shows a great background but my daughter's face is a little dark b/c it's caught in the shadow. look at the railing. this was at 1/320 and f/16 but no flash. any more adjustments and i would have blown out the background although she would have been lit better.
• 
• I added the flash here with the same settings and you can see how well and evenly it's lit-up. I would say part of this is b/c of the Nikon TTL, which rocks, in my humble opinion.
• 

What's Your Gear?

Definitely, this is one of the most-oft asked questions for photographers. What gear do you use and why? Of course, like most fields, it's not the gear, but it's the person behind the gear that is important. Having said that there are some nice features that new gear offers. As technology advances, prices rise and drop, and as skills get refined, we have many more options and variables to consider when we are purchasing a piece of equipment. We may have some gear that is beyond our needs and understanding or we may crave more functionality. Anyway, i think it's nice to see what gear we use and why. It may save each other money, time and energy in constantly looking for what's out there.

Let's share the following: body we use, primary lens and why and one tool that revolutionized your picture taking.

john
Body: Nikon D300
* details: (1.5 crop factor, cmos, 12mp, 6fps, w. grip 8fps, 3in lcd, 51pt AF). low-noise level is amazing at high isos. at 1600-3200 indoors is beyond belief.

Lens: 17-35 2.8 Af-s
* this is my primary lens b/c for a non full-frame it gives me a great wide angle and some nice close-ups in a small room setting. for larger venues, like auditoriums or large group gatherings i have to go longer. but for in your living room or home it's great.

Tool:
* for me it would be my flash - sb600. just changed all my indoor low-light pictures. if i could afford the luxury and price, i'd get the sb900.