WordPress

Alright, so it's only been a few weeks, but I figure if I'm going to switch, I should do it now...

I've moved my blog over to WordPress, so please check it out at:

fmycamera.wordpress.com

Natural Light Part II (a trend is developing...)

So, what you'll see in this sample photo that's the same as my first post on natural light is that it's relying on a big window as the light source. Even more specifically, it's a big window that is getting indirect sunlight so it's even softer.

Here's a photo of the room, so you can see just how much light was coming through the window.

I had my mom stand perpendicular to the window so that it gave a nice side light. Using natural light does tend to result in less detail and sharpness than a flash, but sharper isn't always better, and after all, natural is in its description.

Olympus E-620. 50mm @ f2.0, 1/250 sec, ISO 100.

Using Exposure Compensation

Sure, you can shoot in full manual and really control the exposure. But, if you're like me and generally shoot in aperture priority mode and use the matrix metering, then there are cases where using exposure compensation can really help.

If you're taking a picture that has a specific subject you want the focus to be on (like a portrait), then making sure that subject is properly exposed is more important than worrying about blown highlights (although Niels may take issue) or underexposed shadows.

Deciding when you should use exposure compensation is based on your subject and the background. In an extreme example, when someone is in front of a lot of snow, then the camera's metering might underexpose the subject's face, because it's trying to properly expose the entire image when the thing you care most about is small relative to everything else. Many point and shoot cameras actually have face recognition designed to meter a photo based on the faces for this very reason.

Something else to keep in mind is that the LCD screen on your camera tends to boost the brightness for readability in sunlight and in doing so, even underexposed images may look good on screen.

So, if you're shooting something that is darker relative to everything else in the frame, then you can adjust the exposure compensation in increments. Most cameras do it in 0.3 or 0.7 steps. I tend to do +0.7 at most, because anything more than that and it's likely that you really will be blowing highlights on more than you want to in the frame. A value of +1.0 would mean the camera is compensating for a full f-stop over what it was metering for the image. For a full definition of f-stops, you can check out Wikipedia.

Here's an example scenario where I used +0.7 EV, because I was taking a picture of Roxy on the light carpet. Because she's so dark, I often lose detail in her face, and by increasing the exposure compensation helps ensure more contrast and detail in her fur.

Olympus E-620 @ 50mm, f2.0, 1/200, ISO 400, +0.7 EV.

What using high ISO really means

Getting over my aversion to using anything over ISO 400 has meant understanding better what the implications are of using higher ISOs.

Yes, high ISOs are necessary to get shutter speeds in low light that are fast enough to prevent motion blur or camera shake.

Yes, the drawbacks to image quality when ISOs get high is that it introduces noise, decreases contrast and colors can start to get a little muddy--BUT, a properly exposed image can hide this.

What it really means is that when shooting high ISO, the margin of error is a lot smaller and the key is to ensure that it's properly exposed. More specifically, ensure it's not underexposed. When a high ISO image is underexposed and you try and lighten the shadows, the detail is usually not there, but a lot of noise is.

So, just remember for anything over ISO 400 (at least for Olympus cameras), be sure to properly expose your shot, and I even err on the side of overexposing to be doubly sure.

Here's a shot from today that I took at ISO 800. Roxy moves a lot and I needed ISO 800 to make it fast enough to try and keep it sharp. You'd have a hard time knowing that it was ISO 800 though, because it was well exposed and because so much of the photo is bokeh (the out-of-focus blur), which helps hide noise.

Olympus EP-1 @ 20mm, f1.7, 1/125 second, ISO 800,+0.7 EV.

Sunset Shoot Fail

Well, with daylight savings time there has been a lot more daylight to work with after work. So, I thought I'd take tonight as an opportunity to try a sunset shoot using fill flash.

The result failed for a few reasons:

1) The sunset wasn't very impressive. It was still a little early when I took the photo, but it was obvious it wasn't instantly going to turn into a good one.

2) The background is distracting. This was a composition issue and if I thought I'd be able to get a winner out of it, I would have tried something else, but it was clear it was a fail, because...

3) My poor choice of flash. I decided to try off-camera and bare. Either one on it's own might have been okay, but that combination plus poor flash position resulted in some hard shadows that made for an unflattering picture.

So, this post is all about what not to do. At least you can see the hard shadow a bare flash (at 1/16 power no less) produced when shot off-camera to the right and pointing slightly up. Shooting head-on with a flash on-camera would have helped with the shadows here--although a head-on direct flash usually doesn't produce very interesting results when it's the only light source in front of the subject.

Anyway, if I were really determined to try and salvage the shoot, I'd have made the aperture smaller so the sky wasn't as overexposed as well as either moving the flash so the shadows weren't going up and across her face, or pointing it up more so that it wasn't as hard a light. But instead, I decided posting a failure was just as good.

Olympus E-620 @ 50mm, f2.8, 1/200, ISO 100. Strobist: Bare 285HV low camera right @ 1/16 power.

Of Course, Natural Light Works Too

I was prepared for another gray day today, so I wasn't expecting the sun to be showing through this morning. While my recent focus may have been on shooting with a flash, the morning light was a chance to use the windows in our living room using the same principles.

Here's a shot of the corner of our living room with windows on two sides. The smaller window on the right is where more light was coming in through since it faces East.



The upside to natural light is that it's constant and makes it easier to meter. The downside is that indoors, it's often not as strong as a flash, so I had to open the aperture up as far as it would go as well as using ISO 200 to get a shutter speed that would be fast enough to keep the image sharp.

In this first shot, Jenny was facing the brightest window, with the larger window to her left. You can see it softens the light a little bit so that the shadows across her face aren't too hard and she's still well-lit from the front. This is similar to using a big umbrella camera right.



This second shot was taken with her back to the large window and light from the bright window coming from her left (obviously). Here, there are more shadows on the right side of her face (and hard shadows around her smile), while the left side has parts that are almost blown out. This is similar to bouncing a flash off a close wall.




Both shots were taken with my Olympus E-620 @ 50mm f2.0.

Strobist: Day 1

One key to becoming a better photographer is understanding light. And when most of my free time is spent after the sun's gone down, it's even more important to understand how to use a flash. So far, I've been experimenting with bouncing a flash, but based on posts by Laurence Kim and having lurked the Strobist.com group on Flickr, I've become inspired to try using a flash off-camera. This has been popular for a while and a blogger several years ago coined the phrase "Strobist," which stuck. Strobist.com is still extremely popular and it contains several tutorials that are very helpful for starting out.

Honestly, there's so much information out there, it's actually a little overwhelming on knowing where to start. An initial setup can actually be pretty easy and inexpensive when you get down to it. If you already have an amateur level of gear, including a tripod and a flash, then really there are only 3 things you need:

1) An umbrella. This is to diffuse the light and is what's called a "modifier." A soft box is another modifier that controls the light better, but is more expensive and isn't as quick to setup or tear down. I went with a white, shoot through, which is closer to a soft box. The bigger the umbrella, the softer light. They're measured based on the arc, not the diameter, and I went with a 43" white satin umbrella from Westcott. Umbrellas can be had for around $20.

2) A swivel holder (with a shoe for the flash). This is the part that connects to the tripod (or light stand), holds the umbrella, and the flash attaches to it, pointed at the center of the umbrella. There are a lot of options out there, but the biggest thing is to make sure it has a shoe for the flash (preferably with a screw to lock it in place) and that it has the adapters to ensure it fits on your tripod/stand. Here's one from Adorama, although again, there are a lot of different options out there all around the $15-$20 price range.

3) A way to trigger the flash off-camera. Many cameras can optically trigger a flash by using its onboard flash to send a quick pulse. Any "slave" flash that can be optically triggered (sometimes called wireless triggering) will respond to this little pulse and in turn it'll fire. If the camera/flash combination cannot be optically triggered, then it requires a wire or radio trigger, which come in a breadth of options as well.

Well, today my new gear arrived and tonight I was able to give it a try with a simple setup. Using the 43" white shoot-through umbrella set up in our bedroom, I took some shots of Jenny (and a couple with Roxy, too). The umbrella was set up camera high left pointing at Jenny at about a 45-degree angle. Some shots had the light angled more from the side, but always from her right (camera left).

One challenge I had was with focusing. Even with all the lights turned on, the auto-focus struggled and would hunt. When I switched to manual focus, I had a hard time finding the right focal point given the E-620's dim viewfinder. So it goes. I started with my 40-150mm, but switched to my 14-54mm after focusing issues. I also shot a couple with my EP-1/20mm Panny.

Here's one from the "shoot." It's actually harder than I had made it out to be in my mind, so I'll need a lot more practice. I also struggle with having a place to shoot without distracting backgrounds. Oh well, practice is the fun part, right?

Something else I found interesting is that between the 3 lenses I used, there were some noticeable differences. The 40-150mm was sharp, but it didn't have the nice tones that the 14-54 did. The 20mm on the E-P1 was really sharp, and had really strong contrast. Here's a set with some other pictures from tonight where I'll keep adding more as I practice.

Converting to B&W

Converting a photo to black & white is something that can be done dozens of different ways--yet there is no right answer. However, I will say that I think many of the methods can leave the end result looking a little flat.

I'll get to my (current) favorite last, but here are some of the other basic ways. And first, here is the original photo without any post processing:



For all of these examples, I did adjust the levels and brightness/contrast the same amounts (mainly to make the sky more interesting and also to darken the buildings in the background) before the final conversion.

GRAYSCALE

Here, PhotoShop Elements is discarding the color information and converting everything to a shade of gray. This, in my opinion, is the flatest end result.



"CONVERT TO B&W"

Using Elements' converions wizard for "Urban/Snaphots" this is the end result. It's similar to using "Filtered B&W" in Picasa and it creates certain colors differently. There are a number of different options such as "Portrait" and "Scenic Landscape."



DE-SATURATION

The nice thing about this one is that you can add it as an adjustment layer so you can turn it on and off without having to actually flatten the image (like you have to when converting to grayscale). Since saturation is about boosting colors, de-stauration is the opposite and moving the slider all the way to the left will result in a B&W image.



GRADIENT MAP

This is my current favorite method. This is also an adjustment layer that can be turned on and off, and what it does essentially, is it takes the darkest color in the photo and makes it black. The lightest color is white, and everything in between gets mapped to a shade of gray. Teh reason I like this method the best is that it seems to produce the richest results and keeps the midtones from becoming flat in the conversion process.

Completely subjective and up to the viewer to decide what they like best.

Bouncing in a Bigger Room

After the portrait of Jenny, I tried a similar setup with Jenny holding Roxy over her shoulder. This time, however, I tried it in a much larger room (master bedroom) instead of the master bath. The result was that when bouncing the flash, using similar camera settings (f5.6 @ 1/180), I had to boost the ISO to 200, and it still required more adjustment in PhotoShop from being underexposed in some parts--namely Roxy's face.

So, the quality of the photo isn't as good and you can see definite noise on Roxy in trying to get a similar high key look that was in the portrait of Jenny.

Lesson learned. Bouncing the flash in the bigger room still got a soft light, but it also was underpowered--which is also partly why I'm looking forward to the gear I have arriving next week that will allow me to shoot some off-camera flash stuff. More on that later, but here's the Roxy portrait.




Olympus E-620. f5.6 @ 1/180 with flash bounced camera right.

New Camera

So, while this may seem contradictory to my blog manifesto, let me explain why I got a new camera.

Underexposed photos are bad.

Overexposed photos are worse.

Out-of-focus and blurry photos worse still.

But the worst photos are the ones that are never taken.

There are times and places I wish I'd had my camera with me, and many of those are on occasions I consciously left my SLR behind. My new camera, the Olympus PEN E-P1, is a part of a new category of cameras that has the image quality of an SLR, but the size of a beefy point-and-shoot. This means I can travel lighter (although I'm traveling lighter anyway since I sold a lens to help pay for it), and on vacations I won't have a whole bag dedicated to gear.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to having a walkaround camera to hopefully catch more of those photo moments I've been missing.

Here it is with the 20mm 1.7 Panny.

Update: Here's a set of some snapshots on Flickr. So far, I'm impressed by the handling and feel of the camera (albeit it's definitely heavier than it looks, but it's solid). ISO 1600 also seems quite usuable--at least comapred to most of the Oly DLSRs I've had.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cmoran/sets/72157623567698088/

Self-Portraits are...

...self-indulgent, generally cheesy & bad...but good practice and harder than I thought.

With baseball season coming up soon, I threw on a Mariners hat and tried a self portrait in my kitchen--pretty unsuccessfully. First challenge was that while it was nice to have a swiveling screen and Live View, there wasn't enough light for it to focus once I triggered the shutter. So, I ended up having to focus manually on the Live View screen and then step back (because my wireless shutter release has a dead battery).

Second challenge was in trying to find a way to bounce the flash off the cabinets (and stainless steel fridge) in my kitchen in a way to try and soften the light. In general terms, the bigger the light source, the softer the light. Flashes are a relatively small light source and the end result is a hard shadow. By bouncing a flash against a wall, it spreads the light out across the wall (or ceiling) and it, in effect, becomes a bigger light source.

In this photo, you can see that bouncing it softened it a little bit (the softer shadow from the bill of the hat), and that I bounced it camera left, while I was facing in the direction the flash was pointed.

Anyway, here's a lame self-portrait. Go M's.

Olympus E-620. 35mm Macro @ f5.0. 1/125 @ ISO 100. Flash: FL-36. Because I knew it wasn't a very good photo, I just post processed in Picasa. Cropped, tuning of fill light, highlights and shadows--and of course, converted to B&W.

Lazy Photographer

No joke, I tend to be a fairly lazy photographer. A large number of the pictures I take are in my living room--more specifically, from my spot on the couch. I take lots of pictures of my wife and even more of my dog (or both together), so, I'll admit, this is going to be more effort than I'm used to.

Thanks in advance to my very understanding wife who's been willing to play along. At some point here I promise to branch out though and there will be pictures of things other than Jenny and Roxy. I may be asking people to be in photos in the future, so watch out...

In the meantime, here's my typical weeknight vantage point.

A GREAT resource

There's nothing like learning by trial and error. But nothing speeds up the learning process more than having a great resource, and what's been a HUGE resource for me over the last few days is Laurence Kim's blog: http://www.laurencekimblog.com/index.php. He covers everything from gear to tutorials and shares settings and tips that come from years of practice and loads of talent. I feel like I've learned more about photography since Natalie sent me a link to his blog than I had in the last 4 years.

First, check it out for ourself, it's pretty incredible how helpful it is. Second, one of his tutorials shows the different methods of bouncing an on-camera flash and another outlines his settings for shooting studio portraits. Combining these two was the photo I took below.

I bounced the the flash camera right and completely backwards--something I'd never thought to try. Also, I modified his recommended settings (full manual, f8.0, 1/250, ISO 100) to 1/160 and f5.6 (which tends to be the sharpest for Four Thirds lenses--and also explains why it helped the photo I posted as the 1st sign).

Olympus E-620 with 14-54mm @ f5.6. I shot it in our bathroom to use the narrow walls and lower ceiling for bouncing the flash, plus the white wall for a backdrop.

2nd Sign: Dispelling my high ISO perception

Up until the recent crop of Nikons, the best high ISO performers were Canons. Now, either Canon or Nikon are great up to (and sometimes through) 1600, and while Olympus has made progress, they're not even in the same ballpark. You can see DPReview's noise comparison test on my E-620 here. Visible noise is there at 200 on my camera and then at 1600, the Four Thirds cameras look like an old TV set with bad reception.

For this reason, I've always, always tried to shoot at ISO 100 whenever possible. Well, last weekend, we went to a Frenchie Frolic for our French Bulldog to play with a couple dozen fellow Frenchies. Obviously, shooting dogs running indoors requires a higher ISO. So, I'd been shooting at ISO 800 before Roxy was tired out enough to stand still for a portrait with Jenny.

I positioned them with the available light coming in the low from the windows on the wall behind me, and left it at ISO 800 with what I consider very acceptable results.

My takeaway is that the high ISO performance of my Olympus isn't really an issue--as long as I properly expose the shot. Too often when I have problems with the noise in my high ISO photos, it's because I underexposed the shot and trying to pull detail out of the shadows just magnifies the noise. Shoot it right to begin with and you hardly notice it. So, once again, maybe it's me to blame, not my camera.

Olympus E-620 with the 40-150mm (my least expensive lens) @ f4.5. ISO 800 @ 45mm and +0.3 EV.

The 1st sign that it's not my camera...

One of the biggest motivations for me has been my interest in wanting to be better at portraits and candids before we have kids. I've taken hundreds of pictures of our puppy, so I can only imagine what it'll be like with children.

So, as I've been trolling groups on Flickr, I'd really started noticing just how prevalent Canon's are for portraits--especially in the shots I liked best. Aside from the body, the other common thread is that they were often taken with lenses that have large apertures (i.e. f1.4 to f.20).

Now, I've been shooting with Olympus gear for years, and so two things seemed to be working against me. One being the drawback of the Four Thirds system at being able to capture a shallow depth of field (noted here) when compared to APS-C sensors and especially full-frame sensors. The second thing is that there is only one (affordable) lens that offers anything faster than f2.8 in the Olympus Zuiko range, the 50mm f2.0--and I don't have it.

Well, two weeks ago, after Jenny and I came home from our Valentine's dinner, she was holding Roxy and I wanted to take a picture. Instead of the usual wide open aperture I'd been trying to use for anything portrait-related (to get a shallower depth of field with a focal point on the eyes), I shot with f5.0 while bouncing the flash off the ceiling. And a funny thing happened, everything came out sharper, with more detail, and just all around better.

This was the first photo I'd taken that made me really pause and re-think if I was being limited by my camera (and camera system). It was sharp enough, good color and detail...so what was I doing wrong on my other photos that they don't all look like this? Answering that is precisely what this blog is about.

Olympus E-620, 14-54mm @ f5.0. Flash bounced off the ceiling. PhotoShop was mainly used to clone out something on the wall in the background.

PhotoShop (even if it's Elements 5.0)

There is plenty I still need to learn about Photoshop, and last month, my co-worker, Niels, hosted a quick tutorial on some post processing tips in PhotoShop Elements. And even though I've had PhotoShop Elements for years, I'd never even used Adjustment Layers, so Niels' walk-through was very helpful.

Now, I still don't think PhotoShop can turn a bad photo into a good one, but it certainly can make one marginally better--and that margin really depends on the subject and how interesting the photo is to begin with. This is by no means a great photo (it happens to be one I took for our office photo contest--theme: bridges), and here's the original, shot with my 14-54mm lens on my Olympus E-620 around 8 a.m. on my drive into work on a cloudy day (obviously).

Now, my general approach to PhotoShop is simple:

1) What do I want the focus of the photo to be? And how can I remove distractions?

2) How can I put more emphasis on what I want someone to be seeing?

Despite the 'bridge' theme of the contest, this photo has more focus on the grain silos, but they happen to be more interesting than the bridge in this shot, so I used contrast adjustment layers and a radial gradient to try and make it a little more dramatic and a little less flat. Anyway, nothing too substantial, but something I wouldn't have been able to do with Picasa (which is what I had been using the last couple of years, because it really does a pretty good job of making all the basic adjustments very simple).