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).