White Balance

I'm late with my post this week.  Sorry!  Instead of sitting here at my computer, giving you lots of helpful photography suggestions I was

• supervising playdates (three of them, to be exact)
• enjoying a mother's day festivities at Kardynn's preschool
• reading books to Annika's first grade class
• babysitting Autumn
• traipsing around the National Zoo with Kiersten, Kardynn and a bunch of Kindergarteners 
• learning how to do flip turns in the pool

This week will be spent recovering from last week!

A few weeks ago, my friend Julie asked me about white balance.  I meant to write about it in my last post but when I started to delve into 18% gray and gray cards, I got all caught up with metering and never wandered back to explain white balance.  Sadly this is how my brain works these days - there's a lot of wandering.  *sigh*

So back to white balance.  It's not difficult to understand how I got sidetracked by metering because there is a connection.  The sensors on your camera expect a scene to be a certain amount gray for metering purposes AND for white balance purposes...and they do a pretty good job.  But you can certainly improve the results in one of several ways.  First of all, your camera has some presets: daylight, shade, cloudy, fluorescent, flash, et cetera.  Typically there's also an option to create a custom setting. This is where the gray card comes in  handy.  You can take a picture of the gray card (make sure the card fills the viewfinder) in the lighting situation where you're about to take pictures, and then the white balance will be correct.  If you don't have a gray card, filling the frame with something white, to get a custom reading will also work. You can also take a picture of the gray card and use it to adjust white balance on your computer after the fact, but that's a lot more work.  Having said that, it might be preferable to accidentally leaving your camera with the wrong settings, which I've done a time or two.

If you want to get really fancy with color correction, here are some tips for correct skin tones. I have a little cheat sheet that I use for adjusting the magenta, yellow and cyan.  Caucasian's are 5-20% more yellow than magenta.  A fair-skinned caucasian might be 20% magenta and 25% yellow, whereas a bronzed person could be 45% magenta and 62% yellow.  Asians and Hispanics have 10-20% more yellow than magenta.  On black skin, the yellow and magenta are close. And what about cyan?  Cyan is 30-50% of magenta.  (I got this very useful information from this Smugmug help page.) I also got the free OnOne presets for Lightroom, which work great.  Unfortunately I don't typically use Lightroom but when I do, those presets are lifesavers.

Let It Be Me

Today's Focus52 prompt was essentially a carte blanche.  That worked out perfectly for me because this week's creative mojo took me down a new direction.  I made a music video.  Well, I did the video and editing and my husband and sister-in-law provided the talent.  It was a lot of fun - time consuming, but fun.



If you'd like to see the high res version, follow this link.

Career Day

Annika's class is doing something special every day until the end of the school year.  They're working their way through the alphabet with various special activities each day.  Today was "Career Day" - for C.  Annika had told me that she wants to be a firefighter when she grows up so was intending to wear our fireman costume.  Unfortunately we both forgot about it this morning so she went to school wearing a brown shirt and brown striped pants. 

When she got home she reminded me that today had been "Career Day.  I said, "Oh no!  What did you do?"  She pointed to her clothes and said, "It's okay. I'd also like to work at a Hershey Chocolate Factory."  

I love that she rolls with the punches.

(Ahem...next time I will move the rug before taking photos from this spot.)

Mornings

I intend to start actively participating in Focus52.  Last year I did it for a couple of weeks and then fell behind in my uploads...and that was that.  There was a two-day window for uploading your weekly efforts.  Unfortunately that time frame just *didn't* fit into my schedule.  At the start of this year, once again I had great intentions...but as per usual, my follow-through was not so hot.  But I recently discovered that Jan has now opened it up so that you can upload your projects whenever you want.  I think that will work much better for me. So I'm back on board, baby!

I'm also planning to make a Project Life book this year.  A few months ago I bought the supplies but I could never get momentum to start with that either.  I'm great about taking the pictures but I'm terrible about the rest of the process.  They sit on my camera and then when I finally download them, I barely have time to look at them - and frequently don't.  Which means I never get around to selecting the photo of the day and I certainly don't get prints ordered.

But yesterday I sat down and got myself caught up for 2012. I've got prints ordered and I can't wait to assemble my book.  I know this would be much more enjoyable if I could stay on top of it a little better.  So I'm resolving to do a better job from here on it.  It's not that I feel a burden to "keep up" or to not miss a day, but this is something I really want to do. So I'm choosing to make it a priority. (Of course I'm realistic enough to know that this will still be a work in progress. ha!)

This morning I went back over to Jan's page to look at the prompt.  Morning. I sat here thinking about what morning means to me.  I pictured a steamy mug of tea...with a piece of toast...and my Kindle.  But then I had to quickly admit to myself that that's how I wish my mornings were.  Instead they tend to be an exercise in frustration.  I am much more of a night owl than an early bird. So getting my two oldest kids out the door and on to the bus by 7:19 am is the worst part of my day. Every morning it's a battle to get them ready and out that door on time. UGH.

And suddenly I realized that I already have my Focus52 photos for this week. I took these on Thursday morning. It was a little drizzly so I drove the kids to the bus.  But it wasn't wet enough to keep them in the car. I, on the other hand, felt no desire to get out of my comfortable place. So I played around my my phone and took pictures of them through my windshield...trying to capture the feel of the morning. About a week ago I downloaded Instagram for my droid so I've been a little obsessed ever since. 

Let There Be Light

My first two tutorials have been a light look at some technical aspects of photography.  I gave you a quick explanation of the different modes on your camera and we addressed aperture. Hopefully you had a chance to play around with your camera and try out some of the things I attempted to explain.  If so, I'd love to see some of your photographs - please feel free to link to them in the comments.

Today, let's get artsy!  Let's talk about LIGHT.  Perhaps you're scratching your head trying to figure out how this will help you understand your camera better, but I promise you, this is the key to good photography. I don't care what kind of camera you have, if you know how to use light to your advantage, you can make your photographs stand out.   

We all understand that light is necessary for photography but good light is what makes it magical.  This is where photography becomes an art.  There's not really a right or wrong but I can give you some things to think about.  In general, when shooting portraits, we want to avoid direct light. It's harsh and unflattering; it can create distracting shadows. This is why photographers love cloudy days, because the clouds are diffusing the light for you. So what to do on a bright, sunny day?  Find shade.  Find buildings or fences or trees or anything that you can put between you and the sun.  The trick is to make sure that light isn't mottled or splotchy.  Also, bear in mind, if there's an area of direct sun in the background, that will blow out in your image - which may or may not bother you.

You'll also want to pay attention to the light in someone's eyes.  Do you know about catch lights?  If not, catch lights are the reflections of light in a person's eyes.

Catch lights give sparkle to the eyes, and that sparkle gives your photograph life.

The best time of day for photos is a magical time that happens twice a day. Photographers refer to it as The Golden Hour.  It's the first hour of sunlight and the last hour of sunlight.  The warm light is generally considered pleasing. The long shadows can help give dimension and depth to landscape photography.

Now typically when you're shooting outside, you play this complicated dance with the sun. The rule of thumb is that you want to keep the sun behind you. If you're taking photographs of people, you want to make sure they're not squinting into the sun. If you need to put the sun behind your subjects, you might want to use a flash fill.  Basically this means you're going to force the flash to fire, which will make sure there are no funky shadows on their face. But sometimes you may want to embrace the back light.

Before I go, let me give you a quick crash course on metering. Camera designers have done extensive research (seriously) and discovered that the average photograph is is a certain percentage gray. 18% gray is the number commonly thrown around.  Some people say it's actually 12% gray, but personally that difference isn't affecting *me* too much.  The point I want to make is that there are probably a lot of times when your photograph *isn't* 12% gray so you need to know how to compensate for this.  If the photograph has a lot of light - like snow, or a sandy beach - then the meter is going to want you to underexpose so you need to know to compensate.  Having said that, camera meters have gotten quite sophisticated and they do a pretty good job getting it right.  My camera has several different metering options; matrix metering, center-weighted metering and spot metering. Spot metering allows you to select a point on your camera and the camera will use this for it's metering calculations.  Center-weighted metering is essentially the same thing except that the "spot" is the middle of the frame. But I usually leave it on matrix metering. I've read up a little bit on matrix metering and the engineering that went into it but I can't claim to be an expert.  What I can tell you is that it does a remarkable job at figuring out the correct exposure. Of course when you're trying to be artistic, you might need to outsmart the meter but in general, it works very well.

I'm not sure that I've done a very good job explaining this stuff so please ask any questions you might have.

ASSIGNMENT:
This week's assignment is all about the catch lights. Find some willing subject (or in a pinch, a less cooperative subject will do) and try taking a portrait in good light with nice catch lights. If the light isn't good, find a way to make the light good.

Sanitize

On nights like this, I'm so grateful for Sanitize mode on my washing machine...

Tattoo

Kardynn and I were driving down the road, headed for an appointment.  I had tuned out the commercials on the radio until Kardynn piped up from the back seat.

Radio, commercial for Art Erase: Do you have unwanted tattoos that you want to get rid of?
Kardynn: Yes, I do - a tan tattoo! 

That made me laugh. But actually she's correct. She had a temporary tattoo - actually half of a temporary tattoo - that stayed on her arm forever.  I finally removed it with rubbing alcohol...and we discovered that she had tanned around the tattoo.  Craziness!

It also made me realize that they are paying attention, even when I'm not.  Yikes.