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.

Little Girl

Kardynn and I pulled into a parking space at the gym.

Me: Are you going to put on your sweater, little girl?
K: Yes, big mama!

Um...point taken...I will now stop calling you little girl.

What the F...F-stop, that is

When I took my very first photography class (gosh...was it really twenty years ago?!), one of the things that made a huge impression on me was aperture. It was exciting to learn that I could achieve the look I desired by changing the aperture. 

Per Wikipedia, an aperture is a hole or an opening through which light travels.  In photography this is obviously the lens.  You've probably seen this diagram before - it's a great illustration of what happens to your lens as the aperture changes.  When your lens is "wide open" (i.e. f/1.4), it's letting in a ton of light.  Or you can "stop down" to a higher f-stop (i.e. f/11) and there's less light getting through.
 

The thing to remember about aperture is that the more open it is, the shorter the depth of field.  Someone once used an illustration to help make sense of that.  Have you ever squinted when you're trying to see something far away?  That's how your camera works. When the aperture gets narrow, more of the image is in focus; the wider the aperture, the less of the image in focus.

Now, you can make your camera's sensor more or less sensitive to the light by increasing or decreasing the ISO.  Back in the day of film cameras, you would control this by the type of film that you purchased.  I typically bought 200 or 400 speed film, depending on whether I thought I'd be taking the pictures primarily inside or outside. The wonderful thing about digital is that you're not locked into a particular ISO for a set number of prints, like we used to be back then.  Now you can change the ISO whenever you want.  The thing to remember is that the higher the ISO, the less light you need, but the grainier your final image will be.  I have an example of an image that I love, but it's quite grainy because I shot it at a high ISO (for the camera that I was using).  There are lots of problems with this photo - it has a crazy color cast and like I said, it's grainy, but it's an authentic shot of my husband so I love it.

ISO 3200

One final note about ISO: did you catch my little caveat up there when I said "for the camera I was using"?  Not all cameras are created equal.  The above shot was taken at 3200 with my Nikon D40.  If I were to take the same shot at the same ISO with my Nikon D7000, it'd be a completely different story.  One of the reasons my Nikon D7000 was more than twice as expensive as my D40, was because it's much better at handling low light.  So the point is, know your camera.  Play around with it at high ISOs and get to know what it does.

Okay, moving on, the final variable is how long the shutter stays open. The longer the shutter stays open, the more light that gets through the lens.  So if you have a slow shutter speed at f/1.4 then a ton of light is getting through the lens.  If you have a fast shutter speed at f/16, not much light is getting through the lens, right?  So of course the trick to getting a nicely exposed photo is finding the right balance between these two things.  Fortunately for us, modern cameras make this pretty easy for us.  On an SLR camera, there's an exposure meter inside the camera.  In my Nikon camera, at the bottom of the viewfinder, there's something that kind of looks like this:

+  | | | | 0          -     or maybe like this     +         0 | | | |   -

That's the exposure meter.  In theory, those lines to the left of the "0" mean that the image is over-exposed and those lines to the right of the "0" indicate that the image is under-exposed. I say "in theory" because there are a few other things that can throw the exposure off but for now let's just leave it at that - we can get into the exceptions later.  Understanding how your camera is metering and how much light your subject is reflecting back will help you expose your image more accurately.

There is one point I want you to consider.  Even though your camera shutter can stay open for a very long time to let in a lot of light, you have to remember that if the camera moves at all, it will make the image blurry.  If you're hand-holding the camera, you can only hold the camera so steady.  I've always had it in my head that you shouldn't really expect to hand hold the camera for more than 1/60th of a second.  But that's probably because I started out using a 35mm camera with a 50mm lens.  It's actually relative to the focal length.  In other words, if you have a zoom lens, it's easier to hold the camera steady when it's wide open, as opposed to when you're zoomed in.  Have you already noticed that?  And let's be honest, you as the operator plays a big factor.  I think I can hold the camera steadier than some people can.  I will frequently brace the camera on myself or on stationary objects around me.  This is something you have to kind of figure out for yourself and just be aware of it.  I recently attended a class by a renowned but elderly photographer and he admitted that he can longer hold the camera as steady as he once could.  So you just have to understand your limitations and what you and your camera are capable of.

If you want to learn more, you can start at Digital Photo School's article about shutter speed.


ASSIGNMENT:
For this week, I'd like you to flip that mode dial to Manual, if it's not already there.  Practice exposing the image using the camera's light meter.  Change the ISO from something low like 400 to whatever is high, for your camera.  Pay attention to the difference in shutter speed and/or aperture as well as the clarify of the images.  If you're using a zoom lens, notice the change in shutter speed as you zoom the lens in and out.

Framing for Privacy

This weekend I snapped this photo of my daughter and her friend through the window. I could have easily kept the window panes out but I left them in.  Why? 

I didn't give it much thought at the time but in retrospect, I think it's my attempt to convey that I am not a part of their moment.

As I sit here studying this photo, I realized that I frequently do this.  I zoom out the lens and then frame the photo with something between myself and the subject....my way of giving the subjects their "space". 

I'm not sure that any of these are great executions of the theory but it's interesting to realize that I've subconsciously been doing this.  I definitely love capturing authentic interactions, which is easier to do when people aren't aware of you taking photos.  A while ago my brother suggested that I could be a paparazzi.  I was taken aback by his suggestion but I guess I can see how he got the idea.

Red Rocket

The other day I surprised my children (and myself, for that matter) by letting them do something slightly dangerous.  I had to chuckle when I overheard Oskar telling Annika, "I didn't think Mom would let me do this but she did."  I did caution them about the dangers of jack-knifing and tumbling over the front of the wagon but then I let them be kids and have some fun.

Here we are, a week later, and I'm beating myself up for not making them put on helmets.  I actually didn't think of it at the time.  (Though, ever since my friend's daughter had to be flown by helicopter to Fairfax Hosp, after a minor fall on her scooter, I don't like to take chances with head injuries.)  But on the flip side, there is a part of me that knows that I probably smother them way too much.  Ugh!  I wish I could have an objective perspective on these sorts of things.  It's easy for me to get bogged down in the "What Ifs".

Fortunately no one was injured and they had a blast.  (And for anyone who is truly concerned for their safety, you'll be relieved to know that I had to use a V-E-R-Y slow shutter speed to show some action. Oh, I should include a disclaimer: professional photographer, don't try this at home.)