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Tangents

looking for the light

July 31, 2010

photography technique – looking for great light

This afternoon I walked around the Princeton campus with a couple, Renee and David, looking for cool spots to photograph them.  I noticed the spread of light on a wall coming through an entrance way …
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wedding photography resource page

July 30, 2010

In the spirit of the resource pages on off-camera flash photography, I wanted to do the same for all the blog posts on wedding photography. I pulled together the more important articles, and this resource page on wedding photography is now accessible from the menu on the left-hand side. (About 12 links down from where it says ‘Articles’.) In this way it will be a permanently anchored reference that I will keep updated as I add new posts to the Tangents blog.

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photography questions and answers (002)

July 29, 2010

photography questions and answers

Continuing with the monthly theme where I look at search engine queries,
and answer a selection of 10 questions more directly…

flash outdoors without looking like flash

This is a tough one to give one definitive answer for.  It really depends on what the light is like, and how you position your subjects in relation to the light.

The simplest scenario is where you position your subject so that their faces are in open shade, and then you just add a touch of fill-flash.  The easiest way of doing this is to use TTL flash, and dial your flash exposure compensation down to around -3EV.

Where you have more uneven light, then using off-camera flash with a large diffuser (eg, softbox or umbrella), will give you the best looking results.  The light from your flash will look really good, but I can’t say that it will be imperceptible as flash.  Meaning, if you look at the image, then a logical conclusion about the light is that additional light like flash must’ve been used.  But, it does look good!

Next question …

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flash & ambient light – reverse engineering an image (2)

July 27, 2010

My friend, Josh Lynn, just posted this spectacular wedding photograph.  It does look like he used flash there, so I thought this would make a another good example to see if we can ‘reverse engineer’ a photograph in terms of his settings and setup.

I first had a guess at how he set this up; and then had a look at the EXIF data, and this revealed the true story.  See if you can decipher this image yourself, without scrolling down at first …

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favourite recent images – portraits of a bride

July 25, 2010

I frequently post a favorite image from the past weekend.  This time, I’d like to post a few images.  All are portraits of the bride, Denise, on her wedding day.  This might show some of my approach and style in wedding portraits …

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workshop view: Jersey City and Manhattan – July 2010

July 23, 2010

Aleona caught in mid-air during the recent flash photography workshop. As part of an explanation of High-Speed Flash Sync, she patiently vaulted into the air numerous times for everyone who attended the 2nd day of the workshop.  As before, the 2nd day is the on-location fun practical segment of the workshop which takes place in Manhattan.

The first day of the workshop still takes place in Jersey City at a hotel where we have a grand view of Manhattan …

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available light portrait (model – Anelisa)

July 22, 2010

photographing people – available light portrait

While unloading lighting gear from the van to shoot a last few images for a certain section for my next book, I turned around and noticed the way the light fell on Anelisa.  Beautiful portrait light.  The (cropped) pull-back shot will show why ..

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photographic composition – look at your background!

July 18, 2010

improve your composition in photography – be specific about your background

The impact in this photo of Jessica relies equally on her looks and pose, the lighting, and the background. The background was very specifically chosen by how *I* position myself in relation to my subject. The background was out of focus neon lights in Times Square. I composed the photo very tightly with a 70-200mm lens, set to 200mm. With this, I can select exactly what I want to include in the image.

For comparison, here is the wider shot, so you can get an idea of the mélange we had as a background …


[ click on the photo to see a larger image ]

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using a neutral density (ND) filter with flash

July 16, 2010

using neutral density (ND) filters with flash to control depth of field

Working in bright light, the limitation of having a maximum flash sync speed forces a small aperture on us.  That small aperture means more depth of field than we might like.

There are two ways to force a high shutter speed / wide aperture combination:
- go to high speed sync (HSS) mode. But this dramatically cuts down our power of our flash;
- use a neutral density (ND) filter …

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overpowering hard sunlight with flash

July 14, 2010

For this part of a photo session with Johannie, we worked in an alley.  The light was very uneven, with some swathes of sunlight falling directly on her.  (See the image below for the photo without flash.)  To get rid of this uneven sunlight falling on her, we have to add at least as much light on her as the brightest areas lit by sunlight. In the example above, our exposure is set to 1/250 @ f13 @ 200 ISO and we can see from the bright patch of light on her shoulder, that we’re at the edge of acceptable exposure. Any wider on our aperture, or higher on our ISO or slower on our shutter speed, and we’ll start to lose detail in the sunlit areas.

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