Tangents

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flash and tungsten lighting

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flash and tungsten lighting - gelling your flash for incandescent lighting

Flash, for me, is an essential tool in sweetening the available light and improving the quality of the existing light. I often see comments on the photography forums to the effect that with cameras like the Nikon D3 or Canon 1D mk3, where you have exceptional high-iso noise performance, that you don't need flash.  The crucial point that is missed though, is that flash is not merely there just to use when the light is so poor that you can't stop any motion blur from your subject, or stop camera shake  Read more inside...

spotlight interview

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Every week James Robinson features an interview on his blog with a photographer that has caught his attention.  And this week the privilege is mine - and you can read it here: spotlight interview - photographer Neil van Niekerk. And for no other reason than to spruce up this quickie post, here is one of my favorite images from a destination wedding I photographed in the Bahamas recently. Other interviews with me  Read more inside...

A solution to a persistent Bridge CS3 problem

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A solution to a persistent Adobe Bridge CS3 problem (Windows)

A few days ago I posted on an online forum about a persistent problem I've been having with Bridge CS3.  The problem arises when I open Bridge and navigate to a folder, in that Bridge doesn't show any thumbnails but will just show a blank grey right-hand pane. Just a few hours later, one of the most knowledgeable photographers on the forum, Brian Tao, came up with several possible causes and solutions.   Since I believe that the problem is quite prevalent, and the solution not obvious at all, I thought that it would be  Read more inside...

a raw element of style

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During the portrait sessions with my couples, I try to maintain a fluid style of photographing them.  Instead of rigidly posing I try to direct only a little, adjusting my position and my composition.  I really want as natural looking and flattering portraits as I can, while getting a variety of images.  For these reasons I move around a lot while shooting ... and I often try to get some lens flare on purpose.  I love the way the image warms up and the flare creates pools of light within the image. This is an unpredictable effect, but when it works, I feel that the flare adds something  Read more inside...

wedding photography: working with higher ISO settings

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This was a first for me  - a couple who high-five each other after the first kiss! (This was from a wedding last year.) My settings : 1/100th @ f3.2 @ 32oo ISO. Yes ... 3200 ISO.  I couldn't use flash and I needed a hand-holdable shutter speed with the 70-200mm zoom.  Even though it is a stabilized lens, I do need a shutter speed that is fairly fast to stop any movement.  (Or stops movement enough.) So why this photo?  Read more inside...

direct fill-flash from your on-camera speedlight

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using direct fill-flash from your on-camera speedlight

Here’s a question that comes up often in emails I receive:  Do I use a diffuser of some kind outdoors or do I just use direct flash, with the flash in the straight ahead position. The simple answer is that yes, outdoors I most often shoot with my speedlight straight-on with no diffuser or light modifier, especially if I only use my speedlight for fill-flash. But then again, the answer is not quite that simple - so let's take this back a few steps:  Read more inside...

world in motion …

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This image from the recent photo-session with Amy and Nick in Manhattan received a number of comments and questions about the technique.  The basic camera settings for several sequences of images here, were 1/20th (at f8) and 1/10th @ f11.  The image above was one of a sequence at 1/20th.  But there's more to it ...  Read more inside...

traveling light in Vegas

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Even though most of the tutorial pages here deal with on-camera flash, I don't limit myself to just using on-camera flash. When I need off-camera lighting or when I need more juice from my flashguns than a speedlight can deliver, I use the Q-flashes made by Quantum. For this wedding in Las Vegas, I decided to travel light and as an additional flashgun, bring along a single Quantum Q-flash in addition to the two speedlights I normally take along with me when I photograph a destination wedding.  I also wanted the flexibility of wireless TTL control over the flash, and therefore I chose a  Read more inside...

this happened in Vegas ..

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Doug Fairbairn asked me about this image from a recent post on my wedding photography blog, where I showed some images from a Las Vegas destination wedding: Great photos. I’m wondering about the lighting for the second photo - B&G and wedding party walking to camera with sun in background. How did you get so much light on their faces? Was it just reflected from the walkway or what? Too far away to use flash it would seem. Doug .. thank you for the compliments! About the look of that image and the way their faces are lit - this has less to do with the use of flash than it has with  Read more inside...