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Flash photography and Strobes

So most people don’t actually own any external flashes and if they do, it’s a very basic one that was sold as a package deal. An external flash is an external flash and that will always be way better than any on camera flash IF you use it properly. On the other hand, you can definitely get a lot better images if you understand lighting and (non destructively of course) modify your on camera flash.

First off, if you don’t have any and want to make the investment, here’s the best value in my opinion. Buy these in this order and according to your budget. Neewer Flash, Remote Trigger, …if you want to expand to a 2 flash setup, buy two receivers ahead of time to save some money and shipping time, and you can use your automatic cheap external flash from your package deal or buy another Neewer flash. I’ll explain more of this below under the multi flash setup.

Modifying on camera flash

If you’re indoors and have a white index card or piece of paper, you can try bouncing the flash off the ceiling to create a warmer evenly lit photo with more natural looking lighting. If you want to get fancy, here’s a DIY solution I found and have tried and liked.

Check out my post on modifying point and shoot flashes as well.

External flash

Because most external flashes are designed this way, you can rotate the flash to face the ceiling and bounce light off of the walls rather than directly into the faces and subjects of your photo. This creates a softer light and more evenly distributed light which creates shadows that are less harsh. We’ll go through various setups in a later chapter. Just try this general concept on your own and see how it changes the overall picture quality and mood.

Multiple external flashes

This is the fun part! This is where you can play with the combinations and different more professional lighting setups. If you will be using the automatic external flash on the receiver and trigger combination, you will not have control over the flash power so you will always be firing at full flash power. Keep this in mind. It is not too hard to compensate for or make it work in your favor, just bear with me as I explain. Use your manual flash as you main flash since you have the most control over it. Use your auto to fill the room by facing it toward the ceiling or wall. You can also try doing some high-key photography (I’ll do another chapter on high and low key photography)

I’ll probably write more in depth setups later on but for now, do what you can with what you have and expand your setup and try learning through experience. Lighting is a huge part of photography and can help create infinite moods and scenes just by changing flash positions and powers.

Sunset

Most people love sunsets and one of the most commonly photographed things are in fact sunsets. I’ll keep this one short. If you’re shooting on a smart phone, it’s very likely things get “blown out”, or overexposed, so you get a lot of white instead of the orange or red. Here are two ways to handle this issue. Try taking the sunset through your sunglasses (sounds stupid and may look stupid but it will help bring the brightness down to a level your phone can handle). Also, try turning away from the sun…I know this sounds stupid also but the colors are often a lot more photogenic behind you in the clouds rather than straight at the sun.

And since two tips aren’t good enough, I’ll throw in this last one. Try HDR. HDR is a technique used by photographers to show detail in both the shadow and the highlights. In layman’s terms, that means you get a better exposed image by seeing more detail in the dark “shadowy” regions and less blown out “white” regions in your photograph. If you’re doing a portrait of a person or family shot against the sun, throw in the flash. This flash will help to fill in the shadows and prevent a black silhouette. It won’t let you do HDR when you do flash settings on an iPhone but at that point you won’t need HDR so don’t worry about combining all of these tips together.

Hopefully this one will help the majority of people without fancy cameras to find some great shots while watching the sunsets that everyone knows and loves.

Grenadian Sunset by Kevin Ly on 500px.com

Photographing the Solar Eclipse

Solar Eclipse
by
Kevin Ly

So there is currently a solar eclipse going on right now so I just thought I’d make a quick post. Remember there is never a good reason to look into the sun so remember not to use the viewfinder when using cameras and only use the live screen modes. To view the eclipse SAFELY please try this pinhole technique which can involve a piece of scrap paper and a pencil or pen to create a small hole. Now find a surface and slowly pull the pinhole away from the surface and you should start to see the eclipse WITHOUT damaging your eyes! And this is one of the only ways to photograph the sun using a phone.

For DSLRs, please use a proper solar filter to prevent damage to your sensor. NDs and Polarizers do not filter an appropriate amount of the sun’s rays and will damage your sensor. Also, do NOT use the viewfinder, use Live View and the screen only to protect your eyes.

Capturing the Moon

The moon is probably one of the most popular things to photograph at night but most people struggle to get great images. The moon is essentially a reflection of the sun so you have to think quite differently when photographing moonlit scenes. If you use traditional night modes, you will end up overexposing for the moon and just get a bright white orb. Most people like moon images that actually show detail of the moon. This is usually only possible immediately before sunset or after sunrise when the sky is brighter and more evenly balance between foreground and background. At night, the contrast between the bright moon and dark foreground makes things quite difficult.

To take great moon images, try finding a telephoto lens or a zoom lens to increase the size of the moon in your images and allow your sensor to capture more detail.

A tripod would also be helpful. The biggest trick if you want to have interesting moon lit shots is to take two exposures, one exposed for the moon and one for the foreground and merging the two images in post. I’ll create a tutorial on that shortly.

Another tip is to focus on the moon rather than the foreground. Sometimes I find that the moon is not always in focus when you focus to infinity. I tend to also use manual focus while using a zoom focus assist (commonly found on DSLRs).

iPhone tip: Turn HDR on, and stabilize your phone focusing on the moon so the exposure is initially set for the brighter moon. Obviously the quality and detail in the much smaller moon will likely be less but it should help. If you have a neutral density filter or sunglasses available, putting that over the camera will also create less of a white orb and allow your phone to take more detail.

Learn photography with Kevin

Photography can be as daunting or simple as you make it. I put together a few pages on how to get started with a few advanced techniques inside each post so varying levels of photographers can learn and improve their skills.

Photography is not always about having the most expensive camera or fancy equipment. Creativity and composition can make or break a photo. At the same time, knowing how to use your camera to get more creative shots will also be helpful. Hopefully, I can show you a few techniques, tips and tricks for using the camera you currently have, point and shoot, DSLR or iPhone camera, and learning how to take the best photos possible.

You’ll notice I do focus on DSLRs because that is the most popular type of camera for photography enthusiasts but at the bottom or end of each post, I do try to include how the lesson can be adapted to point and shoots or smartphone cameras.

Start with the contents here or use the menu of this site to navigate through the lessons.

Nature photography

Probably one of the more popular types along side portraits of models.

There are tons of ways to do nature photography. Macro, wide landscapes, we’ll go over most of them eventually. The biggest thing about nature photography is composition and having an eye for interesting things just because nature photography is SO popular that it just gets redundant after a while. You want to capture something special or just see things differently. Don’t be afraid to shoot from weird angles.

With that being said, and all creativity aside, this is one of the easier ones to learn. Most people start on nature photography to learn how to use their DSLRs because you really can’t go wrong. I suggest taking an hour out of your weekend and go sit by some flowers or something and start on manual and adjust all the knobs you can turn until you understand how light is affected by these changes. That’s the easiest way to learn because once you understand the relationships of aperture, shutter speed and ISO, you can take almost any picture you want.

In the following few sections, I’ll try to show you a few more advanced techniques for you to try to feel more professional and make you a better photographer in the end.

Night Photography – Intro

Night time photography is tough. There is no doubt about it. I pride myself on getting the best shots when no one else can and I’m sure that’s a general philosophy among photographers. You have to stand out. With that being said, I’m more than willing to help you all get those shots because I want to enjoy them too!

To start, you have to understand the conditions you’ll be shooting in and what you can handle. This can vary on your physical stability and hand shakiness, your lens and whether or not it has IS or VR (image stabilization or vibration reduction), and whether or not you’ll be moving, like in street photography, or whether or not you’re mounted on a tripod. The biggest trade off will come down to how low your shutter speed can go before shakiness and movement becomes an issue.

For a typical night, run and gun, just taking pictures of anything, I like to keep my shutter speed at about 1/100 (typically that’s my cutoff for how I shoot and the lenses I use) with ISO 1600 so if I’m doing unplanned shooting, I use S mode at 1/100 or A mode wide open, hoping that’s enough to get me down to 1/100.

In the next few sections, I’ll explain the different setups and settings you should consider for each condition.

Moving water

We’ve all seen it before, photos of moving water captured by a single picture. Now, how do we take a picture that looks like that, rather than one that has drops floating or dropping down a cliff. It’s all about shutter speed on this one.
Typically in day light, you’d be shooting in the 1/100s or faster meaning you’d freeze the water while the photos we’re after allow the single drop to travel a certain distance “painting” a white streak to show the motion of the droplets or streams of water. The issue is, if your camera is on automatic or P mode, you’d never get this shot. You would have to force the camera into S mode to control the shutter speed. (non DSLR users, I’ll address this part in the second half since you may not have control over shutter speeed)
Once you do that, see how slow you can get your shutter speed before your aperture can’t get any smaller. Then make sure your ISO is also as low as it can go to help minimize the sensitivity to light (to allow for longer shutter speeds). *also make sure you use a tripod for this if you go any lower than 1/40 second. You can try using rocks to stabilize shots but life will be much easier with a tripod or anything not handheld.

If you’re on a DSLR and you want to go even slower, you’ll need a ND filter, a neutral density filter. This prevents a certain amount of light from entering the lens without affecting color. Think of it as non color tinted sunglasses. Now you can make your shutter speed even slower if you want a smoother effect on the water. Experiment and see what you like.

For point and shoot and smart phone cameras, you basically have no control over shutter speed but you can trick your camera into thinking it needs a slower shutter speed. Hmmm, when would I need slower shutter speeds…AT NIGHT! So get a pair of sunglasses or ND filters (like mentioned above) but hold them in front of your point and shoot. Your camera will think it’s dark out and adjust accordingly. Definitely use a mini tripod or use a rock nearby to stabilize your camera. We all know how night photos look on these cameras (ALWAYS OH SO BLURRY). So once you do that, you should see a significant amount of blurring of the water be introduced. If you have a night time mode or a fireworks setting, USE THAT. Those presets force the camera into low shutter speeds specifically so you’ll get what you want. Make sure your ND filter is taking away enough light. On a sunny day, a single filter may not be enough. I usually use 2 paired together to take out twice as much light.

Neutral Density Filters are relatively cheap, probably in line with polarizing filters. I got mine for about $20 each. There are varying degrees of filters (darker or lighter tint). I have (2) – ND4s. For the cheaper ones, don’t get too picky on brand or anything. They all are pretty much the same. The more expensive ones degrade your images less but it’s not noticeable when you’re just a beginner and want to learn.

Fireworks

If you’re going to attempt photography of NON BLURRY 😉 fireworks this year, here are 10 things to consider. Read the ones that apply to you and enjoy the night

For my DSLR friends
1. Bring a tripod and a shutter release cable (not both necessary but both will help with the vibrations/camera shake)
2. Use Manual Mode, the camera will try to adjust exposure for fireworks and background and get confused and give you overexposed and underexposed shots but none really the way you’d want your pictures to turn out. Using manual mode will also really help you learn photography.
3. Use Manual Focus, only after prefocusing using automatic focus on the fireworks using the first few bursts. Use the first burst to autofocus on the fireworks and then lock it in manual afterwards to avoid the camera from searching for a focus point and delaying your ability to release the shutter.
4. Suggested range: ISO 100-200, keeps noise and grain to a minimum
5. Suggested range: Shutter speed 1-5 seconds, enough to expose for one or two bursts
6. Suggested range: f/8 – f/11, allows the shutter speed to be longer and also puts more of the burst and in focus
7. Take a few shots before the fireworks begin to check your exposure and gauge other lighting (street lights, car headlights, etc) that may affect your shots and adjust accordingly
8. Underexpose your images in your test shots a little because the firework flashes will introduce additional light to balance out the underexposed non-firework shots.

Tips for non-DSLR photographers
1. For point and shoots, use the fireworks mode (it is a generally a preset with similar settings to the ones I listed in 4-6) A tripod is still helpful but a railing or table will do.
2. For camera phones, on the first burst of the fireworks, lock your focus and exposure by holding down on the screen when you see the fireworks and the remaining photos for the night will go by much smoother because the phone will not want to refocus.

Bonus tip: An easy way to reduce on camera shake is hitting the shutter button on DSLR, point and shoot or camera phone on the end of an exhale.

Seeing through water

Using a polarizer/polarizing filter
The photo shows the differences between the use of a polarizing filter and the image with in the absence of a polarizing filter.

What is a polarizer?

To be more technical, light becomes polarized when reflecting off of a surface so that means all reflected light off of non metallic surfaces like water is reflected at a single plane. The polarizer only lets light through at a single angle so by rotating the polarizing filter 90 degrees, we can eliminate all or most of the reflected light by creating perpendicular planes at which the reflected light can’t go through.

When photographing water surfaces such as the Caribbean waters where the green/blue colors really create an image, using a polarizing filter can eliminate the sun and allow more of the color to come through in an image, otherwise hidden by the blue reflection of the sky.

Polarizing filters vary in price but are primarily quite cheap and although the lower quality filters may degrade images slightly, the value added by eliminating unwanted light is worth it. Using a circular polarizing filter (one that you can screw onto your lens thread mount) is a quick and easy way to improve your images.

How do I use a polarizer?

To use it, simply screw on the filter to the front of your lens, making sure the thread size matches the filter you purchase (not to be confused with focal length). Nikon kit lenses are 52mm and Canon is 58mm (you can find these numbers on the lens cap or on the front of your lens) but you can buy step up rings to be able to use a 58mm filter on a 52mm lens which is what I recommend so you have a bigger flexibility in the future (you can screw larger filters on smaller lenses but not otherwise). You should be able to turn part of the filter around 360 degrees AFTER the filter is on tightly. Don’t overtighten your filters though!

The image test shown was done using a Rocketfish 58mm CPL: $20 at Best Buy or Amazon.

For non DSLRs, you can achieve the same thing by manually holding these filters in front of the lens directly against the glass of the lens. Make sure your filter is larger than your lens glass element. Notice how this technique can be applied to iPhones, point and shoots and anything else that you can use to take photos.

Basics

DSLR Crash Course

The easiest way to learn about DSLRs and how to use them, outside the automatic functions, is to understand quickly what is happening inside the camera and how we, as users can control the actions involved.

Background

A two main parts of a DSLR is the lens and the sensor. Think of the camera sensor as a blank slate, and every time you click the shutter button, you’re letting light coming in through a hole, exposing the sensor which then produces your image. If you make the hole in your lens smaller, less light comes in. Similarly, if you lower the time that the sensor is exposed, you also let less light in. The hole is called the aperture and the time the sensor is exposed is called the shutter speed. Now, we can go more in detail but I think it’s easier just to learn these things from experience and see how the images differ based on what settings you use.

Controls/Settings

First, let’s get familiar with the basic DSLR controls. Auto, P, S, A, and M. Let’s start with P. P, stands for program mode, and is the easiest way to have semi-automatic control while not having to think about little details. We can go back and talk about this later. S, shutter priority mode, allows you to change the speed of your shutter, controlling the time an image is exposed. The longer your shutter is exposed, the more light is let in which can give you those light streaks seen in street/highway photography but also makes you prone to taking blurry images. Anything shorter than 1/100 second is about where camera shake can be eliminated. I would recommend tripod shooting at anything slower. A, aperture priority mode, controls the size of the hole in the lens that light comes through. You’ve probably heard of f stops or f-some number. These f values are kinda counterintuitive. f/22 is a smaller opening than f/2.8. You can think of these as fractions of the amount of light. 1/22 is less than 1/2.8. When would you use a smaller aperture versus a larger one? The larger the aperture, and smaller the fvalue, the larger the depth of field is going to be. The depth of field is the “blurriness” behind a subject when the subject is in focus. This is usually a signature of DSLR photography. If you want everything to be in focus, you would want to use a smaller aperture, aka higher f value.

Now these two priority modes allow you to shoot with some control but it still isn’t fully manual. Shutter priority allows you to choose the speed but it will automatically compensate for the change by changing the aperture. Let’s use an example again. If I wanted to shoot a soccer game, I would need a fast speed to capture the movement, so let’s say I’m shooting at 1/200 second. To compensate for this, the camera would open up the aperture since I’m letting less light in than at 1/100 second. This is done by a light metering system inside the camera. If we were in aperture priority mode and we didn’t want the soccer player to be the only thing in focus, and let’s say we wanted to shoot so the whole field is in focus, we would have to use aperture priority mode to tell the camera we wanted a small aperture. The trade off here would be that the camera would force your shutter speed to a slower speed, 1/50 sec or so and you will get blurry players since the speed is too slow. Manual allows you to shoot with control over both however manual’s usually not necessary unless you have ways to compensate for insufficient light which would occur when you combine both scenarios above. A flash or something along those lines would be used. Let’s not worry about that for now. Before you consider flash, let’s talk about the last main component of DSLRs.

ISO, allows you to control the sensitivity of light captured by your camera. ISO 100 would be less sensitive than ISO 1600 and so on. In the case of night time photography, you would want a high ISO however the tradeoff here is noise. Noise is the fuzzy colored stuff that comes up in your images when shooting mainly seen in night photography. Most beginner DSLR cameras produce usable images up to ISO 1600 or even 3200 but I usually don’t go that high unless I have no other option. If you haven’t made the connection, you can see the relationship between ISO, aperture and shutter speed. Increasing one and decreasing another by “a stop” will produce essentially the same image. These stops allow you to make tradeoffs according to what is necessary or required by the scenario and this is essentially what Program mode does. P mode is a combination of S and A modes. Why shoot in S or A priority then? Really no reason unless you know you need a certain speed or aperture. Program allows for the camera to make the best decision that it thinks should occur. Sometimes, it doesn’t understand the context and therefore an image could be ruined. These missed shots often occur at night with a high dynamic range needed such as a very dark face in the shadow and a bright street light in the background. With photography, a lot of what you’re shooting doesn’t happen again so you want to make sure the camera behaves the way you expect it to. Personally, that means shooting in A or S mode if not completely M.

Capturing the Milky Way

Lights of the night
by
Kevin Ly

I lived in the city/suburbs for most of my life so this was the most amazing thing ever when I first took it. I can see stars! and even more than that, galaxies! I know, city boy problems. Anyway, here’s a breakdown of what I did. Obviously I never got a chance to practice this but I was able to get the images I wanted within a minute. How? Reading Reading Reading. I can not stress that enough. You can save yourself so much time by just studying the techniques behind different types of photography and getting an understanding of what is needed for each shot.

In this one, I first had to find the Milky Way (which is what I wanted to shoot). In dark areas, you can actually use your eyes and find a very dim stream of stars in the sky. I live on a college campus so there are street lamps everywhere. I stood a little in front of one along the cliff so the glare wouldn’t prevent me from seeing things. This goes for the camera too. Make sure the lights are BEHIND the camera so that the glare will be minimized. Adjust your viewing angle accordingly to reduce the glare/lens flare on the lens, and if you don’t know what that means, you’ll know when it becomes a problem as you take the photos). It looks something like this.

Anyways, once you position yourself correctly, you need to understand what settings to set your camera. A lot of sites just list off the settings. I don’t think that teaches you a lot.

With Milky Way and deep space astrophotography, you need to understand that these are very dim specks of light. That means you need a very long shutter speed. With that comes the understanding of star trails. Stars in the sky move like the sun and everything else does because of Earth’s rotation. To make sure you don’t hold the shutter so long that the stars start to appear as if they’re moving and therefore create streaks, you will want to follow this rule. 500/x where x is your focal length. For wide angle lenses, I tend to go with 400/x because of distortion on the edges. The answer to this mini math problem will give you the maximum shutter speed you can use before star trails will appear. If you’re using a standard lens, say 18mm on a basic entry level DSLR, you know you can go up to 500/18 seconds as your shutter speed before your stars start to turn from dots into streaks.

Now that you understand your limits on shutter, the next steps are easy. You’re trying to capture pin points of light in a dark background, that means you’ll want to open up your aperture as wide as it will go unless you suffer from extreme aberration/color fringing (don’t worry about this too much if you’re just starting out). So to remind you again, aperture is the f/ number, so the lower the number, the wider the aperture. Kit lenses will probably be f/3.5. Also, you’ll want to be zoomed all the way out because most likely you’ll want to get as much of the Milky Way as possible. Anything around or less than 18mm will be a good starting point. Shutter speed [check], Aperture [check], let’s talk about ISO now.

ISO is an interesting thing to consider because it’s probably where it gets a little subjective. This isn’t very intuitive but you will want to use a very HIGH ISO. Usually with long shutter speeds, you want it as low as possible but here since the light source is so dim, you want as much light as possible. Now the maximum acceptable ISO is determined by your camera and taste. On Nikons you can probably get away with 3200 while on Canons, I wouldn’t be comfortable going past 1600. This does not mean one camera is better than the other!

In the photograph I took, I actually used ISO 3200 but it’s a bit too noisy for my taste if I wanted to hit perfection. With long shutter night photography, you also have to consider the concept of hot spots. With any electronic device, when you have things running for long periods of time, they get hot. When sensors get hot, you get what are known as these hot spots or hot pixels with green and red speckling OTHER than that noise that high ISOs create. Some cameras have “High ISO noise reduction” I haven’t personally tried it yet but I think it would certainly help to have that enabled. It basically takes a darker frame after your original shot to cancel out the pixels that are causing problems.

With regards to focus, because that’s always an issue at night, I just focus on something lit up in the distance or just rely on infinity to actually be infinity (even though i know it’s not. Lenses are always infinite a little before the ring stops). Point is, focus using the auto focus and then SWITCH TO MANUAL FOCUS before repositioning to compose your shot.

I think we covered all the settings, to summarize it, I shot this photo at 8mm, for 45 seconds, ISO 3200. I did a bit of post processing to reduce on noise and color correct. The orange street lights cast a very warm glow on everything. We can discuss processing in a later post.

Other equipment that you should use if available: A tripod, remote cable release (wired or wireless) to help you trigger your shutter without pushing the button and introducing shake. If not, you can use a 2 second or 10 second timer to press the button and let the camera settle before it triggers the release. Also spare batteries won’t hurt. Long exposures take up a lot of power so you won’t get nearly as many shots on one charge.

Once you captured your photos, see how I process them here in a follow up video post.

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