Video Photography Tips

Video Photography Tip ~ Shooting Fireworks

Photographing fireworks is fun and unpredictable. First of all, let’s start off with the equipment, you’re going to need:

• camera, of course (preferably with full manual capability)
• tripod
• shutter release cable
• flashlight

It’s probably best to set up early when you still have some light to work with. Practice positioning your camera towards the sky. This is not a usual tripod position and you may need a bit of time to get comfortable with the controls.

Now for setting your exposure and capturing the fireworks. You can use any lens you’d like. Wide lenses usually work well, but I’ve had a blast (no pun intended) shooting close-ups with a 200mm telephoto lens. You’re going to want to have everything in manual mode, including your focus. I will use the lens’ auto focus on the first burst or two, then once focused, I’ll turn off the auto focus setting.

To reduce noise (or grainy specks) in your shots, keep your ISO down in the 200 to 400 range. We want the camera to slowly capture the explosions and make cool light trails. Setting the ISO up high to 800, 1600 or higher will simply made the camera capture images faster and “see” less of the fireworks. And it will introduce more noise.

Next, in manual mode, I’ll set my aperture usually around f/8 or f/11. This will give a good depth of field. And now comes the fun part – shutter speed. Shutter speed is where the magic and experimenting will be done. Start with a one second exposure and see what you get. Make it longer or shorter, experiment. By the way the little quote mark (“) on your shutter speed indicates seconds. In other words 3″ means a 3 second exposure. If you have “bulb” this will allow the shutter to be open whenever you’re depressing the cable release.

Camera Craft: Landscape or Portrait?

There are lots of different decisions we have to make when we’re taking photographs – what lens to use, what aperture and shutter speed to choose, what to include in or exclude from the picture, whether to use any filters… the list goes on.

But one of the simplest decisions we have to make can also have the most fundamental effect on the resulting image – and this is simply whether to have the camera in a horizontal (landscape) or a vertical (portrait) orientation.

This sounds blindingly obvious – and in some ways it is! But sometimes simply turning the camera through 90 degrees can really transform a photograph.

On many occasions it will be obvious from the start which camera orientation to use. Often this will be dictated by the shape of our subject – to record a long, low building we would use a horizontal orientation, while for a tall thin skyscraper we would change to vertical. But there will be other times when the shape of the subject would fit equally well within the frame either way, and then other factors will influence our decision. We will have to consider the other elements in the frame, and how they relate to our main subject.

For instance, going back to the building analogy, if we had a building that was almost completely square, its shape alone would not make the decision for us. So we would have to decide whether we wanted to include more of what was to the sides of the building – a landscape orientation – or more of the foreground and sky – a portrait orientation.

And although in many situations it will be clear which camera orientation will work best, sometimes we can still be caught out! I remember a few years ago I was photographing some trees in a plantation. Because the trees were tall, thin, vertical subjects, my first instinct was to use a portrait shot. However, I then tried a horizontal shot as well, and I thought this actually worked much better.

When you analyse the portrait photo, all the interest is actually in the lower half, with the white flowers and grass growing among the tree trunks – there is very little interest in the top half of the picture at all! So changing to a landscape orientation included more of the interesting part of the scene, and also gave a better sense of the scale of the plantation by including a larger area from one side to another.

Definitely worth turning the camera through 90 degrees this time!

Image Optimizing For The Web

Optimising images for the web lies somewhere between an art and a science. Images need to be sufficiently big that they are easy to see and do not appear pixelated or blurred, while not being so large that they slow down the page’s load time and interrupt visitors’ experiences of the website.

Given that Google has announced that one of the factors in web search engine rankings is now how fast the page loads, having your images perfectly optimised is more important than ever. The first thing to do is to crop the photo. Make sure that the focus of the picture is large enough to see and that extraneous borders are removed. This will help to reduce the file size to aid quick loading.

Next, resize the image. Optimising your photo’s size is best done in an image editing program. There are many free image re-sizing programs available or you could use paid software which you already own. Resize the image so that it is the size you want it to be on your website. For images which will accompany blog posts, somewhere between 500 and 600 pixels wide tends to be the norm.

If, however, you want to showcase your photography in particular, rather than to use an image purely as an illustration of a text post, you will want a larger image size. The size will vary depending on your website or blog layout but start at 1000 pixels wide and make adjustments from there. At 1920 x 1080 pixels Your image will fill the entire computer screen.

If you are displaying your photographs on your website, you will want the image quality to be as high as possible while limiting the file size. Make sure that the final photo is saved as a .PNG or a .JPEG file. .GIF files are not compressed and the file sizes tend to be very large. In order to reduce loss of image quality, do not repeatedly save the photograph as a .jpeg file because in this format the image quality can degrade when it is repeatedly saved. Instead, work on it in a lossless format and only save the final version as a .jpeg.

Optimising your images for the web is a skill which involves balancing page load time, file size, the size the image to be displayed and the image quality. While it may initially take some experimentation to get the best results, once you have a formula which works well for you and your site, stick with it will and let your visitors enjoy your photography in the best quality possible without making them wait too long for the pleasure.

Photographing in Natural Light

Photographers who work outdoors with natural light, rather than in a studio, have to make the best of the prevailing weather conditions. This will be especially true when we’re visiting a location at some distance from where we live.

If a location is nearby, we can have the luxury of waiting until all the conditions look right before we go out to photograph it. But if we’ve made a special trip to get there, we have to work with the natural light that we’re given!

Outside my window as I write this, it’s very overcast. It would be easy to think that it’s not worth going out with a camera on a day like this. But actually, overcast ambient light can be ideal for a photograph.

Although preferably the sky would be covered with white cloud, to give a bit of a feeling of light, rather than heavy grey cloud – as it is here today!

So what subjects can benefit from overcast natural light? Flowers certainly can, especially for close up photos. Bright sunlight on delicate flower petals can often cause burnt out highlights, especially when the petals are white or light-coloured; and as well as this, one flower can cast its shadow onto another, or even one petal can cause a shadow on the one next to it. The soft, ambient light of an overcast day can often yield a better result.

Wider landscapes will often look at their most dramatic in sunlight, especially when the light is low and coming from the side, which reveals the texture and shape in the land.

But you can often find great cameo images within the landscape on an overcast day. And cameo photos within towns and villages, like windows and doorways, are often much better when the light is diffused, and no hard shadows are cast onto your subject by other buildings or by rooflines.

Although woodland looks fabulous to the eye on a sunny day, with sunlight dappling through the leaves, the contrast between light and shade can often be too much for a camera to cope with, and lead to burnt out highlights or blocked up shadows.

On an overcast day, you’ll capture much better detail within a woodland.

Portraits too can really benefit from overcast natural light, as the subject won’t be squinting against bright sunlight, or be brightly backlit – a day with soft, ambient light can be lovely for portrait photography.

And any subject that has a timeless feel to it – an old, crumbling building, peeling paint on a shutter, a bunch of dried flowers – will usually be enhanced by soft ambient light, which can add to the atmosphere of the image.

Sunny days are wonderful in lots of ways – but don’t leave the camera in the bag just because the day is overcast!

Tips for taking photos in bright sunlight

Now that summer is here we can look forward to some lovely long, hot days with plenty of sunshine. Gorgeous! But although bright sunlight lifts our spirits and feels so good for us in many ways, it can cause its own special problems for photography. So how can we make the best use of the summer sunshine?

When the sun is directly overhead, it’s quite unflattering to most photographic subjects, as it creates harsh contrast between light and shadow without revealing any shape or form. Try to do your photography early or late in the day, when the sun is lower in the sky. This can give a lovely three dimensional effect in a photograph, especially when the light is coming from the side, as it lights one side of a subject while the other side falls into shadow. With landscapes this will generally be a bonus; with portraits or close ups you may want to use a reflector or fill in flash to lighten the shadowed side.

Beware of flare on bright days – this is caused when the sun falls on the front element of your lens, and results in image degradation. To avoid this, use a lens hood, shade your lens with your hand, or position yourself so that you’re standing in the shade to take the photo.

One other important thing to bear in mind is the effect of bright sunlight on colour. Soft, pastel colours will tend to appear washed out in harsh light – see my blog on 20 June. So look instead for saturated colours which can benefit from the brighter light to bring out their full impact. Vibrant, saturated colours can appear at their strongest in sunlight, and you can increase the impact by using a polarising filter to saturate the colours even more. For maximum polarisation, try to position yourself so that the sun is coming from the side.

5 Facts Every Good Photographer Should Know

The truly wonderful thing about photography is that’s always something new to learn. In fact I don’t think it’s possible to know everything there is to know. Isn’t that great? How can you possibly get bored with a subject so vast and rich in potential for acquiring new knowledge? Here are five things you may not know, but really should.

Flash exposure

The effective range of your flash is controlled by the aperture and ISO settings you use. The larger the aperture or the higher the ISO, the greater the range of your flash. What doesn’t affect flash exposure is the shutter speed. The shutter speed you use only affects the exposure of the areas of the scene that aren’t illuminated by flash. If you want to darken the background use a faster shutter speed. If you want to reduce the power of the flash use a smaller aperture.

Lens Quality

Generally, a lens is at its peak optically when you use an aperture roughly somewhere in the middle of the available range. Although using a small aperture may gain you greater depth of field you actually begin to lose sharpness through an optical effect known as diffraction. If you want to squeeze the last drop of image quality out of a lens stick to an aperture somewhere between f/5.6-f/11.

Metering

Modern camera meters are wonderful, they really are. But they’re not infallible and will occasionally get exposure spectacularly wrong. Camera meters work best when the scene being measured has an average reflectivity. A scene that has a higher-than-average reflectivity (such as sunlit snow) will cause a meter to underexpose. A scene with a lower-than-average reflectivity (a black cat against a black background) will cause a meter to overexpose. When this happens you need to be prepared to apply exposure compensation. Positive compensation of 1 to 2-stops of the snow scene, negative compensation of 1 to 2 stops for the black cat.

White balance

Auto white balance, like metering, is excellent but fallible. It can get really confused if there’s a large amount of a particular colour in a scene. A red background can cause AWB to add more blue to the image than is required and vice versa. To be accurate you either need to use a WB pre-set that matches the light source you’re shooting under or create a custom white balance using either a piece of white card or a commercial product such as an ExpoDisc.

A smaller sensor means more depth of field

The sensors in compact and phone cameras are tiny compared to those used in a DSLR. This means that the focal length of the lens needs to incredibly small in comparison too. Small focal length lenses mean increased depth of field. This is perfect if you want front-to-back sharpness. It’s not so good if you want to try isolate your subject by throwing the background out-of-focus. Photography often involves compromise. Small is beautiful (and often more handy to carry around) but big allows you to bring out your softer side more easily.

Share :