Photo Tip of the Day

November 20, 2009 - Oh the sights you can see on Peachtree

2009-11-25T06:27:00.002-05:00

1/500

f2.8

ISO 400

110mm

RAW

Just a quick post. I got today's photo on the way home, at the corner of Peachtree and Lenox Roads. This was taken during rush hour, in one of the busiest intersections of Buckhead.

This nut (because I don't know what else to call him), was standing on the median of Peachtree Road by Phipps Plaza. He was raising his cross, pumping his fists, and dancing whenever people acknowledged him in some way — even if it was a negative kind of acknowledgment.

We had stopped at the red light when I saw him. I had to hurry and put my camera together before the light changed, and I snapped this shot as we turned through the intersection and past him. It was a total snapshot!

November 19, 2009 - Armageddon cometh?

2009-11-24T22:46:00.005-05:00

1/2000

f5.6

ISO 400

200mm

RAW

I was lucky to get this, and it didn't even turn out the way I expected. Coming home from work with my carpool, we had left Buckhead under party sunny skies. But by the time we got halfway home a thick layer of foggy, misty clouds had settled over us.

The setting sun gave us a rare moment when the sun was just off of the horizon and visible under the layer of clouds. I quickly pulled out my camera and attached my 70-200mm lens to get a few quick snapshots as we were going over the interstate. Most of my shots were jostled by the moving car (no, I wasn't driving) or blocked by the accompanying flow of cars. But this one shot was clear.

I used my long lens to put an emphasis the interaction between the sun and the edge of the clouds. I had to guess at an ISO because of the (extremely) short amount of time I had. But it worked, and for that I am glad. I wish I had a higher vantage point so I could have caught the long line of cars backed up on the highway, but the car was too low and the overpass' railing was in the way.

November 18, 2009 - Is the tree on fire?

2009-11-20T06:29:00.005-05:00

1/60

f2.8

ISO 400

73mm

RAW

Just a real quick post today for a photo that didn't take long. There is a beautiful flame-orange tree in the park down the street and I had been dying to take a photo of it. But there was a slight problem — it is sandwiched between the four-lane street and the parking lot for the park, so I wasn't sure how to photograph it without including something distracting in the backgroud.

Obviously, I finally figured it out.

I took out my 70-200mm lens and positioned myself along the fence about 80 feet from the tree. Using the focal length to my advantage, I was able to frame the tree and the fence in such a way as to leave out the parking lot (which was immediately outside the frame on the right). It also required some timing to leave out all the cars driving past on the left. It took several attempts, but I finally got a good, clear shot.

I didn't have a tripod or monopod for this shot, so I had to brace the camera as much as possible to avoid camera shake at this low shutter speed. Since I was shooting around 70mm, that meant my shutter speed needed to be at least 1/70 of a second. As you can see, I wasn't there. So some of the shots came out a little blurry from me not holding the camera still enough. This is another instance of where taking a lot of shots (by holding the shutter button down) helped produce a clear, shake free image.

To brace the camera, I knelt down on my right knee and rested my left elbow on the top of my left thigh while keeping my right arm close to the body. Because I was holding the heavy lens in my left hand, the left leg provided lots of support.

As for things I wish I could change, I wish the day had been sunny and not overcast. That would have let the blue sky shine through the leaves instead of the bright white overcast sky. I also wish there wasn't so many leaves on the ground because the nice thick green grass made a good contrast in color with the leaves in the tree.

And in case you are wondering, these leaves are really that color. I did very little manipulation in Photoshop Elements to accentuate the color. Very little.

November 17, 2009 - Black and white rose

2009-11-18T23:08:00.004-05:00

1/50

ISO 1600

50mm

RAW

I am very pleased with how this shot came out. Rachel had bought some flowers for herself, and I took this while they were in a vase on the table. I took the photo using only the light from the table lamp, which I feel gives it good depth and a three-dimensional look.

I shot at ISO 1600 to both give a grainy look and provide enough shutter speed so I could stop the lens down to f9, which provided a good depth of field. In Photoshop Elements, I converted the pink roses to black and white by removing all saturation and increasing the clarity and contrast.

November 16, 2009 - A beautiful Fall yard

2009-11-17T23:12:00.004-05:00

1/320

f5.6

ISO 200

18mm

RAW

I have always admired how beautiful this yard is in the Fall and now I have a great photo to prove it.

I shot this late in the afternoon, about an hour and a half before the sun sets. The angle of the sun gives a great blue sky without a polarizer. The sunlight coming from the right does a great job of striking the brilliant leaves, but it doesn't over-expose the rest of the yard. This allows the house in the shadows of the great pines to still be visible.

I think without the house the photo wouldn't be nearly as good. It clearly shows that this is someone's home, their yard that they have spent countless hours sweating over. And their toils are well worth it.

I shot this RAW, but the sunlight white balance setting in the camera did a great job of getting the colors right and I didn't need to correct them much. I did some selective saturation in Photoshop Elements, but otherwise left the photo alone.

I wasn't sure how the homeowners would react to me taking the photo (even though I was standing on a public sidewalk while shooting), so I preset the camera to what I thought would be a good starting point before walking over. I snapped two photos, checking each on the camera's display, figured I had a good shot, and got the heck out of dodge.

November 15, 2009 - the Earth's Shadow

2009-11-16T22:10:00.004-05:00

1/60

f5.6

ISO 400

27mm

RAW

To be honest, this wasn't the photo I wanted to take today. True, I planned on taking a photo of my church while standing from this exact location — just not at sunset.

I had seen this shot earlier in the day when I was leaving the church after the service was done. It was with a deep, clear blue sky behind the building with all of the Autumn leaves brightly illuminated by the mid-day sun. In fact, the sun was at an angle where the sky would have had good, deep blue even without a polarized lens.

That's the photo I wanted to take.

But sadly, I wasn't able to get back to the church until the sun was going down. So instead, I settled for a sunset shot with the effect called the "Earth's Shadow" coloring the sky behind the building. What causes this shadow? The Earth itself. The sun has gone done below the western horizon behind me, which causes a shadow to appear just above the horizon in the eastern sky. A lot of people don't notice this because the eye is drawn to the brighter part of the sky (which is the setting sun in the west). But it can be a dramatic effect.

I shot this with my 18-55mm zoom at ISO 400 and f5.6. This was the best combination to still get a fast enough shutter speed (1/60) to avoid any camera shake (blurriness) yet still have enough aperture to make sure everything was in focus. The film speed was slow enough to create a clean image and avoid the graininess that can come at higher speeds. I do wish, however, that I had a vantage point that would have been a few feet higher.

I did quite a bit of experimenting in Photoshop Elements (using my new favorite tool, Adjust Color Curves) to get the color to the point that I remembered it. But I am worried I overdid the effect. What do you think? Does this look unnatural? Or does it look like a photo taken just as the sun is setting?

November 14, 2009 - Turning over a new leaf

2009-11-15T22:09:00.004-05:00

1/5000

ISO 100

200mm

RAW

Alright, I confess. I have given up on trying to get caught up on my photos. Not only that, but I'll also admit I have missed a few days in the past three weeks (working too hard can do that to you — start missing things that are important to you).

So today I am turning over a new leaf (snicker), and promise to do better.

With today's photo I tried to capture some of the beauty that can be seen when you let the sunlight shine through some of your subjects. Thanks to a little Curves adjustment in Photoshop Elements, I was really able to bring out the vivid color in both the sky and the leaves in this shot.

I really like how I zoomed in with a long telephoto lens to isolate this small clump of leaves and almost remove everything else from the shot. I also used a shallow aperture to make the other leaves on the right out of focus.

This is what can happen when you take your camera out and play around with shots. Sometimes the best ones are those you don't plan. But once they happen, remembering them will make you a better photographer.

New Photos

2009-11-02T22:49:00.004-05:00

I had some free time tonight, so I posted five of my photos. They are all available on the main page for your viewing pleasure! Just scroll past the Halloween photo to find them.

October 30, 2009 - Happy haunting!

2009-11-01T00:13:00.008-04:00

1/30

f2.0

ISO 3200

50mm

RAW

I know I am still behind in posting, but I got such a great photo last night I couldn't wait to share it. Hopefully, this will help motivate me to get fully caught up.

Tonight I got a great photo of one of the youth at our church's Halloween Trunk or Treat party. He had his face painted as if it was stitched up, and had fun walking around, staring and pointing at people in a quiet, yet menacing way.

I wanted to get a photo that I thought would portray his behavior in a more sinister way. Here's how I did it.

I set him up in a dark hallway beside an open door where the light was spilling from the room into the dark hallway. This illuminated him from the side, but it still left the hallway dark. The light coming from behind him is about 100 feet away. This light is reflecting on some of the woodwork and art along the walls.

I shot this with my 50mm f1.8 lens with the camera set in aperture priority mode. I set the aperture to f2.0 to get a fast enough shutter speed (at 3200 ISO) to get the photo sharp and clear without using a flash (which would have totally destroyed the lighting effect).

Finally, I edited the photo to be a little soft (in other words, I didn't do any sharpening) and off-color on purpose. I thought it made it look like more like a dream (or nightmare) type state.

There are two things that really bug me about the shot. First, there is a chair in the hallway, which you can see in the lower left of the photo. I wish I had noticed it and moved it first. Second, he hand is much blurrier than I thought it would be. I wish it had gotten into focus a little more.

But what's done is done. What do you guys think? How would you rate the photo?

October 24, 2009 - the best Photoshop Elements book

2009-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00

1/60

f2.8

ISO 800

50mm

RAW

After my success with using Curves in Photoshop Elements, I am totally convinced this is the best book for digital photographers to use for Photoshop Elements. If you don't have version 6, just look the edition that matches your version. Scott Kelby and Matt Kloskowski do a great job of having an edition out immediately after Adobe releases a new version.

To take this photo, I placed the book on my kitchen table (which has a nice black surface). I stood on a chair to get over the book so I would have more a a head-on view. I used my 50mm f1.8 lens and pumped up the ISO to 800 so I could shoot with natural lighting in the room and not rely on a flash. Finally, in postproduction, I adjusted the color to make everything appear natural.

The only thing I wish I had done differently is pay more attention to the corners. I had clipped the lower right corner of the book while taking the picture. To compensate a little for that, I also clipped the upper left corner when I cropped the photo down to fit on my blog.

And I really do love this book. Can you tell by the roughed up edges to the cover?

October 22, 2009 - Intense sunrise photo

2009-10-30T22:21:00.000-04:00

1/100

f5.6

ISO 800

18mm

RAW

Thank goodness for being prepared. I have been bringing my camera bag to work everyday since I started this 365 project. This morning it really paid off. This sunrise was happening when I got to my desk.

This photo is actually a photo-merge of two different versions of the same shot. I got the technique from the Photoshop Elements book I told you about back on October 7. I first processed the photo to give great sunset colors and saved it. I then reopened the original, proccessed it foe sunset, and merged the two.

1/125

f5.6

ISO 800

32mm

RAW

And this photo is what I saw when I turned around. This is a great example of turning around and looking at things differently. You may be missing a great photo just because it isn't what you originally envisioned.

I wasn't sure what photo I liked more, so I put them both in. What do you think?

October 21, 2009 - Black and white ivy

2009-10-30T21:59:00.000-04:00

1/160

ISO 400

175mm

RAW

Today's photo is a closeup of some simple ivy against its concrete border. I used my 70-200mm f2.8 lens to isolate just the ivy in the photo and create a nice depth-of-field.

In Photoshop Elements, I increased the contrast and added to the shadows. I also burned in (darkened) the edges to bring more attention to the leaves in the center.

I like this photo a lot. What do you think?

October 20, 2009 - Operation cow drop

2009-10-30T21:27:00.000-04:00

1/125

ISO 400

18mm

RAW

The Chick-fil-A down the street had a lunchtime festival today. Games, food, and a cow drop. That's right, a cow drop. They dropped 300 mini plush cows — with parachutes — down to crowd of at least 600 people. It was crazy, as the photo shows.

This was a tricky shot. We were outside, but underneath a large, covered plaza between two tall buildings. Both ends of the plaza were very bright, which was fooling the camera a little bit. I put the flash on to make sure that whichever way I was facing the shot would be illuminated. Finally, I took a bunch of shots to try to get something good. And out of about 50 shots, I came up with this winner.

I really like it because it shows a lot of action. There are all the hands reaching for the cow, and the lady in the center isolated fantastically against the clump of people. You can clearly see her business attire — the high heels, short skirt, and white blouse — reaching for a cheap little cow like all the rest (oh, did I mention they all had food coupons attached to them?).

I wish, however, I could have been closer and had more of the faces towards the camera.

October 18, 2009 - A nice warm fire

2009-10-30T21:11:00.000-04:00

1/60

f5.6

ISO 400

21mm

RAW

The weather is getting colder, so we put some logs in the fireplace today. After the girls got dressed for church, they sat in front of the fire to play.

I bounced the flash off of the ceiling to light up this photo. I took a bunch of photos to get a really good expression from one of the kids, and it worked. I also got down to their level instead of simply taking the photo while standing up. If you aren't doing this yet with your photos, do it — it is a subtle but significant change that will make your photos much better.

October 16, 2009 - Curving tables

2009-10-30T20:30:00.000-04:00

1/1000

f8.0

ISO 1600

24mm

RAW

Today was overcast, so I went about looking for good subjects for black and white photos. This is a set of tables outside a Chick-fil-A. I liked the symmetry of the composition, and I cropped out everything that was detracting from the tables.

I shot the photo at ISO 1600 to add a bit of graininess, and set the aperture to f8 to get all of the tables in focus. In Photoshop Elements, I increased the contrast and filled in the shadows a bit in an effort to mimic old-fashioned black and white film.

In retrospect, I think the photo is kinda plain. Not much to it. What do you think? I am trying to do more black and white photography, so I am going to keep plugging away and see what I can do.

October 15, 2009 - Behind the scenes at a HowStuffWorks podcast

2009-10-28T06:17:00.008-04:00

1/60

f506

ISO 400

32mm

RAW

I lucked out today. For the past several weeks, ever since I made this photo for Chuck and Josh of Stuff You Should Know fame, I have been wanting to get a photo of one of the podcast teams at HowStuffWorks doing their podcast. Well, today it happened.

I happened to pass the recording studio when they were just setting up for a recording of Stuff You Missed inn History Class. I politely asked permission to get some shots, and they agreed as long as it was during their sound check before they started recording. So a hearty thanks to Sarah and Katie for their cooperation, along with Jeri and Elizabeth who are part of the production crew.

For the photo, I got down to the same level as Sarah and Katie and bounced the dedicated flash off of the ceiling. I put the camera into manual mode, dialing in f5.6, 1/60, and ISO 400 for aperture, shutter, and film speed, respectively. I focused about a third into the scene (the microphone by Katie on the right), which helped produce a nice sharp photo from front to back.

I took a bunch of shots and selected this as the best. I felt it showed how much fun these two ladies have when talking about their subjects. Sarah definitely seems to be chucking about what Katie is saying. And if you listen to their podcasts, you know that happens a lot.

Taking a lot of shots also helped me with another problem. When taking photos of people talking it is very easy to catch them in unusual (and sometimes goofy) facial expressions. When you look at someone talk, you don't really notice how many positions the mouth and lips take to form sounds and words. But a photo freezes that motion. So take a lot of shots when you are shooting someone talking. It will give you more of a chance to get a good looking shot that still conveys the idea of talking.

I wish I could have gotten a better angle, however, one that would have shown more of Katie's face. But there was some equipment in the way. Plus, I wanted to isolate the photo on the table where they do their work and leave out the other stuff that is used for the video podcasts. Some of that video equipment is literally a foot behind Katie, but because of how I shot and cropped this picture you wouldn't have any idea if I hadn't told you. This is another good example of how photography can be as much about what you leave out of the shot as what you keep in.

October 13, 2009 - Archiving old photos

2009-10-27T20:51:00.003-04:00

1/60

f2.2

ISO 1600

50mm

RAW

This is a rather bland, simple photo. But the underlying significance is huge. This box represents all of my archived photos from before I started using an image management system. It contains nearly all of the photos I have taken since 2002 (sadly, some are missing) and it is sitting beside my desk, open and ready for me to import and catalog them all.

It's a daunting task, but one that I want to get done. I have actually started, but there is a long way to go.

Why would I want to do such a thing? For three reasons. First, those old photos aren't really getting looked at and there are some good ones in there. Second, I sometimes have a past client ask for copies of their photos again. And third, I have a bunch of family and personal shots in there, too. My wife and kids just love looking at their old photos, and it becomes very easy to find particular photos with proper tagging in Photoshop Elements.

That's right, I said Elements. I use Photoshop Elements for managing my photos, and I love it. The Organizer part of the program is fantastic. You can tag photos, add captions, attach keywords, and search everything based on those items. Best yet, you can limit your searches to specific time frames to help narrow your results.

As for my current photos, everything goes into Elements (the current count is nearly 25,000). I have a specific regimen for importing photos and I don't deviate from it. Every photo that goes into Elements gets tagged on import so I can find it later.

I know that Elements isn't as nice as some of the other products out there (like Lightroom), but it was also only $90. And I went through a two or three month period of trying out a bunch of products. I didn't want Elements to win initially (I can be pretty anti-establishment sometimes, and believe me — Adobe is definitely the establishment when it comes to imaging software). But I realized I kept comparing everything I tried to what Elements could do. So I went out and bought Elements.

What kind of organizing do you do? Anyone want to share?

October 12, 2009 - A lack of diversity

2009-10-27T06:23:00.006-04:00

1/15

f5.0

ISO 1600

32mm

RAW

I am the Scoutmaster of our church's Boy Scout troop and we went to the Bremen Jewish Heritage and Holocaust Museum today for an eye-opening look at what can happen when a large portion of society decides to be intolerant of people who are different than themselves.

The lighting was pretty bad for photography, with some displays having plenty of light for photos while others were darker. I couldn't use a bounce flash off of the ceiling because the ceiling was high, open, and painted a dark color. And I usually don't like using a direct flash, so I set the camera to f3.5 in aperture priority mode (the big 'A' on the dial) and set the ISO to 1600 and tried to get photos using the natural lighting. By setting it to the widest aperture my lens (the Canon 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 IS) can cover, it insures the widest possible aperture is used throughout the zoom range.

As you can tell from the photo's settings, sometimes my shutter speed was really slow, even for using a image-stabilized lens. I tried to keep the camera steady by holding the camera with both hands and keeping my elbows close to my sides. In areas where I knew there was less light, I usually held the shutter button down and relied on my camera's high frame rate to take multiple shots in succession.

The photo above is from one of those multiple shots. I took three in a row, and the middle one was the best. The first and last had motion blur since my son, Joshua, was swaying slightly as he was looking at the display. This one does have a hint of blur in his face, but you can still see him clearly.

In addition to the light being low, my photos also had a lot of different colors caused by multiple types of light bulbs being used by the museum. It resulted in a photo that looked bad (bad enough so that a viewer might first notice the color instead of the subject). The solution was easy: convert it to black and white. Now that distraction is completely gone, leaving you to think about my 13-year-old son learning about the atrocities the Nazi party — and that's what this photo is all about.

I wish I had gotten a good photo that included more of the troop, but all of those had at least one person moving (and therefore blurry). Remember, IS only helps avoid camera shake by essentially keeping the camera still. Anything under 1/60 of a second will still likely cause motion blur. So in hindsight, I should have set the ISO to 3200 and just lived with the extra graininess that comes with it.

By the way, the Bremen is fantastic. It present a powerful collection of photos and information that cover the Holocaust from just before the rise of the Nazi party to the migration of thousands of Jews to Israel after the war. Plan on being there for at least two hours to soak in all of the information. We were there for an hour and a half and it wasn't enough.

It isn't a place for little kids, however. It doesn't do much to hide the atrocities of the Holocaust. And I am glad it doesn't. It helped my son and I have a candid discussion about the war and the Holocaust.

October 11, 2009 - Sunday morning coloring

2009-10-26T23:12:00.004-04:00

1/60

f5.6

ISO 400

40mm

RAW

I really like today's photo. There may not be much technically masterful about it, but it shows two of my daughters doing one of their favorite things — coloring with their extensive set of tinted, sparkly glue. It's almost as fun as finger paints, but the colors are shimmery and fantastic.

And best of all, Emma and Morgan can really create some dazzling artwork . . . well, at least in my eyes they do.

Once again, I put the camera into manual mode and used my favorite settings for photos with a flash. I find this setting really helps the camera by taking out a bunch of guess work for it to do. Instead, it's like you're telling the camera, "Okay, here's the shutter speed and aperture. All you need to do is figure out the right amount of pop to put into that flash." And by reducing the options, the camera excels.

As for the flash, I used my dedicated Sigma EF-500 DG Super flash and pointed it up at the ceiling. I also zoomed in with the lens some to help isolate the girls and their fun from some of the distracting background in the kitchen.

In hindsight, I wish I had gotten some pictures a few minutes later when their art on the pages in front of them would be more complete. This would really help bring out the idea that they were coloring.

What do you think? What would have been better?

October 10, 2009 - Youth temple trip

2009-10-26T23:09:00.000-04:00

Today I accompanied about half our church's youth group to Columbia, South Carolina, for a church activity. It was an all-day trip and I enjoyed being there very much.

When we were done, we gathered outside for a group shot. My camera bag was left home accidentally ("You asked me to pack it? Honest, Dad, I thought you said you were going to put it in the van!"), but one of the kids brought his Nikon D70. It was a little unfamiliar to me (remember, I shoot Canon), but I think I pulled off a decent photo.

I put the group in the shade of some trees to keep the sunlight off of them, but then turned on the camera's built in flash to make them brighter. Otherwise, the bright white building in the background would have over-powered the exposure, leaving them in the dark. I also dropped my shooting level down a little bit to make it easier for me to include the whole spire and statue in the shot.

I focused on the kids (which I think caused the Nikon to set the exposure mainly based on them) and then recomposed the shot to where they were in one corner and the angel atop the spire was in the other. I also helped them stand as a group, staggering each one so all of their faces were easy to see.

I definitely wish I had paid more attention to if I was keeping the camera level. It seems obvious to me that the shot is a little crooked. And there are two or three kids that are in less-than-ideal poses, which drives me crazy. I try to notice these kind of things when I shoot, but I don't always remember.

I apologize for not having any of the settings for the shot, but I was given a copy of the photo and it had lost all of its Exif data.

October 9, 2009 - Another missed day

2009-10-26T23:00:00.000-04:00

1/80

f5.6

ISO 200

37mm

RAW

Yep, I have missed another day. So in keeping with my tradition of posting a photo of myself on days that I miss, here is a shot taken by my son, Joshua, during our family's egg hunt last Easter.

Yes, I followed my little girls around with a cannon of a Canon. Besides, they're used to it!

October 8, 2009 - Football practice under stormy skies

2009-10-26T22:25:00.004-04:00

1/60

f5.0

ISO 400

18mm

RAW

I am not too thrilled about today's photo, but here it is. I was short on time and didn't know what to do, but as I was driving home from work (after staying late again) I saw the lights on at the local park. So I stopped for about 10 minutes to see if I could get a shot of a game.

I was disappointed, however, to find out there wasn't a game — just a practice. And it hadn't even started yet. I waited for as long as I felt I could, and grabbed a few snapshots as they moved out to the field for warmups. I purposefully put the ground along the bottom of the frame to bring in the overcast, stormy looking sky.

I wish I had been able to get closer to the players. Maybe catch them in some kind of pre-practice huddle, or lined up on the grass as they stretch. But I had two things going against me. First, I didn't have any time. And second, only the players and the coaches were allowed onto the field. Everyone (and I mean everyone) was to stay on the other side of the gates. The coach seemed like a no nonsense kind of guy, and I wasn't going to push him.

October 7, 2009 - Gorgeous sunset photo

2009-10-25T00:25:00.005-04:00

2 sec

f11

ISO 100

18mm

RAW

We just had a strong front go pushing through today and it turned into a beautiful, clear day. From past experience, I knew this would produce some strong colors at sunset, so I planned out this shot in advance.

My son and I hiked through a field with waist high grass in order to get on the other side of this massive, old oak tree. We set the camera up on a tripod to insure stability, and took a bunch of photos.

Each shot was done on 'M' so we could alter each shot slightly from the previous one. We mostly experimented in longer or shorter shutter speeds, but we also changed angles and orientations.

Sunset photos are the best when you include something in the sunset. It doesn't matter much what it is (like a silhouetted tree, your best friend, or reflections off of a surface), but its inclusion is vital.

For this shot, I put the silhouetted oak down in the lower corner to also use the rule of thirds. As for the other settings, I wanted a good, deep depth of field, so I went with f11. ISO 100 insured the photo would be smooth and grain-free, and the tripod prevented any blurriness on such a long exposure.

I liked this one the best. There was still enough light so the field wasn't thrown into complete darkness, and the clouds had a little hint of pink in them at the top of the frame. But when I loaded it up into Photoshop Elements, however, I couldn't quite get the color that I wanted. Either the sky wasn't blue enough at the top, the clouds weren't bright enough, or the horizon wasn't yellow enough. And I totally couldn't see any pink in the clouds.

So what did I do? I pulled out The Photoshop Elements 6 Book for Digital Photograhers (here's a link to the same book for the latest version of Photoshop Elements). I reviewed the book for ideas on getting the missing colors, and found the solution &mdash the 'Adjust Color Curves' tool. It's amazing! I'm going to need to use this one more. Not only did it bring out all of the color that was missing, but it also helped me keep the field from going completely black. It completely saved me from going into depression (because I was so frustrated with the lackluster look of the photo).

What do you guys think? Did I go to far? Is the color unreal? Or did I get it right?

October 6, 2009 - Beauty amidst the rain

2009-10-20T23:17:00.005-04:00

1/200

ISO 400

55mm

RAW

I know it's been a while since my last post, but I hope this one is a treat!

Today I went out during lunch after a light rain to try to get some water droplet photos, and this time I think I found a real keeper. These were odd little flowers (all of the blooms are half-circles), but were beautiful and vibrant.

I shot them hand-held with my 18-55mm IS lens, which makes for a decent macro lens in a pinch (or on a tight budget, like me). The sky was still overcast, but there was plenty of light to get a good shutter speed and small-ish aperture (to increase depth of field), all while using a good ISO to avoid graininess.

Having shot in RAW, I loaded it into Photoshop Elements and used Adobe Camera Raw to do some post-processing. I actually lowered the exposure by a quarter and bumped up the vibrance to saturate the colors a little more.

Then I did something I usually don't do — instead of raising the clarity to help sharpen the image, I lowered it to make it appear softer. Then I sharpened just the water droplets in the focus zone to make them really pop out. By being selective with the sharpening, I kept the blurry areas nice and smooth (the sharpening affect would have made these more grainy). For the final touch, I put a vignette around the frame, darkening the edges slightly to bring more attention to the brighter center of the photo.

I like this photo a lot. How do you think I did? If there was one thing I wish I had done a little differently, it would have been to capture the photo at a little bit of an angle instead of being so 'straight down' on the flowers.

October 5, 2009 - Gloomy day

2009-10-15T22:13:00.003-04:00

1/200

ISO 200

32mm

RAW

The weather was pretty gloomy today. I took this around lunchtime from the patio on the 15th floor of our office building.

I apologize, but I have been busy the last week or so. I have been overworked and haven't been getting enough sleep.

October 4, 2009 - Cinnamon baked goodness

2009-10-13T23:17:00.003-04:00

1/4

ISO 200

55mm

RAW

I feel like I really learned something from today's photo. Once again, I found myself baking (some cinnamon rolls this time) and took some photos as the batch was cooling. Unlike most of my other photos, however, this was shot from a tripod instead of hand-holding and praying for the best.

I tried two different lenses &mdash first I went with my 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 IS lens, and then I tried my 70-200mm f2.8L lens. After looking through the shots, I really liked the perspective and angle of view of the first lens.

Going into the shot, I thought I would like the photos better from the other lens. Why? Because it is optically sharper. But in reality the smaller, cheaper lens was easier to work with and I got a better angle of view on the rolls.

The tripod let me pick a nice, slow ISO that would give a good, clean image that's free from digital noise (graininess). If you will notice, the shutter speed was 1/4 of a second. Without the tripod, this would have been an impossible shot to make. But even with the tripod there was a problem. This particular shutter speed is smack dab in the middle of a short range of shutter speeds that is susceptible to blurring because of the force of the internal mechanisms of the camera shaking the camera during the shot.

This shake affected the 70-200mm, but not the 18-55mm. I think the difference is the image stabilization. Without it, the 70-200mm had problems. But with it, the 18-55mm performed like a champ.

What would I do differently? I think I would have tried to move the rolls somewhere else, or at least do something to avoid the tile backsplash of the stovetop. The tiles have a floral arrangment printd on it, which can be a little bit of a distraction. Now that I have finished the post, I also think the image is a little tilted. I should have made sure it was level (either when I snapped the photo or with Photoshop Elements in post-processing.

And one other thing &mdash I wish I had made two batches of rolls instead of just one!

October 3, 2009 - What are you willing to give up?

2009-10-12T23:31:00.004-04:00

1/30

ISO 800

32mm

RAW

I am so proud of my daughter. Leigh Ann had decided that her beautiful long hair was getting too long and she wanted to get it trimmed to shoulder length. But then my wife asked why stop there? She was only a couple of inches shy of the minimum length required for donations to Locks of Love.

So she agreed. She even went above and beyond and cut off nearly a full foot of hair so she could have the haircut you see in the photo.

I took this using the available light from the same window I use for many of my black and white portraits. Thanks to the image-stabilized lens I used, there wasn't any camera shake in the shot despite the slow 1/30th of a second shutter speed. I also removed a painting from above the couch so there wouldn't be any distractions — just a nice blank wall. This let the viewer's concentration be solely upon Leigh Ann and her hair.

About the only thing I wish I had done differently is to lower my angle of view just a little more to completely get rid of the couch. And it would have also been nice to get Leigh Ann to part her lips a little on her smile. When she shows just a little bit of teeth, her smile really shines.

And as you can tell, she just loves her new hairstyle. Not only that, but she is ecstatic that the hair she cut off is not going to waste!

October 2, 2009 - Water leak

2009-10-11T23:37:00.003-04:00

1/125

ISO 200

24mm

RAW

As a homeowner, I have come to realize there are all kinds of things that need attention and/or repairs around your house. Undoubtedly, one of the worst phrases you can hear is, "you've got a water leak."

And that's exactly what I was told yesterday.

Luckily, the leak was fairly simple and just a couple of feet from the city's water meter, so it wasn't too hard to find nor dig up. There was a sleeve put over the PVC pipe where it transitioned from 1-inch to 3/4-inch. The pipe had cracked coming out of the sleeve.

I had never worked with PVC before, but it wasn't too hard. Since I did all the work myself, it cost me only about $15. Much better than the $200 quote I had been given by a plumber!

This was a pretty straightforward shot. The sky was overcast, so there weren't any harsh shadows across the pipes. The f8 aperture setting helped insure everything was in focus, from the bottom to the top. I do wish I could have gotten the leak in the photo too, but it was too small to see from this distance. The standing water around the pipes and in the meter box, however, helps you know how bad the leak wss.

October 1, 2009 - Well planned snapshots

2009-10-09T23:53:00.006-04:00

1/40

f5.0

ISO 800

29mm

RAW

A little more simple of a shot today. I got this while my kids were browsing around for a book to buy at their school's book fair. But even with something that looks like a snapshot still has some thought and planning behind it.

Take this shot, for instance. I cheated a little by putting the camera in 'P' mode. This mode lets the camera make all the decisions but lets me influence them. In this instance my influences were setting the camera to ISO 800 and using the fluorescent white balance. The film speed gave it enough light to properly expose the shots without using a flash, while the white balance matched the lights in the library.

Now all I had to do was follow my kids around as they looked at books. But even there I used a specific technique. In this shot, I crouched down so the camera was on the same level as my kids. This simple change in angle of view really changes the whole feel of the photo because it is as if we are seeing the world from their perspective. It's subtle, but can have a powerful effect.

As to what I would change, I wish I had a little more shutter speed. The camera was fooled a little and overexposed the shot, but I was able to dial it back down using Adobe Camera Raw adn Photoshop Elements. If the camera hadn't been fooled, however, the shutter speed would have been a little faster and maybe I wouldn't have gotten the slight motion blur in Morgan's hands.

Oh, and one more thing — why in the world are they holding the book upside down?

September 30, 2009 - Peanut butter chocolate kiss cookies

2009-10-09T22:20:00.006-04:00

1/13

f5.6

ISO 400

55mm

RAW

Welcome to one of my all-time favorite cookies. These peanut butter chocolate kiss cookies are so easy to make but so hard to stop eating, especially when you have a cold glass of milk with them!

I took this photo as the cookies were cooling. We had just pulled them out of the oven and placed the chocolate kisses on each one. The heat from the cookies was melting the kisses in place. That's why there is a sheen on the kisses — they're liquifying.

I shot this in RAW and without a flash, using the light from the stovetop. I used my image-stabilized 18-55mm lens, which allowed me to take the handheld shot at an incredibly slow 1/13 of a second (it probably helped that I braced my elbows on the countertop as I held the camera).

The reason why the shutter speed is so slow is because I was pushing the aperture to as small as possible to get a deeper depth of field. When focusing this close to your subject (the cookies were only about 12 inches away), your depth of field is really shallow and you need a smaller aperture to get more in focus. In particular, I wanted this shot to have a whole cookie in focus, and f5.6 allowed me to do this.

Thanks to the RAW format, I had good control of converting the color to true white using Photoshop Elements and Adobe Camera Raw (it comes bundled with PSE). I have tried setting my camera's white balance to incandescent so it will match the light bulb under the stove's hood. But for some reason this light gets all wacky anyway, so I have to correct it using PSE.

Even though I shot this in landscape format, I liked the resulting crop better as a vertical. I think it brings more attention to the in-focus cookies in the lower third of the shot (rule of thirds!). I also add more feeling of depth to the shot by having one row out of focus in front and three rows behind.

I really like this shot a lot. If I had to nitpick anything, there would only be a couple. First, I think the kiss in the very front has an odd, slightly distracting shape. And second, I wish the two kisses in focus had more of a reflective shine like the ones in the back.

I am not sure why, but I really like taking food shots. I often find myself studying the food shots in elaborate restaurant menus, trying to figure out what makes each photo so nice, so effective. Then I try to keep those things I notice in mind for the next time I shoot.

I think I am getting better. What do you think?

September 29, 2009 - Deliciously disgusting cake

2009-10-07T23:01:00.003-04:00

1/80

f5.6

ISO 400

18mm

RAW

I'll admit up front, this isn't going to be easy to explain. That thing on the table is a cake. It is also supposed to be meatloaf. But in actuality, it's really supposed to be a monster's foot. Make sense?

Don't worry, it didn't make sense at first to me either.

Here's the explanation. I work as a programmer at HowStuffWorks.com, and we just launched the TLC Cooking portion of our website (which you can find at recipes.howstuffworks.com). Being in a celebratory mood, the folks at TLC headquarters wanted to send us us a large cake for everyone to eat. But they didn't want to send just a plain cake — oh no, that just wouldn't be fun enough. They wanted to send a special cake that would look like one of the dishes from the recipes on the new site. But what recipe did they pick? One from the Halloween section called Feet of Meat!

So in honor of our accomplishment, we got to eat cake that was meant to look like a cooked foot of some Halloween monster. How appetizing.

In today's shot, our editor in chief, Conal Byrne, had just cut off the first piece of cake (for those wondering, it was the big toe), revealing to everyone that the cake was red velvet, creating a great illusion of raw meat inside. Everyone either laughed, gasped, or gagged. But what would you expect? Even those on the other side of the cake (who couldn't see the red inside) still saw the blood red cake stuck to the knife as he pulled it out of the cake. Yum, nothing like simulated red meat!

I took this photo just at the height of everyone's reaction. I like the candid emotions and reactions caught on their faces. It was a prime moment, and it can be hard to catch these kind of reactions. If I wasn't ready with the camera when the moment happened, I would have never caught it. Of course, it helped that I knew the cake was red velvet and I was expecting a good reaction. A little planning and anticipation can go a long way in getting great photos.

I used my dedicated flash and bounced it off of the ceiling to get a nice even amount of lighting in the whole room. This technique also eliminates the vast majority of shadows in the room, which helps add to the overall effect of the photo.

I purposely cropped it very wide to eliminate all of the dead space in the upper and lower portion of the photo. This helped draw attention to the most important parts of the photo, the cake and everyone's reaction to it. I just wish it wasn't so dark in the back corner. Maybe I should have had my flash pointing a little more forward instead of just straight up.

September 28, 2009 - Caught red-handed (again!)

2009-10-07T22:44:00.000-04:00

1/60

f5.6

ISO 400

55mm

RAW

I've been caught red-handed again. Twice in the same week I have missed a day, and I don't have anything to post for today.

(Ugh. I feel so ashamed . . . .)

So, in honor of how I feel, today I have posted a photo taken by my daughter, Leigh Ann, when she caught me red-handed as I was licking the chocolate chip pumpkin muffin dough off of the spatula we used back on September 20th.

She saw me taking photos that night, and after I had put the camera down she asked if she could get some photos herself. I said yes (of course) and away she went snapping photos. Little did I know she would get such a good one!

September 27, 2009 - Homemade spaghetti and meatballs

2009-10-07T22:32:00.000-04:00

1/30

f2.8

ISO 400

50mm

RAW

Just a quick one tonight. We had spaghetti and meatballs today and I just couldn't resist another food shot. This was taken while the meatballs were simmering in our cast iron skillet with the spaghetti sauce.

I did quite a bit of contrast control in Photoshop Elements to get the photo to have enough snap to it. I am sure glad I shot it as RAW so I could have more control over how the final picture came out.

I like the way it turned out, especially with the bubbles that show it was simmering. What do you think?

September 26, 2009 - Beautiful day in Buckhead

2009-10-07T12:15:00.004-04:00

1/1000

f7.1

ISO 200

30mm

RAW

Well, I have finally done it. I missed a day. I was going to try to sneak this past you, but then thought surely someone would catch that the metadata for the image clearly showed it was taken on Sept. 25th and not the 26th and I would have a huge Internet scandal on my hands that make my life a living nightmare.

But then I thought, why not admit it? I'm not perfect, just like David Letterman isn't perfect, and if he can admit his shortcomings on national TV then I can surely admit mine to the world.

Whew. That feels so much better.

On to the picture. The cloud cover was just gorgeous today (oops, I mean yesterday), so I got a good shot of the office building and condominium you can see from the 15th floor deck at my office. And because my floor is roughly halfway up the height of these two buildings, I don't get any perspective distortion.

Based on the image data, it looks like I had the camera in 'P' mode, which means the camera made most of the decisions for me (which is generally fine for a photo like this). My only post-production thought was if I should take out the tower crane or not that is protruding on the right side of the image. Since I am so far behind in making my daily posts, I decided not to.

What do you think, should I have?

September 25, 2009 - Tannah and Spot

2009-10-04T15:41:00.004-04:00

1/400

f2.5

ISO 1600

50mm

RAW

Tannah had the privilege of bringing home the class pet for the weekend. She had so much fun with Spot today that I just had to get a photo of the two of them together.

Just like many of my other black and white photos, I had her sit down by the large living room window and used the natural ambient lighting to illuminate her. I used the higher ISO setting to create some graininess in the photo, and the wide f2.5 aperture to blur out the background.

I don't have any regrets with this photo. I had taken about a dozen different ones with her and Spot, and this was the best. I think it does a great job of capturing her happiness and contentment. What do you guys think?

September 24, 2009 - Cleaning up from the flood

2009-10-04T15:11:00.004-04:00

1/50

ISO 400

27mm

RAW

I went to watch Emma at tennis practice today and heard some commotion in the woods behind the tennis courts. I found a county crew trying to clean out this massive drainage pipe, which had become clogged sometime during (or maybe even before) the flooding we had.

The pipe is what a small creek flows through as it goes under one of the roads in our neighborhood. Normally, the creek doesn't have much more than a trickle flowing through it, but was fairly raging during the flood because at least 20 yards empty into it just from our neighborhood alone.

Because of the clog, the creek backed up until it flowed over through one of the houses and over the street. Then it joined up with a larger creek and flooded out the tennis court and swimming pool area. The county crew was trying to clear out the clog so they could send an engineer into the pipe to inspect it for washout damage under the roadway.

This photo was kind of challenging because of the lighting. We were in the thick trees, but there were several open spots that was letting in quite a bit of light. This light was confusing the camera and making it underexpose the majority of the photo. I put the camera into 'P' mode (which on my Canon is one spot away from the fully automatic green mode). This allowed the camera to make all of the adjustments it thought it needed but also gave me the chance to override it.

Since the camera was underexposing the photo pretty severely, I used the exposure compensation setting to overexpose the shot by nearly one full stop. This canceled out the camera's confusion and gave me the exposure I wanted.

I wish I could have used the camera's flash, but that would have drawn a lot of attention to me and I wasn't sure I wanted it. I was worried a little that they might complain if it became obvious I was photographing their work. But if I could have used a flash it would have helped light up the shadows of the photo, especially in the pipe.

September 23, 2009 - Church volleyball

2009-10-04T15:10:00.003-04:00

1/500

f2.0

ISO 1600

50mm

RAW

Getting a photo today was a challenge. I was busy all day, and then had a church youth group meeting after dinner. But when I showed up they were getting ready to play volleyball, so I pulled out my camera.

I quickly figured out, however, that the lighting in our church's simple gymnasium was pretty bad. I had to use my 50mm f1.8 lens, open all the way to f2, in order to get enough light (at ISO 1600) for stop action photos.

To make matters worse, this lens doesn't have a quick autofocus, so many of my photos were out of focus.

Here is one of the few acceptable ones I feel I got. It was taken during the serve and I cropped in on it to focus on the concentration on his face and the blur of the ball as it was hit. This blur really helps add a feeling of action to the shot.

Because of the light colored room divider behind him, the camera was fooled and it underexposed the photo a little. That is why it is so grainy. When shooting at high ISO's, it is vitally important to properly expose the photo during the shot. This will help reduce the graininess of the photo. The more you have to fix the exposure after the shot with your photo editing software, the worse the grain will be.

The lighting was also casting a horrible color that was really hard to nail down in post-processing. Due to being so behind in my posts, I didn't spend much time on it.

September 22, 2009 - Damage from the lightning?

2009-10-01T17:50:00.004-04:00

1/60

f5.6

ISO 400

18mm

RAW

My neighbor, whose lightning strike I told you about in yesterday's post, had a bunch of electronics blow out in his house. How? The water pipe from the city supply ran through the roots of the tree. The lightning's charge traveled down the pipe and into their house.

Thankfully, we were more lucky. We didn't get any lightning strikes. But for some reason the DVD player was dead when we tried to use it today. Today's photo is of Joshua trying to get Tannah's favorite movie out of the player.

I used my dedicated flash pointed up into the ceiling, as I described in the third paragraph of Sunday's post about making some muffins. I composed the photo with Joshua off to one side and the player at the bottom to kind of frame the image a little.

I just wish I had left the armoire door so you could see the TV inside. That would really help set the photo properly. I also wish I had put a little white card behind the head of the flash so it would have bounced a little light into Joshua's face.

September 21, 2009 - Lightning strike too close to home

2009-10-01T12:51:00.005-04:00

1/30

f5.6

ISO 400

18mm

RAW

Today's photo is more of a fun snapshot. Last night we got a ton of rain — officially seven inches. And the worst of it came down during a horrible lightning storm.

Near the end of the storm (around 5 a.m.) I heard a loud SNAP, followed immediately by a massive thunderclap. It clearly came from somewhere in front of the house. I thought for sure one of our trees had been struck.

In the morning we found out it was the massive poplar tree across the street in our neighbor's yard. In the photo you can see the strike went clear down to the ground, shattering off bark and wood as it went. Tannah is holding one of the pieces (which we had found in our yard) that had splintered off from the strike.

This is a straight-forward shot. I used my wide-angle lens to get as much of the 80-foot tree as I could, but I didn't want to step much further back so you could still make out the streak down the tree. I included Tannah to help give some relevance to how big the tree really is.

In hindsight, I should have shot it at ISO 800 or open up the aperture to f4. This would have increased the shutter speed to 1/60. I could have also had Tannah hold the piece of wood more to the side so you could make it out clearly. The way she is holding it in the photo makes it hard to visually separate it from her torso.

PS — this rain was the start of the great Atlanta flood of 2009. Luckily, we didn't get much more during the day. But some parts of the Atlanta area got two to three more inches as the day went on. I don't have any photos of actual flooding, but I will have some more rain- and storm-related photos coming up.

September 20, 2009 - Making pumpkin muffins

2009-09-28T06:31:00.003-04:00

1/60

f5.6

ISO 400

20mm

RAW

Tonight we made a treat — chocolate chip pumpkin muffins!

I used my dedicated flash to light up the kitchen. I pointed it straight up so it would bounce off the ceiling and create a brighter, broader light. It did a good job.

I set the camera on manual, with the shutter at 1/60, aperture at f5.6, and ISO at 400. For indoor shots with a flash, these are my favorite settings. The camera does a great job of figuring out how much flash to use, and my Sigma EF500 Super flash has plenty of power.

The 1/60 shutter speed does a good job of stopping action, while the f5.6 aperture usually creates a good depth of field for indoors. With the film speed set at ISO 400, it's fast enough to light up most of the room and have a slight (yet pleasant) light falloff towards the back.

I composed this shot specifically. I got in close to Tannah and down on her level so you could easily see her. I arranged the simple ingredients so you could see what they were. Because I focused in close, the depth of field in this shot was fairly shallow which helped put the messy counter behind her out of focus (which helps reduce its distraction yet convey enough to easily convey that this is a kitchen).

I like this photo. It really captures the idea well of making something with my kids. Leigh Ann was helping a little, too. And when she wasn't helping, she took my camera and took some photos of Tannah and I working side by side.

By the way, the recipe is really simple. One box of spice cake mix, one bag of mini chocolate chips, and one regular-sized can of pumpkin. Mix it all up (no water needed) with a teaspoon of nutmeg and put it in muffin tins. Cook them at 325° for 10 minutes (for miniature muffins, longer for regular ones) and enjoy!

September 19, 2009 - Flower on a rainy day

2009-09-28T06:13:00.005-04:00

1/25

ISO 800

49mm

RAW

I am sure you have all heard about Atlanta's great flood of 2009 by now. This photo was taken two days before the flood happened. It had been raining for five straight days for a total of about seven inches so far, according to my rain gauge (a large bucket) in my front yard.

My youngest daugher, Tannah, was attending her best friend's birthday party. It was supposed to be at a petting zoo/animal ranch, but the rain had forced those plans to be canceled and the party was now at their home. When I dropped her off I saw their beautiful flowers on their front porch. I got this picture when I came back to pick her up.

The sky was completely overcast (and dark, too, because it was raining as I took this). While kind of gloomy, it offered a very even lighting. I made sure to take this in RAW format so I would have plenty of processing options later on when I loaded it into the computer. And I shot at f8 to have a good depth of field in the photo, which helped more of the flower be in focus.

I pumped up the exposure and contrast in Adobe Camera Raw, while also darkening the blacks a little bit to help keep the background dark. I didn't really like the flower in the background in the upper right, so I burned (darkened) that quite a bit to make the main flower separate from it more.

So what do you think? Overall, I think it is pleasant, but not a knock-out. The overcast skies provided even lighting, but I wouldn't consider it dynamic. I am worried I darkened the background too much and affected the overall mood of the photo. I also didn't have an umbrella as I was taking the photos, so I was a bit rushed (it wasn't a light rain!) and I didn't take my time. Ideally, I would love to find some flowers like this immediately after a storm is over with the sun coming out.

PS &mdash I would really like to know what kind of flowers these are. Anyone know?

September 18, 2009 - Joshua's black and white

2009-09-27T09:52:00.003-04:00

1/400

f2.2

ISO 1600

50mm

RAW

I finally got my oldest, Joshua, to pose for me at the same window, so this completes the set I wanted to do of all my children. And just like the others, everything I said about the first photo applies here, too.

I'm going to break with my traditionally explanation and talk about what I don't like first — that finger resting on his upper lip! I really like the pose, but the finger is very distracting. He was moving around as I was taking the photos (almost like he was modeling for me) and I tried to get him back into the same pose but with his fingers resting on his chin instead, but I was unsuccessful.

Having said all that, I like this photo. The lighting for this portrait is probably the best of the bunch. One thing I did differently is I put my 52-inch round white reflector just out of the picture to his right. This bounced a little bit of the window light back into the darker side of his face, which really helped lighten up his eye.

Now that all five are done, Rachel and I aren't sure we like all of them. There are a couple we feel really capture the kids' personalities (like Leigh Ann and Tannah), but we worried some of the poses are too similar (Rachel wants variety in each kid's pose). We will probably take some of these again until we feel we have what we want.

September 17, 2009 - Slight reprieve in the rain

2009-09-22T02:25:00.003-04:00

1/250

f7.1

ISO 400

55mm

JPEG

The rains held off for a while, and the tree guys came out to make good on their promise. While it is not perfect, my yard looks a lot better now. And since it wasn't raining, they went ahead and cut down the last tree.

Since the ground was still wet and borderline soaked, they cut the tree up into pieces and used a rope to lower each part to the ground. This technique was also used to make sure nothing fell on the power lines going to my house, which were only a few feet away. It also allowed them to haul the trunk off in pieces instead of having to use the same logger truck from the day before (the owner told me he wasn't going to use that guy again).

To help properly illuminate this photo on such an overcast day, I used my dedicated flash. The camera was being fooled by the bright white sky, so I told it to over-compensate on the flash by one full stop. I thought this did a nice job of brightening up the photo without making it look unnatural.

This is a great example of why you shouldn't be afraid to use your flash in the middle of the day. Without it, the photos turned out much darker. Why? I was aiming up into the underside of the tree, and just 25 feet away was my dark brown house (which was acting more like a light sponge — soaking up the light).

Before using the flash, the tree and the tree cutter were much darker and lacked detail. With the flash, everything looks more like you would perceive it with your natural eye.

September 16, 2009 - What a mess

2009-09-22T02:11:00.003-04:00

1/40

ISO 800

20mm

RAW

Between cutting down four trees yesterday and this morning, we must have had around three inches of rain fall. And it was still raining. So I went to work, thinking surely there was nothing that would happen today with the tree cutting.

Oh, how I was wrong.

My wife, Rachel, called me around 11 a.m. and said the logger truck showed up and they hauled away the tree trunks that had been felled from the day before. She was busy upstairs when they must have arrived because she didn't realize they were there until the last log was being dragged through the mud to their truck down on the street.

When I got home, this photo shows what greeted me.

I called up the tree cutting service, and the owner apologized. Profusely. He said the logger truck (which is run by a sub-contractor) had permission to pick up the logs yesterday (before the rain started coming down) but he shouldn't have come today. Not after all the rain. And he was especially wondering why in the world the guy tried to do it while it was still raining.

So for my photo today, you get something more like a snapshot. I took a bunch of photos to show what kind of damage was done in case I wasn't going to get any relief from the tree service. This was taken as I was standing in the street where the truck had been, showing how all the logs would've been pulled towards down the slope in front of my house.

They promised to come back out tomorrow, rain or shine, to get this cleaned up.

September 15, 2009 - Up in the trees

2009-09-19T14:00:00.003-04:00

1/320

ISO 800

150mm

RAW

We had a tree cutting service come out today to take down some dead, diseased, and damaged trees. There was a lot of activity and they were under the constant threat of rain, which made them work even faster.

The guy who climbed the trees had been doing it for years, and was very good. I got up on my roof to take this photo. By getting up on the same level as him, it allowed me to put a background of treetops behind him instead of the overcast sky. Our front yard slopes down to the street (by about 25 feet), so he was about 40 feet off the ground as he was making this cut.

I used my 70-200mm f2.8L lens so I could get a good, up close shot of him with all of the chips flying. I set the white balance mode to cloudy, and then added in more contrast in Photoshop Elements. And the shutter speed was in that magic range where most of the falling chips were frozen in air but the chips coming right off the chainsaw are slightly blurred. This really conveys the action of the photo.

I love how I caught a look of utter concentration. I also wanted to leave some negative space at the bottom (to help convey how high he was) but was careful not to include too much (which would have made him smaller in the photo).

I really like this photo, and I not sure if there is anything I would have changed. What do you think? Do you have any suggestions on what could have made this better?

September 14, 2009 - Biscuits

2009-09-19T13:12:00.005-04:00

1/30

ISO 800

50mm

RAW

Today I made one of my favorite foods — biscuits! I took photos of both the preparing process and the finished product. Since I just recently put up a photo of making cinnamon rolls, I decided to post the golden brown finished product.

I shot this at a shallow angle so I could get the full range of focus zones in the photo. There are out-of-focus biscuits in the foreground and background surrounding the in-focus biscuits in the middle. This gives more depth to the photo and adds to its visual appeal.

I used the rule of thirds by putting the area of sharpest focus in the lower right third of the photo. I also cropped it in close to give more attention to the area of sharpest focus. Finally, I corrected the white balance and pumped up the contrast and color saturation.

I only have one regret &mdash I wish I hadn't eaten so many of them!

September 13, 2009 - Twilight overcast sky

2009-09-19T09:36:00.001-04:00

1/15

f5.6

ISO 400

18mm

JPEG

I had been inspired recently by Bill Warren's outstanding photo collection of the world's largest tourist trap (called South of the Border on I-95 in South Carolina), so when I saw a chance to get a similar photo, I jumped at it.

I took this on an overcast day right as the sun was setting. It was bright enough to see, but dark enough that many businesses had their colorful lights and signs on. There was a balance to how bright the sky was compared to the business lights.

After I loaded the photo into Photoshop Elements, I lowered the exposure, increased the contrast, and pumped up the saturation a little. Even though I accidentally shot this as a JPEG (I had left it in JPEG mode after the tennis match the day before), I still used Adobe Camera Raw to edit the photo. How did I do that? I just selected 'Open As...' from the menu in the Editor, found my JPEG image, and chose to open it as a Camera RAW image in the dropdown menu at the bottom of the 'Open File' window.

The hardest thing for me was getting the photo to appear straight. I hadn't brought a tripod along, so I had to hand-hold the camera as I was shooting. The light was fading fast, so while the pictures I had started taking a few minutes before at ISO 400, I should have adjusted to ISO 800 for this one.

To make things harder, I was standing on the tall cement base of one of the light poles around the station so my angle of view would be a little higher and I wouldn't be aiming the camera up so much. I had to hold onto the pole with one hand while shooting with the other. It's amazing that a photo came out clear at all. I guess that really speaks to the technology put into these image-stabilized lenses that Canon is producing now.

I wish I had waited around a few more minutes and gotten another set of photos when it was almost dark.

I also want to go back and see what I can do to dial down the blue in the sky. I think if it was more grey, then with a little selective burning and dodging (lightening and darkening) I could make this look like a real stormy sky.

September 11, 2009 - Studio 1A at HowStuffWorks

2009-09-17T17:15:00.005-04:00

1/30

f3.5

ISO 800

21mm

RAW

There's a good chance some of you have heard of HowStuffWorks.com, which is where I work (especially since I know some of my co-workers are following my 365 project). We have several outstanding podcasts, including one by Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant called "Stuff You Should Know."

(If you haven't heard it, you should check them out. They are available in the podcast section of iTunes. You'll probably find them in the Top 10 list.)

Anyway, yesterday Chuck asked me to get a photo of the recording studio. It seems some of the listeners wanted to see where they recorded their show. He also had received a wooden sign from a fan that depicted the name of the studio, and he wanted a shot so he could put it on his blog post. This way he could accomplish two things at once.

Today's photo is the result. After seeing how dark the studio is, I kinda wished I had brought my tripod to work. So I pulled out my image stabilized lens (which also happens to be my widest lens), set the ISO to 800, and played around with the aperture until I got a shutter speed I knew I could shoot with while hand-holding the camera.

I noticed the lights seemed to be all florescent bulbs, so I waited a few minutes until they all got as bright as possible (sometimes the CFL bulbs take a few minutes to reach full capacity). I shot it as RAW so if there were any problems with the coloring (even after putting the white balance to florescent) that I could have maximum control in correcting it.

While the photo may make the studio look fairly nice and orderly, it is quite the opposite. To the left of the table (by about three feet) is the sound engineer's work desk, complete with all of her controls, computers, screens, and everything else she uses (Jeri, you do a great job!). To the right of the table (and behind the thick woven fabric hanging over the wall) is the green screen portion of the studio where they shoot their video podcasts. It is a mess of cords, lights, stands, and other studio gear.

Because I was selective in what I excluded from the photo, the resulting shot is much stronger. I always try to keep that in mind when I shoot. Sometimes you can't help but have distracting backgound elements, but when you can minimize or eliminate them, your photographer will be much stronger.

Finally, I regret not being able to talk Josh and Chuck into sitting at their chairs for the photo. Both of them love what they do (after all, who doesn't like to just sit down with a great friend and just shoot the breeze about current events?), but they don't always like the publicity and fame they are getting. Ever the humble journalists, they turned down my request.

September 12, 2009 - Emma's first tennis match

2009-09-17T00:33:00.007-04:00

1/3200

f2.8

ISO 400

200mm

JPEG

Emma and Leigh Ann got to play in a practice match today. This was the first time for Emma. She is just starting to learn the game, but she does a really good job of hitting the ball. She just needs to keep working on getting into position to hit. She did that here.

I shot in JPEG mode so I could get a bunch of shots (my camera in RAW mode will shoot only six successive photos whereas JPEG mode gets somewhere around 20). I also put the camera in "sunny" white balance mode since most of the tennis court was in full sunlight. Finally, I put the camera on my monopod to help support the weight of my 70-200mm f2.8L lens.

As I followed Emma around with the lens, I kept the zoom a little wide so I wouldn't have any problem keeping her in the lens. I shot horizontally because I feel that works very well for tennis, especially when a player is swinging at the ball (like Emma is).

Because the aperture is set to a wide f2.8, the background is slightly out of focus. Emma was close to the sideline when I got the shot, so that is why the fence isn't more out of focus.

In the final print (which is what you see), I cropped the photo in quite a bit to focus the attention on just Emma and the tennis action. The inside of her forearm was overexposed, so I tried to back off the brightness there. This is one area where shooting RAW would have helped. RAW contains more image data in the bright areas, which allows you to pull back from overblown hightlights when you use something like Adobe Camera Raw (which you can find with Photoshop and Photoshop Elements).

The 1/3200 shutter speed did a great job of freezing the ball on the strings of the racket. One thing I could have done differently is slow the shutter speed down. It can be tricky to do this, but there is a balance where you have a fast enough shutter speed to freeze the player, but slow enough where the ball is still a little bit of a blur. This effect does a great job of conveying the idea of motion in the photo.

The better the skills of the players (and the harder they hit the ball), the easier it is to find a slow enough shutter speed to do this. However, since Emma and her partner are just getting started, the game was very slow and it might have been impossible to achieve this effect.

September 10, 2009 - Homemade cinnamon rolls

2009-09-15T21:51:00.003-04:00

1/100

f2.2

ISO 800

50mm

RAW

As you might be starting to tell, my wife and I love to cook. Today, she made some simple cinnamon rolls. I got this photo as she was using dental floss to cut each one away from the big roll of dough.

I used my 50mm f1.8 lens in order to get a fast enough shutter speed in the weak light under the table's lampshades. I also knew that this lens produced an extremely sharp photo, which I wanted.

I got in pretty close to Rachel's hands to concentrate on what she was doing. I wanted to include the tray of cinnamon rolls in the background, and I also liked the splattering of flour spread around the work area.

But I didn't need to include anything else in the photo. This was definitely a case where leaving out stuff was as important as what you leave in.

Even with setting the camera to tungsten lighting (to match the bulbs over the table, I still had to adjust the lighting in Adobe Photoshop Elements so the flour would look white.

The one thing that I wish I would have done is move the little red cup that she used to mix up the cinnamon and sugar. She emptied the cup, so you can't tell what it was used for just by looking at it. Worse yet, it is really red, which makes it stand out like a sore thumb.

But I also didn't have a lot of time. Rachel usually doesn't want to wait for me to make a photo perfect, so she just keeps working when I pull out my camera (sometimes I think she works even faster). She had already gone through one roll of dough and was starting on the other one when I pulled out of my camera. I got only five or six shots before she reached the end of the roll.

Sometimes if you think too much and try to make a perfect shot, you wind up missing the shot altogether.

September 9, 2009 - Morgan in black and white

2009-09-15T21:13:00.003-04:00

1/100

f2.2

ISO 1600

50mm

RAW

Here is my fourth child, Morgan. She was excited when I told her it was her turn for a portrait by the window. Just like the others, everything I said about the first photo applies here, too.

While I like the photo, I am not sure if does a good enough job of capturing her personality. But it was the best of the bunch. Morgan likes it, however, and so does Rachel.

I do like how the lighting turned out on this one. The light seems to wrap around her face better than the other three, and I think I did a better job on the black and white effect this time.

Having said that, you may be seeing another photo of her coming soon. And then we'll pick which one is better.

September 8, 2009 - Another self portrait

2009-09-15T17:45:00.004-04:00

0.6 sec

f5.6

ISO 200

18mm

RAW

I almost didn't get a photo today. Back on Labor Day, I fixed a broken pipe under the sink. After dinner tonight, I checked to see if there was any water under the sink.

Sure enough, there was.

So while I was digging around under the sink trying to figure out where the water was coming from, I remembered I still hadn't gotten a photo yet. So I pulled out my tripod, set the camera on it, and adjusted it to where the camera was at head level. This way the photo would have the same perspective as if you had walked in the kitchen and found me there.

I also set the camera on f5.6 to make sure everything was in focus and put it on the widest zoom possible. I adjusted the white balance to match the light bulbs in the kitchen. Finally, I put it on the 10-second timer so I would have enough time to get under the sink before the picture was snapped.

I wish I had a wider lens for a shot like this. It would have helped. I think the perspective could have been better if it had included more of the kitchen.

What do you think? Did I do a good job?

September 7, 2009 – Aaron and Kirsten

2009-09-13T11:00:00.003-04:00

1/25

f5.6

ISO 100

35mm

RAW

Since today was the last day for us to all be together for the family reunion, several of us went out to eat dinner at James Joyce, an irish pub in Decatur. It was a night for fun and relaxation — which means we left the kids at home!

Rachel's youngest brother, Aaron, married a couple of years ago, but it happened at a period where we could only afford to fly out Rachel for the wedding. So I hadn't met his wife, Kirsten, until this weekend.

We were sitting in the outdoor area at a large table with an even larger umbrella over it. I put the flash on my camera and set the flash compensation setting to use one full-stop less light than what the camera thought it needed (if you have a DSLR, this setting usually has a button that pairs a lightning bolt with a "+/-" sign).

I did this so I would get a little light from the flash to make sure their faces were brightly lit. I feared the large umbrella would make their faces darker while the background areas would still be pretty bright. I also knew the flash would lighten up their eyes nicely.

I should have used ISO 200 to get a faster shutter speed, but thankfully I was using my 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 IS lens. The IS stabilized the shot so even the slow shutter speed of 1/25 didn't create any camera shake.

The only thing I don't really like about this snapshot is the guy behind Aaron's shoulder is a little be too much in focus. I don't mind him being there, I just wish he was more blurred out like the people over Kirsten's shoulder. The people help set the situation and environment. It's just that I think the guy is a little too much of a distraction.

September 6, 2009 – 40th anniversary photo

2009-09-13T09:49:00.005-04:00

1/100

f5.6

ISO 100

50mm

RAW

Like I said in an earlier post, we had a miniature family reunion this weekend. Everyone got together because we had two children baptized (one mine and the other my niece) and a baby blessed (another niece).

After church today, we all went over to my sister-in-law's house for a big sunday dinner. Rachel's parents, Mike and Pam, had a question for me when we got out of the car.

"Chris, Mike and I would like to get a photo done." Pam said. "Since we just had our 40th anniversary, we want a nice portrait."

"Sure!" I replied. "When do you want to do it?"

"Right now, before we change out of our church clothes," she said. "We were just thinking of something here in the front yard."

"Um . . . okay." They had caught me completely off-guard. I quickly looked around for areas around the house that would work. Luckily, the neighbors across the street had this nice white fence, and I thought this would work well.

Is this my best work? No. I found several things I didn't like when I uploaded the photo to the computer. Their faces were in too much shadow, which I tried to fix with dodging in Photoshop Elements (which lightens parts of the photo). The tree in the backgound is right behind Mike's head. Too much of the photo is in focus. Mike's jacket is hanging funny. And for some reason, even at 1/100 of a second there was still a little bit of camera shake in the photo.

The only thing I can think of is I was a little "out of it" because I had skipped breakfast and lunch that day and was super hungry. But that's an excuse — I should have done a better job.

Overall, I thought the picture was okay and I hope my in-laws like it. That's what is most important. I am sending it to them today.

September 5, 2009 - Beaming ring bearer

2009-09-11T06:25:00.002-04:00

1/80

f4.5

ISO 800

35mm

RAW

Weddings can be a lot of hard work, but a lot of fun, too! I had the pleasure of getting this shot of a very personable ring bearer today. The wedding was severely delayed (by an hour and a half) while they were waiting for the bridal group to show up, but he kept a great attitude going.

I got this shot as they were just about to start the ceremony, while they were preparing in a back room. He was concentrating on what he had to do in a few minutes, and when I snapped his photo he didn't look happy. I joked with him about it, and teased that it wasn't against the law to smile at a wedding. He perked right up and let me get a second shot.

I purposefully got down to his level to help make him appear more natural, like a real person instead of a little child. I had a dedicated flash attached to the camera, with the flash head pointing straight up to the ceiling.

This flash technique helps create a brighter and larger source of light directly overhead. Because it is larger (turning the whole ceiling into a source of light), it is also a softer light, meaning it has no harsh shadows. To help bounce a little light straight from the camera to the subject, I attached a little white card to the back of the flash head.

I shot with a wider aperture (f4.5) to help get the maid of honor out of focus in the background. I purposefully wanted to include the maid of honor to help tell the story of the photo, so I put the ring bearer on one side and her on the other.

As for what I wish I could have changed, I don't really like the stand of religious pamphlets in the background, nor do I like the pair of hands sticking into into the left side of the photo. But this was taken at the spur of the moment, and I didn't want to take more than a few seconds to compose the shot because the announcement to line up could have been coming at any time.

The one thing I could've changed (and now wish I had) is to have him turn his pillow around so the tag isn't showing. But some people will argue that the tag adds to the overall photo by reinforcing this is just a little kid and despite his utmost concentration he will still miss some of the fine details (like having the tag sticking out). What do you think?

An apology

2009-09-08T22:48:00.002-04:00

Just a quick note as an apology. I know, I know — I'm missing a few days. We had a family reunion over the Labor Day weekend and we hosted it (with the help of my wonderful sister-in-law and her husband).

So with all of the preparations and the actual reunion, I have fallen behind on making my posts. I promise I have been taking photos every day, so in the next couple of days I hope to get caught up!

September 4, 2009 – Getting my cameras cleaned

2009-09-08T22:44:00.003-04:00

1/50

f2.2

ISO 400

50mm

RAW

Ugh. Hopefully you'll never have to do this, but if you have a DSLR then chances are pretty good you will.

I had to get both of my cameras cleaned today because of dust buildup on the image sensors. Whenever I would take a photo at an aperture like f11 or smaller, I could see dark spots in my photos from the dust collecting on the sensor.

If you have a point and shoot, then you can skip today's tip because it will never happen to you. The inside of your camera is always sealed, whereas with a DSLR the benefit of having interchangeable lenses means you are always opening up your camera's guts and exposing it to the elements.

I am fortunate enough to have a fantastic pro camera shop (Photo Barn) close by, and one of the services they offer is cleaning. While Jim was working on my first camera, I took this shot with my old Canon D60. He is in the midst of using a specially sized cotton swab to wipe the dust off of my sensor.

If you find yourself in my position of seeing spots on your photos where there shouldn't be ones (especially if they are appearing in shots like landscapes where there should only be clear blue skies), I would suggest calling around to your local camera shops to see if any offer a cleaning service. If they don't, find a place that sells the special cleaning supplies and then read your camera's manual on how to do it yourself. If your manual doesn't explain it, then this website may help.

As for this shot, I used my 50mm f1.8 lens so I could shoot at a wide aperture and not use a flash. The combination of f2.2 and ISO 400 allowed me to get a 1/50 shutter speed, which was fast enough to hand-hold without a blurry photo.

September 3, 2009 – Buckhead sidewalk during lunch

2009-09-06T22:42:00.004-04:00

1/640

f5.6

ISO 200

70mm

RAW

Today was packed with stuff that was demanding my time, and I really had one easy chance to get some photos &mdash walking to and from the Chick-Fil-A during my shortened lunch. I used my 70-200mm f2.8L lens to compress the angle of view. I liked how the longer lens compressed the view down to just the sidewalk, the trees that lined it, and the building in the background. This angle really helps convey how much greenery there is on this block of Peachtree Road where my building is, and the tress on the right provide a kind of leading line into the center of the photo.

I stayed a few minutes to get a few shots with a varying amount of pedestrians walking along. Now that I have looked at the results, I decided it looked a lot better with more people in the shot, so I went with this one. And the lighting was wonderful, too. When I took this photo, the sun had gone behind a thin cloud, giving a soft, diffused light. This eliminated the harsh shadows that full sunlight can create. Not sure what I mean? Just pay attention to the shadows of the closest pedestrians. They are soft and fuzzy. If the sun was shining fully, they would have been dark with sharp outlines.

Sometimes a photo is about what you leave out as much as it is what you leave in. One big thing I left out of this shot was a giant for sale sign. Technically, I guess you can say it's still in the photo, but it is behind the shubbery and flowers in the lower left corner of the photo. I definitely liked the angle, but the sign was obnoxious and immensely distracting. So instead of giving up on the photo, I found a way to get rid of the sign! I just backed up about 20 feet and moved a little to my left, and presto! The sign was gone.

As for what I would change, I wish I had more time to get some variety (specifically, a few more women walking around). I also don't like the do not enter sign and the red hand beside it. I could use Photoshop to get rid of those, but I am a huge fan of getting photos right in the camera and not relying on tools like Photoshop to fix them.

September 2, 2009 – Capturing facial expressions

2009-09-05T23:29:00.004-04:00

1/250

f2.2

ISO 1600

50mm

RAW

I had so much success with yesterday's post that I went back and did the same thing with another daughter (in case you don't know, I have five kids &mdash one boy and four girls). And just like the previous post, everything I said about the first photo applies here, too.

Emma remings me so much about myself when I was her age &mdash reserved and quiet at times. But she had seen the photos I had gotten of her sisters and wanted a good one of herself, too. So she really worked with me and made it easier.

While I don't think her expression is quite as precocious as Tannah's, I love it anyway. I feel like she is exchanging a knowing smile with me, like she knows what I am thinking and she agrees.

If you can capture expressions in your subjects that convey a feeling to the viewer, then you are doing a great job with your photography. It's something hard to do, and there will be times that you start to feel like you're doing it, and then you go for a long time without any luck (it's what makes quality photography such a joy to acheive).

If this happens to you, don't despair. Just keep clicking away.

As for what I wish I could change, I shot this too loose and had to crop this in quite a bit to get the composition you see. As you know, my wife wants an 8x10 of each child, and I worry that I had to crop in too much to get a good 8x10 out of this.

September 1, 2009 – Mischievous!

2009-09-05T22:38:00.005-04:00

1/250

f2.2

ISO 1600

50mm

RAW

Same time &mdash same place, and the result is the next black and white photo of my kids. Everything I said in the previous post applies here, too.

This is my youngest child (only 4-years-old), and she really moved around. I kept shooting through it all, hoping that I would get a good one. And get a good one I did. I just love her expression! When you look at this, don't you wonder what she is thinking?

One thing I did while shooting her photo is I kept talking with her. I asked her questions about the doll she was playing with, how pre-school went for her that day, and what she wanted to eat for dinner. It helped her to keep looking back at the camera.

The only thing I wish would have been better was the focus point. Because of her constant movement, the focus point wasn't her closest eye, but instead seemed to be somewhere closer to her leading shoulder. In a web shot like this, it is not so noticeable. But we want to make an 8x10 of this for the wall and the soft-focus might be too much for a print that size.

August 31, 2009 - Self portrait

2009-09-03T12:40:00.002-04:00

1 sec

f8.0

ISO 200

29mm

RAW

Well, it finally happened. I finally had a day where it was getting time to go to bed and I hadn't taken a single shot yet. I was sitting at my computer, trying to update the blog when it hit me.

Oh, crap! I thought. Here it is at 10:15 p.m. and I haven't taken any pictures!

I sat there wondering what I could do for a couple of minutes when inspiration hit me — do a self portrait!

I wanted this self-portrait to be realistic, to reflect how I usually do my photo work. So it had to be fairly dark. It might not be best for my eyes, but I tend to sit with the lights off so I can see the photos easily.

I set up my camera on a tripod, took a few practice shots, and then got serious. I realized right away that letting the light spill in from the kitchen didn't work for a pleasing portrait. So I attached my dedicated flash to the camera, pointed it at the ceiling, and set it to shoot in manual mode at 1/32 power (in case you're wondering, 1/2 power was enough to brightly light up the room).

I decided on ISO 200 and a full second exposure time (obviously I put my camera into manual mode in order to do that) to get a balance between a fast enough shutter speed to prevent motion blur and a slow enough film speed to prevent heavy graininess in the dark areas.

I also set the camera at head level so the angle of view might be like you were sitting down with me to look at the photos. Finally, I tried to eliminate distractions in the photo, so I cleaned up my desk (and put all of the junk on the floor). What you see in the photo is what I wanted you to see.

From beginning to end, this shot took less than 15 minutes to create, and that included using the 10 second timer on my shutter (I would press the shutter button, and then have 10 seconds to climb into my chair and position myself).

In hindsight, I wish I would have taken the time to set the camera to a wider angle (maybe more around 18-20mm) and move it closer to me and the screen. This might have further enhanced the perspective of you sitting down with me.

August 30, 2009 – Window light portrait

2009-09-01T23:57:00.005-04:00

1/100

f2.2

ISO 1600

50mm

RAW

I felt like I was getting into a little bit of a rut (especially since it seems that many of my photos were of buildings, flowers, or bugs), so with today's submission I am going back to two things that will make my wife happy — one of my kids and black and white photography.

My kids were sitting at a little white table by our front window, doing a little bit of crafting. I was helping them out, and it suddenly struck me this would be a great location to get some good black and white portraiture. The window faces north, so it never gets any sunlight shining directly through it. Therefore, all of the light is this beautiful, soft, ambient light.

Notice the pleasing effect this indirect light has — it softly wraps around her face. And while part of her face is in shadow, it isn't a harsh shadow. This lighting also does wonders to make the photo look more three dimensional. The soft shadows do a great job of showing the contours of her face without creating something harsh and unflattering.

Because I already had black and white in my mind, I did three things. First, I set my ISO to 1600, which will produce a grainier photo than normal. Second, I wanted to create a narrow depth of field, so I pulled out my 50mm f1.8 prime lens and set it to f2.2. This gave enough focus to grab my daughter's face, but it still threw everything in the background out of focus. And third, by turning all of the lights off in the room I created a dark background that will not only help focus attention on my subject but also give me a chance for a deep, rich black.

In this photo, the eyes are the most important, so I focused on them to make sure they looked the best. Everything else blends nicely into an out-of-focus backgroud (this blurry effect is called bokeh). Finally, I cropped the photo to put her eyes in the upper-right third of the photo to follow the rule of thirds. I also cropped out the large rainbow hanging from her necklace. It was distracting, and took away from the photo.

The one thing that I wish I had done for this is remove the darned ironing board from behind her, which created the fuzzy bar that you see in the background.

Brian, I thought about burning out the board, but honestly didn't want to make the effort getting rid of the board but not getting rid of the strands of her hair. So instead, I removed the string that was hanging conspicuously from the end. Thanks for giving me the challenge to do so in my previous black and white photo.

Photography behind the scenes

2009-09-01T18:45:00.001-04:00

I came across a couple of items today that went along perfectly with each other. First, I was at a college football site that was talking about schedule posters. BYU has this really nice one.

Linked to it is this great video that shows what happened behind the scenes. There is no explanation, but sometimes just seeing the preparation helps illuminate the techniques to our minds.

Then I found a great entry in Scott Kelby's blog that details the work that went into his fantastic photo shoot of a Army Reserve Medevac unit. I know I haven't included one of his photos in this post, but believe me — they're incredible. Just click here and see for yourself.

August 29, 2009 – Day hike at Stone Mountain

2009-09-01T06:31:00.004-04:00

1/100

f6.3

ISO 400

18mm

RAW

As many of you know, I am the Scoutmaster for our church's Boy Scout troop. Next summer we are heading to Philmont Scout Ranch for a 12-day backpacking expedition, and today we officially started our preparation. It was nothing strenuous, just a 6.5 mile hike around Stone Mountain with simple day packs. Philmont allows only small groups, so our expedition will have only 12 people. Today's group was slightly smaller than that, but it did include one of the boy's mother.

Because the trail weaved mostly through the dense forest, I put my 18-55 f3.5-5.6 IS wide angle lens so I could capture more of the trail and our hikers. I didn't want to interrupt their pacing (and just capture things as they were happening, photojournalism style), so I set the camera in 'P' mode. This lets the camera make most of the decisions for camera settings, yet allows me to make modifications in case I think the shutter speed is too slow or the shots are underexposed (by the way, the camera did a great job picking).

I kept hiking ahead of the group to find places where I could get a good shot, like this one. The trail curved in front of me, and there was a log I could stand on. I had to wait a few minutes for everyone to catch up, but it was worth it.

My son is in the lead. If you will notice, his hind foot is slightly blurry, which helps convey the idea of motion in the photo. The 1/100 shutter speed was just fast enough to freeze the movement of their torsos but some extremities are blurred.

I shot about five photos at this bend in the trail, but this was the only one that was devoid of bright sunlight reflecting off of their clothing. This one also had some good spacing between the hikers, which is nice.

In hindsight, I wish I had put the people in the front a little higher up in the frame (hmmm . . . maybe I shouldn't have stood on the log). I also wish they were looking up and you could see more of their face. Sometimes it's the little details like this that can change a good photo into a great one.

August 28, 2009 – Tiny little cricket

2009-09-01T06:15:00.004-04:00

1/320

ISO 400

46mm

RAW

It had been raining today but had stopped by lunch time, so I set out to capture some closeups of water droplets on some flowers. As I was trying to do so, I luckily found this tiny cricket. Just how tiny is he? There are two good indicators -- look at the water droplet on the leaf above him and the tiny hairs on the left to the left. This little guy was less than a half-an-inch long.

Because of its close-focusing capabilities, I used my 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 IS lens to capture this photo. The sky was still overcast, so it provided nice, even lighting for the photo. If you read my post from yesterday, all of the settings are almost identical and it was for all the same reasons — except for the shutter speed. I could have dropped the film speed down to get a cleaner, smoother image and still have enough shutter speed for a sharp photo.

One thing I did specifically do for this photo is change my angle of view to isolate the cricket more against the darker patch in the background. My first shot had him against some of the green leaves, and he just didn't pop out much in the photo. I also cropped this shot so the cricket was placed in one of the corners of the photo, using the rule of thirds.

What do I wish I could have done differently? I could have done a better job putting him directly in front of the dark background, but I didn't have my tripod with me. I was holding the camera while leaning over some flowers, and it was hard to keep still. I am also starting to wish I had a legitimate macro lens, which would allow me for more zooming and closer photos.

August 27, 2009 – Butterfly photo

2009-08-29T06:41:00.003-04:00

1/320

ISO 400

200mm

RAW

I had set out to do a different kind of photo, but you have to be alert for other opportunities — and that's exactly what I got today. This large butterfuly came fluttering past, and I instantly forgot everything else!

I was afraid the butterfly would be skittish, so I used my 70-200 f2.8 lens so I could zoom in close to the butterfly without physically getting too close. It hung around for about 10 minutes, but hopped from flower to flower, and I had to constantly change our shooting positions.

I shot this at f8 to get more depth of field, even though it was only about an inch. I didn't want to go any smaller on my aperture (which would give me more depth) because that would also reduce my shutter speed, and shooting at 200mm I needed to make sure the shutter speed stayed above 1/200 to help eliminate camera shake (the rule of thumb is you need to make sure your shutter speed is faster than the focal length of the shot).

I did bump up my film speed to ISO 400, however, which helped a lot (as explained in this post). Why didn't I go to ISO 800? Because at that film speed you start to get graininess added to the photo. As the camera increases the sensitivity of the image chip, the colors in the resulting photo becomes less smooth, which makes it appear grainy (like it was printed on sandpaper).

Out of the 40-50 shots I got of the butterfly, this wasn't my first choice. With the wings slightly closed, you can't completely see the symmetry in both wings. I did have one photo where the butterfly's wings were completely open, but there was one offshoot of the flowers below that blocked a tiny bit of the wings. I picked to post this shot was the best I had where there is nothing covering the butterfly.

August 26, 2009 – Sovereign building in Buckhead

2009-08-28T06:09:00.002-04:00

1/640

f5.6

ISO 100

27mm

RAW

I know, I know . . . another building shot. But I was running out of time Wednesday for a photo and this is such an interesting building. It's called Soveriegn, and it combines commercial office space with residential and retail. There's a bank and two restaraunts on the ground floor, office space up to the 25th floor, a private club on the 26th floor (you can see the swimming pool area halfway up on the right), and condos (starting at a $1 million) up to the top.

But that's not what makes it unique. Pay attention to the outside walls of the building. They're curved, not square. They don't twist, but bend outward and then back in. At first it may seem like my shot is tilted, but if you look at the center of the building, you will see a straight line where the edge of the one of the curved corners is facing directly towards me.

I shot this at a fairly wide angle, placing the building in the top 60% of the photo. I then cropped out just the building. This really helped control the distortion that would normally happen when pointing the camera up at something tall.

I wish the clouds were a little better, however, like being smaller and more puffy. I even waited about 15 minutes for a large, darker, gray cloud to pass by, so these clouds are better than what were in the first picture.

August 25, 2009 – Candid photo

2009-08-26T23:37:00.003-04:00

1/640

f2.8

ISO 200

90mm

RAW

One of my good friends, Ramon, was inspired by the August 19 photo of the flowers and the bee, so he asked me to help him do the same thing during lunch yesterday. I tried to get some photos myself, but ultimately decided to snap a truly candid photo of Ramon as he was shooting.

By placing on the side of the photo, it lets you see what he is trying to photograph. The wide aperture (f2.8) blurs out the background, so the construction site in the upper left corner isn't distracting. Finally, the sunlight is striking the side of his body that is facing the camera, which really helps avoid his shirt and face being too dark.

Ramon is also showing good form in how he is holding his camera. He is down on one knee, supporting his upper body and camera by resting his right elbow on his knee.

By the way, I am not sure how my dates were off, but they were. Even though it may look like I have skipped a day, I haven't.

August 23, 2009 - Suwanee Town Center at night

2009-08-25T22:50:00.006-04:00

1/10

f5.6

ISO 1600

20mm

RAW

My wife, Rachel, has been encouraging me recently to do black and white photography, and this is my first attempt at accepting her challenge. Please let me know what you think of the shot.

I am by no means an expert on black and white photography, so I won't be offering much along the lines of tips for this kind of photography. It's something new to me, and it's always good to step out of your comfort zone and be willing to make mistakes as you learn something new. It's a great way to become a better photographer.

There was one really challenging aspect to this photo. One-tenth of a second is really slow (even for my IS lens, which helps offset camera shake at slow shutter speeds), and I didn't have a tripod. So what did I do? I braced myself to be as still as possible and then held down the shutter button to fire off several shots in succession. Out of the five shots taken, this is the middle one and it came out crystal clear. The others were all a little blurry.

I tried to frame the shot a little bit by having the solid brick wall on the left and the tall shrubbery on the right. This allows the curvature of the store fronts go three-quarters of the way into the photo, but prevents it from reaching the edge. This helps keep the viewers eye in the photo.

This was shot after 9 p.m. on a Monday night, so most of the shops were closed and few patrons were walking around. I might go back on a Friday or Saturday night and try this again with several pedestrians walking through the photo.

August 22, 2009 – Daisies in the morning sun

2009-08-24T13:01:00.004-04:00

1/30

f11

ISO 100

55mm

RAW

I got out early Sunday to get some flower photos in the morning sun. I set my camera on a tripod and used my Canon EF-S 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 IS lens, which is also a decent macro lens.

Don't know what macro photography is? Don't worry — a lot of people don't. Simply put, macro photography is the art of taking closeup photos of small things, which allows you to see details not easily seen with the naked eye.

Using a tripod is vital for this kind of shot. As my friend Brian pointed out in one of his comments, the closer something is when you focus on it, the narrower the depth of field is. So in the instance of these daisies, they were about 10 inches from the lens. To get a deep enough depth of field, I needed to close the aperture down to f11.

I could have bumped up the ISO from 100 to 200 (which would have doubled the shutter speed from 1/30 to 1/60), but I wanted to have the cleaner image that ISO 100 would produce. Also, when you are hand-holding the camera at these short focus distances, a slight sway of a half-inch forwards or backwards can totally ruin the focus. Even at f11, you are dealing with such a narrow depth of field that a tripod is vital to hold the camera steady — not only because of the slow shutter speed, but also because you want an exact spot for the focus.

I shot this a little wide to give myself optimum flexibility when cropping the photo in Photoshop. This particular crop shows about half of the photo. I chose to crop it this way to implement the rule of thirds by putting the center of the flower a third of the way into the photo.

If you would like to try this with your camera, there are two options: most point-and-shoot cameras have a macro mode (which is usually represented by a flower icon) or, if you have a DSLR, you can buy a macro lens, which is specially designed to focus on items only a few inches away.

Point-and-shoot cameras can be great for macros since many of them will let you focus as close as two or three inches from the lens. As for DSLRs, some of the newest kit lenses (the one that might have come with your camera) will do for macros in a pinch because they also have a very short minimum focal range. For instance, the lens I used can focus to within five inches.

A couple of notes of warning, however. First, dedicated macro lenses (and point-and-shoot cameras set to macro mode) will have a focus range of only a few inches to a few feet. If you try to focus on something more than three feet away, your lens probably won't be able to. Second, this kind of work is best done under controlled circumstances. The more things that are out of your control (like wind and inconsistent sunlight), the more you will have to work. These flowers were actually in a vase, so as the sunlight moved through the trees I had to move the vase several times to keep it in the light

As for what I don't really like in the photo, there is a hot-spot nearly dead center where the detail in the yellow is lost in one petal. Also, I wish I had gotten the tips of the petals at the bottom of the photo in more focus.

August 21, 2009 – Tennis portrait

2009-08-23T11:25:00.006-04:00

1/400

f2.8

ISO 100

175mm

RAW

My two daughters have joined a tennis class, and couldn't be more excited. My wife, Rachel, has been asking for more photos of the kids, so I was happy to oblige. When I went to take the photo, however, I discovered a problem. There was a lot of stuff along the fence in the background that I didn't want in the photo, so I had to come up with a solution that would create a narrow field of vision.

I stood about 30 feet away from them and used a long telephoto lens (my 70-200mm f2.8L zoom lens) to focus on just them and leave out as much background as possible. I also put the camera in aperture mode (which should be an 'A' on your mode dial) and set it to 2.8. This wide aperture does a nice job in blurring out the background. So I had the best of both worlds — the long lens created a narrow field of vision that left out most of the clutter and the wide aperture made what was left (a bench) nice and blurry.

What also helped in the photo is most of the court was in the shade of some trees, so I had them stand in the shade in the middle of the court. There was plenty of ambient light coming down from the bright, open sky above them, which helped illuminate their faces and create a softer light that was void of harsh shadows.

Finally, a couple of more little tips. First, I knelt down to get the lens to their chest level. This subtle trick can really help make a difference in child photos. It also helped bring more of the fence into the background instead of the court surface. Second, I used the net as a sort of leading line into the photo. By placing my girls where they are, the net practically ends at them, which helps keep your attention in the center of the photo.

There's one huge thing I wish I would have done differently. It just seems awkward that my older daughter's hand is hanging limply in the middle of the photo. I should have asked her to hold the racket with both hands or drop her left arm down on the other side of the net. And while not as much of a problem, I probably should have had them swap sides and place the shorter one on this side of the net.

August 21, 2009 – High-rise condominium

2009-08-22T08:26:00.003-04:00

1/320

ISO 100

18mm

JPEG

A couple of days ago I mentioned how the part of Buckhead I work in has done a good job of keeping green space amidst all of the high-rises. Here is a good photo showing that. At the base of this condominium is a little half-acre park, complete with bronze statues of kids playing (one of which you can see in the bottom left corner) and two water fountains.

I had to shoot with my lens set as wide as possible in order to get all of the building. There was quite of bit of building lean, which resulted in a tall, skinny pyramid look. Thank goodness for computers and Photoshop Elements camera distortion tool.

Another way to avoid the building lean is to get inside an adjacent building, go halfway up, and shoot your intended building through a window.

RAW versus JPEG

2009-08-22T00:04:00.003-04:00

In my last posting, Sheree asked what RAW is and how you can get your camera to use RAW instead of JPEG. Instead of answering in the comment section, I decided to make a new post on the matter.

RAW is the true image data captured by your camera's image ship. If you shoot in JPEG mode (which most camera's do automatically), you are compressing the image data down into the JPEG format.

A lot of point-and-shoot cameras don't give you the option to shoot RAW, and if you have a camera that does then you need software on your computer that can read the RAW data.

Fortunately, Photoshop Elements has a very good RAW editor. It's what I use most of the time. If you don't have Photoshop, then your camera may have come with RAW editing software.

RAW takes a little getting used to because the files are larger and they take your computer a few seconds longer to upload and process. But you have more options and get better results when working with a RAW file.

For a better explanation of what RAW is, how it can make your photos better, and some of the drawbacks of shooting RAW, see this article that I wrote about the subject.

As for how to get your camera to shoot RAW, you will have to refer to that dreaded manual that came with your camera. You know, that little booklet you have never really looked at, even though you probably have a little voice in the back of your head that keeps saying you should.

August 20, 2009 – Party on the deck

2009-08-21T20:37:00.004-04:00

1/125

f11

ISO 200

18mm

JPEG

Our company (HowStuffWorks.com) just launched the first portion of our social networking platform, so we had a party out on the deck (15 floors up) to celebrate. The weather was nice, but really overcast.

I wanted to get a photo that would capture how beautiful the view of the other buildings can be, but also capture the fun everyone was having. That was hard, and here is what I thought was my bast effort.

I shot this at a small aperture (f11) in order to get the people in front (who were about 18 feet away) in focus along with all of the buildings in the back. I might have been able to use a wider aperture, but they were laughing and I didn't have much time to react. So I went with an aperture I knew would do the job.

I used Photoshop Elements to correct most of the distortion from the wide angle shot. I also cropped the photo in a way to leave out the large trash can that was by the table of food on the right.

There were a couple of things I think that could have made this photo better. First, I should have shot it in RAW mode for more post-processing control over the exposure, contrast, and color. But alas, I had left it in JPEG mode after shooting the bees the day before. Second, I wish there were another couple of people talking in the empty space where you can see the tower crane. Ideally, I would have liked them to have been 15-20 feet from the camera.

August 19, 2009 – Flowers and Bees

2009-08-21T00:15:00.004-04:00

1/2500

f2.8

ISO 400

150mm

JPEG

I really work in a beautiful area. It's in the heart of Buckhead, a thriving live-work-and-play area of northern Atlanta. It is dominated by high rise hotels, office buildings, and condominiums. But despite all the concrete and steel, they have done a good job of preserving some green space, too.

I shot this honeybee among a large swath of flowers about 100 yards from my building. I used my 70-200 f2.8L lens to get a clear, sharp, and fast photo. The day was mostly cloudy and the sun was ducking in and out from behind clouds quite a bit. So I left the lens wide open and used ISO 400 to get a fast enough shutter speed for when the sun was blocked.

This shot was in the full sunlight, so it resulted in a really fast shutter speed. But it wasn't fast enough to stop the bee's wings. The blur really drives home that the bee is hovering over the tiny flowers.

This kind of shot is a lot of hard work, but the reward can be great. I shot about 300 photos in 30 minutes, trying to get just two or three like this one, where the bee is actually flying between flowers. You will probably agree, a photo of a bee flying will beat a one of a bee walking any day.

I had to shoot these as JPEGs instead of RAW because my camera will shoot 20 JPEGs in succession, but only 8 RAW images. I would start shooting when I thought the bee might jump off of the flowers and fly to the next batch. If I misjudged (and I did a lot), I would wait for my camera's memory buffer to empty and then shoot a bunch more.

August 18, 2009 – Breakfast for dinner

2009-08-19T23:36:00.007-04:00

1/50

f5.6

ISO 800

50mm

RAW

We decided to have a simple dinner tonight, so we whipped up some pancakes. They were absolutely scrumptious – thanks, Rachel! – so I wanted to share them with you.

I shot this with my 50mm f1.8 lens, which is really sharp. By pumping up the ISO, I could close the aperture a little to get more depth of field (but not too much). This also allowed me to handhold the camera without risking camera shake. I shot RAW so I could tweak the color to the golden hue I wanted.

The color was harder than I thought it would be to get it just right. I can see why commercial food photographers use strobes and flashes because the natural lighting was too mixed up for me to easily find the right color.

August 17, 2009 – Suwanee City Hall

2009-08-17T23:26:00.006-04:00

1/250

f8.0

ISO 200

35mm

RAW

I was driving home from a canceled Boy Scout training session and I noticed the beautiful bank of clouds being lit up by the early evening sun. It's the kind of setting where you want to find something nice to put in front of it, so I thought of the recently finished Suwanee City Hall.

As I was parking, I looked for where I thought would be the best perspective. I also noticed that the sun was dangerously close to going behind some clouds, so I knew I didn't have much time. I literally ran to a spot that, while not my choice for the best location, would let me get a good shot as soon as possible. I then went to the spot I had picked out initially and got some more photos.

When I got back home and looked at all of the shots, the first one turned out to have the best combination of clouds, color, and composition. It reminded me of something I read about how Ansel Adams got his Moonrise photo.

He was traveling down the highway when he noticed the moon rising over the mountain and the village in the evening light. He slammed on the brakes, pulled over, and hopped out with his gear. He feared there wasn't enough time to measure the light and determine the proper exposure, so he made his best guess and took the photo. Then he went through his normal process to take a photo, but before he was done the light was gone.

Adams probably drove away thinking he had missed a perfect opportunity for a wonderful photo, but we all know now that he didn't. One of his most famous photographs was a guess – a well-educated guess, mind you – but a guess all the same.

The main lesson to learn here is to pay attention to your surroundings and don't be afraid to snap off a quick shot at something that looks great. You never know when that moment may be the only chance you've got. Then take the time to make sure you have everything set for a great photo.

I shot this at f8 to get a really sharp photo, and then focused about two-thirds into the scene (around the water fountain in the front) to make sure everything was in focus, from front to back. I also shot it a little loose so I could crop it in the way I wanted once I got it loaded on the computer. Finally, I followed the rule of thirds by putting the building down in the lower third of the photo, which helps place more emphasis on the cloud formation above it.

In order to avoid a slanted effect (where the sides of the building seem to slant towards each other), I purposefully went up the slope in front of the building in order to be standing more on an equal elevation. You can see the camera level is just above the awning over the front doors. This way I was aiming the camera straight ahead instead of aiming it slightly upwards, which would have created the slanting sides of the building.

I really like this photo. Some of the impact is lost here in the small version, but the full-blown shot is fantastic. The only regret I have is something out of my control. I wish the clouds were more puffy and separated, instead of one massive cloudbank.

August 16, 2009 – Movie night

2009-08-17T22:43:00.006-04:00

4 sec

f4.0

ISO 200

25mm

RAW

Last night the girls were crowded around the TV watching Coraline, a claymation movie that reminded me a lot of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. Thanks to the spooky nature of the film, my youngest snuggled up to her older sister, and my next youngest grabbed one of her favorite stuffed animals, Bedtime Bear.

I turned out all of the lights and set up the camera on a tripod right beside the TV. I took a bunch of shots (since the TV was putting out varying amounts of light, depending on what was being shown in the movie) in order to find a few goods one where the kids didn't move.

I used a low ISO to avoid noise/grainyness, and purposefully picked a shot that was a little underexposed to reinforce the idea of watching a movie in the dark. Finally, I cropped it to a wide 2 to 1 ratio to emphasize the kids and eliminate most of the distracting background.

In all, I like the photo. But others may think it could have been better if all the girls were sitting side by side. I wasn't going to pose them, however, because I wanted to capture more of their natural tendencies. Some may wonder why my 9-year-old is sitting off by herself on the right. To me, it fits here independent personality perfectly.

Car repairs

2009-08-15T19:13:00.002-04:00

1/100

f4.5

ISO 400

21mm

RAW

A friend came over yesterday to fix my air conditioner. By the time I thought of taking some photos, he was wrapping up and putting everything back together.

It was a cloudy morning, so I shot this without a flash because the diffused light was doing a great job to evenly illumniate the shot. I wanted the photo to instantly convey "engine repair," so I got in real close and shot at a wide angle. This left only the engine compartment and the mechanic in the photo.

This would make a good stock photo, except for possibly one thing. The dip stick shaft is laying across the top of the engine in the top right corner of the photo. It's something that most people wouldn't notice, but once seen it might have the tendency for the viewer to wonder why it's there. I should have removed it before taking the photo.

And in case you are now wondering, here's what happened. In order to pull out my broken air compressor, he had to squeeze it past the dip stick shaft. The shaft snapped under the pressure.

Dinner date at home

2009-08-15T17:06:00.005-04:00

1/15

f4.5

ISO 800

18mm

RAW

My wife and I had a dinner date at home, after the kids went to bed. We grilled up some New York Strip steak, along with some loaded baked potatoes and asparagus.

I shot this with my 18-55mm IS lens, which allowed to go handheld without a flash -- even with such a slow shutter speed. Even with the IS lens, I made sure to hold my elbows in close to my chest, control my breathing, and just squeeze the shutter.

Shooting RAW helped me with the color cast from the indoor lamps. The wide f4.5 aperture helped put the background plate nicely out of focus.

In hindsight, I wish I would have turned the plate so the steak was place in the 12 o'clock to 4 o'clock position (instead of the 8 o'clock to 12 o'clock position it is currently in. This would have made the steak larger in the image instead of the potatoes.

Starting a 365 photo project!

2009-08-15T10:20:00.002-04:00

I have really neglected this blog, but have been struggling to figure out what can motivate me to start posting again.

I think I have hit on it. I am going to start a "365" project, where I post one photo that I have taken the previous day. I will also explain what I did to get that photo.

Software Tip: Printing and Dots Per Inch

2008-03-21T12:38:00.018-04:00

I had a friend ask a question about printing his digital photos. I thought it would be good to bring the same ideas to you.

Digital photos are made up of tiny little squares of solid color called pixels. This is where the term megapixel comes from, which is a measurement of how many millions of pixels a camera captures in each shot. The more pixels you have in an image, the more detail the image will show.

Therefore, when you go to print your photos, you want to have a lot of pixels packed into the image. The way we refer to how many pixels there are is by pixels per inch (ppi, which is the same as dots per inch).

My basic rule of thumb is if you don't have at least 200 ppi in your photo, you will likely see jagged little edges along the lines in your print. If you want something that will be "picture perfect," then you need at least 300 ppi.

"But wait a minute," you might be thinking, "my camera only said how many megapixels it shoots, not how many pixels per inch the photos will have!" You're right — the amount of ppi is up to you when you go to print a photo.

Let me give you a real-world example. On my Canon 20D I have three different sizes I can select for my photos: large, medium, small. Here are how they differ in megapixels and dimensions (in pixels):

Setting	Dimensions	Megapixels
Large	3504 x 2336	8.2 MP
Medium	2544 x 1696	4.3 MP
Small	1728 x 1152	2.0 MP

This says that at 200 ppi, the largest I prints I could realistic get from each of the sizes are as follows:

Setting	Dimensions	Largest Print @ 200ppi
Large	3504 x 2336	11.7" x 17.5"
Medium	2544 x 1696	8.5" x 12.7"
Small	1728 x 1152	5.8" x 8.6"

So in other words, you can print a 11x14 from the large, 8x10 from the medium, and 5x7 from the small setting. Trying to print a 11x14 from the small will result in an image that seems "blocky" and won't look good, but printing a 5x7 from the large will look beautiful and full of detail.

My next post will talk about using the crop tool in your favorite photo editor and how you can crop out a portion of your photo but still make sure it has enough resolution to print well.

Photo Tip: Window Light Portraits

2008-03-17T22:00:00.004-04:00

I know it's been a long time since my last post, and I apologize. I hope the simpleness and impact of this tip will make up for it.

Please take a look at my wonderful daughter below:

What a wonderful photo! But if it is simple to do, then what's the secret? All I did was find a window in the house that faces north and place a dark backdrop away from it.

During this time of the year the sunlight will never shine through a north-facing window. But the light sure does, and it creates a wonderful ambient lighting effect.

To maximize this effect, I took a dark quilt and draped it several feet behind her. Here's a shot showing how the window and black backdrop relate spatially to each other:

Because the light hitting my daughter's face is several stops brighter (or, in other words, several times brighter) than the backdrop, the backdrop becomes completely black. And because of the ambient lighting coming through the window, it creates soft shadows as it wraps around her face.

You can do this shot with any kind of camera that has a zoom lens. Just stand several feet from your subject and zoom in. This will isolate him or her against the backdrop and you won't see anything else in the background.

Try it yourself and you will see how easy it is!

Photo Tip: Catching the basketball dribble

2007-11-20T08:51:00.000-05:00

Time for quick basketball tip. When shooting basketball, it is very important to capture the basketball in the player's hand, especially when the player is dribbling the ball. Consider the following photos:

Which one is better? Obviously the second! The player looks more in control, ready for action, and seems to be starting his move. In the other photo, which was taking immediately after the second, doesn't have the same 'feel' to it. The player doesn't look like he has control of the ball and the overall feel is rather akward.

If you have a SLR camera with a quick motor drive (by quick I mean 3 frames per second or faster), you can just hold the shutter button down and fire away while your player is dribbling the ball. This should get you at least one good shot.

If you have a slow motor drive (or a point and shoot camera), there are two things I would suggest. First, concentrate on getting a photo while your player is holding the ball with both hands. This often happens when inbounding the ball, looking to make a pass, or about to shoot.

The other is to try timing the shot when he or she is dribbling. This is much harder to do, however, and requires timing and practice. You have to press the shutter button before the ball reaches their hand. How much before depends on the particular amount of lag your camera has between pushing the button and capturing the picture. SLRs have a short lag, while point and shoots (especially digitals) can have a lag nearly up to a second.

Tomorrow I will talk about pre-focusing to help those who have a long lag.

Basic Photo Tip: Stopping Action and Motion Blur

2007-11-06T22:59:00.000-05:00

In photography, you usually want to stop all of the action in a photo and remove any motion blur. But sometimes you don’t. Deciding on which is often determined by what your overall goal is in taking the photo.

Do you want to capture the moment of joy when a football player crosses the goal line? Then stopping the action is likely what you want. But what if you shooting a NASCAR race? Stopping all action, including the spinning wheels, will make it look like the cars are just sitting on the track. In that instance, you probably want a little motion blur to convey the feeling of how fast they are moving.

Let’s talk about stopping the action first. There are a couple of basic rules to remember. First, for normal photography (things like portraits, landscapes, and candid photos), take the length of your lens and put it under a one. In other words, if you are shooting with a 50mm normal lens, then you need to have 1/50 of a second to expect a sharp, clear photo.

Lens Length	Shutter Speed
30mm	1/30
50mm	1/50
200mm	1/200
500mm	1/500

If you are trying to capture a subject in motion, however, you need a faster shutter speed. This is especially true for sports, as shown in this football photo.

The rule of thumb is the same, but you have to triple the length of your lens to expect a sharp, clear photo.

Lens Length	Shutter Speed
30mm	1/90
50mm	1/150
200mm	1/600
500mm	1/1500

Let’s go back to the NASCAR example. How do you create the motion blur to help a car look like it is moving? By panning. Panning is the act of moving the camera in the direction the subject is moving while taking the photo.

Let’s say you’re at a race and the cars are going past you from the right to the left. In panning, you need to focus on the zone the car is about to go through and as the car drives through that zone you follow it with your camera, keeping it in the viewfinder the whole time. Panning also requires you to slow your shutter speed down a little bit from normal sports photography. As a rule of thumb, try the one over your lens’ length as a starting point and then adjust as necessary.

There is definitely a trick to panning, and it generally takes a lot of practice to get it down. Here is a good example of panning from a road race:

Do you see how the blurred background and blurred wheels on the car help make it seem like the car is going really fast? When you get it right, panning can be fantastic!

Basic Photo Tip: Angle of view and depth

2007-11-06T22:09:00.000-05:00

Almost everyone who owns a camera has a zoom lens, whether it is on a point-and-shoot camera or they have one for their SLR. But what exactly happens when you zoom in or zoom out with your lens? Why does your subject get closer or further away? Angle of view is the term for how the camera shows a wider or narrower angle.

It is a difficult subject to understand. Personally, I don't completely understand it myself. But I do know that if I zoom in on a subject the angle of view narrows significantly, while if I zoom out the angle of view widens.

There are three web pages that I would recommend to see the differences in angle of view and get a better understanding. The first is the Wikipedia entry on Angle of View, particularly the section on lens types and effects.

The second is a cool page that lets you click on the various types of lenses from Canon and see the differences in angle of view. You can also click on the different Canon SLR cameras and see how the camera's digital sensor size affects the view.

The third is from Canon itself and it is a little program that lets see all of this simulated in one picture. It starts from a 15mm fisheye to a 1200mm super-telephoto lens.

There's one more important factor to consider when using lenses. Zooming in on a subject also narrows the depth of field, while zooming out increases it. Depth of field refers to the portion of the photo that is in focus. The other factor that affects depth of field is what aperture you have your lens set to.

Although this is on a small scale in a closeup photo, here is a good example of depth of field.

Basic Photo Tip: How cameras work

2007-11-06T01:39:00.000-05:00

I know some might think of this as shameless plugging of the company that employs me, but if you want to know how film and digital cameras work, then you can't beat the explanations at HowStuffWorks.com. Check them out for yourself!

How Cameras Work

How Digital Cameras Work

Basic Photo Tip: Light

2007-11-06T01:33:00.000-05:00

Light is the most basic element in photography. In fact, the word photography comes from two Greek words meaning light and writing, so it literally means writing with light. The amount of light, its intensity, and its direction can make or break a photo more than anything else, except for maybe focus.

Natural light usually provides the most pleasing, natural-looking shots. This includes direct lighting, straight from the sun, and ambient light. Ambient light is light reflected off of or shining through objects. Examples of this are light reflecting off of a wall, shiny surface, or through thin curtains. Without ambient light, objects in shadow would be completely black.

Sometimes, however, there isn’t enough natural and ambient light to take a photo. That’s when a flash comes in. The camera’s flash creates enough light to take a photo, but it usually doesn’t have much range.

Getting the exposure right for the given amount of light is critical. It can make or break a photo. For more information on exposure, see the lesson on exposure and shutter speed.

Basic Photo Tip: Exposure and shutter speed

2007-11-06T01:26:00.000-05:00

Many of you have probably heard the term exposure before. But what is it exactly? It is the total amount of light that falls on the camera’s film or digital sensor while taking a photo. Too much light and the photo will be over-exposed, making the shot too bright with little detail because features will be washed out. Too little light and the photo will be too dark, making it difficult to make out the details.

A properly exposed shot will have a great range of light, allowing you to see detail in the shadows along with highlights in bright areas. A really good example of this is in wedding photography. The right exposure will let you see the details in the groom’s black tuxedo but also see the lines and patterns in the bride’s white wedding gown.

In the past, photographers usually had to draw upon their experience to determine what exposure to use. But thanks to advancements in technology, all modern cameras have light meter built in to eliminate the guess work.

Thanks to this tool, your camera will generally pick the right settings to properly expose your photo. But it’s not fool proof. See the lesson on exposure compensation for an explanation of how it works will help you pick the right exposure when your camera doesn’t.

But just because your camera can pick the right exposure doesn’t mean the photo will come out right. You also need to pay attention to your shutter speed. If it gets too slow, then you will risk moving the camera while taking the photo. This is normally called camera shake.

With a normal, non-telephoto lens, you need a shutter speed of 1/60 of a second to guarantee there won’t be any camera shake. That is why when a flash is needed, most cameras will set the flash intensity to be strong enough to get a photo at 1/60 of a second.

However, if you practice good technique while holding the camera, you can often get a sharp clear image free of camera shake all the way down to 1/30 of a second. Good technique means you stand with your feet spread comfortably apart, with two hands holding the camera, your elbows resting on your chest, and holding your breath. It may also help to lean your body against a wall or post.

If you use a tripod, however, you can go with long shutter speeds and not worry about camera shake. The tripod will keep the camera stationary, allowing you to get outstanding, clear photos even with exposure times reaching into several seconds.

But what about those times when you don’t have a tripod, or your subject is moving and long exposures won’t work? The lesson on aperture and ISO speeds has your answer.

Basic Photo Tip: Aperture and ISO speeds

2007-11-06T01:03:00.000-05:00

So you have a great shot to take, but you don’t have a fast enough shutter speed. What can you do without using your flash? There are actually two options – open up your aperture or change your film speed.

So what’s your aperture? The aperture refers to a numerical representation of how wide the lens opening is inside the lens. On all SLR and most point-and-shoot digital cameras, you can open or close your aperture to let more light or less through.

Many people think a lens has only one fixed opening for how much light gets through. But that is not true. The vast majority of cameras (some point-and-shoot film cameras being the lone exception here) have the ability to change the lens’ aperture and let more light through. This is commonly called the f-stop of a lens. The bigger the opening, the more light comes through, and the faster the shutter speed can be.

Similarly, you can change the film speed and get the same results. The higher the film speed, the more reactive to light the film or sensor is, and the faster the shutter speed can be.

This is where one of the biggest strengths of digital cameras comes in. Whereas with film cameras you can change the film speed only by changing the whole roll of film for a new one, with digital you can change the film speed through a camera setting. So if you are shooting at 100 ISO film speed and you notice it is getting a little dark, you can change a digital camera to 200 ISO in between shots and keep going. ISO 200 film is twice as reactive to light as 100 ISO, so it will double your shutter speed.

That is the key to understanding exposure. Being able to double your shutter speed is called one stop of exposure. Therefore, going from 1/125 of a second to 1/250 is one stop, going from 1/125 to 1/500 is two stops, and going from 1/125 to 1/1000 is three stops.

Keeping track of stops with shutter speeds is very simple. Aperture values, on the other hand, are more complex. They start with a very low number (like f2.0) and go up, but not in a scale you would think as logical. A f2 aperture setting creates a large opening in the lens and lets in a lot of light. A f2.8 aperture lets in half of the light as f2, and therefore is one stop less. Two stops less light will be f4, and f5.6 would be three stops less.

Below is a scale showing all of the normal shutter speeds and aperture values, set one stop apart. If your camera was saying that a photo will be properly exposed at 1/125 of a second with an aperture set to f8, then all of the settings below will result in exactly the same exposure.

Shutter	1/15	1/30	1/60	1/125	1/250	1/500
Aperture	f22	f16	f11	f8	f5.6	f4
ISO	100	100	100	100	100	100

Similarly, if you changed your film speed between shots, all of these would result in the same exposure, too.

Shutter	1/15	1/30	1/60	1/125	1/250	1/500
Aperture	f8	f8	f8	f8	f8	f8
ISO	100	200	400	800	1600	3200

Do you see the relationship? As your shutter speed goes up, your aperture value needs to go down. The opposite is also true. As your aperture value goes up, your shutter speed will go down. The key here is to remember that the higher the aperture value, the smaller the lens opening and the less light goes through to expose the photo.

Basic Photo Tip: Using light to your advantage

2007-11-06T00:35:00.000-05:00

Now that we have a better understanding of exposure, let’s go back and visit the topic of light again. Not all types of light are the same, and certain kinds of light are better than others.

For many subjects, direct sunlight can be very flattering. This is especially true for landscapes, architectural, and sports. Take, for instance, this photo of Main Hall at Southern Virginia University. It was taken in the middle of the afternoon with the sun shining directly on the face of building. It looks great!

For other subjects, however, direct sunlight can be harsh and unflattering. Many portraits are this way.

When taking photos of people, you usually don’t want the sunlight to be shining directly in their faces. It can cause people to squint and wrinkle up their faces. In fact, the only time I like to use direct sunlight in portraits is late in the day, during the last hour before the sun sets. This light is diffused greatly through the layers of the atmosphere at this time of the day, which results in a softer, warmer light than what you have during midday.

Ambient light is much better for portraits and general people photos. There are several things that can be the source of your ambient light – the open sky above, reflecting from off a wall, or filtering through curtains.

What’s even better is when you can use ambient light that is coming primarily from one direction. If you can have the light coming slightly from the side and the front at the same time, then that is ideal. It will create slight shading across the face, which will help create a three dimensional effect.

Take a look at this photo of my daughter. It was taken at a swim meet, and she was waiting for her event. She was sitting in the shade, but the ambient light was coming from above her and to her right. The soft ambient light created faint, soft shadows on her face which allows you easily see how it is shaped.

Since it is coming straight from your camera, light from your flash can cause all of the shadows to disappear and effectively flatten the details of your subjects face. There are some tricks you can use with your flash, though, that will enhance a photo.

For instance, if you have a dedicated flash attached to your camera you can point the flash into the ceiling above or an adjacent wall. This is called bouncing your flash, and it works best when you use a white wall. In this photo, I captured my niece licking the spatula from mixing a cake. I bounced the flash off of the ceiling, creating a much better photo than if I aimed it right at her face.

Notice the light of the bounced flash is reflecting in her eyes. This kind of light reflection really helps your subject seem alive, whether you are shooting a person or an animal. Look for ways to capture that and your photos will improve dramatically.

You can also use the flash to fill in where the dominant light source is directly behind the subject, as in these two photos.

Because of the bright background, the camera was fooled into thinking it didn't need to use the flash. For the second shot, the flash was used to fill in the dark foreground.

Basic Photo Tip: Rule of thirds

2007-11-06T00:27:00.000-05:00

One great way to improve your photography is to always remember the rule of thirds. Simply split your frame into thirds, both horizontally and vertically. This will crate something like a tic-tac-toe diagram, with four intersecting points in the middle. You now have several places to position the focal point of your photo – at any of the four points and along one of the four vertical or horizontal lines.

Confused? Don’t worry about it. Let me show you some examples.

Instead of putting the skyline in the horizontal center of the photo, I put it two-thirds of the way down. I felt the clouds were the focal point, so I wanted to feature them more than the reflection.

Landscapes and water reflection shots should be put one-third up from the bottom or one-third down from the top, but hardly ever dead center. The exception to that rule usually happens when you are trying to have total symmetry between the top and bottom of a reflective photo.

For this portrait of my wife, I wanted to do something different than a typical photo. So I turned the photo horizontally, and put her one-third of the way into the photo from the left, leaving plenty of empty space in the direction she is looking.

If you take a typical vertical portrait, be sure to put the face or the eyes along the line one-third down from the top, as in the revised photo of my wife.

In this photo, both my daughter and the house were important. But the focal point was still my daughter. By putting her on one side, I could still include the house and have a good balance between the two.

Basic Photo Tip: Framing and leading lines

2007-11-06T00:06:00.000-05:00

Framing and using leading lines can do wonders for your photography. They can take a good photo and make it great. Using these elements properly can really rivet your viewer’s attention to your photo.

Framing is using something in the photo to frame the subject. You can frame the subject with two tree trunks, in a mirror, through a window, under an archway, or in any other similar way. You often see this in portrait and wedding photography.

Below is one of my favorite photos. Here I use the bottom of a curved playground slide to frame the face and hair of my youngest daughter. It’s a very simple framing technique, but works really well.

In other example of framing, let's go back to the photo of my daughter waiting for her event at a swim meet. I used the out-of-focus bodies of two other swimmers to frame her face.

As for leading lines, look to see if there are any natural elements that will lead the viewer’s eye into the photo or towards the subject when you are composing a photo. These leading lines can be things like a path, roadway, river, railing, or even clouds in the sky.

In the next photo, we were walking around the gardens surrounding the Alamo in San Antonio. I just loved the shot of my daughter following the rest of the family, but turning around to make sure I was following to. Notice how the path keeps your attention in the photo.

In my photo below of the Blue Ridge Parkway, the curving road leads the viewer’s eye into the center of the photo.

Leading lines can do wonders to subconsciously keep them looking at the photo, but only if they lead the view into the shot. Leading lines can easily draw the viewers eye out of the photo, too.

Because the road in the photo above disappears before reaching the left edge, it helps keep the viewer’s eye in the photo. If I had composed the photo so the road went from one edge to the other, I would have risked the viewer’s eye going out of the photo. Then the viewer could easily loose interest.

Basic Photo Tip: Exposure compensation

2007-11-06T00:01:00.001-05:00

In the vast majority of photos, if you took all of the colors in the photo (when properly exposed) and swirled them all together, it would come out as a medium grey. They call this 18% grey. The light meter in your camera is designed to expose your photos to match 18% grey.

Most of the time this works with fantastic results. It is simply amazing that such a basic idea works out 80% of the time. However, there are a few instances when 18% grey won't work.

If you have an overly bright photo, like kids playing in the snow, your shot will likely have grey-colored snow. If the photo is overly dark, like a close-up of three Oakland Raiders in their black home uniforms, your shot will likely have grey uniforms and overexposed faces. The 18% grey is the culprit in both situations.

You can get past this problem by using the exposure compensation setting on your camera. Most cameras have it, even point-and-shoots. It allows you to add or subtract exposure from your shot.

By adding in one to two stops* of extra exposure in your shot of snow, everything should turn out looking bright and white. Similarly, by subtracting one to two stops of exposure in the close-up of the Raiders players, the uniforms should be brought down to their usual black.

You may need to experiment a little with what works best in each of your photo taking situations. Just don’t forget to dial that exposure compensation back to zero when you are done, or you will likely regret it the next time you pull out your camera!

*for information about what a stop is, see the lesson on aperture and ISO speeds.

Product Review: Picaboo software and service

2007-11-01T22:26:00.000-04:00

My wife has just gotten into digital scrapbooking, and while researching software to use we found a free package called Picaboo. It has really intrigued me. Picaboo is more than just a program, it's also a publishing service.

Here's how it works. You can download the Picaboo software for free, design your photo books and cards, and then upload them to the Picaboo servive for printing and delivery.

I have downloaded the software for a try out. The software is easy to use, and I'm in the midst of creating a photo book of my kid's experience on the swim team last summer. When I am done, I will get it printed from the Picaboo service. Then I will let you know how the book turned out, what I thought of the software, and my overall opinion.

If you don't want to wait, you can check out the software for yourself at www.picaboo.com.

Photo Tip: Using a fill flash

2007-10-30T22:20:00.000-04:00

One of my friends got a thrill of a lifetime today -- he got to walk on a tower crane 54 stories up!

Next to our building in the Buckhead area of Atlanta is a 50-story skyscraper in the midst of construction. The HowStuffWorks team was invited to go to the top of the building and video tape some of the construction and views as they laid the 50th floor with cement.

On the way to the top, they stopped to get a photo with a backdrop of downtown Atlanta. The first photo didn't turn out so well because it was bright in the background, but not so bright in the foreground.

Because of the bright background, the camera was fooled into thinking it didn't need to use the flash. For the second shot, the flash was used to fill in the dark foreground.

Much better! Even though it was plenty bright to see on the open floor of the skyscraper, there was too much difference in light between the background and the foreground to get a good exposure for both.

In photography, we call the measurements of light 'stops'. If the foreground was half as dark as the background, then that is one stop. In this case, the background was more than four times brighter than the foreground.

How do I know? Because the vast majority of digital cameras can't capture more than four stops of light in the same exposure. That is why the foreground was too dark when the background was properly exposed. By using the flash, we evened out the differences between the foreground and background.

Thanks, Scott, for letting me use your photos!

Photo Tip: How to shoot a ghost

2007-10-27T21:57:00.000-04:00

Just in time for Halloween, here's tip sure to fire up the kids. Turn them into ghosts!

Here's how I did it, in general terms. I put the camera on a tripod and set it so it would properly expose the shot without the flash, but had the flash fire anyway. As soon as the flash fired, the kids walked out of the picture. The flash illuminated the kids, and the rest of the scene was illuminated with the natural lighting through a long exposure.

Now for the specifics. With the camera on a tripod, I set the film speed to the lowest setting (ISO 100 for my Canon 20D). Then I put the camera in manual mode and set it to 3.2 seconds for the shutter speed and f5.6 for the aperture. You may need to play around with the aperture and shutter speeds to see what works best for your situation -- f5.6, ISO 100, and 3.2 seconds worked for my lighting situation, but may not for you.

I was taking the photos in our church's parking lot after a Halloween Party. They posed under an oak tree, which helped shade the light from the parking lot lights. I positioned the kids where the illuminated signs were directly behind them.

You need to do something similar. Find a dark place without much light (but enough to see). Figure out how long the exposure needs to be. The idea works better with dark clothing instead of light (light-colored clothing will possibly streak as the subject walks away). Finally, have something bright or light-colored behind the subjects so it will easily shine through their bodies, creating the illusion that they are ghosts.

Be prepared to experiment some to find what works best. And most of all, have some fun!

Photo Tip: Protect your camera with a camera bag

2007-10-26T12:25:00.000-04:00

The most practical tip I can give is something many people don't think about. Protect your camera! There is no better way to do this than putting your camera into a camera bag. It will help protect your camera from being bumped, dropped, or even scratched with keys and coins while inside your pocket or your purse.

I personally use the Tamrac 5375 Photo Backpack. It is rugged, padded, and has plenty of storage for two cameras, a flash, and four lenses. I can also pack it with two spare camera batteries, eight spare flash batteries, several memory cards, and a bunch of odds and ends.

But most of you have just a point-and-shoot camera and don't need all of that room and versatility. While my bag cost over $100, a small camera bag for a point-and-shoot should cost only $10 to $20 and there are a wide variety from which to choose.

One word of caution, however. Camera bags have a tendency to announce to potential thieves that you are carrying a camera, especially if the bag has something like Canon or Nikon printed on it (like many do). Be extra careful and don't leave your camera bag unattended.

But you can use something else to put your point-and-shoot cameras in. I suggest a baby bottle bag! Something like one of these will do wonderfully:

In a baby bottle bag you have plenty of room for a camera, spare batteries, and an extra memory card. You will also have enough room for something like a lens cloth and cleaning solution or a bean bag (which makes a great improvised camera stand). Best of all, because the bag says something other than Canon or Nikon, who would want to take it? No one wants to steal a baby's bottle!

Photo Tip: Block out the sun!

2007-10-24T07:40:00.000-04:00

In my last tip, I showed a bunch of Scouters trying to determine where we were on a topographical map. I had laid down on the ground for a different perspective, positioning myself on the side of the group that offered the best viewing angle of their faces. The problem was I was shooting directly into the sun!

So what did I do? I moved slightly until the sun was being blocked by one of the subjects. Because of how late it was in the afternoon, there was plenty of light coming from the rest of the sky. What resulted was a pleasantly illuminated photo.

So don't be worried about shooting directly into the sun -- just use something that will block it's intense light. If the subjects you are shooting are in deep shadow because the sun is behind them, which often happens in the middle part of the day, then use your flash to lighten them up. Most point and shoot cameras have a button that will force your flash to fire no matter what. Just use that to make the flash fire in bright daylight.

However, there are times when sunlight into the lens (or at least striking the lens even if it isn't in the shot) can add spectacular effects. Don't be afraid to experiment and see what happens. Just be careful not to look into the sun directly through the lens, especially with a telephoto lens. It can cause eye damage!

Photo Tip: Change your perspective

2007-10-21T20:55:00.000-04:00

I have been very busy at work, and I apologize for not having a tip of the day for the past several days. However, this weekend I participated in Outdoor Leadership Training for the Boy Scouts of America and I got a ton of photos.

One of the training classes we participated in was Orienteering. After receiving our instructions, we had a challenge to take a topography map and determine the exact location of the tent we were at.

With the map on the ground, we took our compasses and tried to determine exactly where we were. I took several photos of my patrol trying to figure it out. Some were from the typical standing position, looking over shoulders. Here is probably the best one:

This shows the map, but there are no faces and the text on the back of the gray shirt is very distracting. Overall, I didn't like it as much.

I also took several shots from a ground-level angle. I literally laid on the ground on my side and shot with the camera a few inches off of the ground, and I like these more. You can see their faces clearly, there is no distracting wording, and with a caption you will know they are interacting with a map with their compasses.

When taking a shot, try to think of different angles and perspectives to capture the moment. Experiment with several ideas, even if you think it won't be comfortable or easy to do. Laying on the ground wasn't comfortable and surely wasn't easy to change my position when I needed to, but I think most would agree it resulted in a better shot. When you're all done, you can sit down and throw away the ones that didn't work.