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

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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.

September 11, 2009 - Studio 1A at HowStuffWorks

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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

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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.

August 30, 2009 – Window light portrait

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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.

August 28, 2009 – Tiny little cricket

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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 19, 2009 – Flowers and Bees

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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.

Photo Tip: Clean up your backgrounds

One of the great things about being a parent is finding your kids doing something especially cute. Often, our first reaction is to grab the camera and try to capture the moment.

Today, I have two tips for you along those lines. First, and most important, is to take the shot as quickly as possible. Sometimes trying to get the perfect angle or composition will cause you to miss the moment. So don't hesitate to capture a couple of shots right away.

Second, pay attention to your background and other things that might be cluttering up the picture. Look for stuff that will distract the viewer's eye from the real focus of the photo -- things like toys lying on the floor, people walking around, bright objects, etc.

See if you can change your position to get a less-distracting background, or pick up items that don't need to be in the photo. Maybe a different perspective will remove some of the problems, too, like crouching down to take the shot.

Look at this photo of my daughter coloring. What is the first thing you notice?


Did you see the dolls? Or the bright yellow toy bin? Maybe the chairs in the background?

There's an awful lot to distract the eye in that photo! Chances are the first thing you saw was something other than my daughter coloring.

For a better photo, I took the dolls off of the table, moved the rocking chair on the right out of the way, and then moved the container of crayons from the left side of the table to the right. Finally, I changed my camera angle by squatting a little and moving to the left.

Here is the resulting photo.


Much better, isn't it? By changing my perspective, I made the background a blank wall. Now the photo has only the subject and what she is doing. There isn't anything to distract you from what I wanted to capture in the photo.

Here's another photo taken in a more real-world situation. I had taken my kids to a local park and my daughter was having a blast on some of the playground equipment. I set up to take the shot where there wasn't anything in the background. I purposefully left out the rest of the playground, the kids, and anything else that would divert the eye.


So to recap, when taking a photo many times what you leave out is just as important as what you leave in. And if it's one of those spur-of-the-moment photos, remember to take a couple of shots immediately (so you will at least have something) and then look for how you can improve the photo.