November 17, 2009 - Black and white rose

1/50

f9

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.

October 12, 2009 - A lack of diversity

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.

September 20, 2009 - Making pumpkin muffins

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 12, 2009 - Emma's first tennis match

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.

August 22, 2009 – Daisies in the morning sun

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.

Basic Photo Tip: Exposure and shutter speed

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.