November 16, 2009 - A beautiful Fall yard

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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.

September 3, 2009 – Buckhead sidewalk during lunch

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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.

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.

Photo Tip: Block out the sun!

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!