Tag Archives: tips

Change Your Angle

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If you are like me you find that most times you take photographs from a standing position. Often this is fine; taking a portrait eye-to-eye can work well for example. However there are times when it can pay-off to change your angle of view. Here are some pointers to help you with shooting your angles.

Kids and Pets

The most obvious time this works is when you take photographs of children or pets. The feel of the image changes completely when you get down “on their level”. Getting down low is not just about physical height; it is a reflection of your attitude. Here is an example where I got down nice and low:

Victoria

Getting low and close here helps you to enter the drama of the scene:

Farewell Haka - Postgate Year 8 Boys

The kind of lens you are using helps, too. If you only have the lens that came with your camera, set your zoom to the widest setting (something like 15mm for example) and get really close. You will get distortion; in this case this is what you want to get that “cute” look. A word to the wise – not a good idea to do this on a woman unless they really want you to post a photo with them having a giant nose! You can shoot directly above children as well with them looking up; it can make the photo feel hopeful or innocent. This is what I did on this one: 

Things are looking up

Taking the shot

 

Portraits

With women it is best to either shoot at eye-level or with your camera slightly above. I don’t like to be up too high otherwise the eyes look a bit strange (too much white in the bottom). Again as a rule shooting from below is not very flattering (on the whole). If you can choose the longest lens you have to take these types of shots. The long focal length compresses the image and makes the face look a bit thinner. I will happily shoot with my 300mm f4 lens! If you shoot to the side check the eyes to make sure the white looks nice and balanced. Plus if you do shoot from this angle you will need a smaller aperture (like f8) to make sure both eyes are in focus. When taking photos of guys you can shoot from below and this does work. 

Hello, blue eyes

Here is one shot at 200mm:

My Photo Shooting Buddy :-)

Landscapes

It seems natural to set your tripod up at eye level and shoot from there. But everyone does that, right? Try getting down very low, using something like a piece of clothing or rice sack to position your camera on. You will get a real “bug’s eye view” of the scene.

If you do shoot standing-up then try going as wide as possible with your lens and look directly down. If your lens is pretty wide (like the Canon 10-22mm on a APS-C body or 17-40mm f4 on a full-framed one), you will get some interesting distortion. I do this sometimes when the sky is a bit boring (no clouds!); I focus on the ground, leaving around 1/3 of the picture as sky.

Sky and Sea Meet

Anyway, hopefully these little tips will help you create more interesting photos. Sometimes all you need to do is change your angle of view!

These lenses helped me create the magic:

Having Fun With Your Zoom Lens

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Do you have a zoom lens with your camera?  They are handy for sports, portraits and wildlife.  I usually shoot sports with my Canon 300 mm f4 lens, sometimes with a 1.4x extender for a little extra reach.   This lens is great for capturing birds and distant sports action but lacks the versatility of a zoom lens.  Generally speaking a fixed focal length lens is usually faster at focussing then its zoom counterpart.   I was shooting for a few hours at my son’s cricket game, using this longer lens for most of the time.  It’s amazing how that player fills the image when you use something over 400 mm!

Well, after a while I thought I’d mix it up a bit with a shorter zoom – so I switched to the 70-200 f2.8 lens.  Now that is a heavy lens!  You can shoot hand-held but a tripod with a swivel head or monopod is the best way to go.  (Camera and lens weigh over 2 kilos!)

Here’s some things you can try with your zoom lens:

Freeze the action

Kind of obvious I guess but worth stating!  Depending on your sport, something over 1/1000 second is a good bet here.  I set my camera to Av (Aperture Priority on a Canon) and set it to my widest aperture (smallest f number).  On a nice bright day like this was the ISO can be 200 or so to get a very fast shutter speed.  (Keep an eye on the shutter speed over the course of the game in case the light changes with clouds etc).  Freezing the action is great if you catch “that” moment.

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If you want to reduce the risk of camera shake then have a shutter speed that is around the same as your lens length.  For example, with a 300mm lens make sure you are 1/320 or faster.

Showing the action.

Sometimes its better to show the action by slowing down the shutter.  The trick is that once you do that you might get some dreaded camera shake.  That’s when you really need a monopod or tripod. I use a Manfrotto 393 Heavy Telephoto Lens Support to let me rotate around while still remaining steady.   Great for wildlife, too.

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Creating some drama.

One final thing you can try is to zoom your camera, while you are taking the shot.   Here I pre-focussed on the player and the waited for the action.  Once the ball arrived I zoomed-out as I pressed the shutter.  This one was 1/20th of second:

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It will take a few tries to get one you like.  Start at 1/60th and see how it goes.  You can do this handheld but you will getter better results if you use a tripod!

These tools helped me to make these photos:

Using textures with your photos

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I released some of my favourite textures this week on my. So, I thought it might be handy to give a lesson on how you can use textures to enhance a regular photo. Here is my original photo (an HDR image taken near where I live), opened into Photoshop (you can use Elements too):

4429203116 0eb3ef86ca b

Here is the texture:

IMG 1045

Next open this texture and paste over the original layer:

Screen Shot 2013 03 09 at 9 09 58 PM

By default the Blend mode is “normal”. Click on the Blend mode and you’ll get a list of 16 different modes; these are group by kind of blend. For this example I’m going to use “Overlay” and this is the one you will probably use the most with this kind of texture use. The book “The Hidden Power of Blend Modes” is a great resource if you really want to become an expert on how the modes work. For now I’m going to stick with Overlay. So, I here I changed the mode to Overlay and bingo the image changes:

Screen Shot 2013 03 09 at 9 10 45 PM

My first feeling is that its not a great look; that’s the thing with blending – you often don’t know how things will work until you try them. Sometimes it’s just the wrong blend mode but in most cases the colours or texture blend changes in a way that doesn’t fit what you are after. I will just cycle through a few textures and modes until I find one I like. For now I’m going to stick with this one and make the change a bit subtler.

The sky is the part of this image that I find a bit muddy, so I will remove the effect of the texture there. To do that it’s pretty easy. The first step is to add a layer mask by pressing the Add Layer mask button at the bottom of the layers panel. Masks can be a bit confusing; think of white as being “transparent” and as being “opaque” or “block”. If the mask is white that all of that layer will merge through to the one below (or reveal it).

Next press “B” for brush and pick a nice soft one.

Screen Shot 2013 03 09 at 9 12 05 PM

I set the Opacity to 35%, this will let me paint back and forth, slowly reducing the effect. I’m going to remove the texture from the sky completely. You should notice that as you paint away, the mask thumbnail gets filled-in with black; the sky part should be all black by the time I’m finished.

Screen Shot 2013 03 09 at 9 13 20 PM

That’s it – the only thing left is to reduce the overall effect of the texture, I did this by reducing the Opacity to 79%.

Screen Shot 2013 03 09 at 9 13 20 PM

You can either flatten the layers back to one once you’re done or just export the image as a JPEG, keeping all of the layers. I do this in most cases as it helps when you want to learn from “mistakes” or improve older images.

4429203116 0eb3ef86ca b final

Here are some more examples of how I used textures on photographs:

Ultimate Toilet?

Captain haddock weta

IMG 0198 282 29 848080686 O

IMG 0225 852915608 O

Getting Rid of the Noise

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Ever notice how some of your photos taken in low-light look kind of grainy and lacking in detail? Most likely this is caused by what is known as “noise”. This kind won’t damage your ear-drums but it might just ruin an otherwise great photo. There are a few ways to tackle this problem and the best place to start is when you are actually taking the photo. Assuming you have a DSLR (or similar camera with interchangeable lenses) then you can try and use the “fastest” lens you have. Lenses are generally known as “fast” if they have an aperture greater than or equal to f2.8. Who knows why fast lenses have nothing to do with shutter speed! (Don’t confuse this with lenses that have fast focussing; that’s another whole blog post right there).

A good example of a fast lens then is the Canon 50mm f1.8 (Nikon and other brands have similar lenses). The 1.8 version of the 50mm is one of the least expensive lenses Canon make; it can work marvels at low-light and for portraits. Using a fast lens will mean you can keep the shutter speed high enough to avoid camera shake. If your camera needs more light to set a correct exposure, you will need to raise the ISO. This is where that pesky noise problem can crop-up. On a lower-end camera you will start to get noise at around 800 ISO and so this limits your options somewhat. Ultimately it is better to wind-up the ISO as high as you can (3200, 6400 or whatever you model supports) to get “that” picture. Once you have the photo captured you can apply some post-production magic to reduce the noise. I use 3 noise reduction tools (you only need one – trust me to have 3):

  • Noiseware by Imagemonic– This one is in my view, the fastest noise reduction tool. Faster is not always better but in this case Noiseware does a great job as well, the presets work well and I find they work fine just as they are. Sometimes the Night Scene one seems a bit aggressive so might need toning down to taste (too much noise reduction can result in loss of detail).
  • Topaz DeNoise 5 – Part of the Topaz Suite so if you use their tools (like Topaz Adjust) then using this one makes a lot of sense as the interface works just like their other plug-ins. The JPEG presets are great for iPhone or similar photos, too. Topaz Adjust can be setup to automatically use DeNoise (in the background) and that this can help reduce any artefacts produce with that tool.
  • Dfine 2.0 – This tool is more expensive than the other two I use but it does have the added benefit of easy selective use of de-noise on an image. This works in the same way as the other Nik Software plug-ins; the use of the U-Point technology. Basically you just drop pins onto the image and control how much noise reduction is applied on a section of the image. Handy if you want to only tackle noise in the shadows for example.

I wrote a longer review of Noiseware here by the way.

You can use these coupons to get a discount if you decide you need one of these tools:

Noiseware – Use the coupon “STEWARTBAIRD” at the checkout to get a 15% discount.  This coupon will work for all of Imagenomic’s great products!

Topaz DeNoise – Use the code “stewartbaird” at the checkout to get 15% of this fantastic plug-in. Will work well for their other products, too.

Quick and Easy Digital Art

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Most people like art of some kind or other – watercolours, oils, abstract, line drawing; the list goes on and on. But not all of us can paint, though I do believe anyone can draw! Often the artistic-side of us gets minimised at school as we get older – the focus is more on “practical” subjects. I think that’s a real shame and stems from a misunderstanding of how important creativity and art is to each of us.

Well, thanks to the digital photograph you can tap into your long forgotten arty side! Anyone can be an artist! I use a few cool tools to help me create digital art, the main ones being; Snap Art, Topaz Simplify and Filter Forge. Of course the glue that brings everything together is Photoshop (or Photoshop Elements). I’m going to focus on the least expensive one out of these three – Topaz Simplify (TS). TS comes as part of a suite of plugins from Topaz Labs, these you can buy either individually or as part of the complete package. I’m pretty sure that once you have tried a few you will end-up wanting them all!

Anyway for now, I’ll just give you a quick tour of Simplify and show you want can be done on even the most basic of images. Download a trial here and once its installed it will be available from your plugins menu (under Filters in Photoshop). Just to show that it works well on any photo, I’ve picked one I took with my iPhone. Here it is unedited:

IMG 6677

Not to bad out of the can!  Lets see what we can create in Simplify…

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When the plug-in starts you will get three areas displayed; on the left are some quick and easy presets, with a preview of what the changes will look like. The middle section is your image with either before or after (preview). I like the full-screen version you can see here but you can also see a split view if you prefer. The right-hand side is where you can alter low-level controls; these can work globally or locally (as you paint in the changes you want).

On this photo I settled on the Oil Painting preset and painted-out some of the effect in the foreground using the Local Adjustments window.  I did this, as I wanted some more detail back into the rocks.  Here is a close-up of the window:

Screen Shot 2013 02 04 at 1 26 19 PM

Here is the final result – achieved in just a few minutes!

IMG 6677 2

Download the trial and have a go on a few of your photos. If you do decide to buy it use the coupon code “stewartbaird” to get a nice 15% discount!

Finally, remember to post your final results to the Topaz group on Flickr for everyone to see. You can find it here.

Here’s one more photo I updated with Topaz Simplify, making a more graphic or cartoon look:

IMG 0887 3

After -

IMG 0887 4

Photographic workflow

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What is your photographic workflow? How do you deal with all of those images you keep on taking?

I must have shot 5,000 photos over the last month; slowly I’m working my way through the list. I tend to take quite a few photos and to streamline the process I have a way or workflow that helps me in this.

First step is when I download them all from cards into Adobe Lightroom (the photos are actually saved into external USB drives not on my local machine). I will apply a few basic keywords (if they are all from the same set or session). Lightroom then works through all of the images and creates (renders) previews for each photo.

Once this is all done I take a quick pass through all of the photos looking for any total duds, for example; out of focus, photos of my leg (yes this does happen), the one where I bumped a setting and totally blew-out the photo etc. On average I might cull about 5% of the photos doing this. In the case of bird photos the hit rate can be a lot lower as the focus can be tricky when capturing them in flight. I might discard 10-15% of these.

Then I go through again only looking for obvious standouts; these I “pick” (P in Lightroom) and give a rating. The rating is normally only 3 or 4. Anything less than a 3 I just ignore. I do think it is a good idea to keep everything as years or months later you might see something special in the photograph.

I don’t always put photos in Collections unless it makes sense; for example, a family outing to the beach or the like. What I do use is what is called “Smart Collections” in Lightroom to automate some of these grouping.

Now I can work through my “best of” list and edit as required. These images are tend to add a lot more keywords to and create a title that hopefully makes more sense that “IMG_1234.CR2” etc. These final images I will upload to my gallery and some to Flickr and 500px. For general work I have one Lightroom catalog for the whole year. Any client work or special event has its own catalog.

In case you are wondering about backups; I backup the Lightroom catalog to Apple Time Capsule and an external drive. All of the data on my external image drives and copied using Carbon Copy Cloner (a Mac only product). One of these backup drives I then store at a friend’s house. Amazing how much work there is in this photo business!

The main takeaway from this post is make sure you double-backup and keep one of these in another location from your office or home.

Now it is time to get back to shooting…..

Why backup when you can lose all your data?

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First-up I’ve got to be honest; my backup strategy is still work-in-progress and I’ve still got a lot to learn.  That said, I have hard a hard drive crash, losing all my my photos covering about 3 months of pretty cool stuff.  I’m a graduate of the school of hard knocks!

At the moment I’m doing most of my photo work on my MacBook Pro, supported by an external monitor at home.  My overall workflow, includes a backup step:

  1. Copy the photos from the camera
  2. Catalogue and file
  3. Backup

backup process

Copy

First thing I’ll do is import images from either external CF reader or direct from camera.  Using an external reader is much faster (assuming you’ve got a Firewire one), this has the benefit of saving batter life on your laptop and letting you get you mitts on those awesome shots, that much faster.

Normally I import them into a new project in Aperture (unless at the CF card is part of the same set).  My projects are all within folders to give me another level of control.   There’s a great eBook on ApertureExpert that adds to this by explaining how to correctly import photos.  Trey Ratcliff’s eBook is similar (though not as low-level as the one on AE) but it does cover Adobe Lightroom for those non-Aperture users.

By the way my imported files are all referenced in Aperture with the actual source files saved to external disk.

Filing

Next I scan quickly through the project and reject (using the short-cut key of “9″ in Aperture) any ones that are clearly mistakes; people walking into the shot, out of focus or those ones taken by my kids while I was not looking (grrrr).

You may chose to keep everything; after all what is a mistake?

While scanning through I will also look for any clear stand-outs and apply them with either 3 or 4 stars.  These are the ones I’ll work on later…maybe.  The key is to do this all quickly and don’t get caught editing anything at this stage.  Else sorting through a 1,000 photos (which is what I do most weekends), will take forever!

Backup

Usually, I will backup any significant projects, right away.  The worst case for me would a weekly backup (triggered by Apple’s Backup program).  If you’re like me and have a mix of photos that are saved internal in the Library or as referenced files, you will need to do 2 backups.  Firstly, backup within Apple Aperture using the Vault you setup earlier.  Next using your backup program (Backup in my case), backup the referenced.

I don’t normally format my CF card until the images are backup-ed.  I learnt this lesson once!  Yes, I accidentally deleted some non-saved files.  Thank goodness for “Data Rescue”, that, well, rescued me.

Conclusion

That’s my basic flow.  I also do this:

  • Backup the best of the best to Smugmug and Flickr (JPEG only).  This is a last-resort backup and hopefully will never be called-upon.
  • Apple MobileMe (formerly .mac) backup of personal files and settings.  This runs everyday.
  • Apple Time Machine backup that runs every 4 hours, this excludes apps, videos and photos.
  • Offsite backup.  Every month I take a complete clone of my hard-drive to external disk (using Carbon Copy).  This drive also includes a complete copy of all my external photo drive (the one that I use with Aperture).  This drive is stored offsite; find a friend or family member who will help with this.

Final Tips

  • Expect your drive to die at some point.   Sounds negative but this mindset may save your bacon one day.
  • Don’t delete your source file until it is two places.
  • Keep your photo and video backup, separate from other backups.
  • Remember to print-out your photos and frame them; a sweet way to do a “backup”.

 

 

 

 

Tips for Shooting Landscapes

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Today Canon NZ asked on Twitter for “what is your top landscape tip”.  Well, that got me thinking and here is a quick list of tips that I could think of:

  1. Focus 1/3 of the way into the scene
  2. Use a circular polarizer filter to reduce haze and reflections (depends on time of day and the angle of the sun)
  3. Expose for the highlights
  4. Shoot early or late.  Avoid the middle of the day (can be ok though during winter)
  5. Sometimes shoot with a telephoto to compress the scene
  6. Use the histogram to check exposure; LCD only to check composition
  7. Use the Live View and zoom in to focus manually (when on a tripod)
  8. Shoot RAW
  9. Set the WB and avoid using AWB.  Keep it at the same WB setting for the whole session.
  10. Use a tripod (turn of IS or VR when doing this)
  11. Pre-visualize the end result by shooting in the camera’s built-in BW mode (when shooting RAW)
  12. Use a lens hood to reduce stray light issues
  13. Remove the UV filter when shooting into or near the sun to reduce reflections. (Don’t shoot into the sun during the day!)
  14. Anchor the foreground with an interesting object
  15. Shoot panorama’s in vertical or portrait mode
  16. Make sure that there is at least 30% overlap in panoramic photos.
  17. Level you camera with built-in in sensor (like on the Canon 7D) or get a cheap level-bubble.

My two favourite lenses for landscapes on my Canon 7D are the Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 wide-angle and the Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.  Do you have any more tips to add?  Leave a comment below.  Also, let me know if any of these tips need more clarification.

DSLR cameras by DigitalRev

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