Background

Three more weeks and the year is over. I had promised myself to take 20,000 frames this year. I could only do 17thousand so far, but I'm happy, because I took at least one thousand pictures every month. And taking pictures frequently helps developing some extra skills and speed. For example, you know your camera better, you switch things quicker; or you recover from mistakes quicker.

This time around - with my large audience of a single follower :) - I wanna share the importance of background in (especially outdoor) portrait shots. Here's one I like:

The halos in the background are called 'bokeh'. Apparently boke in Japanese means blur. And 'boke-aji' is the blur (or de-focusing) quality. I'm sure you can reach more precise and detailed knowledge-base about the origin of the word on the net. The contrast of focused and de-focused areas on the picture make it more striking.

In this second example, there is no bokeh, but the background, again, is all washed out. This is best done with zoom lenses, as their focal threshold is shorter and when wide aperture is chosen, then background becomes a soup of colors.

A couple of important points need to be watched:

1) If you're using, let's say a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens and operate at 2.8, in order to get the best of the background blur, then you may also get some de-focused areas on the face of the subject. So be careful about what exactly you want to focus to. You don't wanna miss the eyes.

2) Keep your subject further away from the background. However, you also need to be careful with too much distance, because then you start losing light reaching your camera from the background, which would make it dark and dull.

In the third photograph, there are again focused and de-focused areas, but this time it's not in the form of background versus foreground. This time there are two different focus areas, which makes one go around in the frame.

I hope my large and uncontrollable audience is going to have a healthy, happy, wealthy, peaceful New Year with full of laughter.

Power Of Light

It's been a while since I updated this blog. I've been lazy with it, but I have been very hardworking with shooting bit. I shot about 13thousand frames so far this year. It will be difficult, but I will try to reach my resolution.....20thousand frames in 2010.

The more I mess with off-camera flash thing, the more I realize how difficult it is to deal with all those equipment out on the field, where there is practically seconds of availability. I cannot even imagine how more difficult photojournalism or being a war photographer can be.

Taking this pretty and serene view needed luck.

 I had an old,  really old, Vivitar Series I 70-210mm f/3.5 manual focus, manual everything, non-VR lens on a D700, pushed to ISO 1600 to catch the ambient light, but yet to maintain relatively faster shutter speed.  So focusing a few kilos without a tripod in a jeep is tough. It becomes impossible, when you add the hand-held flash unit to it. So I needed either a clamp or a human to assist me position and keep fixed the SB900 with a flash-beamer attached to it for longer range (which ended up unnecessary and bad quality light.) For some I used a Justin-clamp to attach the flash to the roof bar of the jeep and for some urgent moments, I asked my friends to hold the flash. Exposure was 1/60, no aperture was recorded in the Exif, as  it was manual. But I would guess at least f/8.

Hope to update this more often....not that anybody reads it, but for my own sake :)

Trial and Error

Last weekend I tried a couple of techniques to manipulate the image while taking the picture.

The first one is called 'rear-curtain sync.' What you do here is to pop the flash at the end of the exposure time, rather then in the beginning of it. This way, you capture the movement with the ambient light, but finish the exposure with a flash, which freezes the motion.

It isn't perfect for a few reasons:

1)  In every good photographer's opinion, a picture should tell a story. This doesn't.
2) The background did not fully catch the motion. I should have dragged the shutter further.

Well, deal with it. It's only a try.

I am more satisfied with the result of the second one. I saw this fisherman in a cold afternoon, but the sun was still up and harsh. Here's the first picture I took with sun light only. It is rather a dull and flat image.

Then, however, I pushed the white balance to 'fluorescent' to make the background cooler. Then gelled an SB600 with CTO to give a warm sunset feel and pointed it from camera left to the subject. The flash was only gelled. No modifiers used and it was in full power, zoomed up to 85mm. 

Here's the result:

Liquid Macro Mess

I've been not posting anything in the blog recently, but I was shooting at the same rate as before....As previously announced, my goal is to take 20,000 frames this year. So far? 4571. Here's one of them:

Last couple of days, I started to work on my liquid macro skills...again. This time around I'm much wiser, but being wiser only makes me see more mistakes in my work.

My setup had an important ingredient this time...milk, which brings some smoothness to fluidity. But on the other hand, it messes up with exposure, because it takes away the contrast, so one ends up with a flat, non-appealing final result. I still think milk is a good idea, but certainly with another lighting and photographing technique...yet to be learned. Before I tell you how I photographed these, let me throw in another one:

Ok, as said, mixture of water and milk in a large salad bowl with dark blue inside. Actually inside color of the bowl is irrelevant for this example, because we are picking up the reflections of the milk-mixed liquid. Half crescent of the outside frame is covered with a colorful collage of a cardboard...making a wall of 20cm on one side of the bowl. This is where we bounce off the light to give some color to the surface of the liquid. Am I losing you to the kingdom of boredom? Ok, here's another one then:

Then you put the same mixture of water/milk into a plastic bag, hang it about 50cm above the bowl and quickly punch a tiny whole with a needle...tiny is the operative word here. In my first trial, it was like garden hose with no control. Here's a celestial looking one:

In another session, I tried water in a tray with mirror surface and tried to capture some bubbles. No flash is used in this one....it's called 'Bubble Cake"...Bon appétit....

The Incredible Lightness of Shooting Beauty

Today I was lucky that I had such a spectacular beauty sitting in as my subject. This young lady's name is Meryem....here she is in various light setup. I worked with one SB-600 today, mounted on a reflective umbrella. I also thank to my lighting assistant for this shoot....the beautiful mother of Meryem, Sibel.

Sigmund

Today's subject is Sigmund. Here are a few various light setup trials...We thank the Master for his modeling of various minds.

Poker Face

Scared

Self-Analysis Session

Hollywood Style

Sigmund Hitchcock

...and guess what!?

Freud was a Gator too!

The Witch

I want to shoot 20,000 frames this year. In the first 44 days, I took 3043 frames. If I continue at this rate, I'll be bagging 25K frames by the end of the year. So some days, I simply have to take what's available. And today I was lucky with my precious neighbor's toys...the kind I can share...

Meet The Witch

A softbox at 7ft high, 4ft away from the subject, bounced off the ceiling, about 30deg to the camera right. Camera hand-held at ISO100, 1/250 (sync speed) at f/5.6 with a 60mm 2.8 macro.
















The puppet is hanging from the ceiling. I gave it a little turning move to the right to get some action effect.

Here's another one. I took this with a 20mm f/2.8 and then cropped it to frame it properly. Again this series is shot without control of the frame, as the camera was hand-held up high, without the live view or the view finder. Lighting is the same for all the shots in the series.

This is how I ended the session....with a calm, deep feeling of this....

Alice and Klaus

This is Klaus

I didn't know it would be so difficult to shoot a goldfish. I put the camera on continuous focus, at ISO400. Still not crystal clear...

Here's Klaus swimming :)

And this is the good, old Ms. Alice. She is 10 years old. The most gracious lady on the block.

and she is obsessed with basketball

I put an SB-600 flash about 45deg to the camera left, bouncing off the ceiling.

Post-processing: Matters When Picture is Dull

I took this picture from a high window of Hagia Sophia, holding the camera up high, lens touching the window and without properly seeing what I was shooting. The only smart move I made that day was to keep the remote trigger cable attached to the camera, independent of the exposure value (i.e. long exposure). It becomes very handy, when you are trying to shoot in awkward positions.

Although some birds decorate the composition (after like 3-4 sets of bracketing) and the sun behind the clouds make it more meaningful, it is nonetheless a dull picture unfortunately. Wrong light, too many walls, etc...Well, you can't do much with that kind of a picture, except playing with it for fun :)

So I did:

I first gave it a medieval look by adding sepia-tone.

Then converted it to HDR, so that the dark colors come alive. It will also help the clouds to be more distinguished.

Now we are almost done with it. However the walls are still there. So, we crop a little, so that the wall edges point the main subject...the domes. And added a touch of contrast to it...and here you have the final image:

The moral of the story is obviously NOT 'post-processing rocks', the moral of the story is 'the skill is to take the picture right, so that you spend minimum time with minimum alteration at post-processing.' Otherwise, all you do is to create some sort of a (maybe) art, but it is not an exercise of good photography....as seen in this example :)

Capturing The Moment

Photography is like cooking. You not only need quality ingredients and the right mix and cooking time, but you also need to present it in an appealing way.

This is the original photo:

The ingredients of this photo are

- The setting...people are in their own domain and they don't feel the studio intimidation on their faces. Awareness of their position relative to their surrounding is mixing smoothly.

- Happy bunch...photographs, with people as the main subject, are always about an emotional state. Rarely you have all day to capture it, but often a very short moment.



Pretty much like this one:

The right mix and the cooking time are the lighting of the scene and the reflection of the the emotions to the picture respectively.

If the light is wrong and the subject(s) are bored, then you may end up with something like this:

Well, here we have the right ingredients, but a lousy meal :)

Post-processing is the food on the plate. I wanted it to be as colorful as the emotions of these people on the picture. So, I converted it to black & white :) Bu I wanted to add something more fun, more dramatic to it. So, I tone-mapped the image. And ended up with something, where the people are separated in an exaggerated way from the background to make the picture a one big laugh. Here's the final image:

First Blog - Aya Sophia

I take pictures...and I like sharing them with my friends. So here I am, welcome to my first blog. I have no idea which direction this blogging thing will lead us to, but it will be strictly photography related. I don't know if you will see only pictures, or other activities like projects, workshops, tests, discussions, etc...up to you, really.


Today's subject is Aya Sophia...once - uuh, once for thousand years, the largest cathedral in the world. Here you can get thorough info.


And here are some pictures from today's shoot....


It was nice seeing you...come back again :)

Here's the b&w version...both are HDRed....

The famous dome....

..and some earthly figures...

Strobist Info: An SB-600 from 45deg left of the camera, 60deg high at 3ft with 1/64 power.