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: