Gary's Photography Blog

Before we start I want to share this link to ‘Canon Explains Exposure’ this is great to play with and get familiar with how all three settings work together.

So far we have looked at Aperture and Depth of field and also Shutter Speed and Motion. Now let’s take a look at ISO and what part it plays in exposure.

Back when cameras used film, ISO or also referred to as ASA, was used to refer to the sensitivity of the film to light. Lower numbers indicating less sensitivity, for example, ISO 100 would be less sensitive and therefore ideal for sunny or really bright situations, ISO 400 would be more sensitive to light and used mostly for lower light conditions such as indoors. You could also get film with lower than 100 ISO and higher than ISO 400, such as ISO 800, ISO 1600, however, the higher the sensitivity the more “Grain” or nowadays we call it “Noise”. When digital photography came about, the way ISO was measured stayed the same. Meaning that if you dial in ISO 100 it will be less sensitive to light than if you dialed in 200 ISO, each step gets more sensitive 400,800,1600 and so on. Again, just like film, the higher we go with ISO the more noise we see in our image.

For detail, it is best to shoot at the lowest ISO possible, reducing the noise and keeping the image sharp and clear. In some situations, you will need a higher ISO to use certain settings in certain situations, for example, low light environment and you want to freeze motion, this means a fast shutter speed and also means less light getting to the sensor in an already low light situation, so by increasing the ISO we increase the sensitivity of the sensor and can pick up more light more quickly to get a good exposure.

So let’s have a look at a series of images taken with each ISO from 100 to 25600 to see how and when the noise starts to become a problem. For this activity, I am using a Canon EOS 200D and have taken an inside shallow depth of field image and an outside deep depth of field image to compare differences.

In the above images, I believe up to ISO-1600 is not bad, a lower ISO is obviously better but sometimes we just don’t have the light. The camera and subject are still so shutter speed wasn’t an issue in this image, you could just choose a longer exposure rather than sacrificing quality.

In these above images, I chose a deeper depth of field. I believe up to ISO-3200 is ok, there was a slight breeze and plants were moving slightly, if you were happy with a little blurring, a lower ISO and longer shutter speed would still be ok but to freeze motion a higher ISO may be needed to bring shutter speed down. Next, I’ll go back inside to lowlight conditions, I,m going to keep the aperture the same(f/7.1) and shutter speed at a high enough speed to freeze motion(1/80sec) and just adjust the ISO to show the difference.

Below are just a couple ISO-1600 shots taken at night

Thanks for reading my blog 🙂

In this blog we look at shutter speed. What’s a shutter? The shutter, simply put, is a curtain in front of your sensor that opens and shuts again when the shutter button is pushed. Depending on how long this curtain/shutter is open for determines how bright or dark our image is, more light hits the sensor when the shutter is open longer producing a brighter image and less light hitting the sensor when shutter time is reduced making the image darker. Shutter speed can also be used to freeze motion or blur it. Below are images of our fluffy mascot “Schnitzel”, it’s my son’s toy, honest 🙂 and that’s what he named him. Anyway back to our examples, Schnitzel is hanging from my light fitting with some shoelaces I found laying around and I am swinging him back and forth across the camera frame. I have set my camera up on a tripod and focused centre of frame, resting position for Schnitzel. I set my focus and make sure my lens is set to manual so it doesn’t try re-focus when I want to capture a shot. I start to swing Schnitzel and take images from fast shutter speeds, freezing his motion, to slow shutter speeds blurring his motion. You can also see in the faster shutter speeds, the images are darker and as our shutter speed gets slower the images become brighter. So let’s take a look at the different shutter speeds below.

A little bit of motion blur starts happening now at 1/640sec, as we get slower with our shutter speeds the blur progressively becomes more prominent as we can see in the following images.

At a shutter speed of 1/10sec, Schnitzel starts to become just one big blur and unrecognisable.

Ok, so now we have some knowledge of shutter speed and freezing motion, let’s look at Panning. Panning is a technique that combines a slower shutter speed and panning motion of the camera to create a sense of speed around a moving object. With Schnitzel swinging again we try to move the camera with his motion to create blurring in the background but trying to keep focus on him. This is easier than it sounds, haha, it took 36 sd cards and 3 hard drives to capture 4 images, haha jokes, no but really, it took some patience to get a half decent example. Trial and error when it comes to this technique. Here are those 4 images 😛

I attempted to capture cars driving past using my fast lens and tripod at night. After a few attempts, these are the best two examples.

Now that I’m out the front in the middle of the night, we might as well look at some Long-Exposure examples. Long-exposure photography is exactly that, photography using long-duration shutter speeds to capture stationary subjects sharp and blur moving elements. It is also great for night time shots. Below are some examples of Long-exposure at night.

It’s not just night time you can use long-exposure, daytime is also a great time to use long-exposure. I will write a separate blog tomorrow on day-time long-exposure and ND filters. For now, I’m going to keep playing around in the dark with long-exposures and show a little of what we call Light Painting. Light painting is using light within a long-exposure image to produce all kinds of awesome light effects.

The above image is a long-exposure and light shined/painted around the subject to illuminate and highlight edges. The below image is a light trail in the mirror produced by long-exposure and capturing the lights of the car as it drove past.

The light trail in the above image is my phone torch, directed at the lens and swirled for effect. You can get creative and experiment with different lights and techniques, the possibilities are endless. Below are some more examples of light painting using led lights.

Well that’s it for now, til next time.

Thank you for reading my blog 😀

In this activity, we look at natural light and how we can use it. First, we will take a look at direct hard sunlight. In the image below, we can see the light coming in from camera right. This is hard light, direct from the sun. It produces high contrast, contrast is the difference between light and dark in an image. High contrast images have bright highlights and dark shadows.In this next image, we still have direct hard sunlight coming in from camera right, however, this time we have added a silver reflector to camera left at head level, just in front of our subject to bounce some light back into the shadows on the face to reduce contrast and fill in the shadows. Reflectors come in different colours, the most common being white, silver and gold. Each will work best with different light temperatures. I chose silver because I don’t have a gold one yet and the colour temperature I’m shooting in is cool light so silver works nicely. Gold can work better for a more warmer colour such as golden hours just before sunset and just after sunrise when the sky is redder and softer than when the sun is high in the sky. Also, I do not have a diffuser as yet and could not find or makeshift anything to use as one, however, the below image gives a great example of when the use of a diffuser would be beneficial. A diffuser has a translucent surface that softens and reduces the amount of light travelling through. If a diffuser had of been placed between the sunlight and subject on camera right, we would have softened the light, creating a more even and flattering light and my subject would not have been squinting from the brightness.Next, we will take a look at open shade. Open shade is the shade that is next to direct or open light such as a verandah or a porch or the shade from a tree, anywhere there is shade directly next to open light. By placing our subject near the edge of the shade, but not so direct light is hitting them, the light is softened and contrast decreased. The below images were taken in front of a tree with sunlight coming from behind and a little left. The light is a lot softer and our subject is more relaxed and no longer has to squint, resulting in a more softer and relaxed portrait. May I add that my model has had enough by this point and just wants to go do what boys do best, haha.In these next few shots, we used the reflector to bounce light back at the subject to see what effect it would have and also changed the angle of the face to see what it looked like. For me, the first shot without the reflector is good, the lighting is quite even and soft. The second image, using the reflector actually added shadows to the face and made our model squint a little, we moved the reflector around to see if a different angle would work but didn’t like the way the light was shining back at our subject.So we went with an angle change of the face instead. I don’t mind these shots, the lighting is still soft with a slight highlight on far cheek, my subject is comfortable and relaxed which made for a more relaxed and comfortable image, however, boys have to be boys, so off he went to play. I still wanted to show you one more type of natural lighting situation, so inside I go to find another willing subject 🙂 .Ok, so we are inside now. Window light is a great light to play around with for portraits. The light is indirect and diffused so it’s nice and soft, providing the light is not directly shining through the window. In these next two images below, we started playing around with positions and lighting but felt the light was a little too direct and harsh and not exactly the example I had in mind, yet a perfect example of what we mentioned about the light coming directly through the window. It was afternoon and the sun was low in the sky and shining directly at us. I decided to try again with the morning light.The morning light appears but my models disappeared, they had to go to school so I had to take a few selfies to show some examples of a window-lit portrait. I’ve taken a few images from different angles so we can see how the light coming through the window can change the look and mood of our image. Thank the camera gods for swivel lcd’s and live view 🙂 . I have used my Canon EOS 200D for this activity for that reason.Now we know a little more about natural light, where to find it and how to use it, we can experiment with different locations and times of day and use what we have learned to make better portraits. Thank you for reading my blog 🙂 Happy Snapping

In this activity, we are going to be looking at the basic panel and tone curve in the ‘Develop’ module of Lightroom Classic CC. For this I’ll be using some images I captured in RAW the day before Mandurah Crabfest 2019. First, we need to look through our ‘Library’ and find some images you want to edit or play with. Select an image and then select ‘Develop’ from the top menu. You should then end up with your selected image in the middle work area surrounded by various editing features (as pictured above). If we look to the right of the screen we should see the basic window under the histogram window, I will add the histogram window is live and will change to show the edits you make. Back to the basic window, we have settings for colour such as white balance presets, colour temperature and tint, settings for tones such as exposure and contrast, highlights and shadows, whites and blacks and settings for presence such as clarity, dehaze, vibrance, and saturation. Under all them great settings is the tone curve window and then even more under that such as split-toning, sharpening, noise reduction, lens corrections, effects and a whole heap of other great stuff we’ll get to in future blogs, but for now we are just exploring the basics and seeing how the tone curve works. The tone curve can be manipulated via the curve itself or by the separate sliders below the tone curve histogram that move the curve in their respected section, each section has a point on the tone curve histogram above and can be moved for more precise control of each curve section via the sliders. This affects the highlights, shadows, darks, and lights of your tone and is great for a variety of corrections. For the purpose of this activity, I’m going to demonstrate how these settings can be used by firstly clicking the auto button next to tone in the ‘Basic’ box. This will automatically adjust all the basic settings to what Lightroom calculates is the best settings to have for the image. It’s pretty handy and mostly correct, any adjustments you think need tweaking from there can be done via the sliders.

I won’t go into detail about ‘History’ on the other side of the work area, however, if you need to take a step back it’s got a history of each adjustment made, but sticking with the right side of the work area we have a ‘Previous’ button, this will apply the same settings as the image you edited previously or ‘Reset’ will do exactly that and reset/revert your image to its untouched original state.

I made the images quite heavily edited just to show the power of its capabilities, but when using for corrections the edits can be quite subtle and if using for a more artistic look the edit could be a lot more extreme.

You can see the difference in the images above. The possibilities are almost endless with Lightroom and where Lightroom stops Photoshop begins, but that’s another subject for a future blog.

Until next time “thank you for reading my blog” 🙂

Let’s start with depth of field, what is depth of field? A camera has a single point of focus, but there will be an area surrounding this point that will still appear sharp. This zone is the depth of field and can change in size being described as either ‘shallow’ or ‘deep’. Shallow, being only a small zone of sharpness and deep, where more of the image appears sharp. So, as an example, if you were taking a landscape picture and wanted to capture detail from the foreground all the way to the horizon, you would want a deep depth of field. If you wanted a more defined focal point, say a tree in a field, a shallow depth of field would blur the foreground and background and direct your view to that focal point, making all other detail around less of a distraction. Portraits are another good example of when a shallow depth of field is handy to blur out the distractions in the background bringing more focal attention to your subject. Ok, so how do we control our depth of field? Depth of field is controlled by aperture and focus distance. Simply, wider aperture and closer focusing distances have a shallower depth of field where smaller aperture and longer focusing distance creates a deeper depth of view. Now just explaining aperture quickly is a larger number is a smaller aperture and a lower number is a wider aperture. Aperture is measured in f/stops, so f/1.8 is a larger aperture and will produce a shallow depth of field where an f/stop of f/16 would produce a deep depth of field. Focusing distance does change the depth of field, with wide apertures having more depth of field when focused on a subject further away than when focused on a subject closer to the lens. Now we also have to keep in mind with higher f/stops the aperture is smaller and this can cause ‘Diffraction’ which is an optical effect that limits your total resolution and tends to happen with smaller apertures, your sharpness decreases at smaller and smaller apertures. Below I have taken a series of images in aperture priority mode ranging from f/1.8 to f/22 to see the effect of depth of field.

As we can see from the images above, our depth of field increases around the focal point as we increase our f/stop or in other words, decrease our aperture size. We also see a little diffraction happening, but this image is probably not the best example of that.

Next, I’ll show you some examples of focus distance and how that affects our depth of field. I’ve set my camera to aperture priority and chose ISO-100 at an aperture of f/1.8. All except the one photo that I captioned at 1/2500sec had an exposure time of 1/4000sec (max for my camera).

I had a little trouble with my focal point on the first set of images, so I re-shot some, this time instead of the camera and I moving back away from the subject, the subject was moved back while the camera stayed still so you get a good representation of how depth of field affects the background, but also the foreground when focus distance is changed.

So just as a closing note, aperture controls the amount of light that is let through to your sensor, while shutter speed is the amount of time the sensor is exposed to that light. Wide apertures are also useful for low-light, nightsky and general night photography for certain applications, but that’s a topic for another blog, so on that note I say “thank you for reading my blog” 🙂

Lightroom Classic CC by Adobe is a software program designed for photographers. It’s great for organising and managing our image files, editing and improving images and then exporting and sharing those files. When we first download and install Lightroom, upon opening for the first time you will be asked to create a catalog. After that, you need to import files to your catalog. Library is where you’ll find the import button, in the lower left-hand side of the screen. For this, I decided to select the entirety of drive C:. I didn’t realise I had 8671 photos on my hard drive, wow. In saying that, the great thing about Lightroom is that these images are added to the catalog and library but there is no need to duplicate or add new folders, Lightroom simply acknowledges they are there and where they are stored on your computer.

Now we can import directly from the camera or sd card, however, we need to make a copy of this file on our computer for import so Lightroom has access to it and is not just reading it from the source folder. We’ll go into more detail of all features in future blogs but for now, we’ll stick with basic import and have a quick look at Metadata. In-camera Metadata can be accessed via the menu of your camera to add copyright and contact details. Your camera also produces its own metadata of the settings that were used to produce the image, for example, aperture, exposure time,  focal length and if flash was used, it will also tell you the mode, metering and white balance used for the image and also the time and date it was captured if you have them set correctly in camera. Some cameras have wi-fi and GPS and can geotag location, you can also enter this manually if you don’t have GPS and use an app on your phone to record the geotag for entry later on in the metadata. Now, there are some other things that your camera can’t detect, such as ND filters added to the lens at the time of capture, so you might want to add this to your metadata for future reference or like I mentioned beforehand, location or shoot details. In Lightroom, you can make metadata presets to include this extra information. To make a metadata preset with your copyright information and contact details and any extra information or tag lines you would like to have included in your metadata, click on metadata from the top menu and select edit metadata presets. A box will display where you can enter your information and save it as a preset to apply to future images.

Thank you for reading my blog 🙂

In this activity, we look at white balance. White balance is the process of removing unrealistic colour casts. This is so objects that appear white in person are rendered white in your photo. White balance just refers to the balancing of colour temperature in your photos. So what is colour temperature? Colour temperature is measured in Kelvin, and represented by K. Warm light is generally orange in colour and can vary from candlelight at around 1900K, sunset/sunrise at around 2500K and starts to neutralise around 3000K. Cool light starts to kick in around 4000K and has a more blue look to it like fluorescent light or moonlight, midday sun and daylight are up around 5500K with a cloudy day producing roughly 6500K and clear bright blue sky at the extreme end of the cold scale at around 10,000K. So in order for our cameras to capture images that look the same as we see them with our eyes, we need to give the camera information about the lighting situation we are shooting in. Very simply, the Kelvin setting on your camera should correspond to the lighting situation you are in. You don’t need to memorise the different Kelvin settings for each situation, your camera will have presets to choose from for common shooting situations. My camera has Auto-WB, Daylight (5200K approx.), Shade (7000K approx.), Cloudy (6000K approx.), Tungsten light (3200K approx.), White fluorescent light (4000K approx.), Flash and Custom. Below are a series of images of the same scene, each taken with a different white balance preset.

In the above images, it was a daylight setting and to me, Daylight preset worked the best for this situation. The settings were f/7.1 1/500sec @ ISO-400.

In these images, it was an indoor setting lit by fluorescent light, and again, to me, the best preset for this setting was White fluorescent light. The settings were f/3.5 1/8sec @ ISO-400.

In these next images, I have set my camera to Daylight and taken a series of images throughout the day to show how the light temperature also changes at different times of the day.

The light temperature changes quite a bit throughout the day. This is my only window so had to make the best of the light coming through. Depending on the angle of the sunlight, it made the light warmer when coming in from a lower angle in the morning, however, it passed through some clouds and turned a little cool around 6am(it was a little warmer just before I set up around 5:30am). Again around 9:30am as the sun starts to climb a little higher it produced a more cooler light as it passed through some cloud and started becoming a little more overhead.

Thankyou for reading my blog 🙂

In this activity, we look at how our camera uses metering to gain correct exposure. The first is Multi/ Evaluative/ Matrix depending on your brand of camera. This mode looks at the whole scene and finds the best average between the highlights and shadows and works out what settings would suit the whole frame, or if it recognises a face or a point of interest or focus it may lean towards the best settings for that subject. Next is Centre-weighted. Centre-weighted metering is split into two zones, an outer zone of around 40% of the frame that is considered in the metering but not as much as the “Primary Zone” in the centre of the frame that takes up 60% of the frame and most of the metering weight. This mode is good for portraits and images where the centre is the main focus of the scene. Finally, we have spot metering. Spot metering is based on a tiny spot in the frame/scene, typically in the centre of the frame for most cameras, some more advanced cameras will let you move the spot manually where you want it in the frame. This determines a proper exposure for that specific spot, not the average of the whole frame. As pictured above, some cameras vary in modes. Now in saying that, cameras are set to expose for 18% grey, so scenes that are mostly white or mostly black will trick your camera. So if you point your camera at something mostly white, say, snow or a white dress, the camera meter will underexpose the image because it is trying to make the image grey. For very dark subjects, say, black backdrop, a heavy shadow, a black dress or a black dog, the camera will overexpose the image to do the same, make the image grey. You can use an 18% grey card to establish correct exposure by shooting in manual mode and keeping settings at your control. Put the card in the same light as your main subject and fill as much of the frame as you can. If your card is small, this is where “Spot Metering” is handy. Adjust your settings as needed, aperture, shutter speed and ISO to gain a correct exposure then proceed to shoot your subject with the settings of the card.

Here below are images of a white T-shirt from +3 exposure compensation down to -3 exposure compensation.

 

 

The exposure compensation of +1 here I feel gives a better representation and exposure of what I could see with my own eye with the lighting I used. So for the lighting, I used a warm work light from Bunnings and bounced it off the wall behind the subject. I have then repeated the same but with a black T-shirt. Below are the images of the black T-shirt from +3 down to -3 exposure compensation.

The exposure compensation of -1 is the better exposure of this set, however, I feel an exposure somewhere between -1 and -2 would have been best suited. I never really took in to account the metering process and the 18% grey before doing this activity and that my camera will under or overexpose depending on what it was metering off. I always tried to get it to the best exposure the camera was displaying on the exposure meter. With this new knowledge under my belt, I hopefully can say goodbye to over or underexposed images or at least hello to better exposed images :p

Thank you for reading my blog 🙂

For this activity, we explore “Exposure Compensation”. This is typically displayed as an icon like this +/-. Above are some examples of where you might find it on your camera. The exposure level can be seen on display or in the viewfinder and is displayed as pictured below.

Ok cool, but what is it? Exposure compensation is an in-camera tool that allows us to easily brighten or darken our image before we take the picture at the shooting stage. Most cameras will allow you up to 3 stops in either direction, minus indicating a lower or darker exposure and plus being a higher or brighter exposure. Every camera is different so I won’t go into detail about where it is, I just suggest getting to know your own camera layout by researching it in your owners manual or online videos or just play with it and work it out as you go. I shoot with an older Canon EOS1100D so it’s on the back display in “Live View” mode or in the viewfinder at the bottom of the frame.

For this activity, I have put my camera in “Program” mode and chose an ISO of 400. I have taken multiple shots of the same scene, each at a different exposure value so we can examine the difference it makes to an image. First, we start with no compensation. This is the exposure level the camera has set to take the image.

Next, we will decrease the exposure compensation one step at a time down to three stops.

Ok, so now let’s do the opposite and increase the exposure compensation one step at a time up to three steps.

With this image, I can see the exposure levels get better in the background when the compensation is decreased and better in the foreground when increased. The background is out in the cloudy sunlight so it’s bursting with highlights while the foreground is under the shade of the roof above. To me, the ideal exposure would be between 0 to +1, however, either image could be fixed a little in post-production editing to get a nicely exposed image. A little something else I learned while playing around with exposure compensation is the artistic capabilities it brings to the table. An everyday image can become something amazing when the exposure compensation is used to your advantage. Below are some examples of my use of exposure compensation.

On the left, we have an under-exposed image that was bumped up in Photoshop giving an almost painted effect. On the right, we have an over-exposed image that I just so happened to like. Truth to the image on right is I wasn’t paying attention to my settings while shooting in manual mode on a photoshoot, luckily after a couple of shots I looked at my display and histogram and realised I was still shooting from settings I had set in the shade. Upside, I liked this shot and wouldn’t have captured it if I didn’t make a mistake. Moral of the story is…… mistakes are what help us learn and grow and I encourage everyone to make them 🙂 you never know what you might learn!

Thanks for reading my blog 🙂

Today I went for a stroll along the foreshore experimenting with exposure compensation. Learning a little more about reading the histogram and analysing exposure values. Below are some of the images I captured. As always I had fun out and about with my camera and even met a few interesting people with some incredible stories.

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I did forget to put my camera into raw, so tomorrow I will remember to shoot raw and see how the edits come out. Thanks for looking at my blog, happy snapping 🙂