Adam Koplan takes a closer look at Michael Freeman’s ‘The Photographer’s Mind’. In this follow-up to his widely regarded book, ‘The Photographer’s Eye’, documentary photographer Freeman has published a fascinating text that aims to help photographers to be more thoughtful in their picture-making.
Ever have a problem with onlookers nosey-ing around on a shoot?
Photographer Radu Dumitrescu (that’s his voice on the tape) was shooting in an abandoned house in Bucharest, Romania when a couple of intrepid guys noticed flashing lights inside the house and decided to investigate. When they raised their cell phones to capture hard proof of the afterlife, Radu laid down on the remote trigger and gave them a show.
They only got one reaction on tape, but Radu said the guys repeatedly came back to the house only to be scared back off again by the flashes. Anyone who can have this much fun with a flash trigger is truly a man after my own heart.
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Photoshop trainer and author Scott Kelby has published an ‘open letter’ to Adobe requesting it re-thinks its product upgrade policy. The company, in a recent blog post about its ‘Creative Cloud’ online computing service, revealed that it will only allow owners of the most recent versions of Photoshop and Creative Suite to upgrade to the CS6 versions, when they become available. This moves away from its traditional position of allowing owners of the previous three versions a discounted upgrade. The company is offering a 20% discount for these owners to bring themselves up-to-date in time for the policy change.
Shutter (Thai: ???????? ???????????) is a 2004 Thai horror film by Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom; starring Ananda Everingham, Natthaweeranuch Thongmee, and Achita Sikamana. It focuses on mysterious images seen in developed pictures. The film was remade in 2008 under the same title. ======================================== Plot: —— After celebrating at a drinking party with his close friends, Tun (Ananda Everingham), a photographer, and his girlfriend, Jane (Natthaweeranuch Thongmee), get into a car accident. Jane hits a young woman. With much fear and bewilderment, Tun prohibits her from getting out of the car: they drive away, leaving the poor girl lying in the road. Tun begins to discover mysterious white shadows and what appear to be faces in his photographs. A suspicious Jane thinks these images may be the ghost of the girl they hit on the road. Tun, who has been experiencing severe neck pains since the accident, visits a specialist. While a nurse attempts to measure his weight, to his dismay, he weighs approximately 120 kilograms. While collecting his medication via the counter, he hears a woman’s voice that accuses him of being a liar and he runs away, traumatized. Unconvinced of the existence of the supernatural, Tun dismisses the idea of being haunted although his friends are also being disturbed by this mysterious girl. Jane begins to investigate in the school’s lab and discovers that the girl was Natre (Achita Sikamana), a shy young woman who …
Video Rating: 4 / 5
Image by Sam Javanrouh
This week your photographic challenge is to take and share a photo that uses the technique of panning. We’ve written a tutorial previous on how to master the art of panning (also check out this one on panning too)so you may like to go read that one first – but the challenge essentially revolves around photographing a moving subject and attempting to keep it in focus by panning your camera along with it. The result is hopefully a relatively in focus and sharp subject with some lovely motion blur around it.
The technique can be applied to almost any moving subject – from racing cars, to trains, to bikes, to flying birds, running animals or even to any toddler who has gathered up a little speed.
Once you’ve taken your ‘Panning’ Images – choose your best 1-2, upload them to your favourite photo sharing site and either share a link to them or – embed them in the comments using the our new tool to do so.
If you tag your photos on Flickr, Instagram, Twitter or other sites with Tagging tag them as #DPSPANNING to help others find them. Linking back to this page might also help others know what you’re doing so that they can share in the fun.
Note: while we don’t mind you posting previous images that you’ve taken that fit this topic – the real point of these ‘challenges’ is to inspire you to go out and take NEW photos. So perhaps instead of just trawling through your old photos to find one that fits – grab that camera and go use it too!
Also – don’t forget to check out some of the great shots posted in last weeks Photographer in the Picture challenge where there were some great shots submitted.
Image by Paco CT
Image by ram reddy
Image by Thomas Helbig
Image by Gerald Yuvallos
Post originally from: Digital Photography Tips.
Check out our more Photography Tips at Photography Tips for Beginners, Portrait Photography Tips and Wedding Photography Tips.
Panning: Weekly Photography Challenge
DxO Labs has announced that Optics Pro 7, the latest version of its Raw processing and optical correction software, will be available from November 30th. The company says version 7 has been extensively re-written to make it faster – up to four times faster in the case of batch processing. Version 7 also includes support for popular enthusiast cameras, such as Fujifilm’s X100 and Sony’s A77, as well as more than 300 additional camera/lens Optics Modules. Refinements include an improved lens softness tool that attempts to correct for inherent lens softness without interfering with bokeh in out-of-focus regions. DxO Optics Pro 7 will be available with a 33% discount until December 24th (and free to users who bought version 6 after September 1st).
Digital cameras have been a great boon to photographers working with off-camera lights. The ability to review an image instantly on an LCD (with histogram!) has obviated the need for tedious polaroiding and exhaustive metering of every inch of a scene to ensure correct light ratios and eliminate unwanted shadows. So much so, in fact, that many photographers have begun to eschew the use of a flash meter entirely – relying on the LCD and histogram via trial and error to set their lights correctly. Now while quick and easy, this method has it’s drawbacks, particularly for young photographers. The question that frequently arises is:
“well, I’m essentially just guessing what power to set my flash on then chimping the exposure and adjusting accordingly but how do I know *where* to start with my flash”
Essentially this comes down to a combination of making an educated guess about the exposure and *knowing how much light your flash will put out*.
The beauty of light is that it is predictable. Whether from the sun, a lightbulb, or a flash, given the same source and conditions, you will always get the same light. We can use this to our advantage!
When working with flash, we have fundamentally 2 variable that we control to determine how much light falls on our subject – power and distance. Power meaning how much actual light our flash is outputting and distance meaning how far away it is from the subject (remember that light falls off predictably according the inverse square law). Since we know that light always behaves the same, we can be certain that at a given power and a given distance from our subject our flash will give the same result every time.
Now also remember that light from a flash behaves linearly – going from 1/4 power to 1/2 power is doubling the amount of light that it puts out and vica versa. Thus if our flash exposes properly at f/8 at 1/8 power, it will give us f/11 at 1/4 power, f/5.6 at 1/16 and so forth (given the same distance to the subject).
Armed with this knowledge, we can quickly and easily estimate a “starting point” for exposure in almost any situation. We do this by establishing a “reference point” at which we *know* the exposure of our flash, and can calculate from there. I like to call this “baselining” the flash. To do this:
Now lets put this info to use!
Let’s say we’re in the studio. We want to do a shot with a key and fill light in a 2:1 ratio. We want to shoot at f/11 to give good depth of field for our subject. What do we do? We place our lights in the desired position, both at “wingspan”. We know that each of them gives f/8 at 1/8 power at that distance. f/11 is one stop up from f/8, so we set our main light to 1/4 power (one stop more power). Our main light is now already double the light of our second, so we have our ratio right there – the second light stays at 1/8. We shoot at f/11, and our main light should be spot on with the second 1 stop under. now if we want to “blow out the background” we simply add another light on the background at 1/2 power, giving us an exposure of f/16 – one stop over main. Of course this is not as “exact” as using a meter, but this gives us our starting place and we can adjust the lights from there based on the histogram.
It’s that easy!
This technique becomes particularly powerful when balancing ambient and flash outside. Combined with the sunny/16 rule, we can use our baseline to roughly estimate the combined exposure of flash and ambient without chimping a single frame!
consider the common situation: We are shooting outside and want to drop the ambient by 1 stop. We see that it is mildly overcast – the sunny/16 rule says that our exposure should be approximately f/11@1/100 sec. Again, we know our flash give f/8 at 1/8 power, so we set it at arms length from our subject. In order to drop our ambient by a stop we increase our shutter speed to 1/200 (still at f/11) and adjust our flash up one stop to 1/4 power to give us f/11. Done and Done. Chimp, and adjust as needed. If we are in situation where we can’t drop the ambient by shutter speed (already at sync limit), we can simply adjust the flash power to compensate. Assume the same situation (ambient is f/11). to keep the shutter speed the same and still drop the ambient by 1 stop, we need to shoot at f/16. Again, knowing our flash gives f/8 at 1/8 we simply bump it up 2 stops to 1/2 power (f/8->f/11->f/16 = 1/8->1/4->1/2)
This may sound complicated, but once you are comfortable estimating these exposure, it becomes almost second nature. by using your baseline you will find yourself able to get exposure dead on within 1 or 2 “chimping” shots.
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Wildlife photographer and tour operator Dallas Dahms explains how to choose the most appropriate photo gear when embarking on an African safari. His article shares camera lens and accessory combinations best suited to particular modes of transport and specific types of photo opportunities. He also supplies a handy tip for safely carrying your gear aboard in-country flights.
New look for edzstudios… cleaner and more minimalistic… also galleries changed to a jquery based setup rather than flash (hey gotta be iPad compatible right?) If you are reading this through rss, click on through and check out the new site design. Will be going through a few tweaks in the next few days, but pretty happy with things overall.
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We’ve successfully migrated dpreview.com to its new web servers. And, now that most of the teething problems have been ironed out, we’re confident that the errors and degraded performance that some users have been experiencing over the last few weeks are well behind us. We’ve also got a couple of minor feature updates to tell you about – and the winners of the Tamron Prize challenge are revealed after the link.
