Inspired @ ireneabdouportraitsweddings.com » Photography Techniques

For Budding Photographers: Secret #2 of the Exposure Triangle

Irene Abdou — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 20:51:12 +0000

Blueberries grow on the vine at Butler Orchards in Germantown, MD. Aperture: f/2.8, shutter speed: 1/2000 sec, ISO 800.

In my recent blog post, “Secret #1 of the Exposure Triangle,” I talked about using shutter speed to creatively express movement in your photographs. Today, I’ll take you through Secret #2: Using aperture to control depth-of-field.

Aperture refers to the size of the lens diaphragm opening; it controls the amount of light entering the camera. A big aperture is like a big bedroom window, letting in a flood of light. A small aperture is like a small window – only so much light can enter during any given period of time. On the other hand, shutter speed refers to the time that the camera’s shutter curtains remains open. Imagine drawing curtains across that bedroom window. Leave the curtains open for 1 second, and twice as much light enters the window as if you leave the curtain open for only 1/2 second. Every doubling or halving of the amount of light is referred to as “1 stop” of light. So, if you want a certain amount of light to enter the room, you can either have a big window and close the curtain quickly (big aperture and fast shutter speed), or you could just as easily have a window that’s half the size and leave the curtain open for twice as long (small aperture, slow shutter speed). Get my drift? So, if you get the same amount of light either way (same exposure of your image), how do you decide whether to use a small aperture and slow shutter speed vs. a big aperture and fast shutter speed? Well, shutter speed controls your expression of movement – see my recent post on Secret #1. Today, we’ll talk about Secret #2: using aperture to control depth-of-field.

Depth-of-field refers to how much of the scene is in focus in your photograph. When we look at a scene, our eyes see everything in focus, from far to near. Not so with the camera. You’ve seen landscape photographs where foreground and background are in focus (deep depth-of-field), and you’ve seen portraits where the subject is in focus, but the background is completely blurred (shallow depth-of-field). Well, this is controlled primarily by aperture, but also by a few other factors. Today, I’ll focus just on aperture.

Big aperture = Blurry background

Small aperture = Sharp focus from front to back

In the series of images below, I photographed budding blueberries over at nearby Butler’s Orchard in Germantown, MD.

Starting with a small aperture, each sequential image below opens up the aperture by one/two stops, while increasing the shutter speed by one/two stops. As a result, the exposure of each image remains exactly the same. Yet, you can clearly see a difference in each image as regards depth-of-field. In each image, the subject of the photo – the blueberries – are in focus, but comparing the first image below to the last image, the background in the last image is completely blurred out, as compared to the first image!

(Click on “view with PicLens” for a full-screen slideshow.)

[View with PicLens]

So get creative! Before you take the shot, envision what you want your image to look like, and choose the aperture necessary to create that vision!

And that, my friends, is secret #2 of the exposure triangle: using aperture to control depth-of-field.

Interested in learning more? View information on my private photography lessons here. Or view a calendar of group photography workshops here.

Great Falls Sunset: Vision Doesn’t End with the Click of the Shutter

Irene Abdou — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 23:19:01 +0000

The summer sun sets in glorious colors over Great Falls in Potomac, Maryland.

I’ve been contemplating the image-creation process this week, as I work on a series of images of Great Falls. I thought I’d share some of my musings about the three essential steps to great image-making:

Step 1: Defining your vision for the image and the message you want to convey, be it beauty… drama… majesty… sadness… joy… fatigue…pride… This is the picture you imagine in your mind’s eye;

Step 2: Setting up your camera controls and composition to capture your vision, and clicking the shutter; and

Step 3: Developing/post-processing the image to maximize its impact and message. This is the defining moment of your photographic vision.

Although each step is equally important, most often, people focus on the second step – part 2 of the second step, in fact – the press of the shutter – without putting enough thought or imagination into defining that initial vision. And even fewer people realize the importance and impact of the third step, post-processing, on the final image. And as a result, despite the most tremendous efforts in the field to get that incredible shot, the end image falls flat.

Last weekend, one of my photography students and I were out at Great Falls doing a session on high dynamic range (HDR) imaging. (If you don’t know what HDR is, click here.) Below is a series of versions of the same HDR image, each processed in a different manner. The first image had minimal post-processing, so you can use that one as a baseline. See how different each image is? They each convey a different feeling, despite them being photographs of the exact same scene at the exact same time.

(Click on “view with PicLens” for a full-screen slideshow.)

[View with PicLens]

So even though it means sitting at my computer for even longer periods of time than being in the field shooting, I love post-processing. It’s the defining moment – it makes or breaks the success of the image. It determines whether I achieved my photographic vision. And best of all, it’s such a wonderful creative outlet. So take a little time to revisit that last batch of photos you shot, and exercise your creative mind!

View more images of Great Falls, Maryland here.

If you’d like to learn to be a better photographer, click here for information on private photography and digital darkroom lessons. Or view a calendar of group photography workshops in the Washington, DC metro area.

For Budding Photographers: Secret #1 of the Exposure Triangle

Irene Abdou — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 17:40:17 +0000

Over the past year, I’ve noticed that at least half of the new photography students who come to me bring along with them a misconception about the relationship between shutter speed and exposure. I’ll ask them how they decide to use a slow vs. fast shutter speed, and they’ll say something like, “When it’s bright outside, I know I have to use a fast shutter speed to block out the sun.” Well, actually, that’s not exactly true… That’s really not the criteria you should be using to decide on a fast or slow shutter speed. Rather, it’s really about your photographic vision. Do you want to freeze the action or creatively express movement through blur? Do you want everything in the photograph to be in focused, or do you want a blurry background?

There’s something called the “exposure triangle,” the interrelationship between aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. Understanding this exposure triangle is an absolute fundamental of photography. Aperture is the diaphragm opening inside the camera lens. How big the aperture is regulates how much light enters the camera during any given period of time. In contrast, shutter speed refers to how long the shutter remains open (whether it closes fast or closes slow), which regulates the length of time that light can enter the camera. (ISO refers to the sensitivity of the camera sensor to light, but for the sake of simplicity, I’ll leave ISO for a future discussion.)

So, it may be bright outside, but that doesn’t mean that you have to use a fast shutter speed to block out the light. Sure, you could use a faster shutter speed in combination with a larger aperture, but you could just as well use a slower shutter speed in combination with a smaller aperture. Either combination can give the exact same exposure. So how do you decide then? Fast or slow shutter speed? Large or small aperture? It comes down to your creative vision.

Secrets of the Exposure Triangle, #1: Using Shutter Speed to Creatively Express Movement

Sometimes – or even most of the time – you probably want everything in focus…you want to freeze the action…see that basketball player frozen in mid-jump in the air, see that runner cross the finish line, or in the case of the photo below, see that bale of hay frozen in mid-air as it’s flung into the fire…so, you use a fast shutter speed. In this photo, I used a shutter speed of 1/160 seconds with an aperture of f/8. Had I wanted to show the woman as a blur of motion instead of frozen in time, I could have slowed my shutter speed by 3 “stops” to 1/20 seconds. As that would have increased the time that the shutter is open, thus allowing 3 stops more of light through, that would give me an overexposed image, so to accomodate the slower shutter speed, I would have “stopped down” my aperture by 3 stops to make the opening of the lens diaphragm smaller, thus decreasing the amount of light passing into the camera during the time the shutter is open. So you see, it doesn’t matter how sunny it is – you can manipulate shutter speed and aperture to get the correct exposure, while also achieving your desired creative vision.

In the village of Kalabougou near Segou, Mali, women of the numu blacksmiths population have worked for centuries as traditional potters. A 7-day fabrication cycle leads to the weekly Saturday afternoon firing of the kilns, in which large stacks of pots are covered with grass and set on fire. A shutter speed of 1/160 seconds is sufficiently fast to freeze the bale of hay in mid-air.

In the image below, I wanted to show this children’s carnival ride as a complete blur of motion. In reality, the ride was not moving that fast, and had I wished to clearly show each child on the ride, I could have used a shutter speed of perhaps 1/120 seconds. But I thought it would be more interesting to use a slow shutter speed. In the photo below, I used a shutter speed 5.0 seconds with a correspondingly small aperture of f/22 to get a proper exposure. With this slow shutter speed, instead of seeing a group of children on the carnival ride, we see just streaks of motion, giving the impression that the ride is spinning very quickly!

A slower shutter speed (5 seconds) renders the whirling children on this carnival ride into circular trails of light at the Montgomery County Agricultural Fair in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

And that, my friends, is secret #1 of the exposure triangle: use shutter speed to creatively express movement.

If this post piques your interest, view information on my private photography lessons here. Or view a calendar of group photography workshops here.

For Photographers: How to Check Your Camera for Sensor Dust

Irene Abdou — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 04:22:52 +0000

One of my students recently mentioned to me how he was kicking himself after a shoot for not adequately cleaning his camera lens. I asked him if he was sure that it was a dirty lens rather than a dirty sensor. If you’re getting annoying little spots or blobs on your photos, then this post is for you too…

How to Recognize Sensor Dust

Sensor dust becomes visible at smaller apertures, and appears in the same positions in every image you shoot (photo #2 below). This is why you might notice dust spots on some photos, but not on others – you were shooting at different apertures. (And by the way, that means that if you know your sensor is dirty, then you can shoot at a wider aperture so that the dust doesn’t show up in your photos. Of course, you might be giving up desired depth-of-field…) Anyway, to check your sensor for dust, put your camera on aperture priority, and set the f-stop to the smallest possible aperture. Take a photo of a white wall. Zoom ALL THE WAY into the image and methodically search every part of the image on your LCD screen. If there are spots/smudges/blobs that are not on the wall, then you’ve got sensor dust! (To know that it’s not a spot on the wall, take a second photo of a different section of wall, and see if the spots appear in the same positions.)

The sensor dust evident in the original image has been cleaned up in Photoshop.

Sensor dust becomes more visible at smaller apertures. This image was shot at f/20 with a VERY dirty sensor. The sensor dust is most apparent in the upper half of the photo (the sky). In the lower half, the spots blend into the landscape.

Taking Your Camera for Cleaning

There are a variety of products available for sensor cleaning, and plenty of people clean their sensors regularly on their own. It’s a risk, though, if you’ve never done it before. Scratch or damage your sensor, and you can be in for some serious damages. Taking it for cleaning, on the other hand, can be expensive, ranging from $75-$150. (It’s been a while since I’ve needed to have my sensor cleaned, so I don’t remember the exact price.) The first time I took one of my cameras for cleaning, I went to a camera repair shop in Washington, DC. The shop was in an iffy part of the city, and I had to pay for a cab to get there. If I remember correctly, they were able to do it while I was waiting, so I sat in the shop for an hour until they were done. Then I had to call a cab to pick me up, since there were no cabs in that part of the city. I took the camera home, only to find that the dust was still there…it had just moved around and even got smudged. So I had to take the camera back for a second (free) cleaning. But I learned my lesson: make sure you know the exact picture of the sensor dust on your camera (follow the instructions above), so that you can compare the before to the after!

The next time I took my camera for cleaning, I called up Penn Camera. Turns out, they actually send the cameras out for cleaning to another place in DC, and they recommended that I simply go straight to the second place. Well, at least this place was much conveniently located, so I didn’t have to pay for any more taxi fares. I had learned my lesson from my first experience, and before going, I took a photo of a white wall, so I knew how much and where my sensor dust was. After the camera was cleaned, I took another photo before even leaving the shop…and again found that the sensor was still dirty! So, they too had to clean it a second time for free.

All this to say that even though these two shops are reputable and well-known repair shops in Washington, DC, you can’t simply hand over your camera and trust that it’s been cleaned! Make sure to do the before and after test…

Removing Dust Spots from Digital Photographs

If you have photographs with sensor dust spots, fortunately, they can easily be removed using software such as Adobe Photoshop Lightroom or Adobe Photoshop. Lightroom is good for cleaning up photos that don’t have too much dust on them, or that don’t have dust in “complex” areas, for example, where building meets sky. If you have a lot of dust, or you have dust in “complex” parts of the photo, then it’s much easier and faster to clean up the image in Photoshop, using the spot healing and/or clone tool. (Photo #1 above was cleaned up in Photoshop, though I could just have easily done it in Lightroom.) Of course, if you have 100 images to clean up, it’s a huge hassle. Batch processing is good, but not always appropriate for every set of photos. Wouldn’t it be better to not let your sensor get dirty in the first place? Read on…

How to Keep Your Sensor Clean

As you can see, getting your sensor cleaned is a hassle and expensive. If your sensor is dirty now, I recommend you have it cleaned, but once you start fresh, although you’ll eventually collect dust, there are a number of tricks to help you keep that sensor clean for as long as possible:

Always turn your camera off before changing the lens, as dust is attracted by the electrical charge on the sensor.
Buy a camera with an automatic sensor cleaning feature. All newer Canon cameras have this feature. Every time the camera is turned on or off, the sensor vibrates, shaking off dust. It doesn’t mean that your camera will be forever sensor dust-free, but for sure, it reduces sensor dust A LOT. I know. At one point, I owned one camera with the automatic sensor cleaning, and another without. After one year, my first camera sensor was still pristine, whereas the second was incredibly dirty.
Don’t change lenses more than you have to. For example, think of everything you want to shoot with the first lens, and shoot it, then switch to the second lens, rather than constantly shifting back and forth between the two.
Hold your camera face down when you change the lens. This might be a bit awkward at first, but with practice, you can do it! It helps to have the camera strap around your neck when changing lenses this way.
Avoid changing lenses in dusty/windy environments. Go into a closed space, like your car, to change the lens.
Clean out your camera bag regularly to remove dust and dirt.
Keep your rear lens cap on (and the front cap) when you’re storing it.
Favor non push-pull (i.e. twisty) zoom lenses over push-pull zooms, which can such in outside air.

Painting Peace at the Vietnam Memorial

Irene Abdou — Fri, 21 May 2010 02:50:44 +0000

Painting with light at the Vietnam Memorial, Washington Monument in the backdrop, Washington, DC

One of my students and I did a painting with light session last night at the Vietnam Memorial. Our favorite takes had the long wall of the memorial, together with the ground lights and pavement, form graphic lines all leading in the distance to a single point…the base of the Washington Monument. In these last photos of the night, we used the camera in bulb mode to allow for longer shutter speeds, with a remote switch to trigger the shutter. We faced the camera and burned in a peace symbol with a flashlight at aperture f/11, shutter speed 240 sec., ISO 100.

Later in Photoshop, I added a second layer with another image taken at a 30 second shutter speed and focused on the Washington Monument instead of on the writing on the Vietnam Memorial. Using layer masking, I painted in the darker sky from the second image, the sharper Washington Monument, as well as the left side of the pavement, to increase the tonal contrast between the left and right sides of the walkway. That also gave me sharper ground lights. (For the first image, I wanted the writing on the memorial close to the camera to be in sharp focus, which led to increasing blur going out. My layer masking combine with an image focused on the Washington Monument gives me sharp focus on important spots throughout. Make sense?) I also did a slight fix to my peace symbol. Finishing touch – lens correction, where I pulled out the top right and bottom left corners of the image to eliminate the perspective distortion resulting from my wide angle lens. D’ya like the result?

Photographing Flowers: Water & Mist

Irene Abdou — Tue, 18 May 2010 13:49:31 +0000

A few droplets of water on a flower can transform an OK photo into a great photo. Here, the droplets create leading lines that draw the viewer's eye from the bottom left through the entire frame to top right. No rain in sight? Make your own water spray using an inexpensive atomizer sprayer.

One of my photography students is going up to see a concert at Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, PA on Friday night. He asked me if I have any tips on photographing flowers. This one is for you, John!

A few drops of water on your flower can make the difference between an OK photo and a great photo, whether it’s through reflections in the water, or using a water drop to create a point of interest, or using multiple droplets to create lines that lead the viewer’s eye through the photo to a final resting point. And although you can’t control the weather, you can still make your own water drops by simply using an atomizer sprayer. Buy an atomizer sprayer here for $7.99+shipping.

My final tip today is about Longwood Gardens. Check out their Fireworks & Fountains program! It looks BEAUTIFUL!!! I’ve got to get up there this summer for one of those!!!

New! CreativeLIVE Channel Launched!

Irene Abdou — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 01:31:10 +0000

Awesome! Chase Jarvis and Craig Swanson have just announced the CreativeLIVE channel, the world’s first creative education channel. All live feed courses are free. If you miss the live course, you can buy the downloads. Exciting! The spring quarter lineup includes:

Fundamentals of Digital Photography (10 weeks)
What’s New in CS5 (1-week event)
Photoshop to HTML (5 weeks)
The Creative Eye with Art Wolfe (3 weeks)
Android Java Apps Pt2: A Twitter Client (5 weeks)
Watercolor 101 (5 weeks)
HDDSLR Cinema with Vincent Laforet (weekend workshop)
Vision-Driven Photography by David duChemin (weekend workshop) (bet this one will be GOOD!)
Studio Photography with Zack Arias (weekend workshop)

What a great idea! Check it out on the CreativeLIVE Channel!

My travel companion, Melanie, as we took a boat down the Niger River from Segou to the pottery village of Kalabougou.

Free Web Training on Creating B&W Images with Nik Silver Efex Pro Software

Irene Abdou — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 02:36:38 +0000

Color photograph, converted to black & white, of the 14th Annual Henry Arthur Callis Beautillion Scholarship Gala

Nik Silver Efex Pro is a well-known software program that converts digital color images into black & white. I haven’t used this particular software myself, but you might be interested in a free webinar that’s being offered on April 21st on how to use it.

You might ask what’s the point, when you could just shoot in black & white to begin with using the monochrome setting on your digital camera.

Well, first of all, it’s better to shoot in color, and then later convert to black & white. It simply gives you more options. What if you shoot in black & white and then later decide you want color? Then it’s too late to go back… Plus, if you shoot color and convert later, you can also compare the two versions and decide which you like better. You’ll probably find that some images look better in color, and some in black & white.
Another reason is that to “shoot digitally in black & white,” you would be shooting jpg instead of RAW. (It’s impossible to shoot a black & white RAW file. While your camera LCD screen will show you a black & white image, when you import it into the computer, you’ll find that it’s really a color file.) However, RAW is better than jpg because you retain all the image information. With jpg, the camera throws out bits of information, never to be recovered again.
And finally, when YOU convert the image to black & white rather than letting your camera do it, you retain control over the process and can make certain decisions on what you would like your final image to look like. Let the artist in you loose!

Anyway, click here for info on this free Nik Silver Efex Pro webinar by Nik Software and Digital Silver Imaging. They’re also offering special pricing on all Nik software for webinar attendees. Let us know how it goes and if you think it’s worth it to check out this software!

From One Photo a Day: March 22. Engn Guneysu, Turkey.

Irene Abdou — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 00:55:25 +0000

“Rain After the Game” by Turkish photographer Engn Gunesyu is my second favorite March photo in FWA’s One Photo a Day series. The photo shows a child playing a skipping game around a giant puddle of water, remnants of a recent rain. The litter on the ground, laundry hanging off apartment balconies, and paint peeling off whitewashed walls in the background give us a sense of place and tell us where the girl comes from. Here’s why it’s one of my favorites.

I like images that express movement through ABSTRACTION, and in this case, the blur of the child tells us a story of playfulness and reminds us of the joyful innocence of childhood, despite the otherwise poor surroundings.

A great story contains great CONFLICT, which often shows itself in the form of conceptual contrast. Normally, our eyes are drawn to focused areas before blurred areas, and to human elements before non-human elements. In this case, the blur of the child contrasts with the focused stillness of the surroundings. Which do we look at first? Further, the muted colors of the overall scene – the slate blue of the sky and the light pink of the girl’s dress – contrast with the evident joy of the child.

Thus, our eye leaps back and forth between the two – from the girl to the desolate surroundings and absence of other people, back to the girl, back to the desolate surroundings, and because the photographer has chosen, through the eye of a wide angle lens, to show us CONTEXT, we see within this environmental portrait a story of solitude, and the indomitable nature of the human spirit in the face of this solitude. And this, my friends, is a POWERFUL THEME.

Check out One Photo a Day’s March 17th image, “David and Goliath,” by California aerial photographer Mark Holtzman here.

From One Photo-a-Day: March 17

Irene Abdou — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 01:30:55 +0000

I discovered this cool new website (new to me anyway) that posts one awesome photo per day. It’s sponsored by the FWA (Favourite Website Awards), Group94, Boulevart, and Tier 3. So far, there are 3 photos in March that I LOVE, and I wanted to share with you WHY I love them! I’ll start with March 17, “David and Goliath” by California aerial photographer Mark Holtzman.

When I first saw this photo, it was just a WOW moment – the feeling of SCALE left me breathless. The ship in the upper left corner contrasts with the immensity of the tanker, and the fact that the tanker occupies, oh, less than 5% of the space of the photo tells me something about the enormity of the ocean it sits in.

You might have heard the phrase, “FRAME WITHIN A FRAME,” and it applies here. Within the frame of the image, the tanker is perfectly framed by the waves of water created by the passing ship. Were the waves of water not there, this photo wouldn’t be nearly as interesting or special as it is.

This photo isn’t 100% monochromatic, but it almost is, with the exception of the yellow ship, yellow dot on the tanker, and tiny hints of red. The near monochromaticity of the image forces the viewer to focus on the TEXTURE of the water, and the variations in that texture.

Plus, there are LEADING LINES that help the eye move through the frame to its final resting point – from the yellow ship to the tanker. The lines emerge from the yellow ship in the corner of the frame in a V shape, and to the right of the tanker, the lower line of the V transforms into spirals of water that eventually lead the eye to the ship.

The famous photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, coined a phrase called the “decisive moment”:

There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.

This was a DECISIVE MOMENT. Aside from shooting out the window of my commercial airliner, I’ve never done aerial photography. Yet, I can imagine the photographer’s plane must have been moving at a certain speed, while the yellow ship was also speeding towards the left side of the frame. There was a precise moment in time when the yellow ship, tanker, and photographer’s plane were all in just the right locations to achieve the perfect composition.