Depth of Field

In this weeks installment, i’m going to briefly talk about depth of field (DoF). The term “depth-of-field” refers to the area of the picture in the z-axis (distance) that is in acceptable focus, not necessarily “bokeh” which is about the quality of being out of focus.

Controlling the DoF on your camera can yield very different results depending on what you want to achieve. It’s purely artistic preference, but if you can control the Aperture (f-stop number) on your camera, then you can control the DoF.

The aperture controls how open or closed the cameras “eyeball” is. At lower f-stop numbers, the cameras aperture is more open than with higher f-stop numbers. Smaller f-stops (like f/1.4) will have a smaller DoF (less area in focus), and higher f-stops (like f/22) will have a larger DoF (more area in focus).

The light mechanics and wave properties involved behind how apertures affect DoF are way beyond the scope of this blog, but for arguments sake, thats the gist of it.

It can be handy to manually control the DoF, especially for throwing the background of images out of focus which makes the subject stand out that much more.

For demonstration purposes only, here’s a few examples of what changing the aperture of the camera, and thus changing the DoF, can do for a photo.

Depth of Field is most easily noticed at long focal lengths. If your camera doesn’t allow very open apertures like f/1.4 or f/2.8, often times simply repositioning yourself and zooming in and reframing your subject can produce decent DoF.

Bike rack. Nikon 70-200mm @ 200mm, f/2.8 at 1/250 sec., ISO 400, Aperture Priority Mode, Hand held.

At the aperture of f/2.8, the green bike is clearly the main subject while the remaining bikes are so far out of focus that it would be hard to tell they are even bikes, much less see any lettering on them. This setting can make the subject ‘pop’ out of a picture, especially at long focal lengths.

Bike Rack. Nikon 70-200mm @ 200mm, f/4 at 1/125 sec., ISO 400, Aperture Priority Mode, Hand held.

So now the camera was set to f/4. Still a relatively open aperture setting and one that more consumer SLR cameras will have. While there isn’t a huge difference from f/2.8 in terms of ability to discern the background, there is slightly more detail and harder edges around the out of focus elements. This is also close to the aperture that my lens becomes its sharpest and has less vignette than shooting wide open while outdoors.

Bike Rack. Nikon 70-200mm @ 200mm, f/8 at 1/30 sec., ISO 400, Aperture Priority Mode, Hand held.

Shooting at f/8 outdoors is a bit more normal than shooting at the more open apertures simply because its normally bright outdoors and f/8 lets in 1/16 as much light as f/2.8. This light transmission, or the lack thereof, results in a greatly decreased shutter speed between f/4 and f/8, even more so between f/2.8 and f/8. At f/8, the camera compensated to let in an equal amount of light by decreasing the shutter speed from 1/250th (f/2.8) to 1/30th (f/8). Now if you shoot sports or anything that moves quickly in a relatively dim setting (birthday parties, pets, kids, etc.), you can begin to appreciate the ability to shoot at wide apertures like f/2.8.

Bike Rack. Nikon 70-200mm @ 200mm, f/22 at 1/30 sec., ISO 3,200, Aperture Priority Mode, Hand held.

Stopping the camera down to f/22 is one way to get more things in relative focus, but it brings up another issue. Time for an experiment. Squint your eyes so that the text on the page gets blurry….OK? That effect is called diffraction. The cameras lens is so closed down that barely any light can get through and as a result it boosted the ISO to 3,200 to compensate. After a certain f-stop on all lenses, they begin to get softer due to lens diffraction. So while you may get more things in relative ‘focus,’ it won’t be nearly as sharp as it could be. At f/22, the DoF is so big that even at telephoto lengths, the text on the  bikes 8 feet down the line can be clearly read. Compared to the first two pictures of the series, this one seems cluttered and uninspired because of the background grabbing your attention from the focus on the green bike.

So that’s DoF in a nutshell for telephoto lengths, but what about getting good DoF at wider focal lengths?

Frozen tree. Nikon 24-70mm @ 24mm, f/2.8 at 1/200 sec., ISO 400, Aperture Priority Mode, Hand held.

With wider focal lengths, its not always easy to get noticeable DoF. If all of your subjects are relatively far away, the DoF is going to be so big that everything will appear to be in focus. In order to get DoF out of a wide shot, the lens has to be focused on something that is close to the lens, then the background will blur to varying degrees depending on the aperture. Keeping the exact same settings, but only moving to within 6 inches of the tree branch, we can get this:

Frozen tree. Nikon 24-70mm @ 24mm, f/2.8 at 1/200 sec., ISO 400, Aperture Priority Mode, Hand held.

Now we have a foreground subject in focus which makes it easier to get a shorter DoF. While the effect can be desirable in some cases, it can also lead to your photos having a strong vignetting effect in the corners. This is a worst-case scenario for my lens: shooting at the widest focal length with a wide open aperture against a neutral grey background.

Cosmic Photography

There have been some spectacular photos taken from deep field satellites like the Hubble, but for us mere mortals with a foot firmly on the ground, it almost seems impossible to get a good photo of the night sky. There are several inherent limitations that arise from taking pictures of the night sky: most of us live in or near a city, so we get all of that light pollution (city lights being reflected and refracted from atmospheric particles). Most of us have several miles worth of atmosphere above us which creates distortions and dims the starfield, and the Earth’s rotation can produce either desirable or undesirable results depending on what you want.

The most typical view we have of the night sky is by the unaided eye. On a clear dark night it is easy to pick out thousands of stars and their constellations, the Milky Way galaxy and its clusters, and even some deep-field objects like the Andromeda galaxy.

Milky Way galaxy. Nikon 24-70mm @ 24mm, f/7.1 at 30 sec., ISO 5,000, Manual Mode, Cable Release

This is a picture I snapped one night on a new moon night (really dark). The Milky Way was clearly visible with the naked eye which helped, but unfortunately it wasn’t the time of year when the center of the galaxy is visible at night. To get the trees in the foreground and the starfield in focus, stop your lens down a bit more than you might want to. I stopped mine to f/7.1 and left the shutter open for 30 seconds at ISO 5,000. This prevented the trees from being over exposed from the nearby street lamp and let the stars still get exposed. Leaving the shutter open for 30 seconds left significant trails on the stars when viewed at larger sizes, but since the picture was taken at a wide angle, the effect was minimized.

Andromeda galaxy. Nikon 300mm @ f/2.8, 3 seconds, ISO 10,000, Manual Mode, Cable Release.

The Andromeda Galaxy as seen from my backyard. You’ll notice in the photo descriptions of these two shots that i’ve been using the optional cable release system for my camera. This is because if I were to physically push the shutter button on the camera, the simple matter of touching the camera at such a long focal length and while on a tripod would induce some extreme motion blur.

The galaxy is more than twice the size of our own Milky Way and is about 2.5 billion light years away.

When viewed through a telescope, the spiral rings appear 6 times as wide as the full moon.

When taking photos of objects like this through a telephoto lens, any motion either by yourself and the tripod, or of the planet will show. Instead of using the 30 second exposure like from the wide angle shot, I used 3 seconds (and different aperture and ISO settings) to keep the starfield relatively sharp. Even at the much shorter exposure time, there is still a bit of visible motion blur.

Photographing the night sky takes some patience and a little bit of luck to get the right conditions, but you can get some great shots and have fun doing it.

Motion

Capturing motion can be tricky. Do you want to stop all the action to get a blur-free shot or to keep a little motion still visible in the picture? Both ideologies will provide strikingly different results. The answer is ultimately up to you as an artist, but for arguments sake, i’ll provide a couple examples of situations in which I use one method over the other.

Dropped. Nikon 24-70mm @ 38mm, f/2.8 at 1/1,000 sec., ISO 10,000, Manual Mode, Cable Release.

This shot was setup i’ll admit. Water can be tricky to photograph, especially something moving through the water at high speeds. It can be desirable to take a slower shutter speed to smooth out moving water (like a beach), but for this I wanted to demonstrate how cool water can be when its stopped dead. To get this effect simply set the shutter to anything above 1/800 sec and have the subject on a black background (my jacket) with a bright light to illuminate the rippling water (my desk lamp). I also covered the dice in oil so that the water wouldn’t fully envelope it before it got deep enough.

CSU Volleyball. Nikon 300mm @ 300mm, f/2.8 at 1/800 sec., ISO 2,000, Manual Mode, Hand-held.

A shot of our awesome Ram Volleyball team in action. There are easier things in life than shooting sports indoors. Lighting can wreak havoc on your colors and technical limitations can lead to blurry or out of focus pictures in the relatively dim light. The best piece of advice is to shoot shoot shoot, and shoot. Take as many pictures as you can because 99% aren’t going to be what you wanted. The best action happens in the blink of an eye when everything for a photo lines up just right. Hold down your shutter button to take a series of photos and pic the best one, sometimes there isn’t a good one in the series though because the best moment happened between pictures, but that’s OK, do it again! To stop most bodily movement, shoot at anything faster than 1/500 second, to stop volleyballs enough to read upside-down cursive on the ball, shoot a bit faster.

Liquid light. Nikon 18-200mm @ 135mm, f/5.6 at 1/30 sec. ISO 500, Manual Mode, Hand-held.

Sometimes you may want to extend the moment by slowing down the shutter. In cases like this it’s almost mandatory because otherwise there would be only points of light and not the really cool spark-explosions. The falling balls of liquid metal were the result of some welding happening overhead. Much like fireworks, in order to capture the whole moment from explosion to dissipation, it helps to slow down the shutter speed. Depending on the situation, try shooting at speeds of 1/60 second or slower. In this case I went with 1/30 second to capture multiple sparks.

Low Light

Shooting in bad lighting conditions is the plague of all photographers. It gets even worse when there is virtually no light. The biggest factor when dealing with situations will ultimately come down to equipment, but this relates more to technique. There are several things to consider when shooting in near-black like if you should use a flash or shoot at another time. But if you must shoot in the dark of night, these are a few tips that might help yield better results.

What effect are you going for? Do you want the pictures to look like they were taken in daylight or do you want to capture the scene as you see it, or even go darker?

Lets start with the “as you see it” part.

If the human eye were made into a camera, it would be pretty awesome. But since it hasn’t yet, we’ll have to figure things out the hard way…full manual mode.

Lory Student Center. Nikon 24-70mm @ 24mm, f/2.8 at 1/40 sec., ISO 8,000, Manual Mode, Hand-held.

The human eye can pick up detail fairly well when the scene is well lit. Most cameras usually fall on their face when you try to get a picture like this in Automatic mode; they try to overcompensate from all the dark areas by boosting the ISO or reducing the shutter speed. As I was walking back to the Collegian desk to submit photos from the homecoming bonfire, I had to go past the Student Center building that is pretty dull in most all situations. The smoke from the fireworks and the bonfire that was being extinguished played some crazy lighting reflections onto the building. The scene looked for all intents and purposes, just like this. The hard part was getting the camera to see what I was seeing without overexposing or getting weird colors from the different light sources.

Night becomes day?

Sometimes you might want a night scene to take on the characteristics of day…shadows, good details. This can usually be accomplished by leaving the shutter open for much longer than usual (several seconds, instead of tenths of seconds).

Fire. Nikon 24-70mm @ 31mm, f/2.8 at 1/250 sec., ISO 12,800, Manual Mode, Hand-held.

Since I didn’t want the fire to be a big blurry mess from leaving the shutter open for long, I had to shoot at 1/250 sec. This also meant that the photo would turn out pitch-black if I didn’t push the ISO and open the aperture. The sky was black, but we can see some blues and the firemen’s shadows from the fire.

Going dark.

Sometimes you might want to emphasize the fact that its dark out and thats when you can get some cool effects. This one makes good use of silhouettes.

Passion. Nikon 24-70mm @ 66mm, f/2.8 at 1/250 sec., ISO 200, Manual Mode, Hand-held.

To get the fire to not be a blob again, I used a shutter speed of 1/250 but then also really lowered the ISO almost to the floor. If you don’t want to use a tripod then your biggest tool is a fast shutter speed, usually 1/15 or faster and you shouldn’t have camera blur from shaking. If shooting at those slower speeds doesn’t get the results you want then you can start messing with the ISO, but beware of image noise. Compact point and shoot cameras will start to have noticeable noise (like TV static) at ISO’s above 800. Small format DSLR’s will generally look good in the 1,600-3,200 range if you’re looking for that extra boost.

Jumping the gun

(File photo from NikonRumors.com)

Several days before its intended launch, several lucky customers were able to get their hands on the hot new D7000 from Nikon. The camera is scheduled to be released this Sunday at Best Buy stores nationwide, but in very limited quantities. Amazon.com says they are accepting pre-orders for their November 15th shipment date. An unknown Best Buy store sold several of the cameras well ahead of time and a full unboxing has been documented already. Some customers however are expressing their rage that they weren’t the first to get one, and what better way to express that anger than through a Hitler parody? The camera has already become hugely popular because of its high-ISO performance and imaging capabilities that put it on par with the D300s and way beyond the D90 without costing as much as the D300s.

Megapixel Myth

A war has been waging for almost two decades now. This is a war between camera makers and they’ve been trying to involve us since the early 90′s, and rather successfully.

In 1991, Kodak and Nikon released the first digital that was aimed at the professional photojournalist. It was a Nikon F-3 camera system with a revolutionary 1.3 Megapixel (MP) Kodak sensor that sold for $25,000.  Then the megapixel war started.

Camera makers were quick to jump on the digital bandwagon of the 90′s but it wasn’t until 1999 that Nikon released the worlds first practical DSLR, the D1, which replaced film cameras at many newspapers. At the time, this camera was a mainstay in newsrooms across the country as photojournalists were now able to streamline their workflow in order to get print-quality photos into the papers more easily. At only 2.7 MP it was seen as film’s equal for print journalism.

The term megapixel was something that marketing firms quickly grabbed onto as something that could rate a cameras quality. Over the years they’ve ingrained the notion into the public that more pixels equals a better picture. This is true, up to a point. For example, a 3 MP photo looks nearly identical to a 6 MP photo while viewed from a reasonable distance; reasonable as in not sitting your nose against your computer monitor so that you can count the individual pixels, try sitting back and enjoying the photo for what it is.

If you’re especially worried about the sharpness of your photos, your technique will have more impact on your photos than any number of pixels would ever have.

A 7 MP camera can print up to 12″x18″ and still have no visible pixels. So why have camera makers and marketers pushed these ridiculously high MP cameras onto us claiming that they take ‘better’ pictures? Because they know that the highest resolution you ever needed was from 2006. What matter in cameras is more involved than a simple megapixel number. You! You are what takes the picture, you have to find the meaning in a scene and capture the emotion of a moment. No amount of pixels or stupid gimmicks like scene detection modes, wireless printing capabilities, or my personal pet-peeve, facial recognition, will ever make your pictures a work of art or even worth keeping. You have to be inspired to get a great photo, counting pixels will not achieve that nor help.

It is funny, the amount of pixels your camera has or doesn’t have is the least important aspect of your camera. There are so many more critical aspects of photography, but it is that singular number by which the vast majority of people rate cameras. They don’t even think to consider the lenses, apertures, shutter capabilities, flash syncs, sensor size, ISO capabilities, viewfinders, customizability, and least of all the photographers own abilities.

To show how prevalent this myth has been, a link to a well-known marketer of cameras to people who care more about the numbers is here. This demonstration is brilliant at first glance. However, even at these small magnifications all three of the images should look identical, but the 4 MP and 6 MP images are obviously less sharp. They have been deliberately degraded to make them appear inferior to the 8 MP image by blowing the 4 MP image up to an equivalent size of 12×9 feet, not the claimed 5×7 inches, and this is how they did it:

It’s pretty easy to see how they’ve done this, zoom all the way in on the images and you’ll see the 4MP image is blocky (pixelated). At maximum crop, each pixel of the picture covers 16 pixels on my screen (4×4 pixels). You then divide the width and height of the 4 MP picture by the 16 DPI (dots per inch) to get the actual size of the picture if printed at that 16 DPI resolution. Since a 4MP picture has a dimension of 2,289 x 1,712 pixels, and if printed at 16 DPI, we get: (2,289/16)” x (1,712/16)” = 143.06″ x 107″ and then converting to feet by dividing those by 12, we get: 11.9′  x 8.9′. That’s a picture nearly 12 feet wide and 9 feet tall, not the 5 x 7 inches they’ve claimed.

Whats the difference between a 4MP camera and an 8MP camera? Only a 42% increase in linear resolution, not the 100% it may seem. The image area varies as the total pixel count, which varies as the square of the linear resolution. A 4MP camera has a linear resolution of 2,289 x 1,712 pixels. 2,289 x 1,712 = 3,918,768 pixels (rounded up to 4 million of course). An 8MP camera has a linear resolution of 3,266 x 2,450 pixels or 8,001,700 (8MP). Taking the horizontal/vertical resolution we see that there is only a 42% increase, or 977 horizontal pixels between the 4MP camera and the 8MP camera.

The real deal.

This is a simple shot over my porch to grab a 3MP example. This is about the same cropping that was done on that other store’s site, but this is reality. Instead of using a 4MP camera, I set my DSLR to shoot at 3MP (2,128 x 1416) and even at that lower resolution, it is quite obvious that 3MP is quite sufficient if you know what you’re doing. The differences between 4MP and 8MP are not that much, and nowhere near as exaggerated as the site makes the case out to be.

For comparison’s sake, lets take a look at my phone’s 5MP verses my DSLR’s “pathetic” resolution of 12.3MP.

Can you tell which was taken with what camera? The DSLR simply gives me 100% creative control over the content i’m trying to capture, it doesn’t make good photos by itself, and phones aren’t relegated to making crapy photos, that’s up to you. Let’s kick this megapixel myth, stop counting and start shooting, then we can talk.

Timing

Just as the title suggests and much like swinging a bat to get a home run, there is good timing and bad timing in both swinging the bat and getting a good picture. This particular post has to do with timing over a span of a couple minutes, instead of the similar concept of split-second timing required to get a good action shot. While getting a good action shot depends on the ‘moment,’ if you’re looking to take a picture of a landscape or outdoor scene, then the time of day plays a huge part. I touched on this topic in my first post, Light, but usually the best time of day for taking pictures comes a few minutes after sunset. The time varies because of weather, latitude, elevation, and time of year.

Before Sunrise. Nikon 24-70mm @ 24mm, Polarizing Filter, f/6.3 at 1/160 sec., ISO 200, Program Mode.

This picture was snapped about 5 minutes before sunrise in Rocky Mountain National Park. The effect can be desirable sometimes, but in this example i’m looking to get the grass in the foreground and this one is a bit too dark and crooked. Wait 6 minutes…

The ‘Moment’. Nikon 24-70mm @ 56mm, Polarizing Filter, f/6.3 at 1/160 sec., ISO 500, Program Mode.

Now the sun is just above the horizon and casting a pleasant yellow across the landscape. The natural color of the grass is emphasized and makes for a beautiful morning shot.

After the Sunrise. Nikon 24-70mm @ 36mm, Polarizing Filter, f/6.3 at 1/160 sec., ISO 500, Program Mode.

Keeping the exact same camera settings but waiting 5 more minutes has a tremendous impact on the colors of the scenery. The ‘perfect’ timing for these types of shots only lasts a matter of minutes and sometimes less than a second for other natural phenomenon like the Green Flash seen over the pacific ocean.

Morning and evening colors are so much more vivid because our eyes aren’t nearly as sensitive to dim light as our cameras can be. The world doesn’t go black at night or gray before sunrise, but it looks that way to our eyes. Cameras retain the same color sensitivity regardless of amount of light, they just might have a hard time exposing in dim light.

Composition?

So what is this thing we call composition? Put rather simply by Edward Weston, “Composition is the strongest way of seeing.” So what that means for you is to decide what is absolutely necessary to get the whole meaning into your photos.

Usual photos will most likely be too cluttered and complicated which both lend to a photo looking unfocused (not in the lens-camera meaning) or confusing to the viewer. The process of composing is to find the simplest version of what you want to capture by excluding all unnecessary elements. Photography differs greatly from most any other art form because it is the art of excluding elements that distract from the message. In painting, sculpting, or music, the idea is to include all the necessary elements to get the message across.

Composing your photos is as simple as that. Exclude and simplify the picture to get the strongest message across. Now you might be thinking, “But I can’t create something beautiful without a beautiful subject!” I thought this was the case for a long time until I realized that composing does not mean zooming in or pointing your camera in a different direction (thats framing, different subject altogether). Composition is achieved by physically moving your body and camera to move the elements of the shot in relation to one another.

Get dirty! Most of the time a great shot will require some leg work. Don’t get stuck into the rut of taking a shot from a normal standing angle, get on the ground and get a low point of view, get higher, get really close, just move around until you finally see something that says, “Ah ha! There’s a great shot!” After you try this, it will become much easier and faster to get the shot you want.

There is one trick I’ve found to help tremendously if a scene is complicated. Instead of looking for the detail, defocus your eye through the viewfinder and see all the shapes and colors. This helps you see the basic forms of everything and it will really help you pick out what needs to be excluded.

Relatively speaking, excluding is the easy part of composition. After all the distracting stuff is out of the shot (by moving around and such), then you’ve got to balance your photo. Balance between light and dark, near and far, big and small, rhythm and motion, patterns and textures, lines and curves, positive and negative space, the list goes on. What makes a photo strong is the balance between these elements which draws our eyes into the photo to see more detail.

Walking in downtown Fort Collins, I came across one of those newly-painted utility boxes:

Utility Box. Nikon 24-70mm lens @ 55mm, UV filter, f/7.1 at 1/200 sec., ISO 800, No Flash, Program Mode.

Other than the unique colors and patterns, this photo isn’t all that great. This is the typical view from the street and sidewalk without any attempt to compose. The head-on view is pretty boring, its a box and there’s tons of clutter around the subject that is distracting.

Utility Box. Nikon 24-70mm lens @ 24mm, UV filter, f/11 at 1/400 sec., ISO 800, No Flash, Program Mode.

By shooting the box at a lower angle I’ve managed to exclude the clutter and use some of the boxes painted design to help draw the eyes to the center. Also by waiting 30 seconds the sun poked out from behind the clouds and gave me some better lighting to work with (see my lighting post about how to get great light).

Here’s another typical object that we would otherwise ignore, but can make for an interesting photo. Fire hydrants are pretty low to the ground and most people would get a photo like this:

Fire Hydrant. Nikon 24-70mm at 42mm, UV filter, f/13 at 1/640 sec., ISO 800, No Flash, Program Mode.

This photo has good color and thats about all it has going for it. The photo seems squished to me, the lens is pointing at the ground with little difference in depth of field. Time to get dirty!

Fire Hydrant. Nikon 24-70mm at 38mm, UV filter, f/16 at 1/1,000 sec., ISO 800, No Flash, Program Mode.

Quite literally I had to get down and dirty for this shot. Now the hydrant doesn’t seem so small, but the prominent subject contrasted against the deep blue sky. The lines of the composition tend to draw my eyes to the center and picture is fairly clear of clutter.

Good composition and an eye for good lighting will go miles further than any equipment or post processing will let you. Take the time to think about your shots before you take the picture and eventually you won’t have to think about it anymore. You’ll be spending time making pictures rather than messing with equipment or wasting time with boring photos.

White Balance and You.

So now you’ve started to get the hang of lighting your subjects so they don’t fall into the background, right? If not, don’t get too discouraged because this post ties very closely to light. In fact, it’s about how your camera perceives the light hitting its sensor.

If you know where the white balance setting is on your camera, fiddle with it until the picture looks good to you. There’s no right or wrong answer, but if you want to know how to get there quicker then read on…

In the good old film days, photographers had to buy special types of film and filters to correct for the variations in lighting conditions between indoor and outdoor light sources. These days its extremely easy to not do this with digital, and even easier to let the camera try to figure out what light is being used which inevitably leaves pictures with a yellowish or bluish tint.

The technical reasons behind this are beyond the scope of this blog, but for our purposes you just need to know that light has a color temperature measured in Kelvins. A lower temperature makes light look more red, and a higher temperature makes light look blue.

In digital cameras, even entry level, there’s a function called White Balance that tells the camera how to shift the hue of the color to make whites look white…regardless of color temperature.

The process of “white balancing” is so simple that it confuses those who think it’s supposed to be complicated. I usually mess with the White Balance settings until I think it looks good. It can be changed so the picture will look just like how we perceive the scene, or it can be changed deliberately for a creative effect.

The Kelvin temperature of light works backwards from what we would normally think it would. It refers to how hot something would have to be heated in order for it to glow at that color. Imagine your cars engine. If it really heated up, parts of it would start to glow red. If it reached 3,200 Kelvin, it would have the same color as an incandescent lightbulb, and then explode. But as the color temperature gets hotter, things look bluer, like light under the shade of a tree or light coming through your window.

Now for the samples. Please note that very little effort went into creative composition or lighting, but rather these are for color temperature demonstration purposes only. I made the little color chart as a simple reference to show how the hue affects all colors, not just white.

Incandescent lights (normal lightbulb) have a very cool Kelvin temperature roughly around the 2,200-3,500 area depending on wattage. The 60 watt bulbs in my apartments hallway are on the cool side of things. The manual setting of 2,500 K looks about right, not even the Auto White Balance can calibrate that low which is why it looks slightly more red. This is also why most of the pictures have a red tint to them; the lightbulbs are at the very bottom of the Kelvin scale.

Fluorescent lights are difficult at best. Unless you have professional studio lights, they don’t contain the full spectrum of color and because they cycle 120 times per second, any fast exposure will get a different color each time. This is also why rooms lit with fluorescents are unsettling to some; the color of the light is changing hundreds of times per second. Longer exposures won’t be effected by this since the exposure will combine all the colors into white. Auto White Balance beat out the Fluorescent setting and was the closest of the bunch, but this might have been a result of the colors that the light was emitting at the time of exposure.

Ah yes, whats another post without the guitar? Unsurprisingly, the Flash setting had the best white balance when using a flash. However this isn’t always the case. Since the extraneous light in the room was very little, the only light was from the flash. In a more realistic situation, there is often another source of light in the background, and usually of a different color temperature. The Hollywood trick is to use a light gel (filter for the flash). Depending on the ambient light, you attach a gel that effectively converts the color of the flash to the color of the ambient light and then set your white balance for the new color, not the flash. You can also see that the temperature of a typical flash is in the middle Kelvin range (5,500-6,500) because there are bluer shots on the left, and redder shots on the right.

This really shows how warm the color of shaded light is. The Auto White Balance wasn’t even close this time since it tends to want to stay in the middle Kelvin range. 7,700 Kelvin looks pretty decent but even the maximum of my camera at 9,900 Kelvin looks good. The preset white balances all settled on a conservative value for this shot where the only light was from a window behind me. This really shows that it can help to set the white balance manually.

Sunlight constantly changes its color temperature throughout the day. At sunrise it’s in the 2,000 K range and then warms up to 6,000 K around noon. As the sun sets it gets even warmer into the 8,000 range. The Auto White Balance setting looks a little too blue for my taste, and even the Direct Sunlight setting. Since this picture was taken later in the day, the color temperature matched more closely with the Cloudy setting at a higher Kelvin temperature.

After all that you could have stopped at the second paragraph. Just do what looks good to you!

That is all.

Light

Lighting. Probably the single most important aspect of your photo and why it’s my first post on the subject. Without good lighting, it won’t matter how awesome the composition is, the framing, the timing, or even the subject. It won’t matter how much you spend on your camera, lenses or even how good you are at photoshop, bad lighting ruins photos and is impossible to fix in post.

But if the lighting is good, then there’s a much better chance that the photo will ‘pop,’ especially if the above components are considered.

There are basically two types of lighting. There is artificial light and natural light.

Artificial light is used primarily indoors and in studios where there is little or no natural light to work with. This can come as overhead lights, lamps, or flashes. Depending on the location and what you have to work with, you should have at least one of these options or any combination. Generally speaking, you will have a decent amount of control over artificial light.

Natural light on the other hand is something that you won’t be able to control as easily. If you’re outdoors, then you’ll be at the mercy of natures regular schedule. But this isn’t a completely horrible thing. Since the rise and setting of the sun has been widely regarded as a regular phenomenon, it is reasonably easy to determine the best time to take outdoor photos.

This time is what is known as the “Magic Hour.” While in reality its much less than an hour, but more like 20 minutes after sunrise and 20 minutes before sunset (barring some weather conditions) is when the best natural lighting takes place.

Here are a couple examples of natural lighting that show the difference that even a few minutes can make.

Grand Canyon before sunrise. Nikon 18-200mm lens @ 18mm, no filter, f/3.5 at 1/25 sec., ISO 1000, No Flash, Program Mode

 

Grand Canyon after sunrise. Nikon 24mm lens @ 36mm (1.5x crop in DX), no filter, f/2.8 at 1/1250 sec., ISO 200, No Flash, Manual Mode

 

These images are straight from the camera, slightly cropped on the second, and reformatted for the web.

The first photo is pretty horrible. There is no color and very little contrast because the lighting isn’t there. After the sun rose, I recomposed the same rocks and snapped the second photo. It’s a little better simply because of the lighting, and because of the lighting, the colors and contrast.

With a little thought and foresight, pick your location before the lighting gets good and wait for nature to do its thing.

Now indoor lighting can be a little tricky. There are usually multiple sources of light (lamps, overhead lights, windows) that can play havoc on your photos. Each of these sources usually has a different color temperature than another, but that is for another post.

Taking photos indoors pretty easy, turn the camera on, press the button and after a few strobing flashes of light, you might get a photo worth deleting. On most cameras regardless of make, there is either a dial on the camera or a menu setting that can let you take control of your camera.Mine looks like this, but yours might be a variation on the same functions.

Most consumer cameras are defaulted to the green picture (Fully Automatic) and unless you tell it otherwise, the camera will make all the exposure decisions itself, usually leading to undesirable results.

Take a chance and try some of the other settings out, but I’d recommend staying away from the cute pictures on the dial of the mountains, running people or flowers and try to stick to the P, S, A, M settings.

Program is handy for rapidly changing conditions (dynamic shutter/aperture), Shutter lets you select a shutter speed that won’t change regardless of conditions, Aperture lets you have control of the cameras iris and DOF (Depth of Field), and Manual lets you have full control over everything.

Bass Guitar and Amplifier. Nikon 50mm lens @ 75mm (1.5x crop in DX), no filter, f/8 at 1/60 sec., ISO 1600, Auto Flash, Fully Automatic Mode

With the camera set on Lazy mode, er…Fully Automatic Mode, the camera set everything by itself from stoping down the lens to f/8 so it could get more stuff in focus to boosting the ISO to 1600. What resulted is the typical indoor shot; flash shadows, unnatural colors and a flat image. Lets see what happens when the dial on the camera is turned to the Program mode.

Bass Guitar and Amplifier. Nikon 50mm lens @75mm (1.5x crop in DX), no filter, f/2.2 at 1/20 sec., ISO 1600, No Flash, Program Mode

Now we’re starting to get somewhere. The colors are more natural because the only lighting used was from the window and overhead incandescent bulb. Program mode also chose not to use the flash, but instead it opened up the cameras aperture to let more light in but also kept the ISO at 1600 (it was a relatively dim room). While the shutter speed was a sluggish 1/20 sec., the overall picture is more pleasant to look at and the wider aperture gives it an almost 3-dimensional look; the guitar is in sharp focus and the bass amp is fuzzy in the background. We can take this a step further though.

Bass Guitar and Amplifier. Nikon 50mm lens @ 75mm (1.5x crop in DX), no filter, f/1.8 at 1/80 sec., ISO 800, Fill Flash, Manual Mode

Now we’ve used the natural lighting of the room, but also added a fill flash to emphasize the guitar in the foreground. In full manual mode, I chose f/1.8 to let in the maximum amount of light and create a shallow DOF. This let me reduce the ISO to 800 to create a cleaner image (high ISO’s can create a grainy or ‘dirty’ image). The shutter speed can then be increased to keep the picture free from motion-blur. We now have an image that has greater tonal contrast and perfect color reproduction.

Its all about the light. No matter how scenic you may think something is, if its shot in crappy light, it will be a crappy photo. Shoot something really crappy in great light and it’ll look great. Its just that easy.

That is all.