This is a simple tip on how you can achieve a better (and more accurate) colors with your images. Mind you, this is for when you are shooting with a speedlight (whether on or off camera) like the Nikon SB-900 or Canon 580EX II or even with studio strobes.
Let's take this down to the most basic situation where you will be using a flash to help convey my message.
So you are shooting a wedding in a normal sized room that is light with incandescent bulbs. These bulbs are giving off a warm, amber color. If we were shooting without a flash then our in-camera white balance should be set to incandescent or a custom Kelvin temp of something like 3200K or something within that range. That is all fine and dandy so shoot away.
But what happens if the room is dimly lit and you need a flash to help light things up? Flashes are daylight balanced around 5400K so what will happen is that the light from the flash will conflict with the ambient light from the incandescent bulbs and you will get various color casts on your subjects or background. Welcome to Photoshop hell at that point!
All we need to do is gel our flashes with the proper CTO filter so we can essentially modify the daylight balanced speedlight and mold it into becoming about the same Kelvin temperature of the ambient light that is around. In the situation above, an amber filter over the speedlight would bring that 5400K speedlight down to the 3200K range. DON'T FORGET TO SET YOUR WHITE BALANCE TO INCANDESCENT AND NOT FLASH!
If your white balance is still off then that is okay because you are at least in the same realm of light without worries of any serious color cast that would be noticeable. This is a very easy fix if you shoot in RAW.
Nikon's SB-900 comes with a couple gels to correct for different lighting conditions. These gels even have some intelligence to them and allows the flash to know which one is mounted. If you are shooting in Auto white balance mode then the flash can tell the camera what filter is over the flash so the camera can take the necessary actions for providing you with a fairly accurate image and color rendition. They even include a real spiffy gel filter holder that snaps on to the flash.
So what is the lesson we learned today boys and girls???
Thanks for stopping by,
Mike
7.31.2009
7.28.2009
Nikon 105mm VR Lens Review
The Nikon 105mm VR macro lens is a relatively new addition to my camera bag. It is a very sharp specialty lens that really deserves to be recognized. The 105mm is a macro lens and the way to use it is really different from how we work with conventional lenses. I have to admit, when I put this lens on I thought it was broken. See, I put the lens on and tried stopping down to f/2.8 but couldn't. Instead, I had a very odd aperture that it was stuck at. I put two and two together and started working the manual focus ring and then figured it out and that it is just how the lens works. Being a macro lens, it is used because it provides you with a close focusing distance as well as the ability to produce 1:1, 1:2 (and so on) reproductions of your subject. This is great for flower photography, insects and stuff of that nature because you can do your cropping in camera and have the subject take up the entire frame if you so choose.
This lens can also be used as a portrait lens since it is very sharp and it is at a focal length that is flattering to your subject without any real lens distortion occurring.
There are two cons to this lens that pose a problem. The first is sort of the nature of the beast and deals with a shallow DOF (depth of field) even at higher apertures. I noticed it when I first got the lens. I started off at like f/5.6 or f/8 with flowers but noticed that the foreground leaves were still out of focus. Sure the part of the flower I focused on was 100% sharp but the DOF fell off way too soon IMHO. To combat this and get the photo that I wanted (i.e. ALL petals in focus) I had to set the aperture to f/11 or f/16... That is great and all but you need a boat load of light at times in order to get these shots. I worked my way around that by using my speedlight to compensate for the loss of light. f/11 is totally doable with a speedlight if it is very, very close to your subject. This is also where the VR (vibration reduction) comes in handy to achieve sharp images even at slower shutter speeds.
The second issue I had with the lens is that it is slow to auto focus. This lens works best when you set your focusing distance and physically move yourself and the camera back and forward until you achieve the sharpest focus. I noticed that this was a pain with a tripod!
Now imagine the trouble I had to go through to get this photo:
These bats were all huddled up and hanging on the wood rafter in a historical building in the Smokey Mountains. There was no light whatsoever. I had to have my associate hold up my iPhone to give me something, anything to illuminate these little critters. That gave my camera enough light to detect the contrast necessary to acquire focus. I had my SB-900 speedlight mounted on my camera and it was pointed directly behind me so it would hit the wall behind me and lit up the little guys... I got a couple good snaps off before I looked down and checked out that bat guano that I was stepping in. Anything for the shot right?
So back to the review. The 105mm VR is a very nice (and ridiculously sharp) lens. Remember that photo above? Well here is a 100% crop of the little bat off to the bottom right of the frame.
Yeah THAT'S sharp!
Is is necessary for 99% of the work people do? No... Well unless you photograph flowers and bugs for a living then consider yourself in the 1% range. I personally do not use this lens for portraits often. I bring it out for weddings and baby portraits to capture details. Wedding ring shots work great with the 105mm and I can get those little baby details with this lens as well. Little ears, hands and feet. The other times this lens comes out is when I do the flowers and bug photography.
It is a great lens and I would definitely recommend it.
Mike
This lens can also be used as a portrait lens since it is very sharp and it is at a focal length that is flattering to your subject without any real lens distortion occurring.
There are two cons to this lens that pose a problem. The first is sort of the nature of the beast and deals with a shallow DOF (depth of field) even at higher apertures. I noticed it when I first got the lens. I started off at like f/5.6 or f/8 with flowers but noticed that the foreground leaves were still out of focus. Sure the part of the flower I focused on was 100% sharp but the DOF fell off way too soon IMHO. To combat this and get the photo that I wanted (i.e. ALL petals in focus) I had to set the aperture to f/11 or f/16... That is great and all but you need a boat load of light at times in order to get these shots. I worked my way around that by using my speedlight to compensate for the loss of light. f/11 is totally doable with a speedlight if it is very, very close to your subject. This is also where the VR (vibration reduction) comes in handy to achieve sharp images even at slower shutter speeds.
The second issue I had with the lens is that it is slow to auto focus. This lens works best when you set your focusing distance and physically move yourself and the camera back and forward until you achieve the sharpest focus. I noticed that this was a pain with a tripod!
Now imagine the trouble I had to go through to get this photo:
These bats were all huddled up and hanging on the wood rafter in a historical building in the Smokey Mountains. There was no light whatsoever. I had to have my associate hold up my iPhone to give me something, anything to illuminate these little critters. That gave my camera enough light to detect the contrast necessary to acquire focus. I had my SB-900 speedlight mounted on my camera and it was pointed directly behind me so it would hit the wall behind me and lit up the little guys... I got a couple good snaps off before I looked down and checked out that bat guano that I was stepping in. Anything for the shot right?
So back to the review. The 105mm VR is a very nice (and ridiculously sharp) lens. Remember that photo above? Well here is a 100% crop of the little bat off to the bottom right of the frame.
Yeah THAT'S sharp!
Is is necessary for 99% of the work people do? No... Well unless you photograph flowers and bugs for a living then consider yourself in the 1% range. I personally do not use this lens for portraits often. I bring it out for weddings and baby portraits to capture details. Wedding ring shots work great with the 105mm and I can get those little baby details with this lens as well. Little ears, hands and feet. The other times this lens comes out is when I do the flowers and bug photography.
It is a great lens and I would definitely recommend it.
Mike
7.23.2009
Five Things I Wish I Knew... My Top Revelations
I was introduced to photography in High School, around 1997. Immediately fell in love with it. I rolled my own film, worked in the darkroom and did all that fun stuff. I made the switch to digital around late 2001 and that really appealed to me as well. I was majoring in computer science so digital made the inner-geek in me absolutely ecstatic. I have learned A LOT through these 12 or so years of being a photographer. There are so many things that, for lack of a better word, were revelations. I mean these things could have made my photos so much better, cut my workflow in half or even could have just made things so much easier. Want me to share my top 5 with you?
Haha I thought you would never ask...
1.) Your Light Meter Measures Everything as 18% Gray: I was fooled for the longest time on this one. I have no idea why I never read it anywhere or figured it out on my own. This was a huge "A-Ha" moment for me. Handheld and in-camera camera light meters are made to read 18% gray at the center. I always thought that the center line in the camera's viewfinder was the perfect exposure but that isn't the case. The result was me always tweaking my photos plus or minus a stop or so. If I photographed something that was bright then my photos would be under exposed and vice versa for dark scenes. So I figured out that 18% gray is meant to be the middle ground and it is up to the photographer to take that data and make good use of it. So a bride in a white dress along a white wall needs MORE light to turn that middle gray into about +1 eV on the light meter. If you have a groom in a black tux along a black wall then you need to let LESS light in so that light meter better be about -1 eV.
Digital is a beautiful thing so you can enable highlight warnings in camera and see if you are overexposing any part of the scene. If you see those "blinkies" all over your subject then that should tell you to calm your exposure down a bit...
2.) Lenses Matter: I didn't invest into good glass until about 2006. I was using kit lenses which were often very slow and had variable apertures. Slow lenses are ones that are in the f/4-5.6 f-stop range and variable aperture lenses are cheaper zoom lenses and the f-stop changes when you zoom in and out. For example, if you have an 18-200mm lens then you may be at f/4 at 18mm but when you zoom up to 200mm then you will see your minimum aperture change as well up to f/5.6... I was a Nikon shooter from 2001 to 2006. I wasn't happy with what I had and made the switch to Canon for a year. I HATED the quality control issues Canon had and made the switch back to Nikon a year or so ago. Now I am super happy with my camera equipment... What changed since going from Nikon to Canon and back? My lenses. I didn't have expensive glass the first time but did when I moved to Canon. After selling that stuff off, I bought expensive glass from Nikon and boy what a difference! My photos were sharper, my color accuracy was better out of camera and the faster lenses (some with VR or "vibration reduction" / IS or "image stabilization" for Canon shooters) made it so I could take pictures relatively anywhere. Before I had the faster lenses, it seemed like I was always somewhere that didn't have enough light to shoot at shutter speeds faster than 1/60". Anything in that range or slower means camera shake or motion blur. Not always ideal for photos! Once I got lenses in the f/1.2 to f/2.8 range then that all went out the door. Suddenly I had new shutter speeds available to me that were faster than 1/60" shutter speeds. Some fast prime lenses can get you in this ballpark with ease. A 50mm Nikon or Canon f/1.8 lens can be as cheap as $100. Check out Amazon.com for that kind of stuff because they have great deals on camera equipment. Won't break the bank and it will get you some real nice results. Makes a great birthday gift too ;)
3.) Make Backups and Backups of your Backups: I had a great time at Myrtle Beach in 2004. Took lots of killer pictures and great memories of my girlfriend (now my wife) and I. It was also a bittersweet time because my wife, Rebecca, found out that her Great Grandmother was diagnosed with cancer. I managed to get some real nice pictures of her and her great grandmother before she got real sick. Sure enough, I made only one copy of the above mentioned photos and had them on an external hard drive. Formatted my cards and went about my business shooting everything else. Well, a month later, guess what decided to become a fireball and blow up on me? THAT hard drive. Bye bye photos, bye bye memories. What did I learn? Make backups of your backups!
4.) Shoot RAW: I know there are some JPEG blow hards out there where it is all JPEG or nothing. Good for you. If you don't want to sit behind a computer after a shoot then no problem. That is about the only reason I would ever even consider shooting exclusively JPEG in this day and age. Memory cards are cheap (I remember paying $200+ for a 512mb card in 2002!), RAW converters are cheap and fast and they do the job. Even my snap shots are done in RAW. WHY? I love the flexibility and love the fact that I can apply the necessary white balance, contrast, saturation and sharpness after the shoot depending on my needs. If I shot JPEG then I would be limited to what my settings were at time of capture. Last time I checked, Photoshop has a hard time of getting a correct white balance after the fact and sharpening can always be added but rarely removed! RAW also has more flexibility. In the heat of the moment, maybe you took a beautiful picture but your settings may have been off. If you shoot in RAW and your goof ups are suddenly not throw outs. I have pulled a couple stops back from a file and made it a keeper. If I shot JPEG then it would have been off to the trash can.
5.) It's Called Workflow not "work-slow": I remember editing a wedding in 2006 using Adobe Camera Raw. I was editing every photo one by one. I knew nothing about "batch processing" That wedding took me a week and now I can get one fully edited, make a blog post about it AND push it to Pictage within 2 hours tops. RAW converters like Adobe Lightroom are great tools and should be used to their fullest. Use Lightroom Presets, Photoshop Actions and Batch Processing and watch your calendar free up in no time.
There you have it, my top 5 revelations that I know I would have liked to have learned when I started off. Hopefully these can come in handy for you and you can be off to an even better start then when I did.
Thanks for reading!
Haha I thought you would never ask...
1.) Your Light Meter Measures Everything as 18% Gray: I was fooled for the longest time on this one. I have no idea why I never read it anywhere or figured it out on my own. This was a huge "A-Ha" moment for me. Handheld and in-camera camera light meters are made to read 18% gray at the center. I always thought that the center line in the camera's viewfinder was the perfect exposure but that isn't the case. The result was me always tweaking my photos plus or minus a stop or so. If I photographed something that was bright then my photos would be under exposed and vice versa for dark scenes. So I figured out that 18% gray is meant to be the middle ground and it is up to the photographer to take that data and make good use of it. So a bride in a white dress along a white wall needs MORE light to turn that middle gray into about +1 eV on the light meter. If you have a groom in a black tux along a black wall then you need to let LESS light in so that light meter better be about -1 eV.
Digital is a beautiful thing so you can enable highlight warnings in camera and see if you are overexposing any part of the scene. If you see those "blinkies" all over your subject then that should tell you to calm your exposure down a bit...
2.) Lenses Matter: I didn't invest into good glass until about 2006. I was using kit lenses which were often very slow and had variable apertures. Slow lenses are ones that are in the f/4-5.6 f-stop range and variable aperture lenses are cheaper zoom lenses and the f-stop changes when you zoom in and out. For example, if you have an 18-200mm lens then you may be at f/4 at 18mm but when you zoom up to 200mm then you will see your minimum aperture change as well up to f/5.6... I was a Nikon shooter from 2001 to 2006. I wasn't happy with what I had and made the switch to Canon for a year. I HATED the quality control issues Canon had and made the switch back to Nikon a year or so ago. Now I am super happy with my camera equipment... What changed since going from Nikon to Canon and back? My lenses. I didn't have expensive glass the first time but did when I moved to Canon. After selling that stuff off, I bought expensive glass from Nikon and boy what a difference! My photos were sharper, my color accuracy was better out of camera and the faster lenses (some with VR or "vibration reduction" / IS or "image stabilization" for Canon shooters) made it so I could take pictures relatively anywhere. Before I had the faster lenses, it seemed like I was always somewhere that didn't have enough light to shoot at shutter speeds faster than 1/60". Anything in that range or slower means camera shake or motion blur. Not always ideal for photos! Once I got lenses in the f/1.2 to f/2.8 range then that all went out the door. Suddenly I had new shutter speeds available to me that were faster than 1/60" shutter speeds. Some fast prime lenses can get you in this ballpark with ease. A 50mm Nikon or Canon f/1.8 lens can be as cheap as $100. Check out Amazon.com for that kind of stuff because they have great deals on camera equipment. Won't break the bank and it will get you some real nice results. Makes a great birthday gift too ;)
3.) Make Backups and Backups of your Backups: I had a great time at Myrtle Beach in 2004. Took lots of killer pictures and great memories of my girlfriend (now my wife) and I. It was also a bittersweet time because my wife, Rebecca, found out that her Great Grandmother was diagnosed with cancer. I managed to get some real nice pictures of her and her great grandmother before she got real sick. Sure enough, I made only one copy of the above mentioned photos and had them on an external hard drive. Formatted my cards and went about my business shooting everything else. Well, a month later, guess what decided to become a fireball and blow up on me? THAT hard drive. Bye bye photos, bye bye memories. What did I learn? Make backups of your backups!
4.) Shoot RAW: I know there are some JPEG blow hards out there where it is all JPEG or nothing. Good for you. If you don't want to sit behind a computer after a shoot then no problem. That is about the only reason I would ever even consider shooting exclusively JPEG in this day and age. Memory cards are cheap (I remember paying $200+ for a 512mb card in 2002!), RAW converters are cheap and fast and they do the job. Even my snap shots are done in RAW. WHY? I love the flexibility and love the fact that I can apply the necessary white balance, contrast, saturation and sharpness after the shoot depending on my needs. If I shot JPEG then I would be limited to what my settings were at time of capture. Last time I checked, Photoshop has a hard time of getting a correct white balance after the fact and sharpening can always be added but rarely removed! RAW also has more flexibility. In the heat of the moment, maybe you took a beautiful picture but your settings may have been off. If you shoot in RAW and your goof ups are suddenly not throw outs. I have pulled a couple stops back from a file and made it a keeper. If I shot JPEG then it would have been off to the trash can.
5.) It's Called Workflow not "work-slow": I remember editing a wedding in 2006 using Adobe Camera Raw. I was editing every photo one by one. I knew nothing about "batch processing" That wedding took me a week and now I can get one fully edited, make a blog post about it AND push it to Pictage within 2 hours tops. RAW converters like Adobe Lightroom are great tools and should be used to their fullest. Use Lightroom Presets, Photoshop Actions and Batch Processing and watch your calendar free up in no time.
There you have it, my top 5 revelations that I know I would have liked to have learned when I started off. Hopefully these can come in handy for you and you can be off to an even better start then when I did.
Thanks for reading!
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