Idea books

Next week starts my next group of flash photography students and one of the things that I tell all my students is that they need to create an idea book.  In a nutshell, an idea book is a collection of your own images that you have put together along with information on how you photographed them. It is one of the best long term learning aides that I have ever discovered.

The concept of the idea book is to create a collection of your own images that you can use to spark your creativity and as a source of images that you can build and improve upon.  So how does this idea book work?

Building and idea book.

1. Find yourself an album that can hold 4x6 prints.  The large the album, the better.
2. Get a bunch of 4x6 index cards

When you take an image that you like, make a 4x6 print of it and put it in the album.  Write down every detail of how you photographed the image; lighting, exposure, location, time of day etc.  Even if the image isn't perfect, but you like the concept, put it in the book. As you get more and more images in the book, you will be building a source of ideas that can trigger your memory.  It will also help you become a better photographer because you can go back to an image you like and work on it and make it better.

Its awesome.  Many photographers on the lecture circuit sell there idea books.  If you want, you can pick one or two of these up as starting points, but ultimately you need to be the one taking the images or you will never understand how they were created.

Summer Light

Vancnouver is being hit with a late summer this year.  It never really warmed up over the summer months and we never really saw much blue sky.  Now that has changed and it is awesome.

During the main summer months the light is direcectly over head. And when it is clear sky's you get a lighting that wedding photographers love to hate - harsh, strong, and unflattering.  But, cloudy summers change all that.  Why? The suns harsh light is diffused by this giant soft box called cloud cover.  The light is soft and beautiful.  As photographers, all we have to do is give it some direction.

Sunny weather this time of the year also makes for great light because the light is no longer directly over head.  Now the light is coming at an angle pretty much all day.  Awesome!  Now I have directional, punchy light - outdoors. I'm looking out the window right now and seeing the sun is starting to go down. Absolutely beautiful.  Want some real fun - try shooting after the sun goes down and use the penumbra as your light source.  Light direction is from the west but the sky acts as a giant reflector now, giving you a soft but none the less punchy light.  You gotta love it.  Don't forget to do a custom white balance though.

Compositional Balance

This image was taken Sunday morning in downtown Vancouver.  I was a beautiful sunny morning, well before the crowds had started to come out.  Compositionally, I wanted to balance the green of the young mans shirt with the green of the sign in the background.  The sign was not in direct sunlight, bit was none the less significantly brighter than the subject.  Had I taken the shot with the existing light, the sigh would have been burnt out and the value of the color would of been lost. Instead, I chose to slightly underexpose my background by dialing up my shutter speed..  I lite the subject with a Canon 580 EX speedlight in a 32" umbrella.  A white reflector was used to fill in the shadow side.  The image that came out of the camera is what you see here.



Camera Clubs

Looking for a fun way to improve your photography.  Check out your local camera club.  I recently joined the North Shore Photographic Society here in North Vancouver and am enjoying my experience very much.

One of the challenges to improving your photography is knowing if what you are doing is working.  Asking friends and family their opinion on you images is a start but very often they won't tell you the whole truth.  They are your friends after all, and they don't want to hurt your feelings.  It is also likely that they are not artists or photographers, so they are unsure what to tell you.

A camera club is a group of like minded people who want to practice and share their photography.  As such, they are a great source of subjective feedback - especially the folks who have been there for a while. Clubs will have monthly slide and print critiques, making feedback is a huge component of what they do.

Another fun aspect of a camera club is that they arrange field trips and guest speakers to come in and share their knowledge or special technique.  So, you get a chance to photograph things that you may not otherwise get a chance to photograph and hear about different ideas, all on a regular basis.

Camera clubs can not replace professional photography organizations, and I will always recommend that you belong to them.  Nor will they replace professional print competitions. But I do recommend them non the less.

Photolen

Portraits in Bright Sunlight

Well my Commercial Portrait Photography course at Focal Point is well under way. The one problem I have though is that the course runs in the evenings, making it difficult to demonstrate many of the techniques I want to show the students. Solution - field trip.

This past Sunday we went out during the day to make some portraits.  It was a bright sunny day with harsh lighting.  Perfect, at least for what I wanted to show them.  Most times we do not have a choice as to the time of the day we have to shoot or the lighting conditions that we work in.  A large part of the course is about learning to manage and control all types of light to get the image we want. Bright sunny days are one of the most difficult situations to work with requiring an implicit understanding of your gear as well as the nature of light.

The first situation we set up was in the middle of a field.  The sun is harsh and direct.  For folks like me who are "follicular-ly challenged", one of the most important pieces of gear to have is a hat.  I had misplaced mine and was starting to feel the sun on my scalp within minutes of being there. Today is Tuesday, I still feel the sun.

When creating a portrait, this type of lighting is considered to be the worst. Sunburn aside, the lighting on the face is harsh and unflattering, but, we were able to work through two techniques that got us reasonable portrait images.

For both techniques, the first thing we did was place the subject between the camera and the sun. This did three things

1. It got the harsh light off the subjects face and created separation by back lighting the subject.
2. It created very flat lighting on the subjects face
3. Created lens flare in our camera

Perfect, now we just need to light the subjects face so we get a nice wrap around lighting.

Our first technique was to use a combination of scrims, reflectors, and gobo's. First we set up a white reflector to use a key light on our subject.  The reflector was large enough to create a soft light source giving us the gentle shadow edge transfer that we like.  The shadow side of the face was still very light so do darken it down we used a black gobo.  We had the look we wanted on the face but the back light from the sun was burning out the hair and shoulders.  A white scrim between the sun and the subject solved this problem.

Our second technique was to use a flash.  The downside to using a flash in this situation is that you need one powerful enough to overpower the sun.  The advantage is that you can control the exposure of your background relative to your subject by changing the shutter.  In terms of flash placement, it needs to be off camera in order to get that wrap around look. In bright sunlight, shutter speeds will be high, so will need to place your flash on high speed sync.  David Ziser on his blog, Digital Pro Talk, has some fantastic examples and explanations for this technique that you can check out here.

Open shade is often a more desirable place to take portraits and will be the topic of my next blog.

Focal Point Course Begins

Last thursday was the opening night for my Focal Point class. We have a great bunch of talented photographers in the class so it's going to be a great one for everybody involved.

The first night is always about finding out where eveyone is at (photographically speaking) and finding a common point to jump in at.  I always try insure that everyone gets the most out of every class, so doing this review gets everyone to the same place and helps to refine the materials for each class.  If you are interested in joining my Focal Point class, I could still fit you in. Log on to http://www.focalpoint.bc.ca/ for all the info.  Next week we are going to start exploring light. It's a real eye opener.

Don't forget that I am also running a flash workshop on May 7th in the Ann MacDonald Hall at the North Vancouver Presentation House.  Contact me directly at 604-307-4566 to sign up for this program.  It will be a great opportunity to learn pro techniques with hand held flashes.

5 tips to improve on camera flash

Coming up on May 7th, I will be giving a workshop on flash photography.  Here is a primer for the workshop.

5 tips to improve on camera flash

1. Avoid pointing the flash directly at your subject. This creates a very harsh, unattractive light. Try using a diffuser like the ones made by Gary Fong. 
2. Bouncing the flash off the ceiling is an effective way of improving the light quality.  The idea behind this is that ceiling are usually white so there won't be any colour shift issues and it will increase the size of the light significantly, giving it a softer look.  The problem here is that the light is top down and will create unflattering shadows in the eyes. Putting a white card on the flash to reflect some of the light into the eyes will help.
3. To get a wrap around feel to the light, try bouncing it of the wall.  This will give it a wrap around look and be very soft.  Downside here is that the light will take on the colour of the wall. Make sure to do a custom white balance - but you should be doing this for every lighting situation.
4. If the wall or the ceiling are just too far away to bounce from, use some sort of reflector.  If you have a reflector in your kit, awesome.  If you don't, try bouncing off a person wearing a white shirt or find a towel, table cloth, sheet, or anything that will reflect a neutral light colour.
5. Flash exposure, within the limits of the camera sync speed, are not affected by shutter speed. Adjust the shutter speed, leaving the aperture set for flash exposure, to balance the ambient light with the flash to gain a more balanced looking image.

These tips and many more will be discussed and practices at length at the flash workshop on May 7th.  To reserve you spot at the workshop, please call Len at 604-307-4566. See you there.