Tutorials
Tips on filling the frame
Fri Dec 18th - 10:25pm
Getting back to the original purpose of this site, which was to offer my humble advice and tips on ways to improve your news photography, I wanted to share an experience from today's shoot featuring two people from local businesses who pay for all the presents at a community Christmas party for around 50 kids.
Obviously I want to produce good results at every job, but it was especially important to come up with the goods from this shoot because I had personally asked the Press & Journal to cover the story. In all honestly it's probably a bit of a small story for the P&J but I thought it was important that these businesses get some acknowledgement for their support of this party, which they fund every year without making any effort to get publicity out of it.
I arranged to do the shoot at the village hall where the party will be held, because there's a Christmas tree there, which could make a good background. And the party organiser agreed to come along with all the wrapped presents. But even though I knew about the shoot a couple of days in advance, and I had a 2-hour drive to get there, it wasn't until I was pulling in to the car park that I finally had a set-up idea that I thought might work. This was the result:
There are three lights doing the work in that shot: Canon 580EX behind the people as a rim light, and two Bowens 1000DX studio lights at the front, one on each side.
Pretty good shot, I'd say, but I wanted to produce at least two different set-ups. After a bit of experimentation I came up with another composition that I thought might work. Here's a test shot:
Not very good, eh?
So here's the tip for today. It's an obvious one, but it's easy to forget when you're in the middle of a shoot and you've got half a dozen other things to concentrate on, so I think it's worth mentioning.
By shooting from above and wide angle, which I didn't want to change, I had left a huge gap in the bottom-right of the frame. Now as soon as you see a gap like that on your camera's review screen, the inclination is to re-think the set-up. And that's what my instinct told me to do on this occasion. But I was starting to feel a bit embarrassed about how much I was struggling to produce a good shot, and thankfully the idea popped in to my head that if I gave the lady one of the presents to hold, that would (1) fill that empty corner of the frame, and (2) help to emphasise the number of presents paid for by the donations.
With presents hastily pushed in to the hands of both people, and a few more presents stacked on the pile at the back to build it up a bit, I immediately liked the way the composition was looking. I kept fine-tuning a bit, adjusting the way the lady was holding the presents, and soon produced a shot that looked well-structured but not too posed or over-worked.
The point? Like I said, it's obvious, but it's important to remember. You'll often find compositions that are 75% good, but have one corner of the frame looking a bit empty. When that happens, before you re-think the whole composition, see if there's anything you can use to fill that quarter frame. You might even find that you improve the picture's relevance by having it tell the story better.
Here are a few more examples…
Using a combination of off-angle shooting, perspective compression and frame-filling to make an awards photo more eye-catching than usual:
Using a human to fill an empty corner! If you're photographing one person, but there's a relative or friend nearby who is connected to the story, then grab some frames with them too, like this shot of a young cart racer with his father:
It's easy to fill three corners of the frame with the people you're photographing, which conveniently leaves one corner to be filled with any books, certificates, trophies, sports equipment, drawings, etc, that are relevant to the story. These two girls had their poetry published in a compilation book:
You can also make the 'prop' corner of the frame more prominent to create a more dramatic and eye-catching image, that will naturallly make the viewer stop flicking through the paper and start reading the story. (I see that as the job of an editorial photographer — not just to illustrate the story, but to help sell the reporter's words by making the story look as interesting as possible.) These children had reached the semi-finals of a spelling competition, so we used a dictionary, opened at the word 'surveillance', which one of the boys had said was the hardest word he had been asked to spell in the competition:
Ruthven Barracks and Kingussie panorama
Sun Dec 13th - 11:53am
Yesterday I produced a 60-megapixel panorama showing Ruthven Barracks, Kingussie and the surrounding landscape. Click this small version to see a 2,000-pixel wide version, although that's nothing compared to the full-size version which is over 17,000 pixels wide and prints 60 inches long at 300-dpi.
Tip: When shooting a landscape that has lots of sunshine and lots of shade, set your white balance to shade. That way the shaded areas will appear natural and the sunshine areas will take on a nice warm glow. If you set your white balance to sunshine then the sunshine areas will look okay but the shaded areas will appear blue and the picture will look too cold and unnatural.
Two lights, many options
Sun Oct 5th - 4:16pm
It has been a while since I've posted any lighting set-ups so let's fix that today with four recent examples. These pictures were all done on location with either one or two lights, using a variety of techniques to produce different effects.
1: Wraparound lighting with zoom
This portrait of a martial arts champion used a large, diffused light source in front of him to frame left, with a small, hard light source behind him to frame right. The camera was set to f/16 at ISO 200 with a 1-second exposure, which under-exposed the sports hall background by about two stops. As soon as I tripped the shutter, the flashes fired to produce a correct exposure of the subject, and then I zoomed the lens to blur the ambient.
As well as producing some eye-catching results, this technique has the advantage that you can easily adjust your shutter speed to produce different results. You don't need to adjust the lights at all.
2: Wraparound lighting with camera shake
This shot to promote a rave used a large, diffused light source to frame left with a small, hard light source to frame right. Again a long exposure was used but instead of zooming, the camera was moved around to create streaks of light. We did the shot on a stage, surrounded by black curtains, with the only ambient light provided by two banks of multi-coloured disco lights.
3: Wraparound lighting with key shifting
I'm not sure how the term "key shifting" came about but it seems to be catching on as the way to describe this technique. Basically you use flash to correctly expose your subjects, and a high shutter speed to darken the ambient light, producing a moody, surreal effect. This shot used a large, diffused light source immediately behind the camera position, with a small, hard light source behind the subjects to frame right. The ambient was under-exposed by approximately one stop.
The light at the back puts a highlight around the subjects (sometimes called trim or accenting) which creates a nice 3D effect and helps to separate them from whatever you're using as a background, especially if it's dark.
4: Using distance to produce a silhouette
If I was going to teach someone about lighting then one of the first techniques I'd want them to learn is how to produce a silhouette in a small room. The reason is that this technique is based on the inverse square law, which is just a fancy way of saying that lights become less effective if you place them further away from your subject. Get the hang of this technique and you'll understand how light has a depth of field, affected by distance in the same way that the aperture setting on your lens affects the camera's depth of focus.
This picture was done in a school classroom. The photograph of Auschwitz was stuck to a white wall and a small light source was placed in front of it, lower down so it wouldn't appear in the shot. The camera was set to 1/250s, f/11 at ISO 100 which allowed no ambient light to register in the exposure. The only light would be from the flash. The two subjects then stood slightly behind the flash.
Now you might expect the light from the flash to hit the white wall and bounce around the room, eventually lighting the subjects too. And that's exactly what does happen. But the effective silhouette is produced because of the contrasting distances involved. The light from the flash only had to travel about three feet to correctly expose the wall and the Auschwitz photo. And then, yes, it travelled around the room, bouncing back off the walls and ceiling and eventually lighting the two subjects. But because the light had to bounce around for maybe 30 feet, the subjects were dozens of stops under-exposed, which for our purposes is the same as them not having any light at all.
As always, if anything I've written here has helped you learn about lighting then please try to help others learn in future. Thanks! 
The only thing you can control is you
Thu Oct 2nd - 1:08am
Guaranteed: Most news shoots won't go as planned. Locations will change at the last minute, extra people will turn up and others won't arrive, outside shots will be driven inside by bad weather, elaborate 15-minute shots will become 60-second quickies, kids will cry, equipment will fail, etc, etc. If it's outside your direct control then you can't count on it, but you need to be ready to deal with it.
A lot of that "dealing with it" will only come with experience, but hopefully the example I'm going to give today will illustrate how a few simple tricks can help overcome some fairly major obstacles.
I was meant to be photographing a film-maker and a writer at a small independent studio. This should immediately put ideas in your head for how you might do the shot: You've got two people so you can have foreground and background interest. You'll have the studio setting with props like lights and cameras, to immediately convey the idea of film-making. This should be a fairly easy shot, so you can put all of your effort in to making it as dramatic and interesting as possible.
But… I arrived at the location to find the studio locked and the film-maker apologising that the writer couldn't make it. So we're stood there on an industrual estate, on a gloomy, overcast day, missing 50% of the subjects and 100% of the location. Not good. But somehow the picture needs to get done.
Almost always, when you're working in a location with ugly backgrounds, the first thing you're going to do is look up and look down. What is the sky like and what is the ground like? If you can get low enough or get high enough then the sky or the ground can be your background. You can light people from behind to cast shadows in front of them, which can make a wet tarmac road look amazing. You can under-expose the sky to create a perfectly smooth, dramatic backdrop. Pretty much the only limit is your own imagination. And if you hit that limit then just try random things and see what happens.
The next trick is focal length. Shoot wide or long. Wide can help to keep the subject dominant in the frame while making background objects and buildings appear small and far away. Shooting telephoto can help to blur an ugly background, or you can keep distractions out of the frame entirely. As a general rule, the more extreme the angle, whether it's wide or long, the more eye-catching the photo will be. I usually shoot at 17mm or 200mm. Work the extremes.
And of course, the most effective solution of all: Lighting. If you can light the subject then the shot gets easier. If you can light the background, and it's appropriate to do so, then the shot gets easier again. Remember that lighting the subject can usually let you turn the background black, which is effectively two levels of lighting that you can control using only one light.
Time to put my money where my mouth is and show you what I came up with from the film-maker shoot. The darker shots were all lit with a single flash. Note that in the first one there's a mess of trees and buildings in the background, but you don't really notice them because the wide angle takes your attention straight to the camera and then up the leading line to the subject's face. In the last photo, the 'safety' shot, the background was a mess of ugly buildings, car tyres and junk metal, but with a shallow depth of field and a careful telephoto shooting angle, the viewer would never know that any of that stuff was there.
One more quick example on the same theme. A couple of weeks ago I was meant to be getting a picture of a drama workshop where a group of kids were making props and costumes for an upcoming play. When I arrived they had nothing. So I had to find an interesting picture of a group of kids in a school hall with no props and about 30 seconds to do the shot so no time for interesting lighting.
That's pretty much my definition of a nightmare shot, especially the extreme time limitation. But by taking the photo from the top of an 8-foot ladder, using the floor as a background, and getting the kids and the drama teacher to "just do something with your hands", I got a shot that wasn't too bad.
The point of showing you that drama workshop picture is this: I think the film-maker pictures are very good but I don't consider the workshop picture to be good at all. However I do consider it to be the best that was possible with the time and location limit. I hate coming away from a job with a picture that I don't like and a feeling that I failed, but I came away from that workshop with a picture that I didn't like and a feeling that I had succeeded.
Feathering: It’s like off-camera lighting… but faster
Mon Sep 29th - 2:56am
I've mentioned before (here) about using light feathering to create an even coverage of light on subjects that aren't equidistant to the light source. The example I gave before used off-camera lighting, but for reasons of working speed I nearly always use on-camera flash nowadays.
One of the major problems with using on-camera flash for editorial work is that a lot of your pictures will have some people close to the camera and others further away. You can often do okay with just flashing the people at the front, but sometimes that's not good enough. This is when light feathering can help.
Consider these two pictures:
In the first picture, the boy at the front is about three feet from the camera. The woman at the back is about eight feet away. But everyone was lit equally by simply turning the flash to the right. By angling the flash like that, the girl and the woman got a good blast of light from the centre of the beam while the boy in the white top got some softer light and the boy at the front got the very edge of the beam which is softest of all. The end result is that they all got roughly the same amount of light. To prove the point, here's another unedited frame when the flash didn't fire:
For the picture of the two men with the plane, the flash was angled to the right and also upwards. The man at the back got the main blast of light while the man at the front got the soft edge of the light. The reason for angling the flash upwards was to avoid getting too much light on the white paintwork of the plane, which would have over-exposed it. Again, here's a frame without the flash:
It can take a few attempts to get the hang of light feathering in this way but then it's a technique that will help you countless times. News pictures require interesting compositions, and interesting compositions nearly always require layering of subjects. With feathering you can layer your subjects and still light them evenly so it's an essential technique to master.
Tip: Ambidextrous off-camera lighting
Sat Aug 2nd - 3:56pm
Cameras are designed for right-handed people. This is fine is you want to hold the camera with one hand while holding a light with the other hand, like this:
But it's a problem if you want to hold the flash to your right. This is essential to avoid your lighting becoming repetitive, and so you don't end up designing your compositions around where your flash will be held. There are a few ways to get that corded flash over to your right but I think this is the technique most of us use as it allows you to rest the camera on your shoulder for extra support:
There is another way to do it though. Believe it or not you can actually hold the camera in your left hand and operate it quite comfortably that way. When you look at this next picture you may well think it would take ages to get accustomed to it, but try it and you'll be surprised how natural it feels:
There are two ways you can hold the camera. You can see above that I was holding the lens with my thumb and index finger, and pressing the shutter button with my middle finger. This next picture shows how you can press the shutter button with your index finger while holding the grip with your thumb and other fingers:
However you do it, your thumb takes the weight of the camera and lens. Here's a close-up of the holding-the-lens technique:
And here's the holding-the-grip technique:
I got this idea from wildlife photographer Charlie Phillips. He holds the camera with his left hand for a different reason, but it occurred to me that it would be useful for giving me more control over my light positioning. I tried it, found it surprisingly easy, and now it's another technique to pull out the bag whenever necessary.
Tip: Saturation on a sunny day
Sun Jul 6th - 11:23pm
This is obvious when you think about it, but it's one of those things that nobody ever tells you. How do you get bright and saturated colours on a sunny day without people squinting at the sun?
Here's an example of the problem. The easy way to avoid having people squint is to shoot in to the sun. But unless you're using some creative lighting, that means cranking up the exposure and you end up with the sky blown out and everything else looking a bit pale, like this:
If you shoot with the sun behind you then the people in the photo will be squinting. But there's an easy solution: Shoot from a low angle. This gets you saturated colours, a properly exposed sky, and because the people are looking down at you they won't have the sun in their eyes. Like this:
Here's another example. This was the first photo I used this technique for. It was an unusual choice to do a photo of badminton players outside but time constraints made it the sensible option, and the weather was so nice that it would have been a shame to have the sky blown out. At first I set the group up with the sun behind them, and I was going to under-expose the ambient and light them with flash. But then the penny dropped and I thought of shooting with the sun behind me, but from a low angle. They still squinted a bit because I didn't go low enough, but I learned how this technique could work. And then the photo ran in black & white!
Feathering = two lights for the price of one
Fri Jun 6th - 4:07pm
This is one of those things that I think we all know in theory, but rarely use in practice. So I thought this example might show that feathering is as much a valid light modifier as umbrellas and snoots.
All three people in this photo were lit using one light:
My first attempt at lighting the photo involved trying to position a light stand to frame right, roughly equidistant to all three men. But that meant standing it in a lake and despite prolonged efforts it just wasn't happening.
The only other place I could sensibly position the light stand was behind me. So that's what I did. But that meant it was a lot closer to the guy in the foreground than it was to the guys in the background, so light fall-off was going to be a problem.
To explain:
Suppose I set the light correctly for the guy in the foreground at f/11. The guys in the background were about three times further away so they'd only be getting enough light for an f/2.8 exposure. Or something like that! My knowledge of the inverse square law is a bit shaky but the bottom line is that they wouldn't be getting enough light. Nowhere near enough.
The way I decided to work around this was to set the flash power for the guys in the background, but then turn the flash away to the right. There was still a good chunk of the beam hitting the guys in the background but the guy in the foreground was only getting a thin sliver from the side of the beam.
End result: Everyone got an equal amount of light.
Here's roughly how the set-up was arranged:
Feathering is a technique that you should keep stored away in the back of your mind, like the gadget in your gear bag that you hardly ever use but when you need it, you really need it. As illustrated by this example, feathering can allow you to get a shot that would otherwise be impossible to light.
DIY contact trigger
Sun Apr 6th - 3:43pm
Many thanks to Guy Montag for making this video that shows how to make a contact trigger for a flash, although I expect you could also use it to fire a camera if you wire it up to a Pocket Wizard or similar.
Here's the YouTube version of the video, or there's a better quality version. If you try this for a shot involving high-speed capture then remember to keep your flash power as low as possible. The lower the flash power is, the shorter the flash duration will be, so you can freeze the action better to get a sharper image.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVUxKnNMW44[/youtube]
ps. Just in case you don't know, the way to use a contact trigger is to work in the dark, leave the camera's shutter open, and then do whatever you're going to do to trip the trigger. For instance if you were going to shoot an air pistol through a balloon then this is how you'd go about it:
- Set-up the balloon and pre-aim the air pistol with it mounted on something so it won't move.
- Position the contact trigger to the side of the balloon opposite the air pistol, so the pellet will pierce the balloon and then pierce the trigger.
- Put a thick block of wood behind the contact trigger to catch the pellet. Make sure animals and kids are locked out of the room.
- Turn off the lights.
- Open the camera's shutter.
- Fire the pistol. While the shutter is still open the pellet will burst the balloon and then pierece the contact trigger, which will fire the flash.
- Close the camera's shutter.
And that's pretty much all there is to it. But exploding balloons have been done a million times so try to think of something new.
Tip: Easy fill light in Photoshop
Thu Mar 20th - 12:57am
Here's an easy technique for simulating fill light in Photoshop. If you have a photo in which the darker tones are too dark, often caused by using bounce flash without bleeding enough ambient in to the exposure, then this technique can work wonders.
Here's a photo I did yesterday. This was a test shot, flash bounced off the ceiling, and I'd forgotten to drop the shutter speed to bleed in some of the ambient, so this will work nicely as an example. Notice how some parts of the frame are very dark, ie: the man's clothes, under the chairs and under the arm of the boy on the right.
The first thing to do once the image loads in Photoshop is to create a duplicate layer. Do this either by selecting the background layer (the only layer) and pressing CTRL+J for Windows users or Apple+J on the Mac, or by dragging the background layer on to the "new layer" icon. Select the duplicate layer and change its blending mode to Screen. Your layers palette will now look like this:
And your image will look like this, way too bright:
Right-click on the Screen layer, or if you're using a Mac then do whatever you do to bring up the context menu, and select Blending Options. Double-clicking on the layer icon works too. Down at the bottom right of the panel that opens you'll see two gradient bars with sliders at either end. We're interested in the white slider for the Underlying Layer gradient, but rather than moving it, to start with we want to split it. Do this by holding down the ALT key and clicking to the left of the white slider. This will allow you to move the left side of the white slider, like this:
What these sliders do is allow you to control how much of the layer is visible, based on the brightness of pixels in the original (underlying) layer. By default, all brightness levels are visible. If we moved the entire white slider towards the middle then only the darker pixels would show through. If we moved the black slider then only the brighter pixels would show through.
For this technique we want to create a smooth blend, affecting only the darker parts of the image, so drag the left half of the white slider over to the black side of the gradient. Then move the other half of the white slider towards the middle.
While dragging the slider your image will be updated in real time so you can see how the changes are affecting it. Drag the slider as far as it needs to go, like this:
And here's the result. Much nicer!
