White Balance

I'm late with my post this week.  Sorry!  Instead of sitting here at my computer, giving you lots of helpful photography suggestions I was

• supervising playdates (three of them, to be exact)
• enjoying a mother's day festivities at Kardynn's preschool
• reading books to Annika's first grade class
• babysitting Autumn
• traipsing around the National Zoo with Kiersten, Kardynn and a bunch of Kindergarteners 
• learning how to do flip turns in the pool

This week will be spent recovering from last week!

A few weeks ago, my friend Julie asked me about white balance.  I meant to write about it in my last post but when I started to delve into 18% gray and gray cards, I got all caught up with metering and never wandered back to explain white balance.  Sadly this is how my brain works these days - there's a lot of wandering.  *sigh*

So back to white balance.  It's not difficult to understand how I got sidetracked by metering because there is a connection.  The sensors on your camera expect a scene to be a certain amount gray for metering purposes AND for white balance purposes...and they do a pretty good job.  But you can certainly improve the results in one of several ways.  First of all, your camera has some presets: daylight, shade, cloudy, fluorescent, flash, et cetera.  Typically there's also an option to create a custom setting. This is where the gray card comes in  handy.  You can take a picture of the gray card (make sure the card fills the viewfinder) in the lighting situation where you're about to take pictures, and then the white balance will be correct.  If you don't have a gray card, filling the frame with something white, to get a custom reading will also work. You can also take a picture of the gray card and use it to adjust white balance on your computer after the fact, but that's a lot more work.  Having said that, it might be preferable to accidentally leaving your camera with the wrong settings, which I've done a time or two.

If you want to get really fancy with color correction, here are some tips for correct skin tones. I have a little cheat sheet that I use for adjusting the magenta, yellow and cyan.  Caucasian's are 5-20% more yellow than magenta.  A fair-skinned caucasian might be 20% magenta and 25% yellow, whereas a bronzed person could be 45% magenta and 62% yellow.  Asians and Hispanics have 10-20% more yellow than magenta.  On black skin, the yellow and magenta are close. And what about cyan?  Cyan is 30-50% of magenta.  (I got this very useful information from this Smugmug help page.) I also got the free OnOne presets for Lightroom, which work great.  Unfortunately I don't typically use Lightroom but when I do, those presets are lifesavers.

Let There Be Light

My first two tutorials have been a light look at some technical aspects of photography.  I gave you a quick explanation of the different modes on your camera and we addressed aperture. Hopefully you had a chance to play around with your camera and try out some of the things I attempted to explain.  If so, I'd love to see some of your photographs - please feel free to link to them in the comments.

Today, let's get artsy!  Let's talk about LIGHT.  Perhaps you're scratching your head trying to figure out how this will help you understand your camera better, but I promise you, this is the key to good photography. I don't care what kind of camera you have, if you know how to use light to your advantage, you can make your photographs stand out.   

We all understand that light is necessary for photography but good light is what makes it magical.  This is where photography becomes an art.  There's not really a right or wrong but I can give you some things to think about.  In general, when shooting portraits, we want to avoid direct light. It's harsh and unflattering; it can create distracting shadows. This is why photographers love cloudy days, because the clouds are diffusing the light for you. So what to do on a bright, sunny day?  Find shade.  Find buildings or fences or trees or anything that you can put between you and the sun.  The trick is to make sure that light isn't mottled or splotchy.  Also, bear in mind, if there's an area of direct sun in the background, that will blow out in your image - which may or may not bother you.

You'll also want to pay attention to the light in someone's eyes.  Do you know about catch lights?  If not, catch lights are the reflections of light in a person's eyes.

Catch lights give sparkle to the eyes, and that sparkle gives your photograph life.

The best time of day for photos is a magical time that happens twice a day. Photographers refer to it as The Golden Hour.  It's the first hour of sunlight and the last hour of sunlight.  The warm light is generally considered pleasing. The long shadows can help give dimension and depth to landscape photography.

Now typically when you're shooting outside, you play this complicated dance with the sun. The rule of thumb is that you want to keep the sun behind you. If you're taking photographs of people, you want to make sure they're not squinting into the sun. If you need to put the sun behind your subjects, you might want to use a flash fill.  Basically this means you're going to force the flash to fire, which will make sure there are no funky shadows on their face. But sometimes you may want to embrace the back light.

Before I go, let me give you a quick crash course on metering. Camera designers have done extensive research (seriously) and discovered that the average photograph is is a certain percentage gray. 18% gray is the number commonly thrown around.  Some people say it's actually 12% gray, but personally that difference isn't affecting *me* too much.  The point I want to make is that there are probably a lot of times when your photograph *isn't* 12% gray so you need to know how to compensate for this.  If the photograph has a lot of light - like snow, or a sandy beach - then the meter is going to want you to underexpose so you need to know to compensate.  Having said that, camera meters have gotten quite sophisticated and they do a pretty good job getting it right.  My camera has several different metering options; matrix metering, center-weighted metering and spot metering. Spot metering allows you to select a point on your camera and the camera will use this for it's metering calculations.  Center-weighted metering is essentially the same thing except that the "spot" is the middle of the frame. But I usually leave it on matrix metering. I've read up a little bit on matrix metering and the engineering that went into it but I can't claim to be an expert.  What I can tell you is that it does a remarkable job at figuring out the correct exposure. Of course when you're trying to be artistic, you might need to outsmart the meter but in general, it works very well.

I'm not sure that I've done a very good job explaining this stuff so please ask any questions you might have.

ASSIGNMENT:
This week's assignment is all about the catch lights. Find some willing subject (or in a pinch, a less cooperative subject will do) and try taking a portrait in good light with nice catch lights. If the light isn't good, find a way to make the light good.

What the F...F-stop, that is

When I took my very first photography class (gosh...was it really twenty years ago?!), one of the things that made a huge impression on me was aperture. It was exciting to learn that I could achieve the look I desired by changing the aperture. 

Per Wikipedia, an aperture is a hole or an opening through which light travels.  In photography this is obviously the lens.  You've probably seen this diagram before - it's a great illustration of what happens to your lens as the aperture changes.  When your lens is "wide open" (i.e. f/1.4), it's letting in a ton of light.  Or you can "stop down" to a higher f-stop (i.e. f/11) and there's less light getting through.
 

The thing to remember about aperture is that the more open it is, the shorter the depth of field.  Someone once used an illustration to help make sense of that.  Have you ever squinted when you're trying to see something far away?  That's how your camera works. When the aperture gets narrow, more of the image is in focus; the wider the aperture, the less of the image in focus.

Now, you can make your camera's sensor more or less sensitive to the light by increasing or decreasing the ISO.  Back in the day of film cameras, you would control this by the type of film that you purchased.  I typically bought 200 or 400 speed film, depending on whether I thought I'd be taking the pictures primarily inside or outside. The wonderful thing about digital is that you're not locked into a particular ISO for a set number of prints, like we used to be back then.  Now you can change the ISO whenever you want.  The thing to remember is that the higher the ISO, the less light you need, but the grainier your final image will be.  I have an example of an image that I love, but it's quite grainy because I shot it at a high ISO (for the camera that I was using).  There are lots of problems with this photo - it has a crazy color cast and like I said, it's grainy, but it's an authentic shot of my husband so I love it.

ISO 3200

One final note about ISO: did you catch my little caveat up there when I said "for the camera I was using"?  Not all cameras are created equal.  The above shot was taken at 3200 with my Nikon D40.  If I were to take the same shot at the same ISO with my Nikon D7000, it'd be a completely different story.  One of the reasons my Nikon D7000 was more than twice as expensive as my D40, was because it's much better at handling low light.  So the point is, know your camera.  Play around with it at high ISOs and get to know what it does.

Okay, moving on, the final variable is how long the shutter stays open. The longer the shutter stays open, the more light that gets through the lens.  So if you have a slow shutter speed at f/1.4 then a ton of light is getting through the lens.  If you have a fast shutter speed at f/16, not much light is getting through the lens, right?  So of course the trick to getting a nicely exposed photo is finding the right balance between these two things.  Fortunately for us, modern cameras make this pretty easy for us.  On an SLR camera, there's an exposure meter inside the camera.  In my Nikon camera, at the bottom of the viewfinder, there's something that kind of looks like this:

+  | | | | 0          -     or maybe like this     +         0 | | | |   -

That's the exposure meter.  In theory, those lines to the left of the "0" mean that the image is over-exposed and those lines to the right of the "0" indicate that the image is under-exposed. I say "in theory" because there are a few other things that can throw the exposure off but for now let's just leave it at that - we can get into the exceptions later.  Understanding how your camera is metering and how much light your subject is reflecting back will help you expose your image more accurately.

There is one point I want you to consider.  Even though your camera shutter can stay open for a very long time to let in a lot of light, you have to remember that if the camera moves at all, it will make the image blurry.  If you're hand-holding the camera, you can only hold the camera so steady.  I've always had it in my head that you shouldn't really expect to hand hold the camera for more than 1/60th of a second.  But that's probably because I started out using a 35mm camera with a 50mm lens.  It's actually relative to the focal length.  In other words, if you have a zoom lens, it's easier to hold the camera steady when it's wide open, as opposed to when you're zoomed in.  Have you already noticed that?  And let's be honest, you as the operator plays a big factor.  I think I can hold the camera steadier than some people can.  I will frequently brace the camera on myself or on stationary objects around me.  This is something you have to kind of figure out for yourself and just be aware of it.  I recently attended a class by a renowned but elderly photographer and he admitted that he can longer hold the camera as steady as he once could.  So you just have to understand your limitations and what you and your camera are capable of.

If you want to learn more, you can start at Digital Photo School's article about shutter speed.


ASSIGNMENT:
For this week, I'd like you to flip that mode dial to Manual, if it's not already there.  Practice exposing the image using the camera's light meter.  Change the ISO from something low like 400 to whatever is high, for your camera.  Pay attention to the difference in shutter speed and/or aperture as well as the clarify of the images.  If you're using a zoom lens, notice the change in shutter speed as you zoom the lens in and out.

Camera 101

Over the years I've had many a person joke that they were going to have me show them how to use their camera.  And I always say that I would be happy to do that - and I'm very sincere about that.  It would make me feel great to know that I had helped someone improve their photography. But no one has ever taken me up on it.  I think it's because my friends all know that I can be a bit chatty.  So I suspect that they're probably terrified that once they get me started on a topic I'm so passionate about, I will never stop. *ha* So I thought it was safer for me to write some photography tips. That way, if you get overwhelmed, you can just stop.  Plus, if your life is anything like mine, I'm guessing you don't have a lot of time. So I'll do my best to keep this short.  We'll just tackle one thing at a time...maybe have a weekly assignment.  ??  What do you think?  And you can take one photo or 10 or even 100.  It's totally up to you.  I just want to help you understand your camera better - the more you know about the tools on your camera, the easier it is to get your pictures the way you want them.

I've been trying to think of a good place to start and I think the most logical place is the mode dial.  Most cameras have a fairly similar mode dial. There are usually some letters and some pictures. I think most people start out with "Auto" mode (it's probably the green one).  Auto mode basically just means you're letting the camera make all the decisions.  Fortunately today's cameras are pretty smart so you can get pretty good snapshots this way.  They may not always turn out the way you want, however. So if you want to have more control over the results, you can switch out of Auto mode.  Most cameras have some scene selections - portrait, landscape, babies, sports and macro.  Those all seem fairly intuitive so I'm not going to explain what they do. But the great thing is that once you understand how your camera works, you can accomplish these same results by controlling the aperture and shutter speed yourself.

Let me share a quick story. When I first got my dSLR I put that puppy on Auto and just let it do it's thing.  I marveled at Auto mode because that's something my first SLR certainly didn't have. Another thing my first SLR didn't have was an on-camera flash.  Auto mode and flash made my life so easy. I could take pictures anywhere...and I was perfectly happy with my snapshots.  I was documenting our lives with gusto.  It didn't take long for my husband to start criticizing my "deer-in-the-headlights" flash shots.  I think he was primarily motivated by his dislike for having the blinding light go off in his direction. But in my heart of hearts, I knew he was right. I had a fancy, shmancy dSLR but I was using it exactly how I had used my point-and-shoot camera. I wasn't really taking advantage of my camera's capabilities.

So I switched my camera mode to no flash mode.  (The flash symbol is the one that looks like a little lighting bolt.  Therefore, "no flash mode" is the one that looks like a lightning bold with a line through it.)  When I stopped using the flash, I became a little fanatical and stopped using the flash altogether. Eventually I realized that Program mode (P) gave me a few more options and therefore more control, but the camera would still take care of the aperture and shutter speed for me. 

Now, I'm a sucker for shallow depth of field (which means that I like it when the background is blurry) so I quickly went from Program mode to Aperture Priority (A on Nikons and Av on Canons).  In Aperture Priority mode, I could tell the camera to stay down around f/4 and let it pick the correct shutter speed.  (If your eyes have started to glaze over now that I'm talking about f stops, don't worry, I'll get to that in the next installment.) 

Shallow depth of field

I also love panning so in that case, I would switch to Shutter Priority (S on Nikons and Tv on Canons) and pick the shutter speed, and just let the camera find the correct aperture.

Panning, to capture the motion

Another example of panning

Eventually I decided I wanted even more control over the exposure so I switched to Manual mode (M).  Sometimes I still wander back to one of the other modes.  I'm not as speedy with Manual mode because the exposure is constantly changing.  But in general that's where I shoot.

Okay, that's all we're going to talk about for today.  I just want you to have a basic understanding of the different modes on your camera and what they do.  Eventually we'll get into more details like ISO, and metering and aperture but for now we're keeping it simple.

ASSIGNMENT:
This week's assignment is to switch that camera out of Auto mode and play around with it.  I'd suggest switching to Aperture mode and play around with different apertures and see what a difference it makes.  Compare the background at f/3.5 to the background at f/9 and f/16.