Surprises Happen

I was scheduled to work in the kitchen serving food and bussing tables at a surprise birthday party. The party was for a man turning 80, and he had relatives coming all the way from Texas to celebrate with him.

As I was being given instructions for kitchen duty, I overheard one of the party planners talking about a photographer. Due to a miscommunication, this photographer had no camera! I was shocked this could have happened. It’s sort of like a racecar driver showing up for a championship race without a car, or a soldier going off to fight a war without a rifle. (I’d better give my brother Matt credit for that last one.) Without entirely thinking the situation through, I spoke up.

“I have a bunch of photo gear.”

“With you now?”

“I can run home and get it really quick.”

“Do you have a camera?”

(Here I’m thinking, by whose definition of “a bunch of photo gear” does that not include a camera?) “...Yes, I have a camera.”

And so I got the job of photographing this man’s surprise 80th birthday party. I had maybe 20 minutes to plan, most of which was spent driving home and back to get my camera bag. That’s gotta be the smallest amount of time I’ve ever had between being hired and starting to photograph an event! It was cut so close that I got back to the location, put my stuff down, assembled my camera, and was walking out onto the event floor guessing the correct exposure settings while the lights were being turned off because the birthday boy was arriving!

My part in the party ended up working out surprisingly well. There were lots of things to shoot while the party happened. Everybody seemed to really love this man who they were celebrating with.

Partway through the event came the announcement: “The photographer doesn’t know this, but we’re gonna do a group picture now!” After a second of panic, I remembered shooting a similar group photo in this exact same room about a month back... I set my camera up about the same way, save the tripod and wireless shutter remote to get myself in the other photo.

To get everyone in the group well lit, well exposed, and sharp, I bounced my 2 most powerful flashes on full power off the high white ceiling. This made the ceiling act like a giant diffuse light source, making everyone look pretty. With both flashes firing, they gave me enough light that I was able to use a small enough aperture to keep everyone in focus without bumping my ISO up where I would get excessive noise in the photo. (In this case, it was f4 at ISO 400.)

What lesson should you take away from this? If you want to be a photographer, the #1 requirement is that you have your camera ready and available for whatever life throws at you!

With a little makeup...

I had an awesome shoot this week with a makeup artist and 4 different models, each with a distinct look. While I can’t say this is my favorite type of photography, or that I’m an expert in the world of fashion (quite the opposite), this was definitely a fun photoshoot. It’s something I haven’t done before, which automatically makes it exciting!

Anh Thu Tran was my partner in crime for this shoot. She’s a makeup artist able to do makeup for all occasions, as well as the super extravagant. She applied themed makeup to each of our four models before I photographed them. The day’s schedule for four models was turned upside down when our first two models didn’t show up to the shoot, but two of Anh Thu’s friends were nice enough to step up and fill their places.


It’s always fun when I get to shoot four distinctly different things in a day. Our first model, Mia, was a Victoria’s Secret model. I lit her with a beauty dish off to the side along with a fill flash on low power bouncing off the ceiling. The light reflected all over the place off the walls of the small white room, giving a relatively even light to the scene. The photos didn’t work out quite like I had hoped, but we still had 3 models to go!


Next up was Alyssa, who did a 1920s flapper style look. (Google it, it’s cool.) Anh Thu did her up in all the correct makeup, and the dress finished off the look. I researched portrait styles of the era and made notes on the poses and lighting. Lighting this portrait was pretty straightforward, using a beauty dish and a large silver reflector. (That beauty dish is quickly becoming my favorite light modifier, now that I’ve figured how to make it work right!) This is period-accurate lighting, using a one-light setup for simple yet attractive lighting. With the light down, Alyssa knew how to pose in her dress and hat. I later converted the photos to black and white and added a bit of grain for the complete 1920s look. We got several great shots from that set.


Then we had Vanessa, with a winter grunge look. I misunderstood what she was going for at first, shooting some dark grimy alley photos, kind of a “intentionally crappy” theme. With a better idea of the theme, I then moved to a different area and shot some slightly more traditional photos on a staircase. I put the beauty dish way up high to cover the whole staircase, and kept an umbrella light down low on low power to act as a fill light. Two majorly different styles of photo, but they both have their place.


Last we had Courtney, our second sorority stand-in girl. She got all dressed up in a great punk outfit, complete with fishnet tights, lots of necklaces and rings, and colorful makeup. Being the last shoot of the day, this is where we tried some more outrageous shots... sitting on a computer desk, perched on a bare metal couch frame, tossing around an 8-ball on a pool table, even with the camera peeking over a bathroom stall! It all definitely went with the punk-rebel getup.

Lots of things learned, cool photos produced, and new friends made. A very successful day.

Check my website for more photos from this shoot. http://andysutterfield.com/portfolio.html

How To Make Your Light Better

Good lighting makes a huge difference in photography. When taking pictures in less-than-ideal light, you might find yourself wanting to add some light to the scene to help out the photo. The most common way of doing this is with the flash that’s built into your digital camera. While this is certainly not a terrible thing to do, a lot of photographers don’t realise the full potential of flashes of this type... there are literally endless amounts of things you can do with a flash!

There is one relatively minor, yet critically important, change you must make to your flash to begin unlocking its lighting potential, however. You must move the flash away from your camera. This means you should have an external flash unit, and some way to tell it to fire when you need it to when it’s not attached to the top of your camera.

Lately, I’ve been shooting lots of photos with off-camera flashes. There are lots of benefits to moving your flash away from the axis of your lens (your camera) instead of thinking of it as only a way to add light to a dark scene. You can add contrast and depth to a scene, you can create drama and excitement, you can supplement existing light to make subjects pop, you can add three-dimensional quality to a subject, and the list goes on and on and on! Flashes can be used in ways very similar to large studio lights used in professional photo studios, but they’re small, lightweight, portable, and relatively cheap! When you don’t think of a flash as simply a way to add light to a dark scene and begin to think of it as a flexible light in a photo studio setup, worlds begin to open up.

A flash, or strobe as it is often called, is a light source that only lights up when it is needed: when a photo is being exposed. Flashes contain a flash bulb, a capacitor bank, and batteries (usually 4 AAs.) While the flash is on, the batteries work constantly to keep the capacitor bank charged, and when a flash is called for, the bulb takes power from the capacitor bank. Flash durations are very short, usually between 1/1000th of a second and 1/30,000th of a second, depending on the power level.

Flashes can be used along with a variety of light modifiers, (umbrellas, dishes, gels, reflectors, diffusers, etc.) to give you the photographer control over the direction, brightness, quality, color, and overall look of the light in a photo. This control over light enables you to change the appearance of a photo in ways you’ve never thought possible. I’ve been doing this for a while now and I’m always learning new things to do with my light!

I’ll get more into specifics of how to use flashes in this manner another day. Now, here are some tricks you can do with the camera you already have!

You might have noticed that a direct on-camera flash often gives a harsh, unattractive look to a photo of a person. In general, it’s better to diffuse your flash to get a softer, less deer-in-the-headlights look in your flash pictures. Try to modify your flash so the part that emits light looks bigger.

-If you have a point-and-shoot camera, put a loop of clear scotch tape across the flash, so the strip of tape is held 1-2 inches away from the flash bulb.

-If you use your DSLR’s pop-up flash, cut a hole in the bottom of a styrofoam cup and slide it over the flash so the side of the cup covers the flash bulb. The cup should be pointed forward and up.

-If you have an external flash unit, look for white or grey ceilings or walls to bounce light off of. Turn the flash head so it points at the ceiling instead of directly at the subject.

-Try and think of different ways to bounce, reflect, diffuse or enlarge your light source for softer, more natural looking flash light. Your photos will really show a difference!

The photo at the top of this post was shot in a dark room at night with a single flash on the ground to the right of the camera, pointing up at my friends and I.

Keep on shooting!

Ballet

I am fortunate enough to know a couple of girls who are, among other things, very good ballet dancers. So while reading another (Joe McNally’s) blog, I was inspired by a photo of his to create some similar photos of my friends.

These obviously aren’t your standard dance photos. Basically I needed to have a completely black background and two directional light sources, one on each side of the dancers. Aylin and Rachel were happy to redo their same moves over and over again while I popped off test shots and dialed in my lights for the “real” shots.

When it was all set, the photos started looking really cool- I was able to underexpose the background to make it look black, and the hard directional light on the girls had a very dramatic effect. Being the oaf that I am, I know nothing about dance at all- I just told the girls to do anything they thought would look cool on top of the X I taped on the floor. And the photos did most definitely come out looking cool.

For this setup, I used three flashes, all on manual, full power. Two were firing from the left side, and a third fired from the right. I could have used only one flash on each side, at a lower power, but that’s not the way I did it that day. Using my bargain bin wireless flash triggers, sometimes the right side flash wouldn’t fire at all... but surprisingly, that’s when some of the best looking photos happened! (see bottom photo) Sometimes you lose, sometimes you win.

[Reference] Controlling Exposure

If you’re new to photography, you will want to read over this section thoroughly at least a couple times to better understand some of the things I talk about on this blog. If you already have an understanding of your three basic exposure controls (aperture, shutter speed, and ISO) you can skip over this section without missing anything.

Understanding exposure is the basis of everything in photography. Every single technique you do involving a camera will hinge on your understanding of exposure and how to control it. Discussing aperture, shutter speed and ISO can get dry and boring, but trust me, once you understand it, you’ll be able to do so much more with your camera. Every photographer needs to have at least a basic understanding of exposure. With practice, controlling exposure becomes second nature.

There are three controls every camera everywhere uses to control exposure. That's shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. Each of these has their own effects on the photo besides exposure when you change them, but I won't get into that here.

It's very handy to quantify exposure in a camera because each of the controls I mentioned can be adjusted in something called "stops." A stop is a quantity of light on a scale. One stop brighter means doubling the light, and one stop dimmer means halving the light. In this way it's easy to quantify the relative amount of light in a photo in terms of stops.

Shutter speed refers to the amount of time the camera is exposing the sensor (may be a piece of film or a digital sensor or whatever) to light. An example of a "normal" exposure time is 1/250 second. If I wanted to make the picture darker, I would take away a stop of light by halving the amount of time the sensor is exposed to light. That would mean I would expose the sensor for 1/500 second, which is half the time of 1/250 second. If I wanted to make the picture lighter, I would add a stop of light by exposing for 1/125 second, which is twice as long as 1/250 second.

Common shutter speeds in 1 stop increments: (in seconds)
1 1/2 1/4 1/8 1/15 1/30 1/60 1/125 1/250 1/500 1/1000 1/2000 1/4000
(There are a couple points where the numbers don’t exactly match up here. That’s OK, it’s to make the other numbers nice and pretty and round.)

Aperture refers to the size of the hole in the lens that lets light through during an exposure. This one's harder to understand in terms of how exactly it works, but know that it works the same way as shutter speed in terms of stops. In the aperture, a bigger hole lets in more light, and a bigger hole has a smaller f/number, and vice versa. The specific order of numbers are harder to remember, but know that each number is one stop, which either doubles or halves the amount of light, and therefore the exposure. For example, if I'm shooting at f/8 and I want to make the picture darker, I would halve the light by moving to f/11, and that would make the picture darker. If I'm at f/8 and I want to make the picture lighter, I would double the light and go to f/5.6.

Common apertures in 1 stop increments:
f/1.4 f/2 f/2.8 f/4 f/5.6 f/8 f/11 f/16 f/22 f/32

ISO refers to the sensor's sensitivity to light. A more sensitive imagesensor will be able to take the same amount of light and make a brighter exposure. Again, ISO works with the same double/half stop system as shutter speed/aperture. If I'm shooting at ISO 400 and I want to make the picture darker, I would halve the light by moving to ISO 200, and that would make the picture darker. If I'm at ISO 400 and I want to make the picture lighter, I would double the light and go to ISO 800.

Common ISOs in 1 stop increments:
50 100 200 400 800 1600 3200 6400

These three controls working together give you a huge amount of control over your photo. Learn how to make exposure work, and learn the benefits of moving up and down the range of each of the three controls. Then you can start making your camera work for you.

Photobooths?

In the past couple weeks, I’ve been asked to shoot a couple of christmas-related events. Not by a traditional method of photography, but with a photobooth. Photobooth-style photography, while definitely not the ultimate method of capturing an event, definitely has its place in today’s culture.

A photobooth generally involves an area of an event set aside specifically for photography. This is an area where the photographer has a special backdrop, lights, and often props for people to use in photos. The idea is that people can step into the photobooth and quickly and easily get some quality, well-lit photos taken.

When a photographer sets up a photobooth, most of the creative power in the photographic process is put into the hands of the subjects in front of the camera. What the photographer can still do in this case to make creative photos involves setting up the photobooth.

One photobooth I did was for a Christmas play my church was putting on. The idea was that each family would pose for a quick photo, and the photos would be posted on the church website for free download to get more people looking at our church website. It wasn’t my idea, but people seemed to really like it. I set up my backdrop, which was two decorated Christmas trees, outdoors under a balcony. My lights came in the form of two off-camera flashes. (We’ll get more into lighting and how flashes work later.) After I set up the studio area, I could quickly cycle families through for their portraits, and they each got a nice free family portrait!

My other photobooth was one for my highschool group at the same church. I had a small room to set up in. One wall was covered with a plain white backdrop, and I set up my camera against the opposite wall. This photobooth could have been covered easily by a single flash, but I decided to shoot it with three, because I could! Who doesn’t like a little overkill, eh? Lots of photos were shot that night.

A photobooth can limit a photographer’s creativity, but when executed right, they can really add fun and value to an event!

How To Make Good Photos with Any Old Camera: Composition

There are countless rules and regulations that apply to the art of photography. You should learn them so that you can know how to break them well!

When I’m shooting photos, a lot of people assume I’m a good photographer because I have a big camera. While I may be a good photographer (and that’s always up for interpretation!) it’s not because of my camera. A good photographer is not reliant on his equipment; he can make interesting photographs with any camera- a camera being as little as any lens positioned correctly in front of a light-sensitive recording medium of some variety.

All SLR (single-lens reflex) cameras offer full manual control of exposure (and usually many other settings), and even a lot of digital point-and-shoot cameras offer some level of manual control over some of the decisions the camera would make about your image if it was set on fully automatic shooting. BUT! No camera can ever have control of the most important element of the picture: what you put in front of the lens. Because of this, it really is the photographer that makes the difference in a good photo.

Every camera lets you see a preview of the image you’re about to take before you trigger the shutter. This (usually) rectangular view is known as your frame. The way you arrange different objects within your frame, and what you choose to include and exclude in the frame, is called your composition. This is how you control what’s included if your photo- remember, that’s the most important element in making a good photograph!

Next time you’re out taking pictures, try to consciously think about your composition, or what you’re showing in your frame. Show your viewer something they don’t see every day. Most successful photographs have a single subject, or a central focus point in the image, or what that photo is “of.” Make it obvious what your subject is. Tell your viewer through your image, “Look at this X! Look how dramatic/lonely/exciting/drab/powerful it is!” Some compositions will work better than others. The way to find out what works is to get out and experiment!

Get up high, or get on your belly to get a different angle of view of your subject.

Try standing far away from your subject and zooming in close on it, then walk closer to the same subject and zoom out and shoot the same photo. This can make a huge difference in perspective.

Position your subject away from the middle of the frame. A general guideline is called the “Rule of Thirds.” Imagine a standard tic-tac-toe board drawn across your frame. Put your subject on any one of the four intersection points of the lines. If you’re shooting a landscape, put the horizon line on one of the horizontal lines on that tic-tac-toe board. This is often the easiest way to make your photo more visually interesting.

Look for interesting lines and patterns to include in your composition.

Include contrasting colors in different areas of your frame.

Keep your composition simple; try to eliminate elements from the frame that don’t add to what you want to do with the image. Sometimes the most powerful compositions are the most sparse and basic. K.I.S.S.- Keep It Simple Stupid!

Remember, there are no steadfast rules in photography!