January 23, 2012
Chapateau is a small, rural village in Haiti about 3 hours northeast of Port-au-Prince. Saint Timothy’s Episcopal Church in Herndon, Virginia sponsors the education of more than a dozen children there, and the church is undertaking a formal mission to the village. This video contains photographs that I and another photographer took while visiting the village this past November.
December 30, 2011
What’s the right gear to use for family portraits you want to create at home? Of course, the best gear you can have is a professional photographer, but suppose you want to do it yourself: what do you need? The answer depends on the kind of photograph you want to create, but there are some simple things you can do to make your home portrait come out looking great.
My quick recommendations are below; keep reading for the deeper explanation:
The first and best thing you can do – and this is required for all good pictures – is to get good subject matter. You can put a check in this block right away; your child (or spouse or pet or parent) is beautiful already. These are family portraits, and you don’t really need to do much to the people who will be in them. You can help yourself out later on, however, if you pay attention to a few things about the people:
Especially with small children, that’s not always possible, but do your best and you’ll help yourself out later.
The next most important thing about a picture, besides the subject, is the light. So you need to arrange good lighting conditions. Almost all the time this means having the main light source be something other than the flash on the camera. In the above picture, I’m using two lights – both Canon Speedlite 430EX strobes – and controlling them wirelessly using the wireless flash feature built into my EOS 7D. But an alternative is to get one strobe on an off-shoe cord, a couple strobes on wireless transceivers like the Pocket Wizard, use a couple good floor lamps, or skip the artificial light entirely and just use a nice big window in the middle of the day.
I usually like to soften the light somehow. If I have a big window providing light reflected from outside (i.e., the sun is not streaming through the window directly onto the subject) I’ll often just use that. If I’m using strobes, a softbox or umbrella helps provide a bigger, softer light source. There are tons of different kinds of equipment to choose from here. You could also decide you want the look of strong, hard shadows, and just use direct flash or direct sun. But most people don’t have this equipment lying around. A good home technique is to use a large white piece of paper – 11″ by 17″ or larger – or a big white sheet, and bounce a flash or light off of that.
You also want to provide some level of contrast between the darks and lights, but not so much contrast that the darks are just black. In the picture above, I am using two lights, both on stands with umbrellas. The light to camera right is my key light, and it is set to expose normally. The light to camera left exposes at about 2 stops dimmer, leaving the shadows intact but filling them with soft detail. This helps sculpt the look of the face.
What if you’re not using artificial light at all? Use a window for the main light, and on the other side, use a white piece of paper or a cloth to reflect some of the window light back to the subject.
Most formal portraits use a solid, shaded, or otherwise neutral background. In the first picture above I’m using a large piece of muslin fabric with a mottled gray pattern. The cloth is stretched tight over background supports. But in the picture above I’m using a blue blanket we had lying around the house. It’s draped over a background support rod and hung in such a way that it ripples in the background. There’s one light here: the indirect light coming in through the window.
If you have access to seamless paper, it makes for a simple, neutral background, like this:
Same two-light portrait setup as the first picture above, but this time with black seamless paper. Gray seamless is actually a little more versatile, but I like the way the background just disappears, with just enough detail to frame the hair.
Now that your stage is all set, it’s time to think about the camera. If you are using strobes, you need a camera that can trigger them somehow. The Canon EOS 7D features a built-in wireless (optical) flash controller for compatible Canon Speedlites, but these are expensive (camera + 2 strobes + lens for around $3,500) and not everyone wants to use an SLR. If you usually shoot with a point-and-shoot camera, it might have a hot-shoe attachment for an external flash, and you can use a radio transceiver to trigger remote flashes.
The truth is, the camera almost doesn’t matter as long as your light source works with it. You can, in fact, take fine pictures with an iPhone. But there are a couple camera choices that make a big difference for portraits.
First: use a long lens. On a point-and-shoot camera, this means backing up and zooming in. On an SLR, a zoom length of 85mm to 135mm (on either full-frame or crop-sensor cameras) will work. The idea is to back up and use the zoom to compress the nose against the face so your portrait looks more like the person and less like a strange balloon caricature of a person.
Secondly, use a wide aperture. You want the background to blur slightly, although you want to keep both eyes in focus (and this usually means the mouth is in focus as well). Apertures of f/5.6 and wider, down to about f/2.0, work well, as long as your light is not too strong. Narrow apertures (f/16 or f/22) will put everything in crisp focus, including those dust specs and scratches on the background. The three pictures above were taken using f/5.6, f/6.3, and f/5.6, respectively, and at 105mm, 90mm, and 135mm.
January 22, 2011
… cautiously subtitled, “the Jesus Geese.” It does get cold in northern Virginia — today’s high will be below freezing — although nothing like the mid-west, the north, and other desolate lands.
These geese are walking on the barely submerged ice sheet that’s formed on the top of a neighborhood pond. In between meetings I stopped by and made a few exposures from the “shoreline,” a muddy embankment just off the paved sidewalk. Geese walk on the edge of an ice shelf in a barely frozen suburban pond.
December 30, 2010
The view from my end of the table at Christmas dinner: candles, angels, wine, food, and family. It really doesn’t get much better than a good meal with good wine and close family.
December 29, 2010
August 8, 2010
In any case, the strategy for capturing a dragonfly is:
1. See where it is.
2. Approach.
3. Watch it fly away.
4. Compose the picture that will look just great once there’s a dragonfly.
5. Wait for it.
6. Wait for it.
7. Wait for– okay, take the picture.
8. ???
9. Profit.
This probably wasn’t the best I could possibly do, but it was the best I could possibly do with about 10 minutes of free time. Here the dragonfly is strongly back-lit, as the water is reflecting the sky; it would be even darker, but I dialed in +1/3 stop exposure compensation.
August 1, 2010
Important corollary: you can’t take a good picture unless you and your camera are in the area where the good picture is happening. Fortunately, they’re happening nearly everywhere all the time, so you really just need to wake up to the ones around you.
This is a reasonably competent portrait made spontaneously in the middle of my front yard. Distracting objects are all around, and I’m using a wide-angle lens which always manages to find the nearest ugly background object: orange cones, bright red trucks, someone’s bike left lying around. You get the idea. So how do you isolate a subject with a wide angle lens?
You get close, and in this case, you point the camera toward the sky. I got lucky here on several counts. First – the dogwood in my front yard, although fairly small, has a reasonably dense canopy. Second, the sun was at just the right angle (low down in the horizon) to add the right warm color and strike across the face. We also had a clear blue sky, which adds a much better background than a drab gray I’d get if there were clouds in that part of the sky. And to top it off, the neighbor kid featured in this picture is wearing a black-and-white shirt, so no distracting colors there (apart from the usual kid-induced shirt stains).
So, all the technical conditions were there (good light, exposure set for +1/3 at f/2.8, low enough ISO to drown the noise, but high enough to ensure a fast shutter speed (1/250th).
The next step? Get close. Really close, in physical distance (here I’m maybe 2 feet away) and social distance (our subject knows me and is comfortable with me and my camera).
Then take lots and lots of frames. This was one out of about 30 in the series, and those 30 were part of about 100 or more I shot in a 45-minute window.
This is the general formula for success in photography without a multimillion dollar travel bill: always have your camera with you, get close, arrange to be around when the moment happens, and work the moment as hard as you can.
July 19, 2010
July 18, 2010
This is one of those “I love my wide angle lens” shots. And to hell with the rule of thirds.
