Camera Samurai

Following up on my earlier posting on slating and keeping it all together while traveling or in the field, I thought I would share how I do this in the studio as well.

The studio is a more controlled environment and I have a lot more time to do preparation and record keeping than when I am out and about. Take a look at an example of what I do for studio work:

There’s a lot of writing on this slate board so I will step through this one piece at a time. Jonny Goldstein sat for some portraits recently in my studio. Since he was the subject, his name is the central thing in the slate. At the top is the date – a crucial piece of information. It’s not like Jonny and I do a lot of photo shoots together but it’s always good to capture that piece of data in case there is a question later on.

Here is some other stuff on there:

• 1:WB – this shows that frame 1 was a white balance shot.
• SL-3 – this tells me that the slate is actually frame #3. Normally I would put this as frame 2, right after the white balance but I caught a moment of Jonny mugging for the camera that I could not pass up.
• CW – these are my initials. Carl Weaver. Yep, that’s me – the original Camera Samurai.
• NMR – this means “no model release,” that I did not get Jonny to sign a model release. If I had, as with this model I shot last year, it would have said, “MR”. Jonny has since said I can use his images for my promotion. He’s a stand-up guy, that one.
• 200 – the ISO setting.
• 1/125 – the shutter speed.
• f13 – the f-stop.

These last three items are actually captured in the EXIF data and can be viewed very easily, along with lots of other information about the picture. I record these settings out of habit because they are some of the more important bits of data to know and are easily viewed if I just look at the slate image.

Whatever your method, I recommend you keep information like this. My slate board is a simple dry-erase board that packs easily into my bag of miscellaneous stuff I need for shoots. It’s always there at the ready, along with a marker and eraser.

One company I worked for doing youth sports photography had a very low-tech way of doing things. We wrote the necessary information on a piece of paper and photographed that. Every time we would get a new team in front of us we had to write up a new slate. I never liked that solution, figuring that there had to be a better way.

Is my way better? Yes. For me, anyway. Your way is better for you. As long as you keep track of everything, you can do it however makes best sense for you.

Here is a sample slate to get you going – a freebie from Camera Samurai. Take it, use it, share it, recycle it. Whatever you do, do something to keep track of your shoots. Slate Template

Technorati Tags: slate, studio, Camera Samurai

I have had lots of people ask me what white balance is and why it is important to master this mysterious topic. Well, put simply, white balance has to do with how your camera sees and interprets the color of the light in your picture.

Different light sources have different colors associated with them. Before we get into types of artificial light around your home, let’s just use the example of daylight. In the early morning and late afternoon the sun is a nice beautiful orange and red, slowly losing that warm hue and becoming more yellow, then white as it peaks in the sky.

If you were to photograph something white during these different solar phases, the recorded color would understandably be different – the color of the sun at the moment of the picture.

Now think about shooting inside, or even outside after dark. All those lamps in your home produce different colors of light as well. We cannot always see these different colors with our eyes because our brains are wonderful signal processing units that keep the information straight so that a piece of white paper will look the same to us regardless of whether we have a fluorescent or incandescent light on.

So to deal with these different colors of light, we have built in to our cameras a digital filter called white balance. All these white balance settings in the camera calibrate the internal computer differently so that it knows how to adjust everything to compensate for these different light colors.

In a room lit mainly by incandescent bulbs, you would want to use the incandescent setting. Pretty simple, right?

Yes and no.

Sometimes folks think this whole subject is too confusing and thinking about it a lot is frustrating because really they just want to go out and take pictures. You can do color correction in Photoshop later, right? Absolutely, if you know how to do that.

I keep my camera set to the “cloudy” option in the white balance menu because this is about the most neutral setting. I also shoot outdoors a lot, so it makes sense to set the camera to one of the outdoor lighting settings.

However you choose to keep your camera most of the time, just be sure not to use the “AWB” setting. This stands for average white balance and is the result of the camera taking a reading of all the light in the area and performing some sort of averaging to compensate for what it thinks is the color.

Because the camera’s computer performs this function every time you take a picture, each picture will be slightly different from the next. This makes it hard to do batch processing in Photoshop or even to serially manipulate the pictures manually. Each time you touch a picture in your collection, you will have to do something different. What a pain!

So what happens when you have the camera set wrong for the type of light? Let’s take a look at a couple pictures I shot at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History a couple weeks ago:

These are roughly the same image but are quite different in the coloring. What I was going for (the right side) was to have the light streaming in the window be white, as I saw it with my own eyes. In the first image I had the white balance set to incandescent but for the second one I changed it to cloudy. The incandescent setting was great for the exhibits I had been photographing but it was not what I wanted for this shot!

Be sure to get used to changing your white balance as appropriate but also be sure to play with the settings a little. Notice how the blue picture above gives the windows a cool feeling, as if alluding to cool temperatures. And on the second picture, note how the hallway lights cast a warm glow.

Don’t get stuck on the “right” way to do this stuff. Go have fun with it, be creative and post your photos to the Camera Samurai Flickr Page. Whatever you do, bring a camera and do some great photography!

Technorati Tags: white balance, camera, light, fluorescent, incandescent, AWB, average white balance, Smithsonian, Museum of Natural History, photography

Let’s be frank for a moment. When we are out shooting away with our cameras we sometimes forget to do the simple things in recordkeeping that can lead us to better organization. This is especially valuable when we are traveling and are likely to not remember exactly what we photographed when. Photography is so engaging that we can keep shooting and completely lose track of what we shot.
Here is what I do to ensure that my shots are easily recognizable when I get home:

This is called a slate and the process is called slating. It’s simply a way to keep all the information together. It’s really easy to write something like this down in a notebook I carry with me anyway, snap a picture of it and then I know when I see this frame that the next several pictures will be of Vauxhall Bridge. As you can see, it is reusable as well!

Technorati Tags: travel, Photography, slate, slating