The monkeys are working. We will be back up and running soon.
The monkeys are done with their work and have gone back to their typewriters. The old site is updated and loaded onto a new server and all is right with the world again.
To those of you who are regular readers, I offer my apologies for the changing look of the page. I had been trying to make the last theme work but it was a bit cumbersome and wasn’t really what I wanted anyway. This current look is much nicer, I think, and should be around for a bit.
I know this is not the smartest thing to do – to gain a loyal reader base and then change the look of the site – but it is what I felt was necessary.
Please keep coming back. This is most likely the final change for a long time.
Yes, the next Washington, DC photo tour is almost upon us.
Saturday night, June 30th, we will meet at the World War II Memorial and start shooting there. From there we can get good views of the Washington Monument and then walk to the Korean War Memorial and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, end up at the Lincoln Memorial and then walk out to the Memorial Bridge, where you can get a pretty good view of Rosslyn and see some good headlights, which are great for long exposures.
Sunset is at 8:30 that day, so we should meet then. We will have a little bit of light from the horizon and then will use whatever artificial light there is.
When: Saturday, 30 June 2007 at 8:30 p.m. until approximately 10:30 p.m.
Where: World War II Memorial
Cost: $30
Look for: Carl Weaver (that’s me – the farang in the picture). I will have a camera pack and a tripod. Tall guy. Short hair.
Skills you will practice or learn:
I thought about including the Jefferson Memorial but that’s almost a mile away from the Lincoln Memorial. That might be too much walking for one night but let’s see when we get there.
What to bring (as much of this as you can):
So who’s coming? Will you be there?
Technorati Tags: Washington, DC, photo tour, World War II Memorial, Washington Monument, Korean War Memorial, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Lincoln Memorial, Memorial Bridge, Rosslyn, Nighttime, low-light, photography, Long exposure, White balancing, Jefferson Memorial
I was talking to my friend Johanna today about photography and f-stops. I think I was keeping her from her work but she didn’t seem to mind too much, at least for a few minutes. Johanna is a great photographer who is still learning photography theory, as we all are, and said she has a hard time with f-stops.
Truth be told, I think everyone has a hard time with f-stops until they hear the theory for the fiftieth time and do some practice runs, experimenting with the camera settings. I will include an exercise at the bottom of this post, in case you want to play with your camera and experiment a little.
So here’s how f-stops work. The f-stop on your lens is the ratio of the focal length to the aperture. Get it? Good. Okay, seriously – let’s look at it another way.
f-stop = focal length (mm) / aperture (mm)
Remember: the aperture is the actual hole through which light passes, whose size you control by using the f-stop ring.
Okay, that’s cool and all, but what do the f-stop numbers really mean?
You got me there. Maybe I was being too technical. The small number f-stop means you have a big aperture and thus more light coming through. A big f-stop number means a smaller hole and less light coming through.
So f-stop and aperture size have an inverse relationship. Let’s plug in some real numbers and see what we get.
Note that the focal length stays the same. That’s because you have to keep one element constant to perform this calculation and even with zoom lenses you can only shoot at one zoom setting at a time. You can see that as the f-stop number gets bigger, the aperture gets smaller and vice-versa.
Okay – so what does all this mean?
The f-stop refers to how much light you are letting in. This will affect your shutter speed by allowing you to shorten or lengthen exposure time, depending on how much light is getting in. Back in the day we had to calculate this by hand. Really we did it in our heads because we were dealing with fractions of a second and those of us who are lucky do not have fractions of fingers to count on. Now we have fancy computer-controlled cameras that do all the hard work for us. Thank goodness for that!
Other effects of f-stops
The f-stop also controls your depth of field. Depth of field refers to how much stuff is in focus in front of and behind the primary subject you focus on. A small number f-stop allows more to be in focus and a small number f-stop makes less stuff in focus. Look at these examples. The first one was shot at f22 and the second at f5.6.
The picture shot at f22 shows many more fence posts in focus than the f5.6 picture does.
Assignment
Play with your camera! Do something like I did in the above photos. Take photos of a series or group of objects. Focus on the same element each time and change your f-stop so you can get different effects and get a feel for how f-stop affects the depth of field in your pictures. Experiment! Learn! Have fun!
Post your results in the Camera Samurai Flickr Group.
Technorati Tags: photography, f-stop, experiment, ratio, focal length, aperture, inverse relationship, depth of field
If you have any questions or comments or would like more information about Camera Samurai and Carl Weaver, please fill out this form and I will get back to you shortly. Thanks!
Today I took some folks to Union Station in Washington, DC to do some photography. These were students from a photography class I taught a few months ago and had expressed interest in doing such things. Apparently I did something right if the group wanted to hang out with me after the class was over.
The architecture at Union Station is pretty incredible, the building having been built in 1907 and incorporating some pretty incredible neoclassical elements such as arches, columns, statues and even some paintings of nymphs and satyrs and other things that don’t naturally live in DC. Cool stuff!
In a few weeks we will be doing a tour of Georgetown at night as well as a series of the monuments at night. Nighttime photography can be a blast if you have a good tripod and a good idea of what kinds of pictures you are trying to make. Photographing Georgetown at night will present a different set of constraints than going to the monuments, which are huge sedentary pieces of marble and likely deserted after dusk.
Georgetown is pretty well packed with people from about ten in the morning until the clubs and restaurants close late at night. That means tight quarters sometimes and shooting with available light. It also means interacting with people and coming out from behind the lens to explain to people why you are photographing them. That can be lots of fun but at night it can get a little ugly as well, given the circumstances and how much folks have had to drink. At any rate, it will be an interesting time.
Want to come on down and get some practice with night photography? Let me know and we will get you in on it!
If you are in the DC area and would like to participate in a Camera Samurai photo tour, please email me and let me know what strikes your fancy.
Technorati Tags: Union Station, Washington, DC, photography, architecture, Georgetown, monuments, Camera Samurai, photo tour
Sometimes when I am shooting and either want to be discreet or else just want to get a different viewpoint, I will not look through the viewfinder and will hold the camera at a particular angle, fire the shutter release and see what I get. This is a great tactic for getting an interesting angle that would be either nearly impossible or else very awkward to get by looking through the viewfinder.
It also is good for the times you do not want people to know you are photographing them, thus minimizing camera anxiety. For example, my friend Phramaha Nattapong, shown here, is used to getting tense when someone whips out a camera and wants to pose. Shooting from down low did two things. First, it deceived him a little into not thinking he was about to be photographed, so he did not have time to pose. Second, it produced what I think is a great angle.
My friend Andy Carvin is not nervous at all in front of the camera, being a professional new media expert and journalist, but I thought this shot of him was especially good because it captures a moment just as it was, with no preparation or posing. Just a clear, thoughtful look on his face during a DC Media Makers meeting shows a little bit of his character and why he is such a dominant voice in the blogosphere.
This photo of the main shrine at Wat Tesarangsee in Fredericksburg, VA was taken at such an angle that I would have had to be on the floor on my back with the camera upside down to see through the viewfinder. No joke. And yet I got the shot simply by holding the camera at a certain angle and pressing the shutter release. Granted, this was not the first shot I did. This type of shooting is really hit-and-miss. Sometimes you get what you want and other times not so much. Practice is the real key to this type of photography.
Now let’s take a look at the monks and the temple in a more traditional shot. This is head-on, obviously, and not a bad picture, but it isn’t really very interesting either. You can’t tell anything about the people and don’t see anything spectacular about the shrine. Except for all that golden stuff. You can tell I have seen a good number of Thai Buddhist temples in my time.
I recommend giving this technique a try. It even has a name. My friend Steve Garfield calls it the “Carl Weaver Style,†thus immortalizing me in the annals of Flickr history. Try it out and post your results to the Camera Samurai Flickr Group.
Technorati Tags: discreet, viewfinder, interesting angle, photograph, camera anxiety, Phramaha Nattapong, Andy Carvin, DC Media Makers, Wat Tesarangsee, Fredericksburg, VA, photography, monks, temple, Steve Garfield, Carl Weaver Style
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:
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