That is what I have been doing lately with the Still life forum on PhotoCamel.

Here is what I photographed for the “Bottles” Still Life photography contest.

Photographed with one off Camera flash

Mushroom photograph in high contrast lighting

I am not sure where to begin.

I am as much a beginner in ‘photography’ as they come, and this blog is my husband’s who is currently trying to teach me how to use my camera, which he gave me after one of his upgrades.  Of course I am using the term ‘teaching’ very loosely, he is teaching me, but only as much as I will allow him to, he would be teaching me more…but, you know, husbands and wives…need I say more?  This all brings me to the reason I decided to write this article, the desire to learn photography is an extension of my drawing and painting.  I thought photography would enhance my artistic nature, well it did something more than that…it brought another whole dimension to my art and it awakened a new passion.  Now, would I say I am learning the technical aspects of photography…not so much! (And thank goodness for auto settings!) But everyone learns at their own pace and in their own way.  I am not technically savvy and I don’t care too much for the technical side of things, (or at least I didn’t think I did), but as I am beginning to see some possibility in my pictures I find myself wanting to know more about my camera and what it can do.  I seem to be outgrowing the auto settings and I am looking for something in between his level and the basic auto settings.

Photography, Learning One Step at a Time

My husband’s way of learning is very technically driven and he relishes the idea of sitting down and reading a manual, me not so much, it feels like you are pulling teeth without Novocain.  For him there is no other way to learn, for me it is about the bite size pieces of information given at the time I need it. It tends to stay with me longer when there is a reason for the lesson and I can apply the lesson.  I put off learning this art form from my husband for several years because it all seemed so daunting and hard to understand.  There seemed to be a lot more to knowing how to use the camera and not as much toward the creative side of photography as an art form.  Now, here is where my husband will tell you that knowing how to use your camera is the art form, but for me the aesthetics of the end result, the photo, is the art form.  So I think in the creativity of balancing our ying and yang marriage, we have come to some sort of truce about it all. I will learn from him what I need to know by asking questions and he will answer those questions, with the understanding that if it begins to get too technical in nature I have to stop him because he loses me.  So, there is hope for those of us who have to take the technical knowledge in bite size pieces.

After I learn what I need to know about how to work a specific function of my camera I will practice it by applying it to the photo I am trying to create through my lens.  It all seems to be working.  So, I guess what I am hoping to bring to the blog-site is the excitement I feel when I capture a photo with the camera that has some potential.  It is even better if it is not an accident and I actually got the shot I wanted to get, (and dare I say it) by technically planning the shoot.  I hope to bring the creativity and spontaneity that I feel about photography.  I am not technically savvy, but I know what I want before I go out to take the shot and I am very good at framing the shot in both my mind and my lens.  I enjoy taking macro shots of unusual subjects, I enjoy urban settings, the dirty side of the city, I enjoy architectural angles, repetitive patterns found in architecture.  I really like the stark difference in textures found throughout the city, the softness of grass next to the hardness of cement.  I enjoy steeples and dramatic skies.  So photography has woke my natural awe at the beauty around me and developed it into a passion. I want to share with people how something so simple can be beautiful through a different set of eyes and a lens.  My contributions will focus on making the auto settings work for you and approaching photography from the aesthetics ~ framing the shot and using that to make your family shots not seem so chaotic.

For those of you that don’t know what a script or action is I will briefly explain. A script for PSP (Paint Shop Pro) is basically a set of recorded instructions that tell PSP what to do.

I have created a script that will create a blurred frame of an image and place it around the image you are working with. See the photographs below.

Grand baby photograph without the frame

Framed photograph of Grand Son

To download this script just right click here and select “Save Link As”. Then navigate to “My Documents\My PSP Files\Scripts-Trusted” And save it with the default name. The next time you start up Paint Shop Pro it will appear in your scripts list.

To use the Blurred_Frame script you need to have an image loaded into PSP and the Script toolbar turned on. Make sure you have done all the editing you want to do  and have saved the file in the pspimage format. You need to do this because when you run this script it will flatten your image.

There are two ways to run this script. Silent or Interactive. You select the mode by clicking on the toggle in the Script toolbar.

Paint Shop Pro X2 Script Toolbar

The red arrow is pointing to the toggle in this image. The toggle state shown is interactive. This means that when the script runs you will have the option to change each dialogue box before it is executed.

I suggest you run it the first time or two in silent mode. The toggle button will not be highlighted as it is here when it is in silent mode. This mode will run till completion and not allow you to change anything.

After you have run it a few times click on the toggle and change it to interactive. You will then have the opportunity to change the size of the borders or the color and learn just how it works.

Let me know if you like this script or even what I could do to change it. Happy New Year!

My wife created this green floral arrangement and asked me to photograph it for her. She wanted an image that she could use for decor (a wall hanging) that would tie in with a certain color scheme.

The first thing I do in a situation like this is hit my stash of books for lighting and set up inspiration. One of my favorites  is from HPBooks, vintage 1986 titled “Pro Techniques for Studio Photography
” by Jerry Fruchtman. This book is entirely film related but the techniques will apply equally to film and digital.

I now have a general idea of what I am going to do. I would like the green of the flowers (the color image is on the full article page) to be the dominate color and everything else as close to black and white as possible.

.

The lighting for the flowers needs to come from above. I want the base to be black so I used black velvet. The background needs to go black at the edges and still provide separation.  Since the vase is glass filled with glass marbles I also need to use reflectors to highlight the edges or they will blend into the background.

Here is how I set up the photograph.

The background is a roll of Superior Dove Grey 53″ seamless background paper positioned about 5′ behind the vase.  To light the background I used a Vivitar 285 placed on a small table top tripod and set on the floor. The flash was pointed at the background but kept fairly level with the floor. I shaped the light with a piece of black FOAMIE wrapped around the flash. The 285 was set at 1/16 power and triggered with an optical slave plugged into its foot.

For the main light I used a WL5000 placed in a 24″ x 36″ softbox about 2′ above the flowers. I used this light at full power so I could get a small enough aperture to ensure adequate Depth of Field through out the flowers. WIth a test exposure I realized the tonal range was so great that the top of the flowers were blowing out while the underneath was blocking up.

To bring the exposure latitude into a recordable range I placed a piece of approximately 1′ x 2′ black construction paper inside the center of the softbox and added a silver reflector to both sides of the vase. The reflectors not only helped to brighten up the underside of the flowers but they also highlighted the edge of vase which helps to separate it from the background.

My final exposure was 1/125 @ f-14 ISO 100. Here is the color image:

I was pretty happy with the image, so is my wife. But one thing kept bothering me. The 2 leaf’s in the vase don’t have enough detail in my opinion. This made me start to think of how would this look as a black and white. So I loaded the image in Paint Shop Pro X2 and started to play with the channel mixer. What I found to be the best conversion was using the green channel only.

I’ve always thought there had to be some kind of trick or high tech gear to accomplish these images. Then I came across this article on The Strobist blog: How to Photograph Water Drops. After reading that article I had to give it a shot. Here is one of my images:

Photograph of a Water Drop with one "off camera" flash.

It wasn’t difficult to set up and start getting some very interesting images. However it did take some patience and a lot of compact flash card space!

Step one was to find a suitable pan or tray to catch the water drops in. All I had access to were some old scratched up cookie sheets.  So, I grabbed the darkest one I could find and set it on the edge of my dinning room table.

I then set up a 20 x 30 sheet of white foam core at the back of the pan to bounce my Vivitar 285 flash off of which was set up to the left of the pan on the table. Pointing the Vivitar 285 flash at the foam core and not the water, lighting the water drops from behind.

The flash was set to 1/16th power on manual. This will give you the shortest flash duration and the quickest recycle time.

A plastic Ziplock bag was half way filled with water and suspended from a background stand I set up over the cookie pan. I used a stick pin to poke a hole in the water bag and start the water dripping into the pan.

My camera was mounted onto a tripod and placed very close to where the water was hitting the pan, less than a foot! To focus, I put the lens on Manual focus and stood up a needle for pumping air into footballs in the pan where the water drops were hitting. Once I focused on the air needle I removed it and shot an image at f8 to check my exposure. The resulting exposure was good. I set my camera to record RAW images so I could play around with the color temp later.

So I started shooting………as fast as the flash could recycle. After shooting quite a few shots I previewed what I had on the camera. Most of the shots were boring but a couple looked great. I wanted to check the depth of field so I zoomed in on one of the shots that looked like a crown. Only half of the shape was in focus, bummer!

I kicked up the flash to 1/4 power and stopped the lens down to get more DOF, refocused and shot away. I got some pretty amazing images but it took many clicks of the camera to hit one every now and then.

The photograph I included above is one I liked but I do not like the scratches in the pan that show up in the image. The blue color comes from setting the color temp to 2500°k.

I liked the overall image but again, I did not like the scratches. Hey, maybe if I make the picture black and white and increase the contrast a bit the scratches will ‘work’ in the image better. The black and white is below….tell me what you think.

Black and White version of a water drop photograph

I like this one better.

What I normally do once I have transferred all of my photos to the computer is immediately copy all of the RAW files onto a backup CD. I will not erase any files on the Compact Flash card until I need to use that card again. At that point, I will format the card in the camera.

Select and Adjust with DPP

Now that I feel safe that I should not loose any images, I will load up Digital Photo Professional and navigate to the folder that contains the images I just downloaded from the CF card.  Using the Quick Check Tool I will go through all the images and number them 1 for a “keeper”, 2 for a “maybe I will keep it” and 3 for “delete”.

At this point I will select all of the images marked with a “3″ and delete them. The only thing that remains for me to do in DPP is adjust the exposure for each image. To do this I will select all of the remaining images and then enter edit mode. While in edit mode, I will make sure that I have the “Highlight” and “Shadow ” warnings turned on.

Highlight and shadow warning in Digital Photo Professional

This will allow me to see when the highlights are burning out. I will raise the “Brightness Adjustment” until I start to see the red highlight warning. Then using the left arrow key I will slowly back the Brightness Adjustment down until the red warning goes away. If I shot this correctly, the Brightness Adjustment will be set at zero adjustment.

Brightness adjustment set at zero

You can do other things in DPP like clone out dust spots but I prefer to do this in Paint Shop Pro X2. So at this point, I am finished making adjustments in Digital Photo Professional. All that is left is to output all the files as tiff’s. I will sometimes print a contact sheet from DPP to help me select the images I will manipulate in PSPX2 if needed.

My next installment will cover the post processing I did in Paint Shop Pro.

Grandson's portrait shot with one light.

We recently had a rather large family group weekend visit. This group included my 2 daughters and their very young sons, one each! Along with the visit comes the customary “I want you to take my boys portrait while we are here”, to which I always reply “no problem, I planned on it.”

Grandson's portrait on a fireplace with one light

Well as the weekend progressed our small house became a very big mess. You see….I don’t have a studio space so I have to set up somewhere in the house. It was too cold outside and the weather was rather nasty, so the park was a no go. Within this household mess it was hard to find a clear enough area to set up a background and some lights so I looked for an area that would not require a background set up.

The place I settled on was the fireplace. It gave me a decent background to shoot against and the Hearth (is that what you call the step in front of the fireplace?) is just the right height to seat the little portrait subjects.

For lighting I needed to keep it simple and quick. I decided on one main light and a reflector. The main light was placed at about 45° camera left and placed just above the level of their heads. This main light consisted of an old White lightning 5000 with a 36″ white umbrella. I then feathered the light by aiming the center of the umbrella’s bounced light just in front of the child’s face. Feathering the light in this manner also helped to keep the light level down on the fireplace. On the opposite side, directly to the subjects left and just out of the frame I placed a biological light stand (the Dad of the youngest) to hold a silver reflector. The reflector provided some highlighting to the left side of the head and helped to separate them from the darker background.

Lighting diagram showing portrait set up

Getting the exposure I wanted was the next step. I started by setting the WL5000 to its lowest power setting which is one third. Keeping the light output as low as possible would allow me to use a very wide aperture so I could keep my “Depth of Field” as shallow as possible. I did not want the fireplace to be as sharp as the subjects. My shutter speed was set at 1/125. The Canon 20D I was using will sync at 1/250 but with the cheap radio slaves I use to trip my lights I sometimes get a partial image because the reaction speed of the cheap radio slave is not that reliable. Shooting at 1/125 has pretty much eliminated that problem.

Now I know my lights enough to know I was going to get an f-stop of about f5.6. After my first shot I looked at the histogram on the camera and saw that to get the edge of the highlights close to the edge of the histogram I would need another stop of light. Opening up the lens to f4.5 gave me the histogram I was looking for. My camera was set to create a Raw file only. This allows me to fine tune the exposure in Digital Photo Professional before I output a TIFF for manipulation in Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2.

I am now ready to shoot. At this point the mothers of the two boys have changed their kids clothes and cleaned them up a bit. It didn’t last long…by the time I had enough shots in the bag they were a mess again!

In my next post I will cover the post processing I used to get the final photograph.

I have decided to abandon the old style of web site building and forge ahead with a blog! It just makes better sense to me. My focus is to explore photography from the creation of an image to the final output and any digital manipulation in between.

While I am new to blogging, photography is an old friend. I started my exploration back in the heydays of Kodachrome, before Ektar and when the thought of a digital camera was science fiction. When I started my venture into photography it was not hard to find magazines that contained good how to articles. These magazines have become so product oriented that I have stopped reading most of them in disappointment.

My wish is to produce post filled with “how to” information. I will explore, photograph, manipulate and post as much “How I did it” information as I can. There is no right or wrong technique to achieve your image.