A-Photo Mag

Well, you could do it out of a studio as well! If you remember our last article on what makes shadow less lighting, this one would be much easier to understand, so we really suggest you read that before you get into this one.

As was discussed in the article titled ‘What Makes Shadow Less Lighting’, it is pretty simple to understand the difference between hard and soft, diffused light. Let us now learn how one can create diffused light. Usually, in most photographic applications, diffused light creates much more pleasing an atmosphere, and adds a nice touch to the image.

You must have seen studios with white umbrellas over the flash lights. That’s a fine way of creating diffused light. Alternatively, soft boxes of various sizes that fit on to your studio light create almost perfect diffused light. When you want the minimum shadows and the maximum soft effect of the light on your subject, you need to minimize the soft box-subject distance. Try this as a learning experience – use a small model subject under a soft box if it is available to you. Try photographing the subject with various light-subject distances to see the difference this has on your image. Of course you will need to make appropriate changes to exposure, since the intensity of light is greater at lower distances.

Many readers probably do not have their own studio apparatus. Do not be disheartened, you can create diffused lighting with your portable flash unit as well. If you have one with a swiveling head, turn it towards a wall, or bounce it off the ceiling to create a wonderful soft and diffused light with the flash unit. This is how wedding photographers are often able to provide awe-inspiring lighting with only a simple on-camera portable flash gun. If your flash head does not swivel around to point in various directions and/or angles, you could still do something about it. Use a bit of semi transparent paper over the flash head to diffuse the light. Remember to make adequate changes to exposure to compensate for the light loss. Of course, if you have an auto flash, you need have no worries about exposure, as long as you affix the paper over the flash’s ‘eye’ or sensor as well! It is quite simple to create diffused lighting isn’t it? All you need is a bit of creativity.

Here’s what NOT to do to create shadow less lighting with your flash gun…don’t use the flash on camera – straight on. If you have an adequate flash chord extension, you could even place your flash away from the camera, at an angle. That would give true modeling to the subject. It may not be soft lighting, but at least you will avoid the ugly shadow at the back, and give some modeling to your subject at the same time.

Experience with various kinds of paper and semi-transparent material in front of the flash head to get interesting lighting effects…

We see shadows all around us, in nature. The shadows are what help us see three dimensionally. To put that another way, the gradation from light to dark on the surfaces of objects helps us to see depth. We’ve covered that in another article with the example of a circle and a sphere, both represented on two dimensional paper. So, in the absence of shadows we see the world in a sort of two-dimensional way. That is not what shadow less lighting is all about by the way….just so you don’t get confused between the two.

By shadow less lighting, we refer to diffused light that does not cast a sharp shadow. Light that is not diffused, for example the flash light from a compact camera, casts a sharp shadow of the subject on the wall behind. That’s light that is NOT diffused. So what really causes this sharp shadow? Try this simple experiment – for this you will need a room with a bulb as well as a tube light. The bulb could well be a lamp light without a lamp shade. Now, switch on ONLY the bulb and hold your hand a few inches away from it. You see a shadow of your hand on the wall opposite. Next, switch off the bulb and switch on the tube light. Hold your hand near the tube light. No shadow! The bulb light is an example of light that is NOT diffused, and the tube light creates diffused light. The basic difference is – the bulb is a point light source (the light emanates from the filament of the bulb, which is pretty much a point source). The tube light on the other hand, is a diffused light source, meaning light does not emanate from any one point within the tube, but from all points on the surface of the tube, with equal intensity.

When you keep this simple idea of a tube and a bulb light in mind, you increase your control and understanding of diffused light, which is so often used in photography, especially in the studio environment. In reality, the tube light also creates a shadow, but a very soft one when compared to the point light source, the bulb. The shadows created by diffused light are much softer and thereby pleasing to the eyes. However, certain shoots call for the hard light of the bulb, the point light source. These may include a photo shoot that mimics the lighting from a spot light on a stage. So, let us not compartmentalize hard and soft lighting into good and bad categories, but rather get a better understanding on when and where each kind is required, and hone a better control over creating each kind of lighting artificially. In nature of course, the sun’s light is usually diffused by the clouds. However, on clear days when the clouds disappear, one can often see sharp shadows of people and objects, especially when the sun is high up at times like noon.

One of the first things we notice about an image is its sharpness level. Sharpness is associated with the quality of lens, the aperture used and critically, the point of focus. The more accurately you have focused on the subject, the better will be the overall sharpness in the image. Ideally sharpness is something that needs to be taken care of at the shooting stage and not the post production stage. If certain information is missing in the raw file from the camera, nothing on computer can mimic it. However, we definitely can increase the apparent sharpness of images that are not of very low quality in the first place. Do not use the techniques mentioned in this article as a rescue tool when you have made a boo boo in the shooting stage. Rather, use it as a touch up before final presentation of your images. Again, there is nothing that can replace a quality lens, the right aperture or the critical point of focus. Alright, lets get down to the photoshop bit -

Check out the two image above. The second one appears much sharper than the first, if you look closely. Let us learn how to do this. As usual, open up the image in Photoshop using FILE-OPEN. Once the image is opened, go to the filters menu and choose SHARPEN, and further choose UNSHARP MASK in the sub menu. Here you will be presented with three options.

Well, once you have the Unsharp mask options in front of you, you can begin sharpening the image. The first option, AMOUNT obviously controls the amount of sharpening that is applied to the picture. Instead of beginning with this, we suggest you start with the second control option of RADIUS. This effects the radius of pixels that are effected with the sharpening procedure. The levels of sharpening that you apply – the levels of the 3 tools you see in front of you, will vary depending on the resolution of the image, as with most Photoshop tools. The larger the dimensions of the image, for example, the larger will be the required pixel radius for sharpening. When you alter the variables in the sliding bars, you resulting effects will simultaneously be visible in the opened image. Experiment with radius and amount until you reach the desired effect. Beware-do not sharpen the image to such an extent that it is obvious to the naked eye – you begin to see high contrasts when you over-sharpen, and this is to be avoided at all times. The 3^rd and final tool on the Unsharp mask palette is the THRESHOLD tool. Use this to soften the sharpening effect if it is overly obvious after you’ve adjusted the first 2 sliding bars. We usually leave this alone and work with just the first 2 options of amount and radius.

You could use the SHARPEN EDGES tool under the SHARPEN menu to sharpen only the outlines of the subject. However, the technique mentioned above will give you much more acceptable and natural results. 

Photographing events and concerts of people that you admire and love is an exciting kind of photographic experience. Why, some even get so lucky as to have traveling jobs photographing their favorite bands and rock stars. We can’t promise you that you’ll land your dream job. But we CAN show you how to get better at photographing live concerts.

Use a High ISO

When photographing live shows, the best way you can capture the atmosphere of the moment is to use the existing lighting. Stage decorators and technicians go to great lengths to organize impressive stage lighting, probably coordinated with sound effects. It would be a pity to zap all that creativity away by using a fill flash or on-camera flash. So turn off your flash and turn up the ISO! Trust us; it’s worth the extra bit of grain at ISO 1600, than to have flat lit concert images that look like they’ve been taken by an amateur. While we do agree that lower ISO levels give the best quality, shooting concerts is more about getting the right timing than getting a high quality picture of a static moment…

Turn off the AF

Any auto focus mechanism requires a certain amount of minimum light level for it to work effectively. In concerts where the lights often flash, such as rock shows and dance events, this becomes difficult. The camera’s auto focus mechanism simply does not have the capability to focus when the lights are flashing on and off and varying in intensity as well. No camera in today’s market would be able to lock focus in such circumstances. This is why you could get off-focus images in low light conditions. The answer of course lies in switching the focus to Manual Focus. Many compacts apart from DSLRs of course, offer the manual focus feature. To make things even better, use as small an aperture as possible, so the depth of field is greatest. Again, read that as very high ISO levels to start with (out first tip).

Work to the music!

Say you’ve fired a few test shots in lighting similar to the stage at its brightest…and worked out an acceptable aperture-shutter aped-ISO combination…you are at the concert and ready to fire…how do you get your exposures spot on, how do you time your shots when the lights are constantly turning themselves on and off to the sound of music? Well…simple. Listen to the music! With a little bit of effort, you will quickly get into the groove of the music and start getting ‘in tune’ with it. Expect the lights to go brighter when the drum solo is approaching…for a shoot like this, it would be great if you already know the songs that are going to be played by the band on stage. One quickly realizes that it is very fulfilling to be able to shoot in rhythm to the music. You will probably walk away with the best pictures of the day, if you use these three simple tips to their best applicability.

One of the most common complaints that amateur photographers have is ‘blurred’ images. ‘Blur’ can be a result of two kinds of errors. One would be an off-focus lens, and the other reason is usually camera shake. Both these errors are commonly referred to by the layman as blur.

As far as off-focus images go, it is usually a result of wrongly set focusing ring on a manual focus camera. If you use a auto focus camera, and still find some images off focus, it is probably because of the fact that your subject was off-center. Most auto focus mechanisms take the center-weighted approach, meaning – they focus on whatever subject is found at the center of the frame. If your subject is off-center, try this simple trick for error-free and in-focus images – get the subject into the center of your frame, and half-press the shutter. When you do this, the lens locks on to the subject, and usually a digital camera will alert you of the fact that the subject has been locked in focus, with a beep. Now, DO NOT take your finger off the shutter button. Keep it half-pressed as you re-compose your frame to the desired composition. Now, you can fire the shutter and get a in-focus image. Alternatively, if you are finding it difficult to half-press the shutter to get the focus lock, switch over to manual focus mode and us your judgment to get the subject sharp and clear. Finally, the smaller the aperture you use, the more of a range would you get into focus (more depth of field). The final technique mentioned (small apertures) should only be used at times when you are in an absolute hurry, since it does not always give you the perfect results you can expect with the former two techniques mentioned.

Camera shake is another cause for blurred images. This is quite different from the former reason of off-focus, and is simpler to understand and simpler to correct as well. Typically, you would get an image with camera shake when the shutter speed was set to too low a value, and the picture taken hand-held. There are more than one ways to correct camera shake. For one, maker sure that your shutter speed is at least the inverse of the focal length used. If you re using a 300mm setting on your lens, your shutter speed would need to be set to 1/300 of a second at least. Next, you should use a tripod whenever and wherever it is possible to do so. Where a tripod is unavailable, use a wall or a tree to rest against, as you fire the shutter. In the absence of such, use your knee to rest your hands on. Also, never jerk down the shutter release but instead, squeeze it gently till the trigger fires, much like a gun is fired! Finally, rest the camera against the side of your face for support. This is critical especially with the heavy digital-SLRs.

1. Don’t use the fill-flash unless absolutely required - it is a fact that in-built camera flashes tend to give a very flat and 2-dimensional appearance to photographs. Avoid using it unless the existing light just isn’t adequate. Try using longer shutter speeds instead. In case of automatic cameras, shutting off the flash (if possible) would automatically ensure longer shutter speeds.

2. Don’t pose people awkwardly - it is ridiculous to see people posed in awkward positions, especially when the subject is a shy person who doesn’t like doing so in the first place. With people like those, it is much better to shoot them candid, or give them a prop to distract their attention.

3. Don’t leave room for red eyes - when using flash, avoid the red eye syndrome. You can do so by ensuring that the eyes are not absolutely parallel and directly in fron of the flash. Try shooting at an angle to the face.

4. Don’t use high ISO levels. Well, not unless the existing light is too low. Remember, the lower the ISO value, the better would be the pixel quality in your files.

5. Don’t allow for cluttered backgrounds. A distracting background can take the charm out of the most pleasant of portraits. Make sure you throw the background off focus if you cannot reposition the subject. Also, you could zoom in as much as possible, to keep your attention (and the viewers’) on the subject’s eyes.

6. Never shoot strangers unawares. Thats what the paparazzi do, and that is why they often get into trouble! Of course, candid photographs are always a special something. But when shooting candid, it is better to do so with people you know.

7. Never jerk down the shutter release. Instead, squeeze it gently until it fires. This ensures you do not allow the camera to ’shake’ by the finger movement. In fact, it is also good to hold your breadth for the second you are firing your shutter, while you rest the camera against the side of your face!

8. Never leave your camera at home! If you are looking for winning images, you need to carry your camera with you everywhere you go. For example, this candid image was photographed on the spur of the moment when the photographer’s friend sat down to rest after a long bike ride.

 9. Never leave batteries in your camera for lengthy storage. It is a pathetic way to lose your camera’s functionality. All batteries leak after a certain period of time, especially the use and throw ones. So, if your camera uses something like AAA batteries, REMOVE them when storing your camera for long durations.

10. Never let your camera get damp. Well, not unless it is one of the more modern water-proof models. Dampness is one of the worst enemies of all cameras, digital cameras in particular. Use a water-proof case for your camera while transporting it.

Positioning and posing people is a vital aspect of every day snapshot photography as well as professional photography. It is true that seldom does the everyday ‘amateur’ photographer have the presence of mind, or the time to ‘wait’ for a natural photograph-friendly moment to occur. More often, we use the camera as a means to capture everyday moments on family picnics and get-togethers with friends. Here are a few tips on how you can pose people for your photography. We hope the article will be of use to you, and that you will soon be able to shoot more appealing images after reading this.

Many professionals feel that posing is more than half the ‘portrait battle’ won! Body language plays a vital role when you position the limbs and head and torso of your model(s). A chin held high spells out confidence. A chin held a little too high could, on the other hand, speak of pride. Similarly, a stooping posture could give the viewer an impression of sluggishness or depression, while a chest held out firmly tells the viewer that the model is confident and content.

Photographing and posing children is of course much more difficult than shooting images of adults, simply because kids do not respond to specific instruction as adults do. So, one needs much more patience and dedication to shoot a portrait like the one shown above. It is a great idea to ’set up’ everything other than the child, and wait for the right moment to begin clicking away. For the above shot, the photographer conveniently asked the child to lean her elbow on the bonnet of the family car, and then began conversing with the child. The hand on the bonnet forced a pose out of the child. Being the exceptionally boisterous child that Tanya is, she was not shy at all, as she laughed at all of the photographer’s jokes with zest!

Of course, it is much more difficult to photograph a child, or an adult for that matter when he or she is camera-shy. In such case it is best to pre-occupy the subject’s attention with a prop of some kind. For extremely shy people, it could well be their favorite book or magazine. In case of children, it could be their favorite toy…

A few things to remember in general - never let the background be too cluttered. Never let poles and trees ‘grow’ out of people’s heads and shoulders. Instead, it is better to lean them against the prop. Also, why not get the person’s hands to do something? Hands tend to go stiff when people are asked to pose for a photo. Again, in the above image, the child’s right hand was forced to get involved in the pose, by asking the child to take her hat off. Finally, shoot more images than you require, and select the best of the lot - to get the right expression on the subject’s face. The above image is one out of about 20 photographed one after another.

When photographing in the outdoors, one needs to work with ambient light as the main light source (generally). In such a scenarios you can obviously not have much of a control over the lighting conditions. You need to work with the existing light, which is affected by the position of the sun, the clouds and the relational positioning of the subject. Obviously we cannot have a control over the position of the sun or the clouds. That leaves us with positioning the subject as our most versatile tool.

The classic rule of outdoor photography tells us to keep the subject in front of the sun, meaning keep your back to the sun and position the subject in front of you. The subject would be well-illuminated in this case, and moreover you would eliminate the risk of lens flare (which occurs when the light source is in front of the lens behind the subject). This is a fail safe method to get good exposures. However, make sure that if you have a large area of the sky behind the subject, you lock focus on the subject by half-pressing the shutter before you fire. Also, the exposure can go haywire if the camera was focused on the sky instead of the subject. In such case, you would get a well-exposed sky and an under-exposed subject. To take things further, that is exactly what you should do if you want to photograph a silhouette!

If you wish to experiment with outdoor lighting further - well, wel need to break the rule we just taught you! Lets say we are shooting a portrait. Have you ever seen outdoor portraits where the sun creates a kind of halo effect in the hair of the subject - the classic ’sunshine in your hair’ look? If you want to shoot such a portrait, wait for the time when the sun is low on the horizon. Twilight is too late, around 4pm should do fine in most countries. The sunlight should have started to turn yellow by then, but still bright enough for a good exposure - and just NOT bright enough to create a lens flare. So - we have a light source-subject-camera arrangement here. Look through the viewfinder and position the camera-subject combo in such a way as to catch that light in the hair. This works very well for brown and blond hair. Also, zoom in as much as you can. Not only are longer focal lengths better for portraits in general, but they provide just the right effect for the sunshine in your hair effect.

If you wish to shoot outdoors at night, you have no option but to either use flash lighting, or long exposures. In case of the latter, you will need a tripod, or a support of some kind to place the camera upon. Using natural light in the outdoors, is however the best light source you can have. Just as long as you can either wait for the right time (for the right lighting), or position your subject to suit your photo idea.

A sunset in Goa, India

The red eye syndrome on photographs is a common problem. If you do not know what it is, it is the bright red appearance of the pupil or both pupils, in certain photographs where flash light was used to illuminate the subject. There are a few ways around this problem. Let us understand first, what causes the red eye. In low light conditions, the pupils of the eye expand much like the aperture of your camera’s lens, so as to allow more light to fall on the retina. This forms a brighter image where light levels are not sufficient to do so on the ‘film’ of the eye - the retina. When the eye experiences brighter light, the pupils contract (like a smaller aperture) to accomodate the increase in light, and therefore this expansion and contraction of the pupils is constantly taking place as we experience varying light intensities. Now, the flash on the camera is obviously used in low light levels. Keeping in mind that the pupils of the eyes of the subject were already expanded in such a scenario, the eyes are not prepared for the unnatural burst of light. In such case, if and when the flash and the eyes are near-parallel or parallel to ach other, the flash light hits the retina, and bounces off it to create the red eye. The redness is of course, thanks to the color of blood within the retina. A little bit on how it can be avoided -

Solution 1:

Try and NOT have the eyes and the flash parallel to each other. In other words, do not shoot directly into the subject’s eyes while using flash. Chances are, you will have a red eye effect on your photograph if you do.

Solution 2:

If you already have an image with red eyes, do not worry. We have Photoshop to the rescue as usual. Open the image in Photoshop (File>Open). Select the red area in both eyes using the lasso tool. Give your selection a sufficient feather effect. Now, simply play with the Hue/Saturation/Lightness option (Image>Adjust>Hue/Saturation) to remove the red eye, in a most natural looking fashion.

Solution 3:

Certain cameras have a built in red eye reduction feature. This simply means that the camera’s flash fires one or two times before the shutter release/final exposing flash. The reason for this is, the initial bursts of light tune the eyes of the subject into the bright light levels condition. Thanks to this, the pupils contract, and the eyes are no longer taken by surprise when the final image is photographed. More often than not, this method does not leave room for the red eye. However, in some cases, when the camera flash and the eyes are parallel to each other, a speck of red eye may still be visible. But do keep in mind, this method also consumes more battery power thanks to the extra bursts of flash per image.

Correcting colors on an image is one of the most widely used applications of photo-correcting software. Let us take a closer look at how and why this can be done.

The truth is, that any digital camera, however much effort has been put into its color correction and white balance settings; creates a color cast under certain situations. This is thanks to the different ‘color temperatures’ of different kinds of lights.  For example, our everyday tube lights have a ‘cooler’ tone as compared to the ‘warm tone’ bulb lights from incandescent light sources. No auto white balance setting can be so perfect (at least not till today) that it can accommodate changes for a variety of light sources such as fluorescent, neon, bulb, tube light and daylight. Most cameras perform well under daylight. So what do you do when you get an image with a color cast? Well, you open Adobe Photoshop!

Check this image out for instance. The skin tones clearly tell you that it has a yellowish and unnatural tone. Well, we open the image in Photoshop, and then open the color corrections option. In fact it is called color balance in Photoshop, and you can reach this panel under IMAGE-ADJUST-COLOR BALANCE-

This shows you a sliding tool. In fact it shows you 3 sliding adjustments wherein you can adjust the red, green and blue tones - consequently adjusting their complimentary tones of Cyan, Magenta and Yellow respectively. Consider the image in question. We have declared that it has a markedly yellowish tone. This is obviously due to the fact that it was photographed under something like bulb light with the camera’s white balance set to daylight. Most compact camera users never fiddle with the camera’s white balance settings, and this is exactly what you can expect as a result. Anyway, we declare that it has a yellow tone simply by looking at the image.

Once you have the sliding tool open under the COLOR BALANCE option on Photoshop, we need to reduce the yellow. In other words, we increase the blue. Either way you look at it, it has the same effect on the image nevertheless. When we reduce the yellow (and a bit of red as well), the image begins to look much better - in fact we have adjusted it to clearly look much better, almost as if it were photographed under daylight -

 Do keep in mind that the color correction tools cannot have an effect over the exposure (or the brightness level) of the images. It simply replaces one color tone with another of your choice. However, the wrong color balance at times does seem to look like there is a problem with exposure.

Photoshop also has an auto color correct option. Look under IMAGE menu (IMAGE-ADJUST-AUTO COLOR). This works very well at times, but we have learned that one can get much better results by doing the correction manually using the above described process.