Archive for The Camera
Video for Canon EOS 5D Mark II Users
Posted by: | CommentsI have owned my Canon EOS 5D Mark II for, well, quite a while. I knew it recorded video. I thought I heard that the TV show “No Reservations with Anthony Bourdain” was shot entirely with it. I could not find any reference to that but I did find that it was used to shoot an entire “House” season finale, and the director says it’s ‘the future’.
I have gotten my manual out a number of times to look up how to set it to record video and gave up. Today I Googled “video on Canon 5D” and found a scary article about updating Firmware (do I have to mess with that?). That didn’t appear to be what I was looking for so I called my trusted camera sales person. Movie. I was supposed to look up MOVIE not video.
Since sound is important, I purchased a lavalier microphone by Audio-Technica for $28 and the sound is pretty good! This small microphone can clip to a collar so your subject doesn’t have to shout. The only draw back at this point is that it is on a cord but I think it is a good start before I invest in any money in any wireless systems.
Get out your manuals and look up MOVIE, not video, and play with it. This should be fun!
Five Tips for Working with Outdoor Light
Posted by: | CommentsPhotography is all about recording reflected light. Many beginners and amateurs are not yet familiar with how to see light and know what to look for yet. It can be quite a challenge to find locations that are suitable for outdoor portraits but there are some things you can use to your advantage. Here are five getting started tips:
- Photograph in the shade. Raccoon eyes, squinting eyes, deep dark shadows, and images with no catch lights in the eyes do not make a pleasing portrait. Place your subject in the shade with open sky as your main light source. This takes practice and deliberate study to find this kind of light. Going deep into the woods in too thick of shade is not going to give you a nice lighting pattern. By staying closer to the edge of the shade you will have great light coming from open sky.
- Photograph late or early in the day. This is often referred to as “Sweet Light”. An hour after sunrise and an hour before sunset is really beautiful light. The light is more even light and shadows are long and soft.
- Use a reflector. Reflectors work great to fill shadows and give a little kick of sparkle in the subject’s eyes. I personally use the gold side the most.
- Use a fill flash. When working in brighter conditions or wanting to include dramatic sky in your portrait images a fill flash is required to balance the lighting conditions for a proper exposure.
- Watch for color reflections. Color from items like green trees and red paint on a building, for example, will reflect into a person’s skin tone and shadows. This is not a desired outcome and will look unnatural. Be careful how close you are to strong color reflections. You can also correct minor color shifts in the artwork stage of your final image.
Of course you still must meter correctly, white balance, and process your files. But the more you get right in your camera first the easier the rest of the process is.
The cool thing is we can tell our camera what white is supposed to look like. This is called white balancing. If your camera understands what white is, other colors will fall into place more accurately. Be aware that colors do reflect and bounce around. For example, photographing with someone under a tree may cause a green to grey cast in the shadow areas of their face and neck.
Color temperature, measured in degrees referred to as Kelvin temperature (K), is the color of the light. You may remember seeing pictures of people in fluorescent light, everything was kind of greenish? That is an example of color temperature.
Our camera meters are designed to read 18% grey. By shooting in RAW and using a grey card to take reflected metering off of will make the process of color balancing in the processing stage possible. It is also fast, easy, and accurate. You can not do this with shooting JPEG.
I prefer to shoot RAW not only for the large amount of information I have for a quality file, I have more flexibility. I do not enjoy white balancing at every new location I go, especially when I photograph high school seniors. We change locations a lot!
To keep this simple but still get professional results, I manually set my color temperature on my camera to 4600K. (This setting works perfect for my studio lights and my system. Do not assume your work will look the same. You must test this for yourself.) This is close enough to the outdoor color temperatures so I can leave my camera at my indoor temperature and tweak any outdoor images in Adobe Bride Camera RAW processing.
Color balancing is tweaking the red, green, and blue channels of a file for the desired final effect like warming up skin tones in a portrait so people look healthy.
You may be interested in learning more about histograms also in the “Beyond the Photography Instruction Manual-Professional Results with Manual Photography”. I will take you through it step by step. Click here to learn more.
