Sarina with her strobist setup of SB-600 Speedlight & Yongnuo radio remotes in St. PetersburgBack at The Pier again this evening for my third of four DSLR Photography Lessons with Sarina. This lesson followed our established format of practicing off-camera-flash, "strobist," photography the first hour then editing digital photos she took a few days prior. I was glad to hear that Sarina improved her portrait shooting settings week to week no longer using any ISO above the minimum 200 on her Nikon D90. This week we worked on perfecting using the right shutter speed with the right aperture and the right speedlight power setting. It is really important to keep in mind that the speedlight lights your subject while the DSLR's exposure settings control the ambient (background) light.
First in our practice tonight we decided to include the background in the shots, thereby using a small aperture with a slower shutter speed. I then said I like bokeh and longer focal length portraits, so that meant setting a larger aperture and compensating for that increase in light by setting a faster shutter speed. Typically I would like to use about f/11 and 1/100th for the former and then f/5.6 and 1/200th for the latter.
We concluded by editing some of the photos Sarina took on a maternity shoot on Sunday. Most of the editing questions Sarina had revolved around effectively using the quick select tool to make selective edits to very specific parts of the photo only (SEE HOW TO DO THIS). For example, a bit of clothing material needed to be removed along a defined edge. Without first selecting the material to be removed, it would have been extremely difficult or near impossible to maintain that defined edge just clone stamping freely. Later I came up with an on the fly new way of whitening teach by going into the color balance settings and taking the yellow/blue slider more toward the blue end thereby reducing the yellow look of teeth. We of course did a quick select of only the person's teeth as we did not want to reduce yellow in the overall image.
Sarina has another maternity shoot before our next lesson so I look forward to seeing her continued progress.
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