Photography Tips

Photography Tip - Change all your DSLR settings in under 10 seconds

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Photograph opportunities often are not available for an infinite amount of time.  In fact, most are very, very finite and there are many times you have just one shot at making a photograph.  How can you insure you will always give yourself the best chance at making a great photograph even if you have just one shot at it?  By being able to change the settings on your DSLR very quickly.  

How quick?  

It depends on your particular DSLR and what dedicated buttons you have available.  No matter what DSLR you have, even if you have an entry level one, you should be able to change all five necessary settings for making a well exposed and sharp shot in ten seconds or less.  If you have a fully functional DSLR, i.e. two dials for changing settings, a top LCD display and dedicated buttons for all five things, then your goal should be five seconds or less.  Very rarely are all five things needed to be changed, but you should practice changing all five at home so that when you are out shooting you will be prepared.

Of course you have to know within fractions of seconds what to change your aperture to, or your shutter speed to, etc.  That knowledge combined with knowing your DSLR camera body with your eyes closed (seriously, if you have dedicated buttons you should be able to operate them eyes closed) results in giving yourself the best chance every time a sudden photograph opportunity comes up.

I offer 1-on-1 DSLR Photography Lessons that can help you learn both how to use your camera quickly and what to change the necessary settings to.  Reserve a lesson today!

1-on-1 Nikon D3100 DSLR Photography Lesson with Margaret in St. Petersburg Florida

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Margaret using her Nikon D3100 during our 1-on-1 DSLR photography lesson in downtown St. Petersburg FloridaYesterday evening I met Margaret in downtown St. Petersburg for our first 1-on-1 DSLR Photography Lesson.  There were dark clouds all around, but all they provided was a nice somewhat less hot cover for our lesson time and no rain at all.  The best of both worlds!  Margaret was not a first time DSLR owner as a majority of my photography students are.  She owned a Nikon D40 before recently buying a Nikon D3100, but all that time she had just been using auto-mode.  Now with the new DSLR, she finally was ready to learn to take control of her camera.

As I showed Margaret around her Nikon D3100 I explained that it only takes at most the setting of five things on the camera to make a well exposed and sharp image in any given shooting situation.  Beyond that we also talked about the benefits of shooting in RAW and how an external flash would help her shoot indoors better.  

After that intro we walked around the downtown St. Petersburg waterfront and were treated to a mothership looking cloud formation for a little landscape photography practice.  I also instructed Margaret on how to control the background (in focus or out of focus) using aperture and focal length.  I look forward to seeing her photographs shot in manual exposure mode from now on!

1-on-1 Nikon DSLR Photography Lesson with Rain in St. Petersburg Florida

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Rain photographing a fountain in downtown St. Petersburg during our first photography lessonI met Rain on a Monday morning for the first of our four 1-on-1 DSLR Photography Lessons together in the downtown St. Petersburg Florida area.  Like many people I meet here who have not really been to this part of St. Petersburg before, she was very impressed with its beauty.  Rain is ready to make a significant investment in her photography, of course starting with her buying a 4-pack of my DSLR Photography Lessons, and also in gear too.  We began by discussing which Nikon is best for her and we both agreed the Nikon D600 paired with the Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 lens would be the best way to get started filling out a camera bag for her photography needs.  She will have the camera for our second lesson.  It will be my first time to get hands on with that camera as well so I am looking forward to it.

Rain already had a good amount of photography knowledge, so I helped her organize it in teaching her my 5-step process for shooting in manual exposure mode and showing her around a Nikon DSLR camera body.  I look forward to our next photography lesson after she does some shopping! 

Photography Tip - Use a light stand for off camera flash strobist photography

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I am a big believer in having the right tools for the right job.  Often one can get by using another tool, but there is nothing like having the exact one you need to just make things much easier on yourself.  Such is the case with light stands.  You could use a tripod to hold a speedlight as you might already have one of those, but using a light stand is just much better.  

A tripod has a much larger footprint than a light stand.  Most light stands can be extended to nine feet or higher, much higher than a tripod reaches.  A light stand is faster and easier to setup.  Light stands are also cheap, starting around $50 for a decent one.  The biggest reason of course is that you can put a umbrella holder head on a light stand so you can use light modifiers.  

One extra light stand tip, if you do buy one, make sure to check if it comes with a head unit.  Most do not come with this necessary attachment.  This is a true story . . . the first light stand I ever bought I had no idea about needing a head unit.  I had no umbrella or softbox, I was just going to use a speedlight with diffuser cap (as seen in the above example).  The top of a light stand does have a standard screw that allowed me to attach the speedlight's foot to.  However, there was no ability to tilt the light down!  I had to have someone tilt over the entire light stand for the speedlight to be pointed at the subject.  I went out and got a light stand head (umbrella holder it may also be called) shortly there after.

When photographing families on the beach, I always use two speedlights.  It allows for even light across everyone in group shots of four or more.

Resize photographs to exact sizes with Photoshop for best online presentation on Facebook & Linkedin

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What is the final step in editing digital photos that you will display online?  Resizing.  This is a very simple thing to do, but very important for presenting your photographs online in the best possible quality.  Just uploading full resolution images is very rarely the way to go for a number of reasons.  One is that it takes up a lot of space and many websites do not allow large file uploads.  Secondly, who knows what kind of recompression and resizing websites use in presenting your images.  This is why every single image you see of mine online has been exactly resized in Photoshop to the best possible size for the location it is displayed on.  

In the above screenshot you can see the Photoshop Image Size dialogue box.  The Mac keyboard shortcut to get to it is: OPTION-CMD-I or you can go into the menus:  Image --> Image Size.  I use pixel count to resize my images.  Every image in the blog section of my website (you are looking at it now) is resized to 600px on the width maximum because that is what fits within the body portion of the blog page.  Photoshop will keep the height in proportion automaticaly when I type in 600px for the width, see it chose 399px for the height in the above example.

There is no loss in image quality when resizing in Photoshop, which is why I use it for all my images.  If I just let Squarespace (my content management system) resize a much larger image for me, that will eat up my alloted storage space much quicker and worse, may not display my photographs in maximum quality.  There could be pixelating resulting from poor resizing.

In the headshot example above, each one is 250px on the width.  The image on the left shows what can happen if a smaller image is stretched to a larger size.  A lot of detail in the image is lost.  The headshot on the right was resized from the original photograph to exactly 250px and looks like the full resolution image in detail and quality.  The same poor image quality can result if you upload a huge image then compact it into a much smaller space.  This has happened with past headshot clients actually.  Most website profile photos are only about 200px on the width, which is the case for popular networking site Linkedin.  So when the client uploads their full resolution headshot (2000px or larger) and Linkedin tries to squeeze that into just 200px worth of space, the image will look horrible.  In the case the client did not have resizing skills, I sent them a 200px version of their headshot.  

Facebook is a photograph displaying disaster.  They remain the only site that degrades image quality that I know of.  It is preposterous that they do it when no other photo intensive site does.  Still, it is an important place for me to show my work so I do upload my photos to it.  Even though I resize my images in Photoshop to Facebook's exact required dimensions, their resampling engines go to work on my images reducing their image quality.  

Since adding the feature to display a cover image to a Facebook profile, I have seen an increase in strangely sized and proportioned images on Facebook.  The exact dimension required is 851x315.  Nice even numbers you can remember easily right?

So how can you resize your photo to fit a Facebook Cover image space and minimize the image quality reduction Facebook will apply to the image anyway?  Load the image in Photoshop, choose the Crop Tool, and enter in the pixel dimensions of 851x315.  Select the area of the photograph.  Since 851x315 is a strange proportion, you will almost never be able to fit your whole photo in that area.  Once you crop the image to the right ratio, you still have to resize it.  Then go into Image Size as described above and type in 851 for the width.  Now you can upload a photo that will fit perfectly into the Facebook cover image spot, but you will notice the quality reduction applied despite this.

Action & Sports Photography Settings Tips from Aperture to Manual to Shutter Priority Exposure Modes

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Florida high school baseball action shot using aperture priority - Nikon D300 Nikkor 80-200mm @ f/4 ISO 320 1/3200I am a self-taught photographer with a careful ear for picking up photography knowledge from a variety of sources.  If you browse my work you can see that you can teach yourself to make photographs that people will eventually pay you for.  However, I spend a long time grinding away teaching myself, starting with making thousands of images in Japan over a 6-month period when I first got a DSLR, then for several years back here in Florida.  I would not recommend this method!  That is why I have been offering 1-on-1 photography lessons to teach people in 2-hours what it took me 2+ years to formulate and define.  Taking a lesson or class from a competent photography teacher is a great way to jump start your shooting skills.

So the weekly photography tips I post on this site are part of sharing the practical photography knowledge I gained grinding through those years out in the field, and the knowledge I continue to increase by now shooting paying jobs as a full-time pro photographer.  

In this post you can see action and sports shots that span this window of knowledge.

The baseball photo above was made I believe on my very first sports assignment, so you can say it is the epitome of beginner's luck!  Looking at the settings I used for the shot I would definitely yell at myself for that now.  I was shooting action in aperture priority, probably never the best choice, had my ISO at 320 during daylight, and the shutter speed was way faster than it needed to be.  

Horse jumping in Venice Florida - Aperture Priority - Nikon D300 Nikkor 80-200mm @ f/5.6 ISO 400 1/1600Early on in my time in Florida I also photographed horse jumping a good bit.  You can see by my settings I was making progress, even though still using aperture priority mode.  My ISO was still above the minimum even during daylight, but if I recall at that time I thought I needed that very fast shutter speed of 1/1600th to freeze the action, and to get a good exposure I had to increase the ISO.  Clouds would come and go and settings often needed to be tweaked, but choosing aperture priority and letting the camera adjust the shutter speed on the fly was definitely not the way to go.  I should have been using shutter priority mode.

Triathlon cycling in St. Petersburg Florida - Manual Exposure - Nikon D300 Nikkor 80-200mm @ f/4 ISO 640 1/1250Now we are jumping ahead two years to when I photographed the St. Anthony's Triathlon in St. Petersburg Florida.  I was now comfortable and competent shooting action & sports in any exposure mode.  Why did I choose manual mode then?  At this time the cyclists were coming by in consistent light (no sun going behind clouds).  I was photographing them as they passed by the exact same spot on the road too, therefore there was only one set of settings that produced the best exposure.  So I locked those in with manual exposure mode.  Why did I use the settings I did?  Well the cyclists were going really, really fast so 1/500th was not freezing them, so I used 1/1250.  I used f/4 because that fast shutter speed required I let a lot of light in, but I wanted to retain some depth of field and better sharpeness, so I did not use the maximum aperture of f/2.8 of my lens.  So having aperture and shutter speed restricted by the nature of the subject matter, to get the exposure I wanted I then had to increase my ISO to 640.  This was not the middle of the day, but rather just shortly after sunrise.  As the sun went up, I could gradually decrease the ISO I was using.

Pelican in flight - shutter priority - Nikon D300 Nikkor 80-200mm @ f/5.6 ISO 200 1/1250In this pelican shot you can see my full progress in shooting action shots.  I was using shutter priority mode, had my ISO at its lowest setting, and set the shutter speed to be plenty fast enough to freeze even the bird's wing tips.  The camera was choosing the aperture for me on the fly, and getting consistent f/5.6 results allowed for very good sharpness and depth of field.

So now I would recommend using only manual or shutter priority mode for sports and actions shots.  If no lighting conditions are changing, then lock things in with manual.  If lighting is changing due to shifting cloud cover, or the subject moving across different foreground and/or background light, then use shutter priority mode.  

Of course the minimum shutter speed to use for any action shots, or any moving subjects, is 1/500th and you must also use AF-C (Ai Servo) focus mode.  Both of those are musts.  As you can see from my above examples, though, other settings and parameters remain variables, and there may be multiple ways to get the same shot, but some settings combos are much better to use than others!

Photography Tip - get the subject's head above the horizon

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This photography tip is a long time in coming as it is one of the things that bothers me the most, that being having the horizon cut right through the subject's head in portrait photography.  Living in Florida there is never a beach very far away, meaning there is a distinct horizon in the background of photographs.  When composing a portrait, I always make sure the subject's head is above the horizon for a single subject.  Sometimes in group shots with very tall people and kids mixed, it is not always entirely possible, but for sure I will have the adult's heads above the horizon.  

So when you are out shooting on the beach next time, or anywhere that the horizon can clearly be seen, be sure to get the subject's head above the horizon.  The horizon going through the head of the subject is very distracting.  Just get lower when shooting to avoid this.  When photographing children, like in the example above, you may have to get quite low, often going on to one knee.  It is worth it though!