More of the traditional stuff

Not too traditional mind, I try and avoid the getting in the wedding car shots whenever possible. As mentioned previously, I did have a lot of time with this couple as they are close friends so as a result I have quite a few to post, I might put a slideshow up at some point too.

These are more the traditional black and whites which I really love. The shadows are slightly warmer than a straight black and white and a decent vignette also help the image along.
I won't go into the exif data other than to say I was at a higher ISO than I should have been in bright outdoor conditions but only 400 so not really noticeable. It's never a good idea to step out of a dim church into the sun and start papping everyone at ISO3200!

Black & Whites with lots of Grain

Last night I was messing around with a technique I had seen using soft focus and digital noise to try and replicate an old photography style probably similar to Holga type photos. It relied heavily on the image being slightly out of focus, converted to black and white and a lot of grain added.

Grain is the film equivalent of noise in digital and a lot of the purists say it can't be replicated, where as noise is a pretty horrible by product of shooting at high ISOs, grain can add another element to the photo. I originally though it would be better to use a high ISO (say, 3200) and try and add grain digitally. However the noise is a little uneven and seems to almost create bands on the image, especially if you increased the noise further by increasing the exposure in Lightroom.

With this image, and yes it was taken quite quickly with little compositional thought, I did use a high ISO and wide aperture and tried not to focus on anything in particular. I then used silver efex (a photoshop plugin) to do the conversion and add the grain. It is very user friendly and can add a wide variety of grain effects. I went a little overboard on this example perhaps but I think it could be used quite effectivly in future, possibly for those wedding shots that are good but let down slightly as they aren't quite tack sharp. This was taken at ISO3200, f/2, 1/1000 at 50mm.

The Glass Floor

I was doing some studio portrait shots yesterday and thought I'd have a go at this technique I saw a while ago. It's easy enough to do and gives a decent effect. You don't need to be a genius to figure out how it's done, probably not a great idea if are photographing subjects with skirts on, or Scots in kilts for that matter. This was taken at 45mm 1/125, (studio flash) f/8 ISO125, I increased the ISO by 1/3 because they were a little underexposed and I couldn't be bothered getting up to increase the flash power by a 1/3. A quick Q&A for you, I could have also opened up the aperture to 7.1 instead of the ISO increase. Remember when lighting with just flash the shutter speed is irrelevant as long as it's under the cameras x-sync (usually around 1/200th).

A Trip To The Armouries

Yesterday a friend and I went to the Royal Armouries in Leeds, he had just got a canon 400D and wanted some tips on using the shutter priority and aperture priority modes. I said as a general rule of thumb, to avoid any motion blur from shooting handheld always use a shutter speed of 1/focal length ie at 50mm don't go slower than 1/50, at 300mm don't go slower than 1/300. A quicker shutter speed is needed at longer focal lengths (more zoomed in) because the shake of your hand is amplified.
This was put to the test when we went inside the museum, where even with the aperture wide open (low f numbers, 2.8 or 4) we were still getting shutter speeds too slow to hand hold, flash would have been helpful or better still a tripod but I think we would probably have been shot at by the guards if we even attempted to break out the tripod, so we just cranked up the iso settings.
The test was a bit extreme but it helped my friend get to grips with the relationship between shutter speed and aperture, we also had a go at panning shots (of people jousting none the less) but thats another story. Anyway for those still reading this shot was done at 1/400 at f8 at 38mm, I realise this wasn't exactly practicing what I preached but I was at iso 800, I would have rather been at iso 100 for 1/50, but I was lying down and the suspicious looks of the guards watching 2 seemingly pro photographers was making me a little uneasy.