Behold The Dawn!

I just found this photo I had been playing with a few weeks ago and forgot about it, there isn't much to be said about it really, I'm not a great fan of using myself as foreground interest but when there is nothing else about you just have to make do.

On an unrelated note, apparently photomatix have released a lightroom plugin for all you HDR enthusiasts, I haven't tried it yet but it sounds like a good idea. Anyway I have to sort some wedding photos from the weekend, have a good week everyone.

Woodland Shoot

I was out in the woods with my niece and nephew and as the weather was nice I thought I'd take the camera. There are quite a few problems using available light in woodland, as there is a lot less light than normal outdoor daytime conditions you have to use ISO levels similar to indoors. The light levels can also vary dramatically, confusing the hell out of your cameras light meter so in some cases you might be better finding a good exposure for your subject and dialing it in on full manual.

This can be seen in the first photo, the bright sun light coming from outside would have cause the subject and woodland interior to be under exposed and although there are some blown highlights I'd take it over a near silhouette. Another issue I find in woodland photos is a murky green colour cast from the leaves that is not the best for skin tones. Shooting in RAW you can adjust the white balance during the editing stage, I warmed these up to around 6000K as it also enhances the autumnal colours, just try not to go overboard.

1 Strobe, Choose your background

Hi folks, I've been playing with my pocket wizards again just experimenting with exposures with one flash off camera and some light coming in from the window. This was quite a quick setup in the living room with no clear backgrounds, I have done a shot to demonstrate what was in the background (a couch!). I didn't have any willing subjects so I had to use my wii guitar.

I think ambient exposure was about 1/100 at 2.8 ISO400. From this I can now choose if the background can be blown out white or Black, obviously for a white background there also needs to be something lighting your subject or you would get a silhouette, in this case the light came from the window.

So to blow out the background I had my flash pointed at the ceiling at 1/4 power, my camera set to 2.8 ISO400, 1/200sec, the window light exposed the guitar and the flash blew out the background.

Now to make the background black I had to eliminate all ambient light so I set my camera to 1/200 (I couldn't go any quicker as this is the 5D's x-sync speed) ISO100 and f16. The drop in ISO and aperture would also reduce the effect of the flash. The flash was now lighting the guitar, it was still at 1/4 power but I set the zoom (on the flash) to 85mm to reduce the spread and had it coming in from about 45 degrees to the right, this was important as I didn't want any spill onto the background, not to mention the horrible sharp shadow it would have produced. Instead of increasing or decreasing the power of the flash I just changed the distance between flash and subject and thats about it. I did a very minor tweak in lightroom to ensure the blacks were black and the whites were white but nothing else.

300

I'm just putting a storybook album together for a recent golden wedding celebration I covered when I decided to post this shot we took just before the guests arrived, I say we as this shot was actually the work of my assistant, I take credit for telling her the settings she needed but the actual composition was all hers.
I edited the shot in lightroom to give an effect similar to those typical of the film "300" which is high contrast and heavy use of vignetting, I think it's a great shot for an introduction for the album.