Simple Way To Light A Room

I don't like shooting indoors with on-camera flash, because the light flattens faces and can cast some ugly shadows. The advantage of on-camera flash however, is that you are very mobile. But what if you take your flash off your camera, remotely control the firing of it from your camera, and aim it at the ceiling? Now you always have a diffuse source of light as long as you shoot in the room. I employed this technique at my buddy Mark's son's Red Egg and Ginger Party. As you can see in the photo below, my setup was a lot simpler than the two-light strategy I employed last December. I got lucky this time, because the ceiling was very high, so the light from the flash was able to spread out before bouncing back towards the subjects. How did I do this? 1. I connected the flash to a mini tripod and placed them on a shelf at one end of the room. 2. I aimed the flash at the ceiling. 3. I connected the flash to a radio receiver. 4. I set the flash to manual mode and dialed the power to around 1/4. 5. I connected a radio transmitter to the hot shoe of the camera. Whenever I released the shutter, the transmitter told the flash to fire. 6. Started shooting! Because the flash was set to manual mode, it was easy to modify the power to ensure that my subjects were neither over nor underexposed. There are a few things to be aware of: 1. Watch out for hot spots. The closer your subject is to the actual flash, the brighter and overblown they will turn out. 2. Avoid shooting subjects in darker areas of the room (unless you like the effect). So do you need expensive fancy equipment to do this? Not really. If you have a flash with a built-in optical slave, you're ready to go. An optical slave detects when a flash is fired and in turn tells itself to fire. Use the built-in flash on your camera to trigger the remote flash. This all happens in mere milliseconds. You can also buy a small optical slave unit that connects to the hot shoe of your flash. Just be careful that your remote flash and your built-in flash don't overexpose your subjects. If you have a relatively new camera and flash from the same manufacturer (e.g. Nikon or Canon), you can use their out-of-the-box remote flash trigger solutions. Give it a try, it's liberating! You can see the rest of the photos from the party here.

Taking Advantage of Low Light

Sometimes I know ahead of time that I'm going to be shooting in a low light situation. This was the case with my company's bowling party, so I pre-planned some shots. I really wanted to shoot some silhouettes, because the shape of a person bowling is very unique. The idea for the shot above was actually ripped off of a bowling shot I saw on Flickr. Full disclosure: Before leaving for the party, I searched for "bowling" on Flickr to get ideas. :-) In the shot below, I like how the subject and the background look dark and mysterious. It's a little blurry, but I think it's okay in this case. Off-camera flash can be awesome, but sometimes you can create very nice images with available light, no matter how little of it there is. You can see the rest of the photos from my company bowling event here.

Raw Emotion

My friends often ask me what I look for when I'm taking photos of people. I'll talk about things like lighting, composition, and posing, but what I look for most is raw emotion. It can be happy or it can be sad or anything in between as long as it's genuine and intense. I captured this shot of a coworker at my company's annual bowling extravaganza at the Presidio Bowl in San Francisco. Frankly I'm surprised I was lucky enough to see the moment, much less capture it. It was dark and I had been having problems focusing all day...please no comments about my camera brand (as is usually the case, it's most likely user error and not a problem with the equipment). Somehow all the stars aligned in that sliver of time and I got him. I looked down at the LCD. Yes I know I may have missed another golden moment, but I just HAD to see if I got his expression. I did and to my relief the lighting was decent and it looked like the focus wasn't too far off. I'm not going to lie to you, I felt great, especially since most of my other photos were disappointing for one reason or another. You can see the rest of the photos from my company bowling event here.

Create Your Own Shade

I love the sun, but when it comes to photography, it sometimes isn't my best friend. Portraits don't look as nice when the sun is high and the skies are clear, because the sun casts harsh shadows and your subjects will squint. There are many ways to mitigate this as I've discussed before. For this shoot, I tried #4, which in short says "bring the shade to your subjects, e.g. with a collapsible translucent disc. My buddy and I shot his cousin's graduation portraits at my alma mater U.C. Berkeley (Go Bears!). It's a lovely campus, but the sun was blazing down on us. You can really see the difference between shooting her under the open sky and shooting her in the shade. Compare for yourself: Unshaded: Shaded: Yes, yes, I know there are a bunch of other differences between the shots like her location, her cap, etc. But notice how in the shade her eyes are less squinty and that the light on her face is more flattering. Here's a shot of the disc in action. Brian and I took turns holding the disc and let me tell you, it can really strain the shoulders after awhile! If you don't have a disc, you can move your subjects under a tree, next to the shady side of a building, or any location that will shield your subjects from direct sunlight. You can see the rest of the photos from the shoot here.

Welcome to the World Jacob!

I have a brand spanking new nephew! His name is Jacob and he and his mom (my sister) are doing great. I got a chance to take some photos of him this morning at the hospital. I didn't want to use flash, because Jacob's eyes are still sensitive. To make up for the lack of a flash, I chose to use long exposure times over setting my camera to a high ISO, because I didn't want to see a lot of grain in my photos. I also set my shutter mode to high speed continuous release, used window light whenever possible, and steadied myself on anything stable. Exposure: 52.5mm focal length, 1/20 sec, f/5.6, ISO 200, 10:00am. Post-processing in Lightroom: Cropped, increased fill light, reduced color temperature. To avoid camera shake, I never set the exposure time longer than 1/50th sec when handholding my camera, because my lens has an effective focal length of 52.5mm. When I wanted to increase my exposure time to around 1/20th sec, I put my camera on a tripod and used the tripod like a monopod. By supporting my camera in this way, I reduced a lot of camera shake.

Exposure: 52.5mm focal length, 1/320 sec, f/2, ISO 400, 10:27am. Post-processing in Lightroom: Increased exposure and fill light, reduced color temperature.

I took many rapid fire bursts hoping that the middle shots in each sequence exhibited less blur, due to them not being affected by the movement of pressing and letting go of the shutter release. The only drawback was the loud sound made by the shutter and mirror moving with each shot. It may have bothered Jacob, although he never appeared to be irritated by it. I also took advantage of the light streaming through the large window. My sister's bed was on the far side of the room, so very little sunlight reached her. But whenever someone held Jacob near the window, I had a lot more light to work with.

Lastly, I braced myself on whatever and whoever was near me. My brother's shoulder made a great platform to shoot from! You can see all the photos from our happy day here.

Almost An Uncle

My sister is hours away from giving birth to the first child in my family. It's an exciting time and the perfect time to talk about an image I took of her and her husband last month. It's a very simple photo that I copied from an image taken of one of Amy's friends. The lighting setup was easy: one flash behind my sister to light the wall. Even though the hallway where I shot them was fairly dark, I did not need to light them with another flash, because their faces were supposed to be underexposed. The reflection of the background light off of the wall provided just enough light to bring out a little bit of detail in their faces. The setup and shooting only took five minutes, but retouching the bottom quarter of the wall in Photoshop took a lot longer. I had to remove parts of the lightstand, remove the floor moulding, and with a lot of difficulty: even out the shadows. You can see the color version here.

Bring Your Own Big Wheel Race 2009

San Francisco is pure photo gold! There's always crazy stuff going on. Last month the Potrero Hill neighborhood hosted the Bring Your Own Big Wheel Race. It's exactly as it sounds: people race big wheels (and other things like recycling bins) down a steep and windy hill while mobs of fans cheer them on. It is a sight to see...and photograph! There were some crazy characters: I had fun playing with panning: Once in awhile I caught racers losing control: Focusing/compositional mistakes created interesting shots: Lastly, I wasn't the only photographer out there! I had a great time and will definitely go back next year. You can see all my photos here.