Shooting At Night Is Hard! Part 2

In my previous post, I stated that focusing on a subject at night is very difficult, but I managed to get a more or less clear shot of my buddy Brian. How did I do it? 1. Stabilized my camera on a tripod. 2. Had Brian shine a flashlight on his face. 3. Autofocused on his face. 4. Switched focus to manual, so the lens did not refocus when I pressed the shutter release. 5. Asked Brian to turn off the flashlight and hold very still. 6. Snapped off a shot and examined the LCD. If something was off (focus, composition, and/or exposure), repeat the process. After what must have been an hour, I finally got the shot above. It was hard work for the both of us! By the way, there is a hot shoe flash shot through an umbrella positioned above and in front of (camera left) Brian's face. Here's what it looked like when Brian pointed his flashlight directly at his face:

Shooting At Night Is Hard!

What's one of the most difficult skills in all of photography? For me it's focusing on a person at night. Autofocus has a difficult time in the dark and I can't manually focus if my life depended on it! So what's my solution? Since I need to stretch my blog entries out to meet my monthly quota, I'll answer that later today. Yes, I know, it's pathetic :-)

Face First

Often I find myself taking photos of friends on a sunny day. If my camera is set to any of the auto or semi-auto modes (aperture or shutter priority), their faces appear too dark. The reason this happens is because the camera is trying to balance a bright background with what is usually a darker face (especially if the person is wearing a hat). Let's say I'm taking candid shots and don't want to shoot with flash and I don't want to ask them to move to a different spot. What do I do? I set the camera to manual exposure mode and spot metering (I use this setting 99% of the time anyway) and I just meter for their face. I largely ignore the fact that the background will be extremely overexposed, because most of the time I only care about their face. You can't always do this, for example when you want to make sure that something important in the background is visible behind your subject, but most of the time I find that I only care about the subject's expression.

Move Around

Trying out different compositions is a great way to increase the likelihood that you'll create an interesting image. The best way to do that is to keep changing the position of your camera relative to your subject. Normally when I shoot Kasey, she does all the moving and I just try to keep up. But when she sat down and started banging on the Rock Band drums, it was my turn to move. I shot at Kasey's eye level: I shot above her: I shot below her: I don't think the pictures are very good, but the set would have looked a lot worse if I had just sat on the couch and snapped away. You can see the rest of the set here.

Coloring The Background With Flash

I've long wanted to experiment with changing the color of a background using flash shot through a translucent colored object. I finally found an opportunity to try it out, because Jakey had just eaten, so I knew he and his mom would be glued to the couch for awhile. I shot the background flash through my sister's clear blue water bottle so the formerly white wall in the background became bluish. I don't know if the blue helps or hurts the photo above, but I look forward to trying this again with different colors and in different settings.

Imitating Window Light

I love the way light from a window wraps around a person's face. Recently I've been experimenting with firing a hot shoe flash through a translucent disc to imitate the diffused and directional source of light that a window provides. I could have use one of my umbrellas too, but this time around it was simpler to bust out the reflector instead of opening an umbrella and attaching it to a light stand. Either way would have worked in the photo above. The setup was very simple. I attached a wireless receiver to a hot shoe flash and aimed it through a translucent disc. I could have made the apparent size of the light even larger had I put some more distance between the flash and the reflector, but my goal was to just shoot Jakey, so the apparent size of the light was big enough to provide soft directional wrap around light on his face. To avoid having too much light spill from the top of the flash, bounce off the ceiling, and light the top of Jakey, I placed a plastic case on top of the flash (it acted like a gobo/flag).

Shooting JPEG instead of RAW?!!

I haven't picked up my camera much lately, as you can tell by the recent dearth of blog postings. There are a few factors at play that have discouraged me from shooting: 1. Work has kept me very busy. 2. My right arm is starting to progress from tendonitis to full blown carpal tunnel syndrome. 3. My computer has probably caught a virus or two (for the umpteenth time!) which has slowed it down considerably. Copying images off a CF card takes 2-3 times longer than before...and let's not talk about trying to open Photoshop! To combat the last two factors, in the last few weeks I've begun to shoot in RAW+JPEG mode. By saving my shots in this way I can upload the JPEG's to Flickr right away without having to post-process the RAW files first. I save the RAW files for future tweaking after I buy a faster computer and hopefully after my arm heals. If you follow baby fisheye, you know that this is sacrilegious because I prefer shooting in RAW over JPEG. But given the choice between sitting on my hands and doing nothing, and shooting in JPEG, well, there's really no choice. Shooting in JPEG and uploading the images without post-processing present some unique challenges: 1. The white balance needs to be set correctly in the camera. I cheat and use Auto :-) 2. No cropping means I must pay extra attention while composing each shot. 3. The lighting has to be close to perfect as possible, since I can't tweak the exposure after the shot. I think this whole shooting in JPEG business has been a blessing in disguise. It's made me much more aware of how I compose and light my shots. I can no longer take shots on autopilot and rely on Lightroom/Photoshop to fix my problems.