Photography

A little while ago I joined up with an online photography course Through the Lens on the blog From the Rubber Room. I’ve been a bit slack at keeping up with the assignments, but I still intend to follow through with them at some stage (and blog about them too). The assignment I was up to was all about White Balance, which happened to be something I was learning about in my IRL photography course last week.

It’s a pretty confusing name, because essentially it’s all about colour and correcting the cast that different light sources throw on the subject. Apparently it’s not something we see with the human eye because our brains calculate the compensation needed and we see it in “true colour”. The camera can’t do that so sometimes photos will look washed out or have very yellow or blue or green tones. The Auto White Balance will do its best to correct things but sometimes you need to switch to manual to get it right. My DSLR has settings for Daylight, Shade, Cloudy, Tungsten (lightbulb), Fluorescent, Flash and a few others. By setting White Balance to one of these settings you tell the camera to compensate for the colour cast (for example where lightbulbs give things a yellow cast, Tungsten White Balance will add some blue to even it out).

It seems that, generally speaking, the daylight setting will give the true colour of what’s in the picture, so it can be useful to take a shot on this setting to see what might need balancing out.

This photo of Chiq was taken inside under lightbulbs on the Daylight Setting - you can see the warm yellow tones from that light source. Changing the White Balance to Tungsten will try to balance out these yellow tones by cooling it down with blues (like putting a blue filter on the lens).

This photo(taken on Tungsten) is much cooler and I guess technically more balanced. What my teacher was saying, and you can see pretty clearly here, though, is that with portraits its better to go for warm tones than cool ones - it’s much nicer on the skin.

I’ll have to test this out with a subject other than people (I have to actually take a photo of something other than my kids!) to see whether it’s better, but I think for these photos of Chiq, I much prefer the warm “true” tones of the Daylight setting.

By the way, all photos in this post are Straight out of the Camera, so no photoshopping interfered with the colours.

I’m loving the fact that school is so close that we can easily walk everyday. In fact it’s so close that it would take longer to load the kids in the car, drive 2 blocks then unload them, than it does to walk.

Guerita resisted the walk at first, but she’s enjoying it now. She even made it halfway before asking me to carry her school bag today! Chiq always loves getting out in the sunshine but she doesn’t always love getting strapped in the pram each day.

So, when my Mum said she wanted to buy Chiq a trike (one of those adjustable ones with the parent handle) she ended up with this sweet ride…

Chiq absolutely loves it, sitting up there like a big girl, turning the handlebars (I have to counteract that to keep us on course!) and even chatting on the plastic mobile phone that comes attached to it. It’s great not having any arguments about pram time and it’s very light to push so the walk is very easy.

I took this photo of the girls as part of my Photography Homework to practice what we were learning about Exposure Compensation. I actually stumbled on this trick a little while ago, and it’s pretty useful to be able to lighten or darken the exposure depending on the lighting conditions. Another trick the photography teacher showed us was to take a few test shots to work out the lighting and compensation needed before you actually start the “shoot”. You can do this easily by using Auto Exposure Bracketing (AEB) which will take 3 photos at 0 exposure compensation, -1 (darker) and +1 (lighter). You can set this up from the menu in your camera - just look for AEB (I can tell you its in Menu 2 on my Canon but it’s probably different on other cameras). It’s a good idea to also change to continuous shooting mode, meaning you can hold the shutter release button down and it will take 3 photos in quick succession. You can then compare the 3 photos, decide whether any compensation is needed, set it to that and shoot away!

Here’s the sequence of AEB shots I took for this tricycle shot:

The compensation from right to left is -1, 0 and 1.

Sometimes the best lighting is somewhere in the middle and you can adjust compensation in 1/3 increments so it’s worth trying AEB with smaller amounts (1/3 or 2/3) if none of them look quite right.

These were taken at -1/3, 0 and +1/3.

I think I like the slightly darker one, particularly because my kids have such fair skin that its easy for them to look washed out and over-exposed. There’s a lot more detail and rich colours when it’s a bit darker. (Plus there’s always Photoshop for more fine-tweaking!)

Here’s a couple more taken the same day…just cause they’re cute and I feel like posting them!

0 exposure compensation (slightly lightened in PS)

-1/3 exposure compensation (slightly lightened in PS)

Apologies if this is all a bit technical and boring for those of you out there not interested in twiddling dials on your camera. Just thought I’d share it for those I know are interested (and also to have it recorded somewhere in case I forget!)

I mentioned a few days ago (or week, maybe?) that Guerita’s class recently put on the school assembly. I assume this happens all over the country, or at least in WA, but for anyone who doesn’t know what I mean, each class in the school has a turn (usually once a year I think) of putting on some kind of play, skit or presentation for the whole school at their regular assembly. It’s quite a a big thing for the kids (specially the pre-primaries, since it’s their first time) and lots of parents come to watch, take copious amounts of photos and video and generally beam with pride at the cleverness of their offspring.

Guerita’s class chose to put on a little play of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and Guerita’s part was…you guessed it…Goldilocks! I’m sure the fact that she already has golden locks made her a shoe-in for the role - she very excitedly told me “I don’t even have to wear a wig, Mum, because I already have goldilocks!”. I kept teasing my Mum that she was being a complete Stage (Grand)Mother by telling everyone her granddaughter had “the lead” in the play! The reality is that every child had lines to say and Guerita’s just happened to be the “this porridge is too hot etc” lines.

She is a “performer” though and was definitely in her element up on stage, microphone in hand. All the kids did such a great job, remembering all their lines and speaking clearly. After the short play they all sang the “Three Bears Rap” which was extremely cute, with lines like “Hey Paparee Bear, said the little wee bear, someone’s been sleepin’ in m’ bed. Yeah!”.

I don’t have a lot of photos since I was mostly on video duty, but I did take a few at the beginning and managed to do some of my homework for the photography course I’ve just started.

I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while, because it’s very exciting. 2 weeks ago, my Dad and I started a 5 week course with a professional photographer that’s aimed at people who want to learn how to use their DSLRs better and understand all the settings. I am loving it so far - there are only 3 people in the class (he only takes a maximum of 4) so it is virtually one on one teaching and is the perfect level for me. So far there’s been a bit of technical stuff but what I like is that the teacher boils it down into pretty manageable things to remember. The first lesson we talked a lot about ISO and shutter speed and how the two work together to let enough light into the camera. The homework we were given was to take a few photos at different ISOs and see how that affected the shutter speed, and of course the resulting photo.

The way I understand it, when you’re talking about getting nice sharp handheld photos you need to find the balance between fast shutter speed and ISO. The lower the ISO number, the less “noise” or grainy-ness you will get on your photo. But the higher the ISO the more light is let in, which allows the shutter speed to be faster, which in turn means there will be less camera shake/blur. Does that make any sense?

The photo above is an example of my homework for this ISO/shutter speed lesson. Our teacher told us that for handheld photos to try and keep the shutter speed to 1/30 second or faster. So with the camera in P (program) mode I set the ISO to 100 (the lowest number which will give the least amount of noise). Because the lighting conditions weren’t great (outdoor but undercover, so the light was low) 100 ISO gave me a really slow shutter speed and I had to dial it up to 1600 (the highest number on my camera) to get the shutter speed fast enough. So the result is a photo that is light enough, but is pretty grainy.

Can you see the noise? (That’s a strange sentence!) Depending on what you want to do with the photo and how big you want to print it (or crop and zoom in) the noise might not be an issue. In this photo of Guerita it doesn’t bother me too much, except that now that I am looking for it I see it really clearly!

It’s pretty interesting to do the exercise just to see how the results differ and I do like being given “rules” to follow, such as shutter speed 1/30 or higher. (Incidentally he also said for action/sports photography you want to get a shutter speed of 1/500 or higher.) Obviously it won’t always be as easy as following a “recipe” but it’s good to have some guidelines as a starting point.

Next lesson…exposure compensation and some neat tricks for “hedging your bets”…stay tuned!

Today was the photo session for Guerita’s ballet concert, so full hair & make-up was required. After much worry about how I would manage to do her hair and make-up, I chickened out and arranged for someone to do it for her! I discovered that the ballet school had a hairdresser and make-up artist available to do it for anyone who wanted - and the price was only $30 total for hair and make-up for both days (the photos and the concert) which I thought was a pretty good deal. Particularly since it turned out the hair was not to be done in a bun, but ringlets and I don’t even own a curling wand. I was happy to completely avoid the embarrassment (for me and Guerita) of doing a shoddy job.

Guerita was pretty excited about the prospect of going off to have all this done, although the reality of it all was a bit more tedious. We had to wait for a while before she got started and then she was required to sit still for over an hour! Not an easy feat for her.

The novelty wore off pretty quickly

but she was very happy with the finished result (lipstick already needs touching up!)

And here’s a sneak preview of her ballet costume…

In other news I’ve also joined the Through the Lens - Digital Photography 101 Group, conducted by Hallie at The Rubber Room. This is exactly what I need right now - a bit of guidance and a little push to get me using the manual settings on my camera, and hopefully some tips on what all the buttons and dials mean. It seems to be a pretty active group so I’m looking forward to learning lots of new tricks from everyone.

The first assignment was to read the manual for your camera and take the best photo you could. I did actually read the manual when I first bought the camera and even bought a guidebook to go with it, so I kind of remembered some of the terms, but because I hadn’t put each thing into practice a lot of it was a jumble of confusing terms.

One type of photography situation I really want to work on is taking pictures when the lighting conditions aren’t perfect. When I can, I try to think about the time of day, the position of the sun etc, but the reality is that I often just pick up the camera to snap a few photos of the kids doing something interesting, so you can’t always plan each photo like a “session”.

Like today, for example where we were sitting in a room in someone’s house with the curtains drawn and the overhead light and a few lamps on. The Auto mode prompted the flash which made Guerita’s skin over-exposed and look even paler than it is, like in this photo.

I remember reading (not in the manual, on a blog I think) that in low light situations, where the automatic modes would prompt you to use the flash, it’s good to use the Av mode which lets the most amount of light in. Maybe someone will correct me here, because I know this is all related to shutter speed and the slower the speed, the more light comes into the lens, thus compensating for the lack of natural light and making up for the lack of flash. The result should look more natural than with a flash but when I’ve played around with this before the photos often still came out too dark.

Today while I sitting there for hours watching a parade of girls turning into painted dolls, I had a little play with the dials and discovered one I didn’t know was there! On my camera (Canon Rebel XTi) you move the top dial to Av mode, hold down the Av +/- button near the LCD screen and twiddling the little dial near the shoot button and you can adjust the aperture value up and down. Obviously I hadn’t read the manual that closely or I would have realised this earlier! By increasing the aperture value you decrease the shutter speed and let more light in. Here’s an example of 2 photos taken straight after each other with different aperture values (on my camera the first is at 0, the second at 2).

The data for these photos (and I still don’t understand all these numbers, but I’m learning) are:

Photo 1
Shutter speed: 1/80 sec
Aperture value: f/5.6
ISO: 1600
focal length: 55.0mm

Photo 2
Shutter speed: 1/50 sec
Aperture value: f/6.3
ISO: 1600
focal length: 55.0mm

I know the assignment said to take the best photo you can, and this obviously isn’t the best photo, but it’s going to be my entry for the first assignment, because it shows something I learnt about my camera, and I think that’s what the course is all about.

Decorating my backyard