Water Flora, Acadia National Park

Amphibian Paradise, Acadia National Park

Sunrise of Cadillac Mountain, Acadia National Park

It’s been a great day. Vacation has gone great, and you’ve had beautiful weather.  You arrive home from vacation and open up your photos and find one of your favorites is blurry.

It turns out, your 3 year old got to your camera when you didn’t expect it and put a food and saliva film right on your lens.  I have to admit, in earlier years, I hadn’t always been diligent about making sure my lens was clean. Unfortunately, the only likely outcome is a bit of disappointment.

Courtesy of IdahoEditor on MorgueFile.com

How do I combat this? Well the answer is easy but hard in practice.  Consider you’re a mom on the go. Off to the beach, the library or the playground. You grab your camera on the way out the door hoping the batteries still have charge in them.  Life with little ones moves very quickly.

Of course you’ll never get “the shot” if your batteries aren’t charged.  What if the batteries were charged, you’ve remembered your camera, the kids are together, happy as can be, and you get the shot! The only problem is that the lens has goo all over it.

Kids are born to drool like Saint Bernards. They drool on everything. The t.v. screen, the telephone, you name it. It gets everywhere.  So logically, keeping your lens clean should rank as high as batteries in order of importance.

There are 400 ways to ensure your lens stays clean. My few are:

• Keep the lens covered with a lens cap. If you are using a point and shoot, turn the power off and make sure the lens door shuts
• Avoid keeping the camera in a place where a child or a dog could have a lickfest on it. A purse, or a camera bag helps greatly for this.
• Keep a lens cloth handy. If you wear glasses, this should be an easy addition to your routine. If not, keep a lens cloth in your purse or your camera bag.  Only take it out in order to wash! Otherwise you won’t have it when you need it.
• When you arrive at your destination, before unpacking the kids from the car, open your camera case or purse and give the lens a once-over. If you decide you will do it after, you know that you will be distracted by crying, complaining, snack, bathroom break, etc.

If you keep your batteries charged, and your lens clean, you have increased your likelihood of getting that prized shot that only lasts a fleeting moment…

Courtesy MorgueFile.com

I’m sure you can remember in recent memory where you were at an event for your child, a loved one or a friend. You have your battery charged, your memory card freshly formatted and you snap away all day. You return home with excitement as you are importing your photos. You’ve taken hundreds of shots and are excited to see how they turned out.

Your heart sinks into your stomach a bit when you see that a number of your shots are blurry or dark. “What the heck happened?,” you ask yourself.

Many events, be family or the like, are not always lighted well. You might be in a large gymnasium with huge fluorescent lights 20 feet in the air or in a dark function room.

You have to do your best to prepare for the lighting conditions in which you will be shooting. Some times it’s the last thing on the to do list for most people, but for a photographer, the equipment is often prepped before the clothes are ready. The night or two before the event, ask yourself if you know where the venue is located. If yes, skip to the bulleted items. If not, open up your browser and google the location by address, town and state. See if you can find any photos on a web site to see where you will be shooting.

• Is the location bright or dark?
• What kind of light is there? Candle light, fluorescent, natural, etc.
• Is it a place that allows flash? Like a church, etc.

I do not want to over simplify, but I am going to break it down into two scenarios; Lots of light or lacking light.

Lots of light

The more light you have, the “easier” it is for the camera to expose a perfect shot.  Now the reason the word “easier” is in quotes, is because too much light can also be challenging, but that is a topic for another post.  I digress. With an abundance of light, the camera, working in conjuction with the lens and the shooter have a better probability of a correctly exposes shot. Why? Well, for example, when there are moving objects, a fast shutter speed is paramount to “stopping” the subject in motion. An example to consider: You’re taking photos at your child’s birthday party. It’s a sunny day outside and the kids at the party are running around and playing on the swing set. When you take the shots of those children, I’m sure in most cases you are able to effectively “stop” them in motion as they are swinging or sliding down the slide.

Lacking Light

Now consider another child’s birthday party. This one is also outside, but takes place just after dusk when the sun is going down. Now for the sake of my example, let’s assume there is no flash present on your camera.  As with the well-lit daytime party, the children are running around and playing. Swinging on the swings and sliding down the slide. Now you and your child’s eye adjusts to the lack of light.  You are able to see fairly well even though the sun is going down.

Your camera’s functionality and electronics are dwarfed by the human eye. So what you can see out of your eye is not what you’ll get out of your camera.

Now when you take shots, your camera is trying its best to expose the image properly. So to allow the sensor in your camera to take in enough light, the shutter has to stay open longer. And if the shutter stays open longer and you have moving subjects, what do you think you will see?  You guessed it. Your images become blurred.

The answer then is to “find” more light. How do we find more light?  The short, but complete answer is:

• Increase the ISO (film or sensor sensitivity to light)
• Open the aperture (Lower your f-stop number)
• Introduce a light source to provide the necessary light

Increasing your ISO causes your sensor to become more sensitive to light. The trade-off for this is that if you raise your ISO too high, your photos will become “grainy”. I suggest you experiment with the ISO settings on your particular camera to get an idea as to what’s an acceptable level of grain.

Open the aperture on your lens. With many cameras, automatic settings adjust ISO, shutter speed and aperture to expose the best shot possible. Modifying the aperture means that you are able to be in some creative mode in your camera, but certainly will be available with “Manual” mode. Opening your aperture has other side effects, the most prominent being shrinking your “Depth-of-field”.  I will let you search “depth of field” in your favorite search engine. There are thousands of examples on the net explaining the ins and outs of DoF.

Finally, introducing a light source is often the easiest method to “find” light. Light sources can mean opening a curtain and letting the sun light in, turning on an overhead light, an outdoor spotlight, or using the on-camera flash. Specifically, a flash has a limited range. So you’ll want to take that into consideration. I can’t tell you how many people I have seen at a graduation type of event shooting with their flash at the back of the gymnasium. Of course you can’t stop the ceremony by waving the person down and explaining to them why their photos aren’t exposing correctly.  The flash has a limited distance in which it’s effective to light a subject. So the flash lights up 3 or 4 rows of people’s heads and the stage, your subject, is dark and under-exposed.

So how do you combat these issues. Well, a photographer practices situations (or tries really hard to anticipate and try them) before being in the situation. So practice. It doesn’t have to be hours of practice. Show up early and practice.  You might say, “but if I practice and don’t do it right, I’ll miss those shots, won’t I?”  This might very well be true, but consider, without practice you would have missed them anyway.  Whether it be this, or the next, or the next event, you will get the hang of it and will get those shots that you were missing before.

It’s hard to believe, but it is that time of year again. Thanksgiving is one of those holidays that, to me, is truly celebrated with the idea of enjoying family and/or friends. Since the dawn of time, humans have been eating in a circle whether around a fire, or a table to strengthen the clan’s bond. What better time, to take photos of family and friends laughing and enjoying one another’s company?

Having said that, here are a couple of things to keep in mind when trying to capture those moments this holiday:

1. Not everyone enjoys having their photo taken. It’s your family, so you should be pretty familiar with these family members. Consider the following: If you walk up to your uncle, who never wants his photo taken and say, “Hey, can I take your picture uncle blah blah blah?” The answer will likely be a negative, and if he does accept, you are going to get the “staged-I-only-agreed-to-this-to-get-him-off-my-back” photo. I’m not sure if those are the memories that you want to capture. To combat this, wait until your uncle is having a moment laughing at a memory with a relative and take a candid shot of the moment. Choose your moment wisely. When your uncle is having a conversation with his brother, politely ask him if you can get a shot of the “two-brothers”. You’ve now added some emotion and reasoning as to why you want the photo and will often get a more genuine emotion.
2. Get the kids playing earlier in the day. As the day progresses, kids of varying ages can have their “spunk” drained. Consider a 5 year old getting tired from all the running and playing that he has done. Consider the teenager, who does not yet have the patience to listen to toddlers arguing and running around all day. By the end of the day, they will “want to bolt” and you will decrease your likelihood again of getting a true emotion from them.
3. Try to avoid taking of photos of people eating. For most of society, there is some negative connotation  with having your image captured while a forkful of cheese cake is being put into your mouth. I have to admit, I fall victim to this and do not prefer to have my photo taken while actually putting food in my mouth.
4. To segue off of point three, what happens in the afternoon after Turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, bread and dessert, is usually consumed in mass-quantities? People become sleepy and tired.  These shots might be good for, “Do you remember how cranky you were after Thanksgiving 2010?”, but if you are looking for those memory making shots it’s going to decrease your chances. So try to take as many as you can as the holiday starts. People are excited for Turkey, playing, conversing about football, etc.

Please don’t stop shooting after Turkey time or the like. But rather, don’t wait until the end of the day to capture your favorite memories of Thanksgiving.

~Craig

When I started taking photos (@12 years ago), I was in the same boat. That and I’m sure post-process software was in the zillions of dollars;-) As the years progressed I ended up using Paint Shop Pro by Jasc Software, but it is a paid product and technically can be very overwhelming for a beginner. Always on a budget, I am a free-software fan. I like to download different tools and see what they offer and what they don’t. One of them being Picasa made by Google.

Courtesy Kuanhoong.com

Picasa, is a simple photo editing program which starts by scanning  your hard drive (entire or just My Documents) when installed and catalogs (by folder) what photos you have on your disk. It presents  thumbnails of each of your shots as a particular folder is selected from the left-side panel.

On that left-side panel there are three tabs at the top. “Basic Fixes” which allows for thing like cropping, red eye, fixing contrast and adding fill light. The “Tuning” tab allows for more detailed control over some of the settings from the “Basic Fixes” tab. Last is the “Effects” tab. This allows you to add canned changes to your shots like black and white, Sepia, and more.

If you feel like stepping into the “editing” arena and a beginner, Picasa maybe the tool for you.

• Picasa for the PC

• Picasa for the Mac

White Balance Shot - eyefetch.com

The above example (eyefetch.com) is a perfect display and the drastic difference between shots with the white balance adjusted properly.  Consider the following:

1. All cameras should have this setting
2. Not all people have the software to adjust the white balance later.
3. If you decide to go the software route, you will need to process each image.
4. Why go through the hassle?

It might sound like a bit of work before hand, but take your camera to different lighting situations before you need it.  Outside in the sunshine, on a cloudy day, a lamp lit room (as demonstrated above), etc. Adjust your white balance (WB) but choosing the sun icon, or a cloud icon, etc. For each setting, take the same shot with the same lighting with the auto white balance, and you decide which looks more natural.  The only caveat is to remember to change the setting to each light setting or at least back to auto! My guess is you’ll be happier with the result, you’ll have more natural looking photos and you won’t have to wrestle with software to fix them!

You can check out an article at one of my favorite photography sites, DPS.

http://www.digital-photography-school.com/introduction-to-white-balance

It was a very overcast day, so I set the white balance to cloudy and I think it really made a difference.