JasonFredin.com

After an afternoon of photographing jets and helicopters in St.Thomas at the “Wings and Wheels” airshow I came home wanting for a longer lens. Without shelling out cash for a new lens or a tele-converter I compensated (and some would say I cheated) in Photoshop.

6, Crop your images.

My Canon 70-200 f/4 lens preformed well at the show, but I would have loved to have a 300mm lens (or longer). When photographing objects like planes, birds or many other subjects you want to fill the image with your subject.

“The name of the game is to fill the frame.”
Rick “RAW Rules” Sammon

So what do you do when your longest lens is not long enough? In some situations the answer is the crop tool. I do understand this limits the possible print size, but when sharing online you can crop a lot of the image out without loosing quality.

Original image

Cropped image with the subject filling the frame.

My Canon XTi shoots 10,062,144 (3,888×2588) effective pixels and for the pictures I put on Flickr only require 240,000 (600×400) pixels. This resolution would look horrible printed but for sharing on my blog or other websites 600×400 is enough, meaning we only need a small fraction of the image, so trimming a bit off the sides wont be too detrimental. Be careful, the more you crop out, the more obvious problems with focus or noise become.

Keep in mind that we can still use this technique for print, but you will loose print quality if you crop out a lot.

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Let’s focus on a basic tip that everyone should know.

5, Use a tripod for long exposures.

Thank you…see you next week.

What? You want more out of a photo tip? OK, lets look at a way to improve the shots you already use a tripod for. (You are using a tripod, aren’t you?)

5.5, Get your hands off your camera.

As you know, the advantage of using a tripod is to eliminate camera shake during long exposures. One problem is we still need to touch the camera to make the shutter fire. Many photographers introduce a small amount of shake at this point.

So how do we fix this problem? If you enjoy spending money, you buy a cable release or an IR wireless remote. That’s the route I usually take. But, I also have a horrible habit of forgetting to pack properly and find myself digging through my bag looking for a cable release that’s not there.

Lacking a remote, how do we eliminate the problem of camera shake? The 10 second timer is not just for getting yourself into the family photo. The 10 second delay mode (some cameras have 20, 10, 5 and 2 seconds) will allow the camera to settle down after pressing the button before firing the shot. So you can frame your shot, focus, press the shutter, step back and let the camera count down 10 seconds before firing.

For zen like stillness, look into “mirror lock up”. The mirror in your SLR is the most violent movement within your camera just prior to exposure (as seen in a previous post). Locking your mirror in the up position for a few seconds before opening the shutter reduces internal vibration.

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There’s a button on the front of many SLRs that amateur photographers never even notice. It is often unlabeled and on the front of the camera body near the base of the lens.

The depth of field preview is a seldom used feature that does have a purpose that seems more fitting in the film days.

First a little background, when you look through your viewfinder to compose the shot the aperture inside the lens is at its maximum opening. Having the aperture wide open allows for the most light possible to come through the lens, making it easier for the camera to obtain focus and for you to compose the shot. The aperture only closes down to the required setting for a fraction of a second for the exposure. One thing to notice when we look through the viewfinder is a shallow depth of field no matter what our aperture is set.

Depth of field (DOF) refers to how much of the photograph is in focus. A shallow DOF means little in front and behind the point of focus is in focus. A deep DOF means a lot in front and behind the point of focus is in focus.

Notice the out of focus areas in the foreground and background.

That is alright if you are shooting at f/2.8. But, what if we were shooting at f/22? The view through the viewfinder actually doesn’t change. That is until we press the depth of field preview button.

Notice the sharpness in the forground and background.

Now you might say “WHOA! It makes everything darker” and yes it does, but only temporarily. What the camera is doing is closing the aperture down to the f/22 setting to show what depth of field you will obtain at that setting. This will not effect the brightness of the image. So after taking the shot we still get an image that looks like this:

Notice the increased depth of field.

Most people avoid this by looking at the LCD after the shot to check the depth of field. That is acceptable in my books. Like I said at the start, it was a much more useful feature when shooting film and every shot cost you money.

If you liked this post and want to see others like it leave a comment or make a suggestion of a camera feature you would like explained.

After telling students that there are no waterfalls in the area to practice a slow shutter technique, I finally found somewhere that is public, accessible by vehicle and close to London. Although not as beautiful as some of the falls in Hamilton Ontario it is also less than two hours away.

The Mill Pond in Dorchester Ontario [map] has a man made waterfall/dam to control water levels and it is less than 100 meters from Hamilton road. You can find more information on the area is available at the Mill Pond website.

Being close to home allows photographers to experiment with the technique and know they have the required equipment before traveling to more beautiful, naturally occurring waterfalls.

One item I was lacking on my visit was a neutral density filter. I didn’t think it was necessary when leaving the house, and I was wrong it would have helped. The photo was taken at f/29 and 0.6 seconds. Having a ND filter would have allowed a longer exposure making the water appear smoother. On a bright day requiring an even faster shutter speed (lacking an ND filter) would have ruined the effect.

For those of you saying “What are neutral density filters?”, they are like sunglasses for your camera. A neutral density filter (otherwise referred to as a ND filter) cuts the amount of light entering the lens without affecting the colour. You can purchase these filters in various densities (darkness) depending on how much light you need to cut down. Several filters can also be stacked to increase the density if you need to severely reduce the light entering the lens.

Reducing the amount of light allows for longer shutter speeds which is how pictures like these are produced.

Sorry about the missed week. This week’s tip focuses more on the printing side of photography.

4, Think outside the box… outside the 4×6 box.

Not every shot has to be in the 2:3 ratio.

Filling the frame with your subject is a good thing, but when shooting at a 2:3 ratio, making an enlargement to the standard 8×10 size can cause issues.  You will either need to decide what part of your photo will be chopped off or print it with bars along the long sides. Alternately you could print the whole image in the less standard 8×12 size but have fun trying to find a pre-made frame to fit that.

With 10 and 12 megapixel cameras being common now we have the ability to shoot a bit wide and crop down to the final dimension we want.

Here are a few examples of when we might want to do this:

• Leaving room to allow an 8×10 photo to be printed without cutting off important areas of the image.
• Give your photo a nostalgic look, try using a square crop that many professional medium format cameras shot.
• Printing on canvas. An image printed on canvas requires about an inch of image that will be wrapped around the side of the frame.

An example of a shot that would require trimming off critical details to print at 8x10.

Shooting in unusual dimensions was the reason I spent a few dollars and bought a matte cutting kit. A small investment will allow you to frame your shots without spending an arm and a leg on custom cut mattes.

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Just a quick post to show what happens when you press the shutter button.

This was shot with a Casio EX-FS10 H.S. which is a $400 point and shoot camera.

I can’t believe this tip has waited three weeks. It was brought to mind after a friend stopped by with his broken laptop. He wanted to see if I could recover any of his photos after it appeared to have given up the ghost.

3, Backup your photos!

This tip is fairly self explanatory, if you only have one copy of your favorite photos you are asking for trouble. I prefer to have multiple copies of my photos both at home and offsite.

Having a second copy of your pictures at home protects you from loosing precious images due to computer malfunction or even user error. Having a second copy is a good start, but that won’t protect you from a disaster like a fire.

An offsite backup is the best protection against data loss.

Getting a copy of your images offsite can be as easy as burning a DVD and keeping it in your desk at work or asking a trusted relative to hold onto it for you.

If that sounds like too much of a hassle there are now great services out there like Carbonite.com that supply you with a large amount of online storage space for all your documents and photos and software to take care of keeping your computer backed up. This is one of the best solutions for “set it and forget it” methods of offsite backup.

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Last week I received an e-mail from Rogers informing me that the promotion that provided me with a Flickr Pro account was coming to an end.

My first reaction to the end of the Rogers promotion was the same as many of the people online that day…

People enjoy crying foul against Rogers, they are the evil empire and all. But, after some thinking and discussion on Twitter with Keith McArthur I realized that separating services is better for the consumer.

This decision like all others can’t be made in a vacuum, so the consumers can only guess at the factors that went into this decision. Including what appears to be Rogers and Yahoo severing some ties.

Only approximately two percent of Rogers High Speed customers took advantage of the offer. To me this really shows that it was not a service that Rogers customers wanted. It was nice for those of us who would pay to be a Pro member anyways. I would be willing to bet less than 25% of the people loosing their Pro account will actually end up paying.

I don’t believe anything outside core services should be distributed evenly across customers (including a firewall and anti-virus that I can’t use). And neither should the cost of website memberships.

What I would like to see Rogers High Speed internet service adopt is the business model of a utility, where we pay for what we actually use and allow us to make the decision on what services are of value to us.

Now, I have to decide if the Pro services of Flickr are worth the $24.95 USD per year.

Wow, two Fridays in a row! To be honest, I totally forgot about writing this week. Although short, this week’s tip is no less useful.

2, Shoot candids!

Most people already know this, but I thought it was worth stating again. People look unnatural and frankly stupid while saying “cheese”. Photographs capture a moment in time, and good candids capture a person’s personality. The best way to do that is to show what they look like most of the time, not posing with a big dumb grin on their face waiting for a flash to temporarily blind them.

And for the slightly more advanced users, the best way to capture a candid photograph is with a sneak attack.

One key to a good stealth approach is to turn off your camera’s autofocus beep. Most cameras are capable of this and should be buried somewhere inside your menus. While eliminating the beep you need to either have a sharp eye or look for your focus conformation light.

Turning off the beep means your victim subjet gets no waning of the shot being taken.

Candid Will Spaetzel

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I know there are a lot of places to get tips to improve your photography…and I have decided to make my blog another.

Many of these tips are covered in other places and I make no claim on these being original, but they are ones I think will help you take better pictures.

1, Get down to their level.

Kids and pets make great subjects for your photography. Through teaching I overwhelmingly hear that kids and pets are the top reason people bought their cameras.

When trying to figure out what is also the easiest way to improve their pictures I notice a lot of the time people are taking pictures looking down on the subject. And even if your kid is cute, the top of his head is still boring!

Even if it makes you look silly, crouch, kneel, or even lay on the ground to get your camera at the same level as the subject’s eyes.

This tip alone will improve your pictures dramatically.

I used this technique last week when a friend stopped by with her puppy.

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