Night Time

Shooting events at night can be hard. Depending on the movement of dancers, you need shutter speeds in the 1/250th range. If you are not using flash, and like most events at night are shooting in low light, that means you have to shoot with a fast lens (aperture of f2.8 or faster) and/or a High ISO. In this photo, I was shooting at ISO 1600 at f2.8. This ensured the shutter speed was fast enough to freeze these dancers, who were moving quite fast. Now depending on your camera, you may introduce a lot of noise at ISO 1600. My Canon Eos 20d is quite good and even at ISO 1600 the noise is acceptable. I also ran this photo through a third party software that reduces noise further. I bought Neat Image (software name) which is a photoshop plugin a long time ago. There is also Noise Ninja and a bunch of others. Photoshop also has a noise reduction feature.

Now Noise is caused by a couple of things. First, your camera sensor has noise. This is exacerbated by longer exposures, or multiple exposures, which increases the heat of the sensor or having more things on a smaller chip (which is why a digital SLR will generally have less noise than a point and shoot digital camera). The second thing is your ISO Think of ISO (for this example) like the volume on your stereo. With the volume lower, you can't hear noise coming from your speakers. But crank the volume up enough and you start to hear a hiss through your speakers. And just like speakers, some cameras handle higher ISO better than others. So get to know the limitations of your camera.

Photo Manipulation

Photoshop opens a whole new world of opportunities. Everyone has an opinion on photo manipulation. When does photo manipulation take an image out of the realm of "photo" and more into digital art? I don't really know. My opinion is unless you are shooting photo journalism, use the tools available to you to achieve the look you like. The "Dave Hill" look is very popular these days. I love his images, which are heavily manipulated. But don't get me wrong, his photography is excellent and his use of light etc. allows him to manipulate the original photo to get the look he wants.

The photo in this post was originally posted in a prior post. To achieve the look, I did the following steps:

1. I reduced the noise two times (you can do this in photoshop - I use a plug in called neat image);

2. Go to layer->New Adjustment Layer->Hue Saturation and hit okay. Go to the red channel and reduce the lightness by -15 to -35 (depends on the photo)

3. Repeat step two, only this time go to the yellow channel and reduce the lightness just a little bit.

4. Now using the unsharp mask, use a high radius of between 80-100.

5. Depending on the effect, you may want to dodge the highlights or burn shadows

6. reduce noise again (optional)

7. Make another Hue saturation layer and this time increase the lightness of the yellow channel to taste.

I did not come up with this on my own, and want to give credit to a post I read by Lei Sarmiento on Digital Photographer - Philippines. A lot of neat things on this site http://www.digitalphotographer.com.ph/

A Different Perspective

I'm always goofing around looking to try things to put a unique perspective on my photos. One of the neat attachments I have for my camera is a bogen Magic Arm with a bogen super clamp (you can google to see photos of this). It allows you to attach your camera to things like bikes or even broom in this case. I attached the camera to the broom using a wide angle lens and set the focus manually. Then using the timer on the camera and a slow shutter speed, I did some sweeps of the broom until I got something I liked. In this case I used 1/8 second. This photo (with the exception of normal adjustments in photoshop) was done in camera. The blur was created by using a slow shutter speed and the broom is kept in focus as the camera was attached to the handle of the broom. Ended up liking this photo in black and white the best. So if you have some money to spare, this attachment is neat and allows you to do some creative things.

Church

American Samoa must have more churches on a per capital basis than anywhere else. Everywhere you look, there is a church. While driving home after a rather uneventful day looking for photographs, we decided to stop at a little store to get some food. I looked up and found this beautiful cloud formation. Knowing I had to photograph it, I knew there was a church a couple of hundred yards down the road. I got in my car and drove to the church, which luckily had no cars parked in front. Knowing that the dynamic range (the difference between the brights/darks) would be too much, I set my camera on a tripod and shot a series of photos at different exposures. Back at the house I combined all the exposures into a HDR (High Dynamic Range) photo, using Photomatix (a program you can buy to help with HDR photos). I liked the way this photo came out. The moral of the story is you never know when a photo opportunity will present itself so be on the lookout.

Tisa's Tattoo Festival (Continued)

As promised, here are some of the photos from Tisa's Tattoo Festival on Day 2. The art work was incredible. Remember to click on the photo to see the larger size. I will post some more tommorrow so check back.

Important things

After missing the Tattoo festival in American Samoa last year, I was looking forward to spending a day photographing this event. But as luck would have it, the kids announced that their annual Halloween Party would be on the same day. Although I love photography and was looking forward to this event, my kids will always come first. Luckily, it looked like the event would start at 10:00AM and the party for the kids wasn't until later in the afternoon. Arriving at 10:00 it was soon apparent it was not going to start on time. So I blazed down to a sewing shop to pick up one of my kids costumes and then went back at 12:40PM. Still not really starting. It ended up with the show starting at about 2:00PM, which meant I would only have 1-hour before I had to leave. Ended up with a couple of photos before I had to pack up. But you know what, the kids had a great time at the Halloween Party and the smiles on their faces are just too important. Tomorrow the tattoo festival continues so maybe I will have better luck then.

The photo above was taken on Friday. Right after work I went home, grabbed the kids (they had a day off) and headed towards the beach Arrived in time for a nice Sunset and I really like this photo of a SeaScape that I captured. Setup was simple. Find the spot I liked and set up the camera with some GND filters. As the sunset arrived, took a bunch of photos, bracketing and watching my histogram. This was the one I liked. There is some vignetting on the top corners but I actually liked it so did not try to work that in Photoshop.