Dusk is my favorite time of day. I love the rich blues of the sky and the contrast of dark trees and such in the foreground. Normally, these shots require long exposures and a tripod to capture and a bit a tweaking post-process to get the lighting and color right.

This shot required a 30 second exposure at f/9 and ISO 100 with +1EV exposure compensation. I chose f/9 for two reasons. First, f/9 was the smallest aperture I could use and still keep the exposure under 30 seconds in Aperture Priority mode (maximum shutter time without switching to Bulb mode) at ISO 100. I wanted to keep the shot at ISO 100 to ensure tack sharp details, rich saturation and no noise. Second, I have found that my kit lens is its sharpest between f/8 and f/11, so f/9 was a logical place to start.

This photo was processed in Adobe Lightroom to look as close to what my eyes saw as possible. Here’s the original RAW shot straight out of the camera (SOOC) with nothing but my default import processing:

Since I was shooting in RAW I left the white balance at Auto and simply used the histogram display on the LCD to verify a good mix of highlight and shadow detail. After downloading I started off by cropping and straightening the shot a bit. Next I tweaked the white balance to 3700K to get the blue to pop (the sky was too purple at the Daylight/5500 setting and too blue at Tungsten/2850). I then pushed the exposure up another +1EV and dropped the Black slider to 3. Nudging the Fill Light slider to 21 pulled even more shadow detail out. I set Clarity to 11, Vibrance to +25 and Saturation to +21. Finally, I added a touch of Sharpening and Detail (50 & 50) and Defringed all edges.

The Clarity, Vibrance, Sharpening, Detail, and Defringe settings are pretty standard for most of my shots with the Pentax K10D. I find the SOOC RAW files are a little flat color-wise and softer than I like. Also, the kit lens leaves a bit of color fringing on hard edges that Defringing seems to fix well.

The final result turned out very true to what I recall seeing that night in Birmingham. It was a bit windy so the tops of the tree branches are motion blured. The tiny star trails were an unexpected surprise.

Just a quick note to say Merry Christmas and thank you for your support. I started this blog less than 3 weeks ago and I have already had over 1,100 views! I hope everyone is enjoying this site and getting something out of it. I’ve got some new topics I’m working on that I’ll be posting over the next few days as time permits. Meanwhile, have a very merry Christmas, safe travels and take lots of pictures!

With Christmas just a couple of days away there is no doubt that many of you have been enjoying taking artistic photos of your Christmas tree and other Holiday decor. All those colorful and tiny lights make perfect bokeh fodder. And highly processed detail shots like this are also fun.

Problem is, many of us (present company included) forget to take good documentary photos of our holiday decor that we can pull out and reminisce over with the grand kids 30 years from now. While all those artsy detail shots are nice, none of them capture the full majesty of your 2008 Holiday decor. Going through my photos a few days ago I ran across this image I took of my mom’s Christmas tree back in 2005:

This is one of my favorite Christmas photos of all time. Even in black and white (shot in B&W mode so there is no color version) I can totally feel the warmth of the twinkle lights and even smell the fresh pine fragrance of the Frasier fir tree. With this in mind I decided to figure out what makes good Christmas tree photos and do a bit of a tutorial aimed at DSLR users while I was at it.

Step 1: Turn off your flash!

Out of the box in Program Auto mode just about all DSLRs are going to pop the flash in an attempt to achieve “proper” exposure. While this may accurately capture the image, I doubt that anyone will find the results very warm and inviting.

Switch your camera into Program mode and turn off the flash. With the flash off you’re likely to get something like this:

This is a 1/8 second hand-held exposure at f/3.5 and ISO 400. I actually had to dial in +1EV of exposure compensation because my Pentax K10D’s matrix metering was underexposing the image considerably trying to compensate for the brightness of the tree lights and lamp to the right just off frame. While the image more accurately captures the look and feel of the decorated tree, it isn’t very dynamic and compelling.

Steps 2 & 3: Get out the tripod and close down the aperture.

This shot is essentially identical to the previous shot except it is a 15 second exposure at f/16 and ISO 100 (shot in Aperture Priority mode). The small aperture does three things here. First it creates all those dreamy starbursts. Second, and more notably, it forces a long exposure. This long exposure time pulls in more ambient light, giving the entire scene more apparent dynamic range. Finally, it sharpens up the details. Zooming into this image you will find much crisper detail than the rather soft previous f/3.5 shot. As a bonus, using a lower ISO means richer colors, better detail, smoother gradients, and less noise.

Step 4: Attend to the details.

While the previous shot had come a long way from the Program Automatic blown-out flash shot, I felt there was still room for improvement. I didn’t like the reflections in the windows behind the tree coming from the upstairs lights and the lamp to the right was a bit harsh. Also, there were a few unsightly items cluttering up the foreground of the earlier shots and I wanted to add a better sense of grandeur to the shot.

For this final shot I turned off all the lights in the house except for a single 60 watt desk lamp behind the camera to add just a tad of ambient fill to the high ceilings. I moved the dog kennel and Where’s Waldo book. I then repositioned the tripod closer to the tree and lower before zooming out wider to exaggerate the scale of the tree and height of the room. This ended up being a 10 second exposure at f/16 and ISO 200- I bumped the ISO to 200 because the rest of the family was complaining about sitting in the dark during all my 20+ second shots ;-)

RAW file post processing in Lightroom was limited to setting the white balance (tungsten) and dialing in a bit of Sharpness, Clarity and Vibrance. You may want to tweak the Recovery slider a tad to compensate for any blown-out Christmas lights from the long exposure.

While I recommend shooting your Christmas tree photos at night, depending upon the situation, decent results can be achieved during the day. The wall of windows behind the tree here made daytime shots pretty much impossible. However, waiting until dusk I got this shot which was pretty nice:

Step 5: Share!

This is a picture of my Christmas tree I took last week using the small aperture/long exposure technique described above. The photos for this tutorial were shot at my in-laws house. When you travel to visit friends and family this Christmas be sure to pack your camera and tripod. Take pictures of your non-photographer friends’ trees and send them a copy as a Holiday treat! Tis the season of giving, right?

Merry Christmas!!

My father in-law asked me to take a picture of his Christmas table centerpiece arrangement so he could e-mail it to an out of town friend. My attempt at a quick snapshot didn’t meet my with my photographic standards so I spent the next hour playing with lighting to get the final shot above. This was a very challenging shot as I had to make do with what lighting I could find in the house. Here’s how I did it:

First of all, my in-laws’ house is DARK. Dark walls. Dark floors. Dark furniture. Dark lamps. You get the idea. Plus, it was night so the wall of windows to the left of the subject weren’t helping. Of course, I could have waited for morning but I always like a good challenge. Plus, I figured that if I got it right, a night shot would better capture the elegant and rich warmth of the table setting.

My first test shot was attampted with nothing but the incandescent  lamp light filtering in from the living room behind the camera. This required a 6 second exposure at f/8 and ISO 400 (a tripod was used so my K10D’s IS was OFF). I used f/8 to ensure that the entire arrangement was in sharp focus while the background was blurred a bit. I like the f/8 shot because there is enough background detail to clearly place this shot in my in-laws dining room while the subject focus was nicely isolated. The lighting in this first shot was too flat. I wanted more subject isolation so I grabbed a floor lamp and placed it to the left of the camera and tried again:

This set-up provided better subject isolation via lighting but the shadows seemed a bit harsh. I played around with a few combinations of settings and finally settled on 4 seconds at f/8 and ISO 100 but was still not happy with the results.

Recalling some studio shots that I did not long ago where I held a shaded lamp directly above my subjects, I decided to try holding the lamp above the centerpiece just out of the frame. I also turned off all the lights in the living room and opened the glass doors on the china cabinet behind the arrangement to eliminate the reflection of the lamp. Finally, I lit the candles to add another level of detail and ambiance to the shot.

This set-up is what I used for the final shot. (Note use of lens hood to quell flare). I sped up the ISO to 200 to get a 1.6 second exposure at f/8. This was mainly because the lamp was a bit heavy to be holding up like this for 6 seconds but also because a shorter exposure helped cut down on the ambient light bleeding in to the background. While the shutter was open I slowly arced the lamp from left to right to paint the entire arrangement and blur the shadows. The resulting image (top) ended up with shadows that were much softer at the subject with a nice gradual fall off of the light into the background. I couldn’t have done much better with an actual soft box in a studio ;-)

With a nice looking exposure I pulled the image into Lightroom to adjust the white balance (2625K) and apply my standard Sharpness (14), Detail (51), Clarity (30), and Vibrance (+25) settings. I also pushed the Recovery up to 73 to help correct some over exposure of the reds and knock back the highlights on the shiny green leaves a bit. A bit of final cropping (always leave room for cropping!) and off the image went to my father in-law.

There are few things more beautiful than a good sunset or sunrise photograph. However, if you’ve ever tried to do it you know it can be frustrating. How many times have you seen a beautiful sunset like the one above only to have your photo turn out something like this?

There are a couple of easy things you can do to get great sunset photos. First, turn off your flash. The only thing the flash is good for during a sunset is to add fill to illuminate a foreground subject. Unfortunately, getting the right mix of fill flash and background exposure can be very tricky:

Not a very inspiring photo (though after the number of rum punches I had I didn’t care). For now, let’s just turn the flash off and focus on capturing a brilliant sunset photo.

Next, set your white balance to auto. You can also try daylight but I have always found the auto setting gives the best mix of deep blues, pinks, reds and oranges.

I like to shoot sunsets with a wide angle lens to get as much of the sky in the picture as possible. This ensures a full mix of colors from the darkest indigo blues overhead to the brightest pinks and oranges at the horizon. Usually I leave only a strip of ground/foreground across the bottom to anchor the photo- letting the sky dominate the scene for maximum impact.

The main challenge with sunset photos is getting around the camera’s matrix metering’s natural tendency to balance exposure across the frame. The camera doesn’t know what’s going on and tries to balance the dark foreground with the bright background. The washed out example at the top is what you get when you just point-n-click. To get a decent sunset exposure you either need to dial in some negative exposure compensation (usually -2/3EV to -1EV). An easier method is to just aim the camera at an unobstructed portion of the sky, focus, lock exposure, recompose, and shoot. I typically use a little of both.

For the best sunset photos I typically like to wait for the sun to be fully below the horizon. That beautiful glowing orange ball of the sun absolutely wrecks exposure on a camera and typically results in pretty disappointing shots. Also, some cloud texture in the sky helps provide a good mix of colors. Be sure to look behind you as many times clouds away from the setting sun pick up some awesome colors. Finally, some good foreground silhouettes can help add additional visual interest (especially helpful if the sky itself is not as dramatic as it could be).

A medium aperture like f/8-f/10 is best to ensure the best detail and sharpness across the frame and eliminate vignetting typical at larger apertures when shooting at a wide zoom setting. Since I generally like to wait for the sun to drop fully, there’s typically not very much ambient light. This means I either need to be shooting on a tripod at a low ISO and slow shutter speed or bump the ISO up to prevent camera shake. These samples were all shot hand-held at ISO 200-400 and f/8 and f/10 at around 1/4 second. The combination of the K10D’s in-body IS and the wide focal length meant it only took a few tries to get sharp shots (wider zoom angles can be hand held at slower shutter speeds than longer ones).

Typically a properly shot sunset photo doesn’t require much post-processing. Since I shoot everything in RAW I have to tweak sharpness and saturation on all my photos in Lightroom. I can also play around with the white balance a bit to get the best pop from my images- though the as-shot (Auto) setting worked best for these images. Often I find the fluorescent WB preset works well for sunsets for some reason.

While a DSLR gives the most control over all of these settings, I have gotten wonderful sunset photos with a pocket camera by simply turning off the flash and using the focus, recompose and shoot method. Here is a collection of some of my other sunset photos on Flickr.

The most difficult part about getting good sunset shots is being at the right place at the right time with your camera. I hope this helps you get that great shot the next time that happens!

Apparently, Panasonic has listened to the complaints of photographers like myself and made improvements to the image quality. Meanwhile, the solid build, wonderful wide angle Leica lenses, built-in IS, and user-centric controls continue to make the Lumix line one of my favorites. While I ultimately decided that an advanced compact camera was not a viable substitute for a DSLR, I did settle upon a Lumix for my pocket camera of choice.

Following my experiment with shooting the Christmas tree lights reflecting in the front lens element of my 50mm f/1.7 I had the thought that it might be interesting to turn the lens around and see what things looked like through the lens. Again, this was in the interest of trying to find new ways to shoot Christmas tree bokeh (though, the old ways still work pretty well).

The set-up for this shot was pretty basic:

The 50mm lens is perched on top of a flashlight to get it up to the right height with the Pentax K10D on a tripod. The lamp to the left provides fill light for the front of the lens. I used the rule of thirds to frame the shot (knowing that I was going to crop to square later to eliminate the flashlight). I set the ISO to 100, zoomed to 55mm and selected an aperture of f/5.6 (the largest aperture my kit lens can achieve at 55mm). I dialed in the focus on the front of the lens manually before tripping the 0.6 second shutter with the 2 second delay self timer.

Post processing in Lightroom was limited to cropping, white balance (tungsten) and my usual mix of standard processing tweaks for this camera:

• Clarity: 39
• Vibrance: +25
• Sharpening: 48
• Detail: 49
• Defringe: All Edges

Everything else was left at the Lightroom defaults.

The main thing to take away from this photo is that it doesn’t take much effort to do this kind of stuff. From start to finish this shot took me less than 5 minutes (including taking several test shots and set-up shots for this post with a 2nd camera). The only set-up required was balancing the lens on the end of the flashlight and tilting the lamp shade a touch to get the light right.

Sometimes cool pictures just come from thinking outside the box a bit. Here I was sitting in front of the Christmas tree contemplating what kind of unique Christmas tree bokeh photo I could take when I thought of my recent experience capturing bokeh with my pocket camera. I got to thinking that my 50mm f/1.7 lens might make a good subject for a shot, rather than simply the tool for capturing them.

The set-up for this shot was pretty simple. I placed my Pentax K10D DSLR with the 50 attached on the coffee table in front of the Christmas tree. Next, I set my Panasonic Lumix FX07 on the table in front of the K10D and framed up the shot. I wasn’t happy with the vertical angle so I placed a quarter under the front edge of the bottom of the Lumix to prop it up a bit.

As you may be able to see, I also dialed in -2/3EV in exposure compensation. I’ll save it for another post, but understanding and properly using exposure compensation is one of the most important steps to good photography. Anyway, at this point all that was left was to do was fire, download, crop, and post.

In my opinion, the photo turned out pretty nice. I may try and re-shoot it with my K10D and 18-55 kit lens (with the 50mm not attached to the camera). If I do I’ll post the result here.

UPDATE:

Re-shoot with the K10D and processed through Lightroom. This was one of those shots where when you see the image for the first time you say “whoa”. Pretty cool stuff!

Behind the scenes:

Photo stats: ISO 100, f/5.6, 55mm, 4.0sec, IS off (tripod), 2 sec self timer release. Cropped, adjusted white balance and added a bit of sharpening in Lightroom.

There are a number of resources out there for creating your own electronic remote shutter release for Pentax DSLRs with a 2.5mm remote port. I don’t use a remote very often as the 2 second self timer seems to work fine for 99% of my photos under 30 seconds. However, longer bulb exposures require a remote. So, I picked up a generic cellphone headset at the dollar store and wired it up to a toggle switch I had laying around. (It seems this design also works for Canon Digital Rebel cameras with 2.5mm remote ports.)

There are 3 wires inside one of these cables: white, red & black. (Four conductor versions will not work with a Pentax so make sure the 2.5mm plug has 2 silver bands and not 4). All I did was cut the cord, strip back the outer jacket to expose the 3 conductors then plugged it in to the remote port on the camera and shorted the red and white wires to the black one to figure out which controlled what function on the camera. In this case the white wire triggered the shutter and the red caused the camera to auto focus. I connected the white wire to one side of the toggle switch with a small acorn nut and the black to the other side. I drilled a couple of holes in an old pill bottle to make a housing for the assembly.

superior ergonomics of the pill bottle housing

In standard shooting mode flipping the switch to the “on” position releases the shutter. You have to return the switch to the “off” position to review the shot and take another (ie: the shutter only fires when the switch is in the “on” position). For bulb exposures you simply flip the switch to “on” to open the shutter then flip it back to “off” to close it. A momentary switch would facilitate non-bulb shutter releases but I found the toggle switch to be perfectly workable as long as you remember to turn it off after the shot. There’s no auto focus function with this set up but that’s not typically a concern for the long exposure shots I take as I usually manually focus anyway. You can add a momentary switch to the focus wire if that’s important to you. Also, you could wire in both a toggle switch and a momentary switch to the shutter release to make non-bulb shots more convenient.

1 minute bulb exposure using DIY remote release switch

Typically I have seen these DIY releases installed in an old film canister. Seeing as how I haven’t shot film in about 10 years I didn’t have one handy and figured the pill bottle was a good substitute. All was good with the use of my $1 release during my first outing until I was stopped and questioned by a policeman while shooting long exposures in downtown Auburn, AL. Seems he was less concerned with my skulking around in shadows taking pictures and just wanted to know what was in the pill bottle :D

UPDATE:

Shot the family Christmas card photo today and needed a little more reach than the original 12″ cord provided. 50′ of old speaker wire from the garage and a couple of extra wire nuts and voila!

DIY Pentax cable release with 50' cord.

I had to make a run to the recycling center today and decided to stop by Wallace Center (the building on Auburn University’s campus that houses the Industrial and Graphic Design programs). I thought the place might be deserted on a Saturday during Christmas break. I was right and got some very cool photos with my Pentax K10D and Pentax-A 50mm f/1.7 SMC lens. Lucky thing I always have my camera handy!

The photo above was shot hand-held at ISO 400, f/4.0 at 1/25 second. The K10D’s in-body IS helped ensure a sharp shot. I later processed the image as black and white in Adobe Lightroom.

When I first entered the building I came in just on the other side of the doors at the end of this hall and headed up stairs. The motion activated light switches automatically turned on the lights at the end of the hall where I came in. Later, I came down another set of stairs at the opposite end of the building and entered this hallway on my way out. The automatic lights took a second to react to my presence before flooding the entire corridor in fluorescent light. I really liked the way the light at the end of the hall played off the walls and polished floor when half the lights were off, so I found the switch and turned off the lights at this end of the hallway before taking this shot.

After taking the black and white picture of the hallway, I decided to try a long exposure deep focus shot. Having not brought my tripod I had to improvise and simply set my camera on the floor. I got this shot by simply selecting  f/22 and ISO 100 in Aperture Priority mode and the camera dialed in 10 seconds for the exposure. I used the 2 second self timer to release the shutter without touching the camera. All I did in Lightroom was tweak the white balance and add a little sharpening.

These push pins adorn the gallery wall used by the Graphic Design program. Normally they are holding up student artwork and photography. Now they patiently await next semester. Hand-held, ISO 400, f/2.8, at 1/15 second. I tried f/1.7 but couldn’t get the focus on the push pin in the dim light of the hallway. Plus, I found the slightly greater DOF of f/2.8 did a better job of keeping the push pins in the distance recognizable.

This is the studio where I have spent the last 3 1/2 months. It’s a lot cleaner and quieter than it has been. I love the feeling of the vignetting this lens produces wide open. Hand-held, ISO 400, f/1.7, at 1/500 second.

One of the 3rd year studios. All the stools where upside down on the desks and the light filtering in through the windows facing the hallway was mesmerizing. I shot this hand-held at ISO 400, f/1.7 and 1/8 second. 1/8 second is starting to push the envelope of what the built-in IS can do on the Pentax. I could have bumped up the ISO but instead I just braced myself up against a wall and controlled my breathing. It took a few tries but I got a number of clear shots with some wonderful bokeh.

I love taking pictures in vacant and deserted buildings. I always find myself wondering what stories the things left behind could tell. Of course, it’s also pretty easy to creep one’s self out…