Have you ever handed your camera over to someone else and asked them to take a picture for you? Are you usually satisfied with what you got when you take a look at the picture later? Most of the time, I bet your not. Here is why. Most people typically include too much background in the picture. Background is great if the setting is important in why the photograph is being taken. For example, if you are visiting Biltmore House in Ashville, North Carolina and you are standing on the front lawn and ask someone to take your picture, chances are you want them to include the 100+ year old castle in the background. If you are somewhere that the background gives the viewer no further information, chances are you want the frame to be filled with you or your family. Here is an example from my life. Bless this sweet lady for taking the time away from her own family to snap a picture for mine but this is the picture she took of us.
Do you have any idea where we are? Can you really even see much of us in the picture? About two-thirds of this photograph can be eliminated. Here it is after being cropped.
Now the focus is on the family. Fortunately, my camera is a high enough resolution that I can crop out that much of the photograph and still have a good quality print. Not all cameras are like that. Also, by cropping it, I eliminated most of the trash can behind my son and myself. The photographer could have also done that by merely taking about three steps to her left before pressing the shutter.
This post is not meant to criticize the generous person who snapped this photo for us. I’m happy to have a picture that includes all five of us – particularly me since I’m usually holding the camera. It’s only meant as an example of the difference between filling the frame versus too much background. When you are snapping a photograph for yourself or someone else, consider what is behind the subject. Is it important in telling the story? If not, fill the frame with the subject.
I know I’m revisiting fill flash – again – but I have another example for you. I’ve read in several places that if your subject is in the shade, you will have a more even light to work with and you don’t have to worry about raccoon eyes from the sun overhead. Well, that may be true if you are in full shade. The other day the boys were playing in our pool in the backyard. Half the pool was in the shade and half was in full sun. I wondered what effect that would have on my photographs. I took two shots of my son in the same exact spot -in the shady side of the pool – less than a minute apart. For one I used the pop-up flash on my camera for fill flash and for the other, no flash at all. Here are the results.
Obviously, merely being in a shadow is not the complete answer to raccoon eyes in the mid-day sun. You need to be taking enough pictures in enough situations to learn to anticipate the type of results you can expect your camera to produce. In the example above, the flash saved the picture. If I had only taken the no flash picture, I would not have a picture that captures my son’s fascination and excitement with his pool toys.
Once upon a time, I was watching The Whole Picture on DIY with Erin Manning. She mentioned that you can take pictures in your home without expensive studio lighting by purchasing some simple lights from your local home improvement store. Ever since watching that episode, I’ve wanted to try it. I went and bought myself three of the lamps pictured below, three light bulbs and two clamps. I spent a total of $37. I thought I was buying day light bulbs but I was mistaken.
To make sure my pictures come out correctly, I have to set my white balance to tungsten. I’ll be on the look out for daylight bulbs in the future because I think they’d make the portrait look better.
I set up my first lamp by clamping it on top of my dining room cabinet to aim it down toward where I plan to have my subject seated. Then I set up the other two lamps by clamping them on chairs on either side of the room aiming them toward where my subject would be – creating side lighting. I think I’m going to have to spend some time setting up those lamps to get them just right and figuring out where they would work best. I had some serious shadows happening on my back drop. That will take some practice. Speaking of backdrop, I used a king size flat sheet and clamped it to a large mirror that was leaning against my china cabinet.
Here is a shot I got of my dog – Miss Molly.
Now that I think I have everything set up in a fashion that can produce some even lighting, it’s time to bring in my toddler. Each of these shots have been cropped but here are the portraits I took of him today.
If you want to be able to produce some nice pictures in your own home when your little people are in a good mood and not be at the mercy of grumpy studio photographers, perhaps this is your solution. It will take some practice but it may be a good, inexpensive bet for your consideration. I snapped 45 pictures of my child this morning. I cropped three of them and I think they might be worth printing.
Do you know how to add the copyright symbol to any of your work? Writing, photographs… anything you want to protect on your blog? As you can see in the pictures in my last post, I was trying to learn how to add a watermark and copyright logo to my pictures – just in case. All you have to do is hold down the alt button and type the numbers 0169. It’s that simple!
I couldn’t pick just one. They were taken as a series to put in my scrapbook. Do you like them better in color or black and white?
Maile from the Daily Relish has started another blog where she plans to offer Photography Tips every Friday. This week on her new blog she challenges us to find a picture that offers some juxtaposition. As I looked through my files, this was really the best I could come up with. Does it count?
Toddler boy with beer in his sandbox? I will be on the lookout this week to see if I can see a better one to shoot.
Recently, my husband and I went to the Melting Pot for dinner. Naturally, I took along my camera. I had planned to practice some cool low light techniques to see if I could capture something fun. I snapped a picture in the waiting area before turning it off and putting it away. Then I saw a cool lighting fixture that I wanted to capture. I pulled my baby back out and turned her on to find a CF error on the back. Isn’t that bizzare? Literally 3 minutes apart.
When I got home, I found a free recovery program out there in google land. So if this ever happens to you – don’t just reformat your card. Try to recover your images first. It took about an hour and a half but it got almost all of my images back for me including some that I’d previously deleted or moved off the card. Worked like a charm. Here’s the link.
I think that part of the process of getting better is learning to shoot five more frames after you think you’ve got the shot. Yes, we’ve all lucked out on occasion and gotten one great shot the first and only try. However, most of the time that is not likely to be the case unless you are a professional or a well practiced amateur. Here is an example from my house yesterday. I took the kids to the pool for a few hours and when we came home, my daughter – the girl who never sleeps – was so wiped out she took a nap. Since she was sleeping during daylight hours, I thought I’d try to snap some shots of her sleeping sweetness. This is the first picture I took. A fine snapshot, but not fantastic. Also, not terribly flattering to her with the up-the-nose, open mouth look of it.
Frankly, at the time I took it, I failed to notice the unflattering angle because I was thinking sweet thoughts of my sleeping angel. It wasn’t until I saw it on the screen later that I realized that the angle wasn’t a good one. After I shot this one frame, I noticed how sweetly she had her hands folded in her sleep so I peeled back the blanket a wee bit to get a shot of that.
Then I decided to walk around to the other side of the bed to try a shot from that angle.
A much more flattering picture of my girl. After I snapped this picture, I noticed that she had her arm wrapped around her favorite stuffed kitten so I thought I’d try to get a picture of that little detail because someday it will be a nice memory of her at this age. She’d had the animal in her arms in the hands shot above, but now she’d moved her hand to rest it on her kitty.
I wasn’t satisfied of the way the kitty looked in the frame so I thought I’d try a new angle that allowed my daughter’s sleeping face to be in the same frame with the face of the kitten.
A much more flattering picture of my sleeping child and it included a sweet detail of her childhood. This was my favorite picture once I pulled them up on my screen.
My challenge to you when you are photographing your life… take that first snapshot to make sure you’ve got the moment captured. Then, if you can, try to shoot at least five more frames to see if you can make it better.
It happened. Just like Chuck Delaney said it would in Photography Your Way. He said that even if you don’t consider yourself a professional photographer you should have business cards with your name on them to give to people when they ask – which he said they would. I was at my first gig last weekend and within 5 minutes someone asked me for a card. Unfortunately, I’d ignored Chuck’s advice and I had no business cards. My reasoning was that I didn’t know what I’d name my business – if I were to get that far. I was still trying to come up with the perfect name when I should have followed his advice and just had a card with my name printed on it and photographer as my occupation along with all my relevant contact information. Business cards are cheap enough to have them reprinted when the perfect name comes to you. In the meantime, have something to hand to a prospective client that is more professional than your digits scribbled on a scrap of paper – which is what I had to do. Ugh.
Lesson learned.
I learned an important lesson yesterday. Either I need to get in the habit of resetting my camera back to a favorite standard before putting my camera down or I need to check my settings every time I pick it up. The lesson from yesterday for me involved shooting pictures of my children attending their first parade in full afternoon sun and shooting all of it at an ISO of 1600. Everything is dull looking and none of the colors really pop. This is a picture I took of my two older children jumping up and down waving in excitement to the local fire department as they passed by in their trucks. As a mother, the picture is a sweet memory in a snapshot. As a photographer, it could stand to be improved.
I had a friend tell me once that she’d done a similar thing by setting her white balance to tungsten to snap pictures with no flash in her home only to forget to change it and snap about 50 pictures of her kids playing in the snow. All of the pictures came out blue. She was so unhappy because she’d managed to get many great shots of her children but they would have all required a great deal of post production editing to make them printable.
I guess the lesson here is that if you start to play with your various settings, learn to reset them back to a favorite standard each time.
