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I went to see the fireworks at Candlewood Lake last night (they're always on the Saturday before the 4th). They shoot off from a small island on the lake, and I watched from the town park with some family and friends. Of course, I took some pictures.
Here's a few I like, from the beginning to the grand finale.
All taken with my D300 and Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 lens.
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Fill flash was used in this shot of a Hosta plant.
A basic photographic technique, known as "fill flash", uses your camera's flash to fill-in dark shadows when you're shooting in harsh lighting conditions (i.e. midday Sun), especially with a backlit subject. Its very easy to apply, and very effective, but it often seems that the average snapshooter doesn't know how to use it.
Without going into too much detail, I'll explain how to enable the fill flash setting on your camera. All you have to do is find the button that looks like a lightning bolt, and press it until the camera's display shows only the lightning bolt (this option may be in a menu, check your camera manual). Sometimes it'll display "auto", "slow", or "rear" next to the lightning bolt instead, but you don't want those. Once you've done that, the camera will handle the rest automatically, and you can enjoy better pictures when you're outside.
For the longer explanation of fill flash, I'm still going to keep it fairly simple, but I'll provide some sample shots to show it in action.
For example, let's say you're at the beach on a bright, sunny day, and you want to take a picture of your friends with the sand, sky, and Sun in the background. Now, I know most people wouldn't shoot into the Sun, but I want to emphasize the fact that the background is brighter than the subject. Still, even without the Sun, the sky and sand would be much brighter than your friends. So, you snap a picture, but your friends are all too dark to see! You can barely make out their expressions, while the sky and sand look great... ain't that a B?
Well, the reason this happens is because your camera is trying to make everything appear natural (blue skies look blue, tan sand looks tan), and it gives priority to bright areas of the scene. Subsequently, your friends fall into shadow, because they aren't nearly as bright as the sky and sand. If you wanted to account for this by changing the settings in your camera to brighten everything up (called exposure compensation), your friends would look normal, but you'd lose the colors of the sand and sky as they washed out and faded to bright white.
Here's a shot to show what happened in the above scenario.
Everything in the foreground is dark, but the solution is simple here. Press that little lightning bolt button on your camera, and give the shot a dose of fill flash.
Notice that the sky looks exactly the same, but my hand and the camera (Canon SD600) are now lit up. Boom. That's fill flash.
To leave off on something with a little more impact, and going along with the beach theme, here's a shot of Ryan.
This shot, and the one of the Hosta at the top of the post, were both taken with that little Canon SD600 camera and it's built-in flash!
Please leave a comment if you find this post useful, or at least entertaining... I'd love to get some feedback here!
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Grabbed this shot of a white Honda S2000 on my lunch break at work today... nothing special, just a quick one taken from my driver's seat.
Taken with a Nikon D50 camera and a Tamron 17-50 f/2.8 lens @ f/5.6 with a circular polarizing filter attached.
As I've said before, I sometimes like to make daytime shots B&W, because the harsh midday sun doesn't usually create very appealing colors. However, the CP (Circular Polarizer) filter I used helps to cut down on glare, so it brought out the colors a little more and created a darker, richer blue sky. Here's the color version for comparison, which I'm pretty happy with, all things considered.
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Also, here's two older, never-before seen shots from Tarrywile Park in Danbury.
Both were taken with a Nikon D300 camera and a Tamron 17-50 f/2.8 lens.
I did some dodging and burning on the first shot, but the second shot is what's called an HDR image (High Dynamic Range), or some might call it simulated HDR. Creating an HDR image allows one to retain detail in both the light and dark areas of the image. In my shot, for example, it would be nearly impossible to expose for the tree without having the sky "blow out" (overexposed and loses all detail). Likewise, if I exposed to keep detail in the sky, I would lose detail in the tree and bushes (underexposed - they would be too dark).
The process of creating an HDR image requires multiple exposures of the same exact shot (look up "bracketing" - tripod needed in dim lighting). These bracketed exposures may then be combined using automated software like Photomatix, or manually in Photoshop (can also be automated in PS CS3), to retain detail in both the highlights and shadows. If you have any questions about the HDR process, please contact me, but there are a number of tutorials available online too.
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I hope everyone enjoyed Father's Day yesterday, because I had a good time taking pictures and eating some great food... nothing like cooking on the barbeque on a beautiful day. Anyway, I'd like to show off a few shots I took at my girlfriend's grandmother's house in her garden. Hold your mouse over each one to see a short description.
All of the above photos were taken using a Nikon D300 camera with a Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 lens and a wireless SB-800 flash.
I also found a frog hanging out in a mini-pond in that same garden. He was a brave little guy, and didn't even flinch when I blasted him multiple times with my SB-800 flash. I was using my Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 at 50mm, and was literally 4 inches away from his face (leaning over the pond, almost falling in or worse, dunking my camera!). Here's two shots of him, the first with flash and the second without. Again, taken with my D300.
The funny thing about these shots is that I actually prefer the one without flash. You see, I had been using my flash all day, so by the time I got to the frog, I naturally used the flash first. I took about 10 shots of him before I called it quits, and actually put the flash away after that. 15 minutes later, I decided to go back and see if he was still sitting there. Well he was, so I snapped a few more, this time without flash, and came back with the shot above.
Even though the shot without flash is at ISO 800, versus ISO 100 on the shot with flash, I still prefer it because one, the D300 handles high ISOs very well (low noise/grain) and two, the flash picked up too many reflections on his slimy (shiny) frog skin. The thing about it is that I didn't consciously think, "the frog's skin is too shiny for flash" at first, I simply tried a different technique (no flash) that happened to be more effective, and had one of those "ah-ha!" moments. Looking back, I should've known better, but I was just in the habit of using flash after shooting the flowers beforehand (plus I rushed over to snap the frog before he hopped away).
This is the kind of thing that makes photography fun to me, and was a nice reminder to not get stuck using one technique all day. I also hope that you can take it as a lesson to "switch it up" every once and awhile, just because.
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Just a little something to get me started here...
Welcome to the Photograph Danbury blog! My name is Mike Yamin, and I'm an up and-coming freelance photographer from Danbury, Connecticut. I created this blog to serve as a place to post all of my ideas, experiences, and tips pertaining to photography. I will also post new photos as often as possible, for your viewing pleasure. I'd love to hear any questions or topic suggestions, so if you have any, please email me at info@michaelyamin.com.
Today, I have a shot of a Porsche 911 Carrera S.
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This was taken using my trusty old Nikon D50 with the 50mm f/1.8 lens at f/5.6.
It may appear to be a straight B&W shot, but its actually split-toned. The term split-toning comes from film days, but digital files may be altered to achieve the same effect. Split-toning allowed me to shift the hues of the highlights separately from the shadows. Using PS CS3, I added yellow to the highlights and blue to the shadows in an attempt to add depth to an image that was taken in broad daylight, which is often harsh and washes out colors.