Hello everyone!  Beckie here again, bringing you a little bit o’ photography goodness today :)  I figure it’s time we tackle that photography topic that makes even seasoned photographers shake in their boots…er, I mean high heels…ISO!

A long, long time ago on the blog I did a very basic primer on photography and understanding how ISO, Shutter Speed, and aperture (that f number) work together to capture light to expose an image.  The basic idea is that you want to set those three variables in such a way that your camera meter reads “0″, or it’s perfectly centered between positive (too much light), and negative (not enough light).

ISO is something that many beginning photographers don’t like to utilize in high ranges because either a) they’ve tried a high ISO photo and it didn’t turn out well (lots of noise), or b) they’ve heard from people not to use higher ISOs because their photo will be noisy!  Well, let’s demystify and debunk some of that today!

What I’ve learned about ISO:

1.  It is true that as you increase ISO, you begin to add “noise” to a photo.  How much noise is added and when the noise is introduced (at what ISO range) is somewhat camera dependent.  However, there are things you can do to mitigate noise!

2.  Not all noise is bad.  Seriously.  It’s far better to CAPTURE the moment at a high ISO than to not capture the moment for fear of an imperfect image.  Heck, all the photos from my childhood are either orange, polariods, or glued down into an album that has a plastic cover stuck to it.  So really, put it into perspective – is a tiny bit of noise in an image going to ruin it for future generations?  um…nope.

3.  There are steps you can take to make the noise as minimal as possible.  Let’s look at some of them next!

But first…what is noise?

That, my friends, is noise.  This is a section of a really crappy photo, one shot at a pretty high ISO (ISO3200) that I under-exposed on purpose to exaggerate the noise. I also picked the worst part of the entire image to show you because you can see both types of noise…regular old noise (grainy chunky pixels that shouldn’t be there) and color noise  (colors that don’t belong there – the flecks of pinks, greens, reds, etc that you see around this sample).

Typically you’ll get regular old noise in whiter, lighter portions of an image with the addition of color noise in the darker, shadowed areas.  In this particular example, because it’s that bad, there’s also color noise over the white portion as well.

So…what can you do to prevent un-necessary noise??

NO MATTER WHAT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, SHOULD YOU UNDER-EXPOSE THE PHOTO.

That’s pretty much it :)

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that you actually should learn that you often have to over expose an image to capture it correctly. Slight over exposure is very easy to fix in editing software with simple sliders in  ACR, Lightroom, even Photoshop (here’s a post that covers basic adjustments in ACR).  And over exposing minimizes noise.

Another key reason why you need to over expose in many cases is that, well, the camera meter can be wrong. Well, it’s basically a computer so it’s never really wrong, but it can definitely tell you that something is “right” when it really isn’t.  There are two main reasons this happens:

1. Your metering mode.  I always shoot in spot meter mode because it takes a small, very specific portion of the image into consideration when it determines whether or not there is sufficient light.  Canon cameras use the area just around the center focal point and evaluate the light to give you a meter reading.   An alternative mode, called evaluative, considers a much larger area of the photo around that center focal point and gives you an “average” value for the entire area considered.  I typically photograph people – my kids – and I want their sweet little faces to be properly exposed.  Because of this, I want the camera to disregard everything around them and make sure the photo is exposed properly for their faces.  So I put the center focal point on their faces, adjust the ISO, aperture, and shutter speed until my meter says “0″, and then I shoot.

In evaluative mode, the area around that sweet little face is considered as well.  So if you have strong backlighting your meter will actually consider some of that brightness and determine that your average light value is higher than what it would get as spot metering on the face alone.  As a result the face will come out darker.  You can find many resources on-line to further (better?!) explain these modes, including your camera manual, but for now stick to spot or partial metering (partial metering is kind of in-between spot and evaluative).

2.  The color of your subject.  This one is really, really important so I’m illustrating it below.  Your camera is designed to give you a meter reading as if you are taking a photograph of middle gray (18% gray).  White reflects nearly 100% of light, black reflects nearly 0% of light, and middle gray is – you guessed it – in the middle.  But the world, fortunately, is not shades of gray.  Here’s a very common example/problem…WHITE.

In the series of photos below, I used spot metering and metered off the large white flower hanging down to your left.

In the far left image, my camera meter said I had the perfect amount of light to capture my image – assuming I was taking a photo of something 18% gray!  But I wasn’t…i was taking a photo of red and white flowers.

So – to prove my point – I changed my shutter speed, kept everything else the same, and took another photo when my meter was to the first dot past “0″.  This is called over exposing by 1/3 stop.  That image is brighter overall, and looks better than the one on the left.  I continued this, reducing my shutter speed to add 1/3 of a stop each time, until by the fourth photo I was one full stop over-exposed (according to my meter!).

The FOURTH shot is the best!  Want to know why?

This screen shot says it all.  My histogram shows that very little data in the image is blown (hitting up against the right wall of the histogram), and the portion that is blown is highlighted in bright red in the image itself.  It’s all stuff I don’t care about!  the back lighting in the window, the bright parts of the reflection on the floor…I’m far more satisfied having the flowers nice and bright even though some of the other portions of the image are blown.

Even if this post wasn’t about shooting at high ISO, it’s really important to know that a good SOOC (straight out of camera) image looks more like the photo on the right than the one on the left.  I could scrap this photo as-is without having to do a single thing to it!  Heck, if I really loved it (which I don’t, LOL), I could print it for my wall and hang it up.  Learning to master white balance and exposure in camera, without relying on editing, is the single most important thing for a photographer to accomplish :)

ok – so now we’re ready to tie this back in to ISO…

Here’s a close-up of the noise from the first and fourth images from the exposure sample above:

The general brightness is just much better in the image on the right, but if you look more closely you can see a few other differences.  The image on the left has color  noise on the bottom portion of the white flower while the image on the right doesn’t.  Also, the noise is much heavier, almost “bigger” looking in the neutral space behind the flowers in the image on the left.  The +1 stop photo has much finer, smaller noise.  And keep in mind – ALL of these images were shot with ISO3200, a relatively high ISO setting!

So – wrapping this up (you’re quite a trooper if you’re still with me, LOL!)…

1. PROPERLY expose your photos.  That sometimes means “overexposing”.

2.  Do not sharpen images with noise – it makes it SIGNIFICANTLY worse. I usually fix noise and then do some sharpening if it’s necessary, but they two kind of counter-act each other to watch closely as you make adjustments.

3.  Learn to use noise reduction in your editing software.  ACR has it, as does LR.  I regularly use the noise sliders in LR to reduce noise.  It’s so powerful, in fact, that it can virtually eliminate the noise altogether.   Here’s a before and after with noise reduction applied:

{After settings in the LightRoom noise reduction panel:  Color +18, Luminance +28).

4.  and final…do your own ISO test so that you know how high  you can go with your ISO with confidence.  Do a test just like I did here!

That’s all I have for you today!  Please don’t hesitate to ask questions or to share your own experiences in the comments section!

Join SP tomorrow for the launch of Project SCRAP 2012! Yay!

BeckiePhotography, Uncategorized 8 Comments

Hello everyone!  Happy December!  Beckie here.

I just LOVE this time of year.  I love the cool (almost COLD!) weather, the scent of burning candles, and the glow of festive holiday lights :)

Last year, almost a year ago to the date in fact, I shared tips for taking photographs around the holidays.  It’s a great “getting started” overview with ideas on how to make your photos from this time of year even more special.  This year I decided to do something a bit different, and to try out a technique I’d seen a few times before but never actually tried…creating shaped bokeh!

We’ve probably mentioned it in the past, but bokeh is “the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light“.  It’s the blurry part of an image :)   Turns out, by putting a template over the front of the lens and shaping the light that hits your sensor, you can create some really cool effects with your bokeh.  Ready?  It’s super simple, I promise!

What you need:

• portrait lens (you need something f2.0 or wider (a lower number) for this.  When looking at a lens, you’ll see “50mm 1:1.8, or 30mm 1:1.4″ – we’re talking about the “1.8″ and the “1.4″ part.  If you have those numbers, you’re good.  If your lens has bigger numbers, this technique most likely won’t work very well :(
• black cardstock
• craft knife

Place your lens face-down on the black cardstock and trace around the inner most ring of your lens.  It might take a small bit of “fiddling”, but you simply cut the circle down a bit until it fits within the ring of the lens.  As you can see, I kind of pressed it in there snugly to make sure it stayed in place.  Once you get one ring sized properly, just trace it out a few other times in case you get the fever and want to create a few different shapes.

Once you have your black circles, you need to use the craft knife to cut shapes from the center.  I had a holiday stencil on-hand from years of holiday craft projects, and I used it to trace and cut out a starburst, a star, and a tree.  You could also use a punch if you have one!

Unfortunately I got home every night this week after it was already dark, so please excuse these photos – they aren’t my best!  But what I do love about them is that you can very clearly see how COOL and how amazing it is to actually change the shape of the light (the bokeh) in your photos:

shot at 1/50, f1.4 with my Sigma 30mm f1.4 lens (which rocks, btw!)

Here are a few tips:

• You want your lens to be as “wide open” as possible (the lowest f-stop number your lens supports).
• blurry is better!  In other photos not shown here, I focused on the tree – and the photos had no shaped bokeh because well, there was no bokeh!  The idea is to create blurry light to allow the little lens cover thingy do its work :)  So just manually adjust the focus  and watch the beautiful bokeh emerge :)
• The more blur, the bigger the bokeh.  So play around to find out what looks best!
• Use a tripod.  Or, if you do what I did – which is to temporarily misplace that little thing that screws into the bottom of the camera to allow your camera to snap into the tripod, you can pile up books on the coffee table and very carefully press the shutter button.  LOL!  (I need to find that thing!  hubby will not be happy if I tell him I need another tripod, LOL.  But the pile of books worked OK)

I was SUPER curious to see how the left image  would come out, which was created with the starburst cut-out.  I love the effect it created – but it also created a bit “messier” image.  I think it’s pretty cool!  I know my daughter would love it if I created one with her initials in the bokeh – something I might try over vacation :)

I have better examples of holiday bokeh (and tips on how to create it) in the post from last year, so be sure to check that out also!  And remember that you can just use the bokeh as a background element.  Believe it or not, you can still focus on a person (or a gift, an ornament, etc) in the foreground of your image and it will look perfectly normal – and still have that cool bokeh in the background.

Well, that wraps it up for me today!  I hope you enjoyed this simple little experiment.  And for even more inspiration – check out the shaped bokeh images on flickr!  And stop by the Blog tomorrow for some more festive food fun with Casharina. SP and Kylie will also be stopping by with all the latest on projectSCRAP!

Happy holidays to you all, and best wishes for a healthy and happy new year :)

BeckiePhotography, Uncategorized 4 Comments

Hello again everyone!  It’s Beckie here today :)  I’m super excited with today’s topic, as it’s the first thing in a long time that has made a truly dramatic improvement in the quality of my photos!  And I know it can help you, too :)  So….let’s get started!

Let’s start with a very basic discussion of white balance.  White balance is the adjustment applied to remove color casts from your photos.  Every different lighting situation we face presents a different lighting color.  Candle light and light bulbs are warm (yellow-ish), cloud coverage and shade are cool (blue-ish).  Our own eyes have a fantastic ability to see beyond the color casts present in light; that is, we don’t usually perceive the color differences from one light situation to another.  Your camera, however, needs a little help!  Your photos will look their best when your camera is set to compensate for the color cast of the lighting situation.  We do this with the white balance setting on the camera.

Nearly all cameras, including basic point-and-shoot cameras, have several white balance settings to choose from.  These typically include “Auto”, “Cloudy”, “Daylight”, “Fluorescent”, and “Tungsten”.  Chances are, your camera is set to “Auto” (sometimes written as “AWB” for Auto White Balance).  This is a setting that effectively puts the responsibility for detecting and removing color cast to your camera.  The camera does an OK job, but typically only gets white balance accurate in relatively “neutral” lighting – flash and daylight.  But in all other conditions, your camera most likely doesn’t do a great job – leaving a color cast to your images.

One other drawback to using AWB on your camera is this:  your camera will re-evaluate the lighting with every shot taken.  This means it will potentially apply diffferent corrective adjustments to every photo you take.  Consider this:  the presence of white/gray/neutral content in your photo increases the chance of your camera making an accurate assessment in AWB mode.  So what if one shot is of a neighbor in a white shirt in the shade, but the very next shot is of a small child wearing purple (also in the shade)?  It’s likely that your camera will assess the two situations differently.  Neither shot is likely to be really great, but the image of the person in the white shirt will likely have truer color than that of the child in purple.  Later, when you upload the images to your computer and you want to edit your photos, each image will need it’s own custom color adjustments!  The same adjustment that warmed up the purple shirt photo and made it “just right” is likely to be too warm for the white shirt, which likely had a warmer value to start with.  In essence, using AWB makes batch editing photos nearly impossible.  I recommend using the RIGHT white balance modes for each situation for two reasons:

• more accurate representation of color for all situations if  set properly
• bulk editing photos (through PS, Adobe Camera Raw, Lightroom, etc) is possible – dramatically reducing  your photo editing time

Now…for those of you who have dSLRs – you have even MORE options.  At least one more, to be specific – and it’s called Kelvin.

I’m going to be straight up here and say that I don’t understand the details, nor do I care, about the physics and science behind Kelvin, but it’s basically a scale that measures the warmth of light.  The good news?  You’ll get CRAZY good photos if you take advantage of what your camera has to offer here.  Here’s a reference of how common lighting situations translate to their corresponding Kelvin values:

So – all you have to do is set your white balance to “K” for Kelvin (see your user’s manual for instructions on how to do this).  Once you do this, you’ll see a number pop up.  The default value is typically in the daylight range above (5000-6500) and varies by manufacturer.  The default value doesn’t really matter anyway, as you should set it to the value that is correct for the current conditions in which you’re shooting.  5800 is a great place to start for normal daylight, just to get a starting point.  Some photographers prefer “warmer” images and shoot at around 6200 in normal lighting conditions.  Think of the number as the amount of light you’re adding to the photo - that’s the easiest way for me to remember that low Kelvin numbers are already warm and don’t need much warmth added (like candle light).  Shade, on the other hand, is cooler and needs more warmth added – so the number will be bigger.

I took my camera out one evening and practiced setting/changing values.  It just takes a few clicks on my Canon 7d to change the K value – it’s super easy!  I set the value, then take a test shot, and view it through the screen.  If it looks “true to life” to me, I leave it, otherwise I adjust up or down accordingly (remember, making the number bigger adds more warmth to the image).  After just one evening of shooting with Kelvin, I’ll never use any other white balance mode again.  Seriously.  My white balance modes have always been consistently cooler than what is “true to life”, something I’ve heard photographers with Nikon cameras say as well.  By using Kelvin, you spend a few extra seconds setting the value to exactly what you need for true to life images.  Just remember that as lighting changes, you’ll want to adjust your Kelvin values accordingly.  I typically increase the K value by a few clicks at a time throughout the evening, just as reference :)

I find that now I rarely adjust the white balance of my photos, and if I do have to make edits, it’s a VERY minor adjustment.  Refer to this post for tips on how to edit white balance and exposure :)  If you shoot RAW, you can either use the color sliders in ACR or LR, or you can change to a different WB mode (like daylight, cloudy, etc) after the fact.  If you use JPG, you will have to use the yellow/blue color slider to adjust WB accordingly in your editing program.

This photo is nothing special…except that it was one of the very first images I shot using Kelvin white balance.  It is completely SOOC (straight out of camera) except for a small amount of cropping.  I immediately noticed a HUGE improvement in the color!!  I had it set to around 9000 as it was late in the afternoon and the whole front yard was in shade.  Don’t be afraid to increase the value!  Skin should be warm, not cool and “pasty”!

Getting the white balance right “in camera” (as the photo is taken) produces more accurate representations of color than anything I achieve using other WB modes.  I’m just not an expert at photo processing/editing – nor do I want to be.  So I am so thrilled I spent an evening learning to shoot Kelvin to produce better, more accurate colors than what I’ve had before.  :)

I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s detour into White Balance!  I’d love to hear about your experiences below in the comments section :)  I also feel the need to remind everyone that I’m NOT a pro, just a mom with a camera…on a mission to capture great photos :)

Thanks for stopping by the blog today! We’ll be back tomorrow with some COLOR inspiration!

BeckiePhotography, Uncategorized 16 Comments

“Why be perfect?  Nobody else is.” – Julienne Beasley.

Hi everyone.  It’s Jenelle here, with my very first Shabby Shoppe blog post.  (Can you hear my knees-a-knocking?!  I’m a bit nervous!)   Today’s post is not going to be a ‘technical’ style focus on photos (they are best covered by our photography expert Beckie!) but I do hope you enjoy reading along and that it inspires you to continue scrapping and preserving your precious memories.  Most of all, I hope it encourages you to keep posting your layouts in our wonderful inspiration gallery. 

We all know that scrapbooking and photography go hand in hand, but I don’t believe that being a first-rate photographer is a pre-requisite for creating eye catching layouts.  A photo doesn’t have to be perfect to touch our hearts, capture a memory or tell a story. 

When I scrap my photos, I naturally choose the pictures that are visually powerful – colourful, bright, in focus and sharp.  Great photos make great layouts, right?  But what about the not-so-perfect pictures?  You know the ones – out of focus, poor composition, bad lighting, too far away, not everyone looking at the camera etc.  We all have them! Sometimes our lives are recorded by more ‘not-so-stellar’ photographs than ’stellar’ ones.  This is especially true for me, with two little boys who don’t like to sit still and the fact that I don’t have a top of the range camera.  I have so many imperfect photos on my hard drive, but I just can’t bring myself to delete them.  I love some of these bad photos I have – they’ve captured a memory that is dear to me and they’re part of the story I’m trying to tell through my scrapbooking.  Sometimes they’re the only picture I’ve managed to capture at that time.  So… I’ve decided to scrap some of them – warts and all!  And I think you should too. 

Let’s look at some tricks that might help you to scrap some of those imperfect photos stored away on your hard drives.

Of course, the first step would be trying to manipulate these photos in your software editing program and seeing if you can improve some of the flaws.  Some ruthless cropping, using the unsharp mask, making adjustments to lighting and/or a bit of extraction work can vastly improve certain photos (and no-one would ever know the difference).  However, if you have a really poor quality image (or you’re still learning how to master these editing techniques like me) you may have to call upon a few other tricks to help mask the imperfections.

I’d say the most common issue would be blurring in our photographs.  Agree?  Don’t be shy, we all have them in our stash!  How do you keep a toddler still for long enough to take a good photo?  What about an energetic pet?  Photographing a sports game?  Trying to get a good family photograph when everyone is fussing about?  Blur, blur and more blur!!!

Here are two blurry photos I took of my sons and nephew chasing the waves at a surf beach during a recent holiday/vacation.  I took lots of photos this particular day, as the kids were having such fun.  So many blurry images resulted from this cavorting with the waves, mind you… and I was really disappointed.  I still got some other great shots, but I really liked some of the blurry ones (particularly the one where all three boys are in the frame because that didn’t happen again) and I wanted to include these pictures in my album of our trip.

How could I fix them?  They were quite blurry and sharpening them properly was getting way too technical for me.   I had to think outside the square, so to speak!  So I opened up Photoshop (I use CS2) and experimented with adding textures to the images to see if that would help disguise the blurriness.  (Lay your textured image above your photo, clip it to your photo and then adjust your blending modes accordingly).  After some trial and error with the textures I had in my stash, I decided upon a raised texture I downloaded for free from HERE.  There are a number of sites where you can download textured images for free (just check copyright and terms of use first).  Here’s how the photos looked with the texture added.

For both photographs I set the blending mode to ‘overlay’ and the opacity to 100%. (For more information on blending modes check out this Tips and Tricks post.)

As you can see, the raised texture seemed to give the photos the look of a painting, even a bit like a watercolour and the blurriness (although not gone) seemed to work here!  So I added some frames and other Shabby Shoppe goodies to come up with this layout of my blurry beach photos.

I’m so glad I didn’t leave them out of my album and hidden away on my hard drive.  They’re not perfect, but much better than the images I had SOOC (straight out of camera) and I was happy with my final layout in the end.

 Here are some more ideas for helping disguise bad photos in your scrapbook layouts:-

•  Play around with the artistic filters in your photo editing software to give your photo a completely different look.  Try converting it to a sketch or a watercolor.
• Leave the main focal point in colour and desaturate the rest
• Play around with masks and gradient blending to help hide imperfections
• Use a large title and lots of journalling to detract from poor photo quality
• Strategically place an element or cluster over a particular part of a photo that is distracting (like a bin/trash can or stranger passing by in the background, etc..)
• If the bad photos are of a famous place or landmark, consider finding stock images to mix in with your good photos (always check copyright first). It is often difficult to get good photos in museum exhibits, but museums often have great images on their web site  
• Blending an image into a different background is another great way to minimize negative issues.  When you blend a low resolution image in with a high resolution image (a background paper for example), many of the flaws are hidden
• When an image is beyond repair (eyes closed, silly face, fuzzy picture) why not just go with it and incorporate a funny title or theme to match the photo or accentuate the imperfection.  Here are some examples:- ‘Blink and you’ll miss him/her’, ‘You’re growing so fast, sometimes you’re just a blur’, ‘Fuzzy Memories’, ‘When Life Rushes By’,  ‘The photo may be blurry, but your beauty is crystal clear’… (can you think of some more?)

Sometimes you may have a layout in mind for a particular event but when you get your photos off your camera and onto your screen, you find that some of the shots aren’t so good.  This also happened to me recently.  I had a mix of good and bad photos from the one outing but wanted to include them all to help tell the story.  Here’s one of the blurry photos I took on this outing at the park.

It’s blurry and badly composed, but I wanted to include it as I remember the boys laughing so hard as they ran away from their cousin (who was about to throw grass all over them)!   I recalled reading about using storyboards in your layouts and how they can often help minimize the flaws in your photographs.  So I decided to make all my photographs smaller and add lots of them to my page, giving that storyboard effect.  I also ran an instagram action over the pictures, added in a big title, large elements and widely spaced journalling - all helping to distract from the original blurred photographs.

Tucking away these photos because they weren’t perfect would have resulted in missing this moment in our family album.  I’m so glad I scrapped them in the end – the boys think they’re great pictures anyway and really, they’re my main audience aren’t they?!

 So, next time you are scrapping a memory or special story and find that you only have bad photos, don’t get discouraged. Why not consider using some of the ideas I’ve mentioned in this post to still create a great layout. You will still be preserving those precious memories and may even be surprised with your end result.  We’d love to see how you scrap some of your imperfect photos in our inspiration gallery soon.

Thanks for joining me today for my very first post! Kylie will be here tomorrow to share the latest Project SCRAP templates!

JenelleInspiration, Photography, Tips and Tricks, Uncategorized 21 Comments

O, little remote shutter clicker, how I love thee! Let me count the ways!

Valentine’s day might be over, but I (Beckie) still have MAD LOVE for my little remote.  What is this magic little device, you might ask?  It’s a simple little button that lets you remotely activate your camera’s shutter.  Not impressed?  Well keep reading – it has more practical uses than you might realize!

The idea is simple…securely position your camera (rest it on a table, on a tripod, etc), then frame up your shot, focus on your subject, and then walk away.  Trust your little remote to use infra-red technology to fire your shutter for you from up to 16 feet away!  There are many types out there and you need to be sure to do a little shopping to get one that works for your make and model!

Why would you use a remote?  There are many reasons!  Let’s take a look at a few:

:::Group photos:::

So you’re the designated family photographer, eh?  When’s the last time YOU were in a photo??  And I’m not talking about that time you pushed the button and jumped over Aunt Sally and busted the seam in your pants to get in your spot before the timer went off, either!  There’s a very relaxing way to quickly get a series of group photos – even when you need to be part of the group!

• Secure your camera on a tripod or other sturdy surface, like a table.  Get the group assembled, frame up the shot, make sure everyone can be seen, etc.  Designate your spot in the group and ask someone to hold that place for you :)

• Set your camera to remote/timer.  Mine has options for either a 2 second delay or a 10 second delay.  This is the setting where it knows to “look for” an infra-red signal to fire the shutter (consult your camera manual to see exactly how this works for your model).

• Take a test shot, then look at the photo on the LCD screen.  If all is well, grab your remote and join the group!

• Fire away!  Give the group a warning, ask them to hold the pose, etc.  Take a bunch!!  Remember our head swap tutorial?  Having a series of photos to work with is the best way to create a perfect group shot when you don’t capture one.

Look! I’m actually in this photo!  That’s me in the black sweater.  Three generations of my husband’s family!!

:::Macro:::

I’ve been dabbling in macro photography for a few months now and having lots of fun with it!  But I often have to close my aperture way down in order to create a focal plane that is large enough to capture an object in focus (high f-numbers).  This creates quite a challenge for allowing in sufficient light, which can result in slow shutter speeds.  A slow shutter speed poses a huge risk of motion blur in a photo, which is one reason why many photographers use a mini-tripod for macro photography.  In fact, you often have to manually focus on an object to achieve the exact shot you’re after.  When I’m shooting things that don’t move, I go the extra step and use my remote.  I really value the peace of mind that comes from knowing I’m not introducing an additional opportunity for blur from moving my camera when I push down on the shutter.

f5, ISO800, 1/125

I love this shot of a cool old marble my hubby had in his collection from when he was a kid.  The imperfections in the surface of the glass and the cool swirl of color are so interesting when photographed through a macro lens!  (I use a Canon 60mm f2.8 macro lens). Notice how only a tiny portion of the surface of this marble is in focus?  There’s no room for error in getting the macro shots you’re after, so relying on a tripod and a remote is a great way to eliminate the chance for motion blur from you touching your camera.

:::Slow shutter speed photos:::

Similar to the example above with macro photography, there may be other types of artistic photography you’re interested in that require slow shutter speeds.  Remember the fireworks photography post from a while back?  I used my tripod and remote for the shots in that post.  By using my remote, I could get out there and show my kids where to stand, help light their sparklers, etc – and still remotely activate the shutter to take the picture!  Here’s another of my favorite shots from that night!

f11, 1/5, ISO160

:::Kids “photo-booth”:::

My kids may very well be the most photographed children on the planet.  Seriously.  They’re completely immune to my pleas for “just one more! Smile! Look here!”.  But when I set the camera up the other day and asked my 6 year old to come over and take pictures of herself with the remote, she was super excited!  I got the camera all set up, then turned my back while she did her thing.  She proceeded to give me a series of about 15 silly, kooky, funny, and sweet faces that perfectly capture her big personality.  And she giggled the entire time!  She got the biggest kick out of surprising me with her faces and showing them to me when she was done.  No matter how many times we take their pictures at home, there’s just something about a photo booth opportunity to have their picture taken that most kids seem to love.

:::Self portraits:::

• A remote is a wonderful way to get YOURSELF in front of the camera!  Again, do everything as described above (position the camera securely, focus in, etc) – but this time you need to find a proxy for yourself so that you can frame things up and check your exposure.  Simply grab a baby doll or a stuffed animal!  These toys are great because you can still use the eye as a nice high-contrast area to use for setting focus on the desired position.

• As an alternative, you can find an assistant.  I did a self portrait session and  asked my daughter to tell me if the “little red box” was over my face when I took my first sample photo with the remote.  She helped me scootch into the right position, and then I clicked away!

That wraps up today’s little crash course on remotes!  Feel free to share your own ideas in the comments below.  Be sure to come back again tomorrow to see a fabulous scrapping inspiration post from Kylie!

BeckiePhotography, Uncategorized 7 Comments