All Occasions Photography

2010-01-22T05:54:00.000-08:00

I actually did this one prior to the pirates photo. I think it is a little better but sharpness is gone. I have some lighting ideas to make this a little better and I read where a lot of what you see in Dave Hills photos are composites, shooting things separately so that every thing is artificially sharp. Makes a lot of sense that he did that and if you watch the behind the scenes of girl on adventure he does that with the motorcycle shoot.

2010-01-17T10:19:00.000-08:00

Practicing creating "Dave Hill Effect" on old photos. I still don't quite have it but I think I'm getting closer. Here is a before and after of a photo. I really think I need some big soft boxes and a ring light after looking a videos from Dave Hill's site.

2010-01-08T08:28:00.000-08:00

I'm at a tipping point with my camera equipment. I really need to update my camera because my backup digital rebel is starting to slow me down during wedding shoots. The noise and slow raw image writing is a real pain. The problem with getting a new camera body in particular either a Canon 5D mark II or the Canon 7D is that the resolution of my current lenses will probably cause the images to look less sharp. To add to my apprehension about what to by, Canon is in the process of updating the particular lenses that I am considering buying. The Lenses I am wanting are the EF 70-200 f2.8 IS which was just announced on Jan 5 that it is being updated, and the EF 24-70 f2.8 which I have read is being upgraded with new IS components which it currently doesn't have. I really like what I have read about the new focusing, metering system and new wireless command of the flash on the 7d, but would really love to have the full frame, low light and image quality of the 5d. There is about $900 difference between the 5D and the 7D with the 5D being more expensive ($2600 and $1700).

Current pricing on the 70-200 lens is $1700 and the 24-70 is $1300 my guess is that the newer lenses are going to be more expensive (Nikons new 70-200 is $2400) hopefully Canons new lens doesn't make that big of a jump.

I'm going to have to make a trip to Roberts to gets some hands on of the new cameras and lenses. I've tried going to Cord Camera but they don't keep cameras in stock which totally blows my mind that a camera store doesn't keep cameras in stock.

Bye bye Geocities

2009-08-09T07:09:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I received an e-mail from Yahoo that they are closing down Geocities. For me this is a good thing and a bad thing. Good because it got me motivated to actually figure out how to customize my smugmug pages. This consolidates my photography files in one site instead of having to maintain two. The bad because most of my promotion information points to the geocities site. I still have a lot of work to do on my smugmug site but I think right now its very usable and probably already better than the Geocities site.

2009-03-22T14:17:00.000-07:00

While posting on Bloomington Indiana's Flickr group I was reminded of a DIY PVC construction guide that I came across about a year ago. The guide is free to download. It looks like most can be completed in a weekend. I haven't built one these but have built my own PVC stands in the past. Use the tinker tubes link to the download site. Enjoy.

The setup

2009-02-07T12:48:00.000-08:00

Again using my wife as the guinea pig I setup the camera to show how simple it is to do a portrait shot. To camera left is a Canon 430EX with shoot through umbrella. In the back is a Canon 420EX with a Honlphoto snoot. on the right is a SP studio systems 5 in 1 reflector with the gold side towards the subject I believe the camera settings were 1/250 f2.8 iso 400. The hair light separates the subject from the back ground. In the making it look natural post the setup was nearly identical except that I used the white wall camera right to reflect light onto the dark side of my wife's face. Use a wide aperture when taking a portrait, I set up the center focus point, focus on the subjects eyes, recompose and take the shot.

2009-02-05T15:57:00.000-08:00

I came across a pretty good site last night and thought I would share the link with you. The link is to a site that has instructional videos for photo shop and light room. The site is "The digital Photography connection. See link in side bar

Making it look natural

2009-02-01T18:23:00.000-08:00

Part of what makes a photo interesting is that it looks natural and not a stiff pose. Here is an example of a posed shot of my wife doing what she does naturally, talk on the phone. In order for me to keep my skills honed in the semi off season I grab the wife or kids and ask them to stand in for a lighting set up. Here she is working on her adoption work and was kind enough to get a quick pose or two while talking with the other Indiana AAC rep. Notice that the light looks natural even though just out of frame camera left there is a 45" shoot though umbrella with a 430EX and behind her is a 420EX with snoot for hair light. This setup takes about 5 minutes and can be used for a single or double portrait.

Lighting examples

2009-01-02T13:08:00.000-08:00

Here are two examples of lighting the one on the top was shot with a shoot through umbrella off camera approximately centered on the group. The one on the bottom was with a flash mounted high on a bracket centered above the camera. Although both are technically correct the off axis shot in my opinion appears more 3d looking and 1 on the bottom appears more flat because of the lack of shadow on the face. You'll also notice that the white dress in not blown out in the off axis shot.

Well here it is the first post of my blog site

2009-01-01T16:10:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the blog for All Occasions Photography. In posts that follow I will explain my approach to Wedding and Location photography.

It seems to me that as digital SLR's are get better in low light, many photographers are moving away from their strobes and relying on higher ISO settings. There isn't any wrong with this in essence, but you are at the mercy of the location lighting. For example a photographer may end up in a dark church on a rainy day. This would really put a damper on available light shots.

Here are the drawbacks to using available light:

1. Unless you are outside your going to have to bump up you ISO setting (more noise less detail)

2. You will have to open up you lens aperture which decreases depth of field (amount of the image in focus)

3. Use a slow shutter speed, the slow the shutter speed the less likely you are to stop motion.

You say I want that photojournalistic look that you see all the photographers have posted on their web sites. If you pay close attention to the photos you'll start to notice a couple of things.

1. The shots are outside, great if your wedding is outside.

2. The shots are in black and white, why because it helps hide noise (similar to grain in film)

3. The people are not moving because if they did you would get motion blur.

4. The photographer has mastered blending flash and ambient light and it only looks like natural light.

Many photographers myself included, set their aperture to F8 and shutter to 1/60th of second and blasted away. Why, because we were using film and this setup produced the most consistent results. We didn't have the luxury of chimping shots on a cool 3" screen on the back of our cameras. F8 produced a good depth of field and was pretty close to the sweet spot of most lenses and was good to 10 to 15 ft. Back then you probably didn't shoot more then 5 rolls of 36 exposure film now I shoot around 500 images.

This past fall I changed my shooting style, after studying other photographers work, and practicing on everyone and everything before trying it at a wedding. It was a huge difference in that first wedding I shot with the new style. The images seemed to pop off the page. What is it that I'm doing different you ask? I moved the light off of the camera/flash bracket and started using things to modify the way the light looks. I use to shoot weddings alone, now I use an assistant when ever possible to help with the moving the lighting around. I read on blog where the photographer mounted his speed light to a monopod and had assistant position the light where it was needed. I've been doing ever since, I'll never go back to just a flash bracket.

I'll post some photos in the next couple of days showing the differences in the "Look" of the new shooting style.

Here is some geek stuff explaining ISO.

ISO Setting: In film cameras you set your camera to the film speed or ISO rating. Film has chemical layers and each layer is sensitive to different colors of light and how fast these layers react light exposure determines their ISO rating. A higher ISO rating means the film will react quicker when exposed to light. The trade off here was that these faster films produced bigger blobs of color known as grain. Grain reduces the sharpness and clarity of the image and as you increase the print size the more noticeable the grain becomes.

Digital Cameras with the exception of those using the faveon chip have only one layer of light receptors called pixels. These pixels are only sensitive to three colors Red, Green, and Blue or RGB for short. Believe it or not these pixels don't see color just shades of grey 0-254 shades to be exact 0 being black and 254 being white. When a Red pixel is exposed to red light its value is closer 254 and the less red light that is available to the pixel the lower its value. The same is true for the Green and Blue pixels (for more infomation on the bayer pattern visit www.siliconimaging.com/RGB%20Bayer.htm) Now that you are thoroughly confused I'm going to explain how this effects the ISO on a Digital camera. Unlike the film camera where changing the chemical make up of the film changed how fast it reacts to light. To make a digital camera more sensitive you have to increase the voltage at each pixel. The more voltage the less stable the pixel. In electrical terms this is described as gain but photographers can't relate to gain just ISO so you setup the camera so that the gain matches an ISO setting relative to what you would see in film. Like in film increasing the ISO degrades the image quality.