Using a Neutral Density Filter

Since my last post I have indeed been shooting exclusively in manual mode. I've played with changing the ISO, the aperture and the shutter speed to get a well exposed shot, and although I haven't taken any pictures worth bragging about, I have learnt a lot and believe I'm taking better exposed pictures as a result.

I can highly recommend going fully manual, you will really get to understand your exposures so much better.

Ever since I began trying to take long exposure shots of waterfalls I've been coveting a neutral density filter. The problem with taking longer exposures of white water is that although you get the silky look, the white tends to be over exposed. Which is where the neutral density filter comes in.

A neutral density filter is like a pair of sunglasses. It reduces the amount of light coming through the lens, therefore allowing a longer exposure - to get the silky movement - without blowing out the highlights. The filters come in various strengths, depending on how many stops down of light they block.

I have a variable ND filter on order, but at present am working with a Hoya NDX400 which is effectively a 9 stop filter. This filter is considered the grand daddy of ND filters and came with a hefty price tag, but hey, it's Christmas right? It's also summer, so no waterfalls anywhere near me at present. Lots of ocean and sunsets though.

I had to head up to Carnarvon for a teaching session, so I threw the swag in the car and headed north on Thursday, stopping in at Gladstone for the night. This is an old loading jetty on Shark Bay, now disused and falling apart, but the shallow waters of Shark Bay make for a good subject for my first attempt at a long exposure shot with the filter.

The following photo was taken at f/18 for 30 sec, ISO 100 using my EFS 10-22mm lens at 10mm. Without the ND filter this would just be white. I've done some post processing to bring out some of the colours.

Comments always appreciated.

Going manual

It has been a while...

It isn't that I haven't been taking photos, I have, or that I haven't been thinking about taking better photos, I have, it's just I haven't posted anything. This blog is supposed to be a journey, and well, I've been a little stagnant...

Recently I returned from a 3 month trip to New Zealand, the home of drop dead gorgeous landscape scenery, so I've been pretty snap happy. Both the SLR and the iPhone got a good workout, as did the GoPro, and I've got some fantastic images. But I realised that I was struggling a lot with getting the right exposures, so on my return I've hit the books and decided to start from square one.

I'm going manual.

This means setting the camera to manual settings and working out my exposure by fiddling dials. I've ISO, aperture and shutter time to play with (I'm leaving the focus on automatic for the time being) and I'm basically learning how my camera works. It also helps to read the manual it came with. Duh!!

I've set the histogram to blink when I blow the highlights or there's too much black, and I'm using a 50mm prime lens to take some of the complexity away.

I've pulled out my old Canon EOS 30D for this exercise, but am unsure whether I'll keep with it. The shutter button has quite a delay on it, which is weird, and may well be the reason I upgraded to a 50D in the first place. Won't hurt me to persist for a few days anyway.

I've tended to stay on aperture priority unless I'm taking moving water shots, so I need to get out of that rut and experiment a bit. I'll post some pictures next weekend.

Happy shooting :)

Gadgets, apps and smart phones

I have never been a great fan of mobile phones because I actually like not being contactable. Perhaps because I spent so much of my early working life attached to a pager!

Then along came smart phones. It took me a little while to join the crowd, but when I was having battery problems with my old phone, and needed a new point and shoot camera after my Nikon Coolpix disappeared, I decided to upgrade. I bought an iPhone 4S because its camera got such a good review, and well, the rest is history....

I predict that point and shoot cameras will soon be obsolete. With a smart phone you can take great photos, use apps to edit them, and then share them online within minutes. Oh yeah, and you can make calls and text on it too!

My iPhone takes fantastic quality shots. Last year on my ski trip to NZ I left the SLR behind and just took the iPhone. It felt snug in an inside pocket of my ski jacket, I could listen to music whilst skiing, and could pull it out for those memorable shots.

Then add apps. Until I got my smart phone I didn't understand what all this excitement about apps was about. It didn't take me long to find out, and soon I was downloading all sorts of stuff from the iTunes store! And so cheap compared with add on software for computers!

But it can be a bit overwhelming. A great resource I found was an eBook on iPhone photography that informed me regarding what apps are available. Did you know you don't have to use the photo taking software that comes with your phone? That you can use apps that allow you to control the focus and exposure, and that allow you to take photos just by tapping the screen? And then there's editing options. You've heard of Instagram, but there's a myriad of other free and not so free apps out there to edit your photos. And some awesome photo-stitching apps as well. The photo heading up this blog? It's a panorama taken from eight photos at Mt Hutt ski field in New Zealand with my iPhone and then stitched together and cropped. Not bad hey?

Your smart phone has other uses too. Like when you are using your SLR instead and would like to have a few tools at your fingertips. The Photographer's Ephemeris is something I'm only just starting to use, but it's a great tool for planning the best time to take a photo at a particular location. It uses GPS coordinates and times of sun and moon rise and set, so you can plan to be at the right place at the right time for your perfect photo. I'm not quite in that league yet, but the tool's there, just saying. And it's on your phone in your pocket any time you need it.

Another app I like to have, and am using quite a lot with macro photography, is Depth of Field Calc. I upgraded from the free app, which allows me to plug in what camera I'm using, and then customise focal length, distance to subject and f-stop to determine the depth of field of the shot I'm about to take. It can take the trial and error out of setting up a shot. In the old days people had paper charts, now you have an app in your pocket with customisable options. Awesome!

But say you only have an iPhone and want to take macro shots? All credit where it's due, many of the point & shoot cameras were strong here, but all is not lost, because you can get a gadget for that! I've got an Olloclip, but there's a few other gadgets out there that do the same job. The Olloclip allows you to do macro, wide-angle and fisheye, adding alot of creative fun to your iPhone photos.

Here's a few shots to show you what a wee iPhone, an Olloclip, and some apps can achieve.

Fisheye

Macro

Sun and moon

perfect reflections

And one last thing. How often do you use your SLR to take self portraits?

Management 101

Don't know about you, but I've got about 6 or 7 years worth of digital files, and another 30 odd years of film stock sitting around gathering dust. And a pretty poor management system.

Whether starting up, mid flight, or just staring down a pile from the past, I doubt there's anyone out there who hasn't thought to themselves "I've gotta have a system for this". Well lucky for us there's enough OCD types out there in geek land who have developed systems for us!!

I'm now working from a Mac, and am in the process of collating my past files from numerous sources, consolidating them, and backing them up. I'm just going to talk about digital files today.

The software I use is Lightroom.

The reasons:

1. It is a database. If I import all my photos into the LR catalog I can do all my renaming inside the catalog and the catalog finds my photos when I go looking for them. All file management is done from inside the application. One place does it all, and every new version just gets better!

2. It's backup friendly. I actually purchased Lightroom outright, but an alternative these days is to join the Adobe Cloud and get access to the software (in fact all their creative software applications) for a monthly subscription, meaning should you need to reinstall the application you can. If you haven't already set up your own backup that is! Lightroom allows you to backup your catalog - for which most people utilise cloud services like Dropbox - and your photos to a second location. And you can set this all up to occur automatically using preferences and presets.

3. It's intuitive. Look I've struggled with Photoshop for years and I just find all the switches and toggles, layers and masks, brushes and smart filters incredibly overwhelming. I don't understand how to use them and I'm scared I'll do something destructive. I've even bought books and tutorials but it's just got too many bells and whistles for a girl who's just a photographer. Lightroom, OTOH, is completely non destructive and can now do pretty much everything for photographs that Photoshop used to. The way the graduating filter and adjustment brushes work make so much more sense to me. It still can't do HDR or photo stitching but there's good software available to go to for them anyway. Editing really is very easy, and if you make a mistake, you just reset or go back a few steps. And you can make multiple virtual copies from the one photo which I think is awesome.

4. You can do slideshows, make books and upload your pictures directly to online photosharing sites. Be it Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, Smugmug, there's a plugin available so you can publish your edited collections straight to your online accounts, without having to export them and then upload them manually. And if you then re-edit a photo, it'll republish the edited photo for you! How's that for saving you precious time?

I'm afraid I've never seen Aperture, which is really the only other viable competition, but with a history of PC and Premiere Pro use for my video work, I'm sticking with the Adobe platform, which these days is fully Mac compatible. I've actually heard alot of Aperture fans have moved to LR because of its superior data management system, but I'm making no comparisons, just saying what I use and why.

So you have a nice little application, now you've got to use it properly. Let me give you a few tips.

1. Don't go moving your files around, renaming them or whatever, outside the application. You want to show someone some of your photos? Open LR, find the photos and start a slideshow. It'll take less than a minute to set up and if you've got a good data management system, you'll find the photos really easy.

2. Develop a workflow and stick with it. Naming your files in one consistent way. Adding keywords and location metadata to your files makes them so much easier to find. Learning how to use the filters to find your photos helps of course, and you do have to put in a bit of hard yakka initially to make the database work its magic for you. But because Lightroom allows you to make presets, and remembers what you do often, you get faster and faster at the data entry as you go. Use smart collections to track your progress through the workflow. You want to know where you are along the treadmill, how many photos you've yet to keyword, or edit, or upload to your preferred photosharing site.

3. If you have a system, this job doesn't seem insurmountable. No system and it's a source of ever mounting anxiety. Trust me, get a system!

Let me introduce you to Gavin Gough. Don't know the man but if I ever meet him I'd give him the biggest hug and kiss for publishing not only an eBook, but also a bunch of presets and smart collections that I can use to instantly have a fully functional workflow. Not quite instant, it probably takes a day to read the book and set up Lightroom before you're ready to go, but a day!!! Not bad work for years of barely restrained panic at the sight of those thousands of photos banking up.

You can find Gavin's book here. Use code photowork33Jan to get a 33% discount till the end of January.

Oh, and what he has to say about backing up your files, do it!! I mean, external hard drives are so cheap these days it's a no brainer.

What this blog is all about

This year, 2013, I've decided to get a bit more serious about my photography. I've dabbled for a good 20 years in both stills and video, at times being really involved, at other times just stagnating. But I want to change that! I want to make taking photographs and movies something I do consistently, and hopefully improve the quality of my work.

This blog will explore my past exploits as well as my future journeys.

I'll post on any topic to do with the visual mediums I'm working in. I'll talk about the directions I go in achieving creative shots as well as my trials and tribulations with digital file management and editing.

I'm not really sure where this blog will go, except to say that it's my impetus to get out there and shoot!