(Photo taken at 1/4000, f/3.5, ISO 400)
My photo was picked for Group 1 of the Landscape assignment over at PioneerWoman! As usual, she’s put together a wonderful selection, the best out of thousands of beautiful submissions. I’m thrilled to somehow be in there amongst them. Go and take a look at the gorgeous landscape photos there! Group 2 is now up as well.
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“The single most important component
of a camera is the twelve inches behind it”
I love spring more than any other time of year.
It’s the season I eagerly wait for, and year after year, it never disappoints.
(Photo taken at 1/4000, f/1.8, ISO 200)
After about 5 months of cold, grey, drizzly English winter (okay, so technically not 5 months, but winter here kind of stretches across three seasons), suddenly one morning you pull apart the curtains, and the grey sky has become blue. The sun is shining, and glorious green has emerged seemingly overnight.
Here are some photos that have inspired me recently.
Click the photos to get to the original pages, each photographer has many, many more beautiful photos worth seeing!
Photo by TaT Okada on Flickr
A simple and delicate composition. Like ghosts in a fog.
Photo by Rob Cherry, on Flickr
Last week we looked at some of the reasons to use layers while working in Photoshop. Now let’s see some of the flexibility that Layer Masks can bring to the workflow. As mentioned last week, there’s more than one type of layer in Photoshop. To understand masks, we’ll begin with Adjustment Layers because they come with a mask automatically attached.
Quite simply, Layer Masks are your way to tell Photoshop which parts of a layer to use or hide, without having to actually delete a thing. On an Image Layer this means, for example, being able to erase part of a photo without losing the data and, with a sweep of the Paintbrush, being able to bring back what you erased.
On an Adjustment Layer, a mask lets you choose which areas of the photo to apply the adjustment to. Instead of having to use only blanket adjustments across the entire photo, this means that you can isolate certain areas. There are endless ways this can be used. Let’s look at a simple example, following on in the theme of contrast.
Have you ever been completely over the moon about discovering something and tried to explain it to someone else, only to then have to explain why it’s “sooooo amazing!!”?
That was me last night trying to explain to my family how thrilled I was to discover back-button autofocus on my Canon 450D. I’d never heard of it before, I don’t know if that’s due to me missing something, or just that it’s not commonly known. But in my view it’s the greatest invention since… since the thing before they invented sliced bread.
The site I found for instructions is specific to Canon EOS. A quick search turned up some Nikon users discussing it, although I don’t know which models implement this. Here’s the link for Canon users.
I recommend reading through once quickly before trying to change anything as the article discusses back-button auto focus a lot, but doesn’t explain how to change any settings until near the very end. Also, the actual wording in your custom functions menu are likely to be different than the example ones on the site. You may understand it all straight away, or you may be like me and have to play with them until it makes sense and does what you want.
This is my cue to make a confession: I rarely use manual focus.
I’d love to have the confidence in my focusing skills but I tend to shoot fast, and often miss shots if I stop to mess with focusing. Like any photographer, I hate to miss out on photos because they’re badly focused. And modern auto-focus is often so quick and crisp that it seems a shame to waste it. Or maybe I’m just lazy and making excuses. Either way, I usually use auto-focus.
The problem with auto-focus is that I often find my camera’s focus drifting between the time I press the shutter button halfway to focus, and all the way to release the shutter. This is especially true when I try to lock focus on an object and re-compose the image before taking the photo. And if I have a stationary subject I still have to re-focus every time I take my finger off the shutter button. Well no more.
Back-button AF takes the focus control from the shutter button and puts it on a button on the back of the camera instead. Changing these settings has turned what was my AE lock button into a dedicated focus button, and I have set my half-pressed shutter button to be AE lock, so that feature is not only still available, but is far more accessible and useful to me now.
Once I’ve focused I can now recompose to my heart’s content, and take as many photos as I like without ever touching the focus. The Canon site gives a lots of examples of where this can be useful.
It takes some getting used to, but I love it already and doubt I’ll be going back to standard AF in a hurry. If you have a Canon SLR (or any other that has this function) give it a try and see if you like it!
Oh, and one last point. This function is only activated in the “creative zone” modes (P, Av, Tv & M), so if you click the dial to the “green box” auto mode, you can hand it over to anyone to use without having to explain how your focus works. Handy.
This is part of a four-part series on exposure.
Click here to read an overview of exposure, and for shutter speed, and aperture.
Once your aperture has allowed your chosen amount of light into the lens, and the shutter speed has controlled the length of time the light has passed through the lens, the ISO controls how much of that light is absorbed.
The ISO is the camera’s measurement of light sensitivity. In analog photography, a higher ISO film absorbs the light faster, and film with a lower ISO number absorbs light more slowly. In digital photography it works in the same way, just with an electronic sensor in place of the film. A low number equals slower absorption.
Like both shutter speed and aperture, the ISO increases in stops that double or halve the light absorbed.
Standard digital ISO range
Some newer dSLRs have a higher range than this, but the principle is still the same. These stops correlate with the shutter speed and aperture stops. One ISO stop up or down equals one f/stop up or down, or one shutter speed stop.
Okay, that’s interesting, right? But how is it useful?
Jack Turner - Press Photographer. 1914
How great is this image? Jack Turner, press photographer nearly a hundred years ago. Suitcase-sized camera slung over his shoulder, cigar clamped between his teeth, bowler hat, and that wonderful expression.
Old photos are so often sombre affairs, I love when they’re full of character and show their subjects as real people, instead of “olden day” people from some time so distant that they were nothing like us.
P.S. A little further research uncovers Ted Hood, the photographer who took the photograph above.
Ted Hood photographing Leo Basser. 1937
Didn’t they look so ultra suave in those days? I want his hat and his jacket and his gorgeous camera, and I want to be a slick photographer just like him… except… you know, less stubble.
