Night Landscapes and the Moon

The moon is a beautiful but often elusive element for nighttime landscapes. If your previous attempts have resulted in sheer lunacy, take a look at these helpful tips.

 

Nothing perks up an evening landscape like a rising moon hanging above the horizon. You walk out of the office to go home. It's dusk and there's still color in the sky. Then, like magic, the moon appears from behind the clouds. You feel like you can reach out and touch it, just like that. These are the small moments that often stay with us.

 

Trying to photograph that is another matter. The moon hanging just above the horizon looked so big. But it seems to shrink in size the minute you point a camera lens at it. What was once a compelling evening moonscape photographs as a bunch of clouds with an overexposed dot of light among them.

 

Don't despair. By making a few adjustments to how you take the shots and applying a little photographic wizardry, you can bring the moon back to its rightful splendor. But to do so you have to overcome a few common obstacles.

 

Obstacle: The Moon Is Brighter Than Everything Else

If you wait until the sky is completely dark and the moon is high above the horizon, chances are the moon is brighter than everything else in the scene. The trick here is to catch the moon when it's low and to include other bright things in the composition. When the moon is lower, it shines through more atmosphere than when it is high in the sky. The atmosphere serves as a neutral density filter of sorts and reduces the moon's luminosity.

 

However, if everything else in the frame is dark, then your camera will expose for the dominating dark elements and thereby overexpose the moon, rendering it as a fuzzy dot of light. Look for adjacent elements to lighten up the scene, such as brightly lit buildings (their lights often go on at dusk, before darkness sets in), illuminated clouds from the setting sun, or any other radiant element.

 

You will have to experiment with your exposure times as so many elements will affect the outcome. The degree of available moonlight; any other light sources; clouds; rain; light reflective surfaces; each of them can make a huge difference to the amount of exposure time needed.

In general, during night photography, one can say that on a night of full moon, with optimum conditions, 8 seconds at f/8 using ISO 100 film will be about right. If there’s a crescent moon and conditions are also optimal, you would need as much as 10 hours on one shot! So you see experimentation while photographing the moon is really the only way to go.

 

Source: O’Reilly | Portfolio Website for Photographers | Online Portfolio Solutions

Create Soft Background Portraits

Do professional portrait photographers use special lenses and accessories to soften the backgrounds in their portraits? No, they don't. They manipulate the depth of field, and this hack will show you how.

 

The previous hack showed how to create tremendous depth of field for landscape compositions. But when you're shooting portraits outdoors, this is usually the last thing you want. For these types of assignments, you want your viewer's attention locked in on the subject, not the background. The best way to accomplish this is to narrow your depth of field and focus your camera directly on the subject's eyes.

 

Why Soft Backgrounds?

When everything works right, the result is a dreamy, soft backdrop that makes your model pop forward, attracting all attention to her presence. Generally speaking, the first thing viewers look at in a portrait is the subject's eyes. The easier you make it for them to get to that spot, the happier they will be, at least subconsciously. Once they've viewed the eyes, they examine other aspects of the person until they're satisfied and move on. To get a soft portrait background, try to get some distance between the subject and the backdrop. Then, open your aperture to limit the depth of field.

 

 

Distracting background elements, such as a tree growing out of the top of the subject's head, is unsettling to the viewer. That's why you often want to eliminate or at least soften these elements.

 

Now remember, this is not a technique that you'll use every time you shoot a portrait. If, for example, you're shooting a baseball owner standing in his stadium, you might want the background elements distinguishable, because that tells a better story. So, soft-background portraiture is a technique to use only when appropriate for the assignment.

 

Here’s a tip for creating a soft background for your portrait: Use a telephoto lens

 

Source: O’Reiley | Portfolio Website for Photographers

Smart Photography : Capture Kids Without Going Crazy

Sure, kids are cute in real life. But when it comes to capturing them with your digital point-and-shoot camera, they can be as elusive as leprechauns.

 

Digital point and shoots are great general-use cameras. But most of them are plagued by a phenomenon called shutter lag: the response time from the moment you push the shutter button to when the picture is actually captured is too long, sometimes as long as a second. In kid photography, a second might as well be a week.

 

Choosing a DSLR Camera

This next section of this hack provides ways to increase your odds of success with point and shoots. But first, if you want to cut right over to the fast lane, consider getting a digital SLR (DSLR), which has a much faster response time and performs better overall. DSLRs look and behave just like your favorite 35mm single lens reflex (SLR) cameras of years past, but they have a sophisticated image sensor instead of film.

 

Not long ago, this wouldn't be practical advice for parents, because DSLRs were just too darned expensive. But you no longer have to choose between a camera and a college fund.

Both Canon and Nikon have introduced quality DSLRs for under US$1,000, and more are sure to be on the way. The Canon Digital Rebel and the Nikon D70 are two examples of DSLRs that will help you keep up with your kids without maxing out your credit card.

 

DSLRs have minimal shutter lag times, allow for generous sequential shooting, accept a variety of lenses, and enable you to use external flash. In other words, they are perfect for action, kid photography.

 

Hacking the Point-and-Shoot Camera

Now that you know what your next camera should be, how do you get the most out of the one in your hand? OK, here are some tips to increase your odds of success.

First, get everyone outdoors, where there's more light, better backgrounds, and lots of things for kids to do. Then, make these three adjustments on your camera:

 

Set for the highest resolution your camera allows: This enables you to later crop out part of the picture, yet still has enough pixel information to make a good-sized print. It's like adding a powerful telephoto lens to your little point and shoots.

 

Find Infinity Focus mode and activate it: Essentially, this disables the autofocus (which is slow as mud on most consumer digicams) and lets you capture perfectly focused images from about eight feet to infinity. By doing so, you've just shortened the length of time from when you push the shutter button to when the image is recorded. This also allows you to hang back a few feet, so you're not spending all your energy chasing kids around instead of Photographing them.

 

Enable Continuous shooting mode: Instead of taking a bunch of single shots and missing the action, Continuous Shooting mode lets you hold down the shutter button and fire a series of frames. The knack to this is starting the sequence right before the decisive moment and shooting through it. Then, review your pictures on the LCD screen, remove the obvious misses, and keep the winners.

 

Source: O’Riley | Portfolio Website for Photographers

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