Balancing Act With Light

This isn't exactly a simple technique for photographers, but hey, film is cheap when you're using a digital camera, so give it a try. The important thing about shifting your camera into manual everything is it gives you control. Get out of program mode, get out of autofocus, and get your electronic flash on a cord, or even better, on wireless setting! Now you're cooking with gas. The lighting for your background is determined by the amount of light that's able to pass through your lens and the amount of time your shutter is open. Find a shutter speed and aperture that works to give your background sky the deep rich blue color you get in the 15 minutes after sunset! This will probably take a slow enough shutter speed to make quite a bit of motion blur in your shot. Now comes part B! Freeze your subject in the foreground with an instant of blinding light in their face. This technique uses manual exposure, manual shutter speed, and manual focus. The only thing on auto is your TTL flash, which should get the foreground lit right if you dial up the power using about +1 stop of flash compensation. Hard work to get it right, but worth the wait when you pull it off successfully. Oh, and this may sound weird to some of you, but if you trust in Jesus, and read his word, and pray over your camera gear that you can use it it a way that honors him, it makes a difference in your pictures, as well as in your life.

Dragging the Shutter

Showing action can be an important part of conveying the image your eye sees. Here Deano and the Dynamos, a Christian Music Ministry, are performing at one of the largest churches in Southern California. Deano's jumping and whirling and playing his guitar is so dynamic, it's hard to capture in a still image. In the closup of Deano, I wanted to caputure a sense of motion, so I selected aperture priority mode and set the camera at f-14. The technique of dragging the shutter, that is, intentionally choosing a slow shutter speed, can work with or without a flash, but often the best results come with a flash. If your camera has a flash option for "slow sync" and "rear curtain sync," try turning both of them on. This technique works best with a high powered electronic flash like the Nikon SB-800, but the real key to making it work is taking lots of shots to get the one "keeper" that will become your personal treasure.

Photojournalism 101

A group of Christians from Shepherd of the Hills Church are doing a "community days" project. People are donating time and materials to help beautify Mayall Street Elementary School. Here, a team of people are putting in a garden.

Let's talk about this from a photojounalism standpoint. Getting an overall shot that captures the essence of what's going on is critical. In order to get the angle I wanted, I decided to double park and scramble up onto the roof of my vehicle, standing up and getting images with a wide zoom lens. This shot captured the overall story. Getting ten feet off the ground made the difference. From street level, you couldn't tell what was going on. So don't be afraid to look for an angle that works, even if it takes thinking outside the box to make it happen.



Try to add a foreground that helps tell the story. Here, a volunteer works hard planting a flower garden. This shot captures the essence of the task. From a technical side, the secret to making this shot work was balanced fill flash. With direct sunlight as the only light source, the subject's face would have been dark beyond recognition. Using a camera mounted TTL flash I was able to capture the details of her face. I needed to adjust the exposure compensation, decreasing the exposure by -0.7 stops, and powering down the flash by 1.7 stops, to keep the foreground from being overlit.

How To: Capturing Action

The key to capturing a sense of action in your shot is picking the right shutter speed, and then panning the camera to follow the action. In the shot of the motocross rider, a shutter speed of 1/250 freezes ALMOST all the action. You want a little bit of motion blur somewhere, so the rider doesn't look like he's suspended on a string. 1/250 lets the spokes of the wheels blur, but keeps the rest of the image sharp. Most digital SLR's have "continuous focus" modes and a mulifunction button on the back that will let you pick which part of the image you want the autofocus to lock in on. I selected a zone on the right side of the frame, then turned the camera vertical to get the shot. With continuous autofocus tracking the rider, the camera fired off 4 shots of him in the air, and two more of the landing, all perfectly focused. Not all shots lend themselves to autofocus, however.

In the bottom shot of a motorcycle roadracer, the bikes moving away from me at over 100 mph were more than the autofocus in my Nikon 300mm f2.8 lens could handle. I picked a spot at the apex of the corner, and prefocused the camera on that spot using manual focus. When the rider came down the straightaway, I panned with him, keeping the rider centered in the frame. When he got to the apex of the corner, making sure to keep panning, I fired off a this shot at 1/500 .
A 1/500 shutter speed usually will freeze anything, but these bikes move at airplane speeds, and there's still enough motion blur from the panning to capture a sense of how fast these guys really are.