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.

The Missing Man Formation

IN MEMORY OF PHOTOGRAPHER JEFF MILLER 1955-2008

Today I said farewell to a friend. He died at the age of 53, which at one time would have seemed old to me, but no longer does. There are many great lessons in life, and we all learn them along the way. It's important to work hard and play hard, and to use the talents God gives you.
A good life lesson, once paraphrased by Bill Gates, is "life's not fair. Get used to it." Jeff's greatest love in life was flying. He was a commercial pilot with 7000 hours flight time, when a trip to the flight surgeon pulled the plug on his career overnight. He had been diagnosed with diabetes.
Re-starting his life, he did some entrepreneurial things to make a new career for himself. He got involved in volunteering, and found himself hanging out of helicopter doors in a harness, holding a camera instead of a stick and throttle. He helped organize the Heroes Airshow, and shot photos for the fire service, including the LA City and LA County Fire Departments. The diabetes eventually took one of his legs. When Jeff went to the County Fire Department to renew his fire line credentials, there was a new fire department official at the desk who was skeptical as to why a disabled man in a wheelchair would need a departmental ID. Today, that same official spoke with pride of how Jeff didn't quit. One of the photos on display showed Jeff in the door of a helicopter, flying over a scene with his camera. One leg was against the helicopter's skid bracing his position, the other leg was still freshly bandaged from his then recent leg amputation.
Life is finite. As you come to terms with that reality, you learn to worry less and pray more. I liked Jeff's approach toward life. He had passion, and he was organized. He never spent a moment of his life drunk or on drugs. When he died, he wasn't rich, and he wasn't famous, and he had little in the way of material possessions. His most treasured earthly possessions were simply a flight harness and his camera, but he lived his life to the fullest and he made the most of the talents God gave him.
When helicopters come in for a landing, the ground controller will raise both arms vertically to signal the pilot that he's on the right heading. At the memorial service, I took this picture as three LAFD Huey's flew the missing man formation over us. As they came in, Jeff's sister, doubtlessly raised on a diet of aviaion, instinctively raised her arms overhead vertically, giving the same signal I've seen Jeff give time and time again on the airfield. I took the picture you see here.

Jeff, you're on the right heading.

Amen.

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.

Seeing the Light

A big part of successful photography is pre-visualization. PBS put together a documentary on Ansel Adams where Ansel talked about his images. Instead of using the phrase "take" a picture, he described how he would "make" a photograph that would capture the image he saw in his mind's eye.

In this photograph, elements of strong lighting and linearity bring together dramatic elements that help make the image pleasing to the eye. When I pre-visualized the picture, the elements that stood out to me in my mind's eye were the two triangles formed by the sides of this "urban canyon" as it recedes back to the vanishing point. Shape and balance and depth all play a role in making this image aestheticly pleasing. None were obvious to the casual bystanders, who for the most part took snapshots of their friends with their backs up against the railing instead.

Urban Sunset

Our stormy weather of late has produced some fabulous clouds. The day that the storm breaks us is the classic time to get the best scenic photos, and the golden light of the last hour of the day caught me struggling with rush hour traffic on the way back over the hill from Hollywood. There really aren't a lot of special tricks to getting good sunset pictures. Just basic fundamentals. If you're looking into the sun, your optics better be nice and clean, just like your windshield needs to be for a sunset commute. Watch your shutter speed, and be ready to put your camera on a tripod once the light levels go down. I like to shoot sunsets using aperture priority and the right amount of exposure compensation. Digital cameras make it so much easier than the old days of film. Take a test shot, check the histogram to make sure you're not running off either end of the scale, and then fire away. This sunset shot was made using a gradient filter that reduced the amount of light hitting the bottom portion of the image, which gave me the little bit of foreground detail I was looking for. Like many landscape images, previsualization helps you be able to make a picture that caputures the feeling of the event as you see it in your mind's eye.

Portraits

I love portraits that tell a story. Here, the story is the intense concentration of the young musician. The bow coming across the face, the eyes, and the deep shadow area between the neck of the instrument and the player all help keep the focus on the intensity of his concentration. The lighting setup was straightforward, and actually more simple than a lot of other portrait shoots. A single, point source was used, set a few feet higher and to the left, where the music stand would act as a scrim and keep the light from falling on most of the top surface of the violin. This draws the eye to the strings, which now stand out from the dark background.

This is one of those shots where a large pair of softboxes, which typically are used to give nice catchlights to the eyes, would have made the shot ordinary. The lack of catchlights in the eyes and the darkness of the instrument itself is what makes this shot work.

A small aperture was used to provide the needed depth of field to keep both the subject and the instrument in focus, but also to let the blackground fade quickly to black. Once the image was capured, there was very little post production, just a little tweaking the levels and some dodging of the background and the rail of the bentwood chair.

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.