Photographing Flowers

One of my favorite ways to photograph flowers is to move in really close, and fill the frame with a single flower, or sometimes just part of one. When I am making this type of image, I'm thinking more about line and color and shape, and less about capturing fine detail. When choosing your subject, look for flowers with great curves and soft color, such as roses, orchids, tulips and calla lilies. (Choose a pristine subject, when you are photographing this close, any flaw will be magnified and prove distracting). Really look at the flower you have chosen, examine it from every angle, decide what you find most interesting and capture it! This type of photography is interpretive, you want to capture what you are seeing and feeling about the subject in a simple manner.


You'll need equipment that lets you move in really close to fill the frame, use either a macro lens, extension tubes, or a wide angle lens with a reversing ring. Extension tubes are great, you can use them individually with larger flowers, or stack a set of two or three for really moving in close to smaller blooms.

Set your aperture to the largest your lens has, these images should be all about romance, soft and sensual, you don't want or need every detail in sharp focus. (If you are using a Lensbaby, use extension tubes or the macro filters and shoot wide open or with the F/2.8 aperture ring). Manually focus on a single petal edge, line or curve, and let the rest of the image go to soft blur. Shooting so close with such limited Depth of Field can create a very romantic image, with soothing lines and curves and relaxing colors. You can do this type of shooting year round, flowers can be purchased everywhere these days! Who couldn't use a little flower therapy in February? If you start practicing now, and you'll be ready when those spring flowers bloom!




Kathleen Clemons
PPSOP Instructor & Director of Student Happiness

Shooting Bird's Nest - Make The Best of Any Situation

On a recent trip to China, I got a chance to pay a visit to the National Stadium-"Bird's Nest", where 2008 Olympic Opening ceremony was held.
It's a cold week day afternoon in the winter, I arrives at the stadium around 5:00pm, the air is hazy and heavy. To my disappointment, all adjacent areas around the Bird's Nest are closed to public due to a Formula-One car racing event at the stadium that evening. Well, I just lost a great amount of point of views to shoot Bird's Nest as planned. Only one venue is open-the promenade in front of the stadium where tourists gather. I have no choice but going there and make the best of the situation.

As I am walking down the promenade, trying to find a good shooting position, the Bird's Nest went alive-the beautiful red and yellow lights lit up the whole stadium. I am filled with joy at the moment! What a roller coast ride-from disappointment to excitement. Usually, Bird's Nest is not fully lit every evening. Thanks to the car racing event, it's fully lit and I am here with my workhorse Canon 5D II, my 24-70mm and 70-200mm lens. Time to shoot.


I make a couple of wide angle shots, as shown above. To me, the images are just plain snaps, weak on energy and expression. What really caught my eyes is the lines, the curves and of course, the colorfulness of the stadium against the deep blue evening sky. Wide angle lens is definitely the wrong tool of choice to express these design elements in the photo, wide angle image includes too many distractions in the foreground like people, fences, trees, etc.


With the pre-visualized image in mind, I switch to 70-200mm lens and walk as close to the stadium as possible(leaning on the fences). At 200mm, I turn my camera and shoot the above images. You can clearly see the colors, curves, lines and textures. No distraction at all. By twisting the camera, I compose the image in which, the lines and curves run diagonally, making the image more dynamic and energetic. As rule of thumb, never forget to shoot both horizontal and vertical. It's a good habit and practice, particularly if you shoot stock images.


Tip: Although most of our images are shot in color these days, it's a good idea to think about the good old black and white from time to time. Especially, when you shoot a lot of night scenes or high contrast images, these are perfect candidates for black and white conversion. An excellent tool that does black and white conversion easily and gracefully, is Silver Efex Pro from Niksoftware, a plug-in for both photoshop and lightroom. The above images are the result of black white conversion using Silver Efex Pro.

Overall, Although I lost chances to shoot from different point of views of the Bird's Nest, I managed to make the best efforts within the limits of the situation, and got some decent images. As photographers, we have to adapt and adjust to whatever the situation are throwing at us, and make the best of it.


William Yu
www.chinaphotoworkshop.com

Shooting Bird's Nest - Making The Best of Any Situation

On a recent trip to China, I got a chance to pay a visit to the National Stadium-”Bird’s Nest”, where 2008 Olympic Opening ceremony was held.

It’s a cold week day afternoon in the winter, I arrives at the stadium around 5:00pm, the air is hazy and heavy. To my disappointment, all adjacent areas around the Bird’s Nest are closed to public due to a Formula-One car racing event at the stadium that evening. Well, I just lost a great amount of point of views to shoot Bird’s Nest as planned. Only one venue is open-the promenade in front of the stadium where tourists gather. I have no choice but going there and make the best of the situation.

As I am walking down the promenade, trying to find a good shooting position, the Bird’s Nest went alive-the beautiful red and yellow lights lit up the whole stadium. I am filled with joy at the moment! What a roller coast ride-from disappointment to excitement. Usually, Bird’s Nest is not fully lit every evening. Thanks to the car racing event, it’s fully lit and I am here with my workhorse Canon 5D II, my 24-70mm and 70-200mm lens. Time to shoot.

I make a couple of wide angle shots, as shown above. To me, the images are just plain snaps, weak on energy and expression. What really caught my eyes is the lines, the curves and of course, the colorfulness of the stadium against the deep blue evening sky. Wide angle lens is definitely the wrong tool of choice to express these design elements in the photo, wide angle image includes too many distractions in the foreground like people, fences, trees, etc.

With the pre-visualized image in mind, I switch to 70-200mm lens and walk as close to the stadium as possible(leaning on the fences). At 200mm, I turn my camera and shoot the above images. You can clearly see the colors, curves, lines and textures. No distraction at all. By twisting the camera, I compose the image in which, the lines and curves run diagonally, making the image more dynamic and energetic. As rule of thumb, never forget to shoot both horizontal and vertical. It’s a good habit and practice, particularly if you shoot stock images.

Tip: Although most of our images are shot in color these days, it’s a good idea to think about the good old black and white from time to time. Especially, when you shoot a lot of night scenes or high contrast images, these are perfect candidates for black and white conversion. An excellent tool that does black and white conversion easily and gracefully, is Silver Efex Pro from Niksoftware, a plug-in for both photoshop and lightroom. The above images are the result of black white conversion using Silver Efex Pro.

Overall, Although I lost chances to shoot from different point of views of the Bird’s Nest, I managed to make the best efforts within the limits of the situation, and got some decent images. As photographers, we have to adapt and adjust to whatever the situation are throwing at us, and make the best of it.

William Yu

http://www.chinaphotoworkshop.com

Senior portrait posing doesn't have to be that hard

One thing that I have noticed that other portrait photographers do, is go way overboard with their posing. They set up the subject and then take a shot, move the subject and take another shot and then repeat this over and over. They are working way too hard. Don't over do it with your poses. Work the poses and make your life easier.

If you look at this first shot, it's a really nice shot, so why go and move the subject again until you get the most out of the pose. You already have her in position, so why not just zoom in and take advantage of the nice pose.

All I did with this shot was zoom in to 200 mm wide open at f2.8 and look at how pretty that same pose is. Without even moving the subject, I have 2 sellable shots, and isn't that what we are after.

When I was shooting her, I noticed a nice red background behind her. All I had to do was get lower and shoot up at her. This did two things, it made the background red and I think this angle worked the best for her face. Shooting slightly up at someone makes them look a little more powerful, as in this shot. So without the subject even moving, I now have 3 shots that would not only sell, but I could group them together and sell them as a grouping! I just made more potential money in less time!

I do this a lot with my studio. First off, the clients aren't natural posers most of the time, and it is the hardest part of the job. Trying to find a pose that makes the person feel comfortable as well as looks good in the shot. Once you find a good pose, work your angles and your focal lengths and get as many useable shots as possible out of it.


If you look at the shots posted here in groups, they are all similar in the way I shot them. I start out long and then move in for a head shot. After that, I start walking around and let the subject stay put. The less they have to move the better. This technique saves you a ton of time and in the senior portrait business time is money. The more time you save, the more seniors you can shoot!

The next time you are ready to re-pose your subject ask yourself if you have worked the shot to it's full potential.

Kevin Focht
PPSOP Instructor

For Compelling Travel Photos: Think Like a Film-maker

With Christmas and New Year behind us, the summer travel season is only a few short months ahead. It's not too soon to be thinking about the capturing the best travel images of your life. As a photographer, the chance to travel and immerse myself in another culture while working to capture the essence of a place is a challenge I simply cannot turn down. But creating compelling travel pictures is no easy task. I'm sure you have all had the tortuous "pleasure" of sitting through a friend's travel slide show, where each image is accompanied by the phrase, "This is us in front of the [insert name of well known travel icon]".

When a professional travel photographer decides to cover a destination, the first thing they do is research the location. Travel books, Travel web-sites, both commercial and those of the government tourist agencies are all good sources of information. Learn about what may be going on at your destination when you arrive. On what day of the week is the local farmer's market? When are the local holidays? If possible, plan your trip to coincide with local festivals: these are excellent opportunities photograph people when they are out and about. Google your destination to death! To see how professionals cover your destination, search the web-sites of the major stock photography sites: Corbis, Getty and Masterfile.

Now that you have a good idea about what you will encounter when you arrive at your destination, think about letting your images create a story of what the place is like: what it's like to visit there, perhaps even what it's like to live there.

Good Travel Photography and Film Making share many of the same attributes. This makes sense, since both disciplines are essentially story telling mediums. Film Makers think in terms of three basic types of images: Establishing Shots create the overall view of alocation. "This how the location looks": is it set near the mountains, or the sea? Is it an urban or rural environment? Higher points of view can be useful in creating establishing shots... look for balconies, hillsides or observation towers.

Image 1: Establishing Shots create the overall view of a location

Medium Shots provide the substance of your story; this is where you get right into the locale: street scenes, architecture and portraits shot with normal lenses or so-called "street zooms" are good examples of this type of image. This is also where you should let your compositional creativity loose: use these as an opportunity to look for patterns and colours to enhance the impact of your images.

Image 2: Medium shots provide the substance of your travel story

Detail Shots are in many ways the most important type of travel image: as human beings we are all the same: it's only in the details that we are different from one another. While they need the other two classes of images to provide context, details provide the visual vocabulary needed to define a culture. Without them you're missing the most important part of your story. Used in a slide show, or album of your travels, detail images may not occupy the screen for as long as other images, or they may be smaller and collaged together with other images, but be sure to include at least a few in every show.

Image 3: Details are an essential part of your travel story

With a bit of planning and some thought about what you want to communicate to your viewers, you can tell a story that will convey volumes about your subject; often with almost no need for words. Suppose you wanted to create a story about the life of the small independent lavender farmer in Provence. One of the larger lavender growing regions in this part of France is on the high plateau above Valensole in the Alpes de Haut-Provence. The four images below encompass an establishing shot, (the landscape), medium shots of two brothers in the fields where they work. The details of sun burned faces and weathered hands tell a story of years of labouring under the hot Provencal sun.

Start planning now to make this year's vacation trip the most photographically rewarding one ever, be sure to plan for establishing and medium shots, and keep your eyes open for those telling cultural details.

Best wishes for the New Year to each of you!

Mark English

The Joy of Photographing People Using Small Flashes

Last week, I got opportunity to shoot portraits of different people in different settings at Paso Robles, California. Here are some tidbits:

1. The Happy Couple:

As my friend and I were walking in a park at dusk, we come across a young couple cuddling on the chair. They gracefully accept our offer to take couple of pictures of them. I set up a westcott 43" umbrella(in shoot-through mode) and my Canon 580ex II on a light stand, about 5 feet away from the couple, at about 8 o'clcok position to the camera left. I used 70-200mm IS canon telephoto lens to isolate their faces. Both the camera and the flash are in manual mode, and the flash is triggered by pocketwizard transceiver. As my friends were chatting with them, I quickly tested the flash exposure, and made some adjustment. Suddenly, the couple is laughing hard, I seized the moment by clicking away a dozen shots. The above image is one of my favorite.

2. Sophia in the shower room:

This time, my assignment is to shoot a beautiful model Sophia, at the bathroom in a gorgeous Victorian House. After some brainstorm, got an idea. I had her put a towel around the head, standing in the bathtub, pretending just finishing the shower. (Thank God, she didn't mind to mess up her hair with the towel). There is no room for light stand, but fortunately, I had my friend Martin as VAL (voice activated light stand), and he was over 7 feet tall. I put a Canon 580ex II and 43" shoot-through umbrella on a small Bogen Nano light stand, and Martin held it high to the right of Sophia, I took couple shots, the light wrapped around her nicely.

3. Abducted by UFO:

Sean, Steve and I were wandering around in a park at sunset, we found couple of big electrical boxes, and decided to use them as interesting background. After some test shots, an idea came to me, I like to make some cold vs warm contrasty shots. First, I set my camera white balance to tungsten(it makes daylight blue), then I put one canon flash on top of the electrical box with head facing down. The key light comes from a flash(with a full CTO gel attached to the head) on 43" shoot-through umbrella to my right. I also had steve hand-held a snooted flash pointing to Sean's right ear. All 3 flashes are triggered by pocketwizard. Lastly, It's Sean's turn to make some faces and poses, and he was really good at it, you can clearly see the result here.

William Yu

Nikkor 200mm Macro lens f/11 @ 1/60 second, ISO 200

Following the announcement last week of our February contest winners, we received an unusually large number of emails. Most of the emails expressed an interest in the story behind the photograph taken by our second place winner Angie Wright. Her simple yet striking image of "oil and water" had most everyone shaking their heads with disbelief and of course the question of "HOW" she did it.

Having "been there and done that" myself some years ago, I went out onto my back deck, just yesterday in fact and shot a few images of "oil and water" and as you will quickly see, it is an easy thing to shoot. The 'trick', as I am sure Angie will agree, is deciding what kind of colored background you wish to use AND to be patient! Hunching over this set-up with your camera and lens on tripod, waiting for the right arrangement of oil and water to form will test your patience, but it's truly worth it!

This is NOT a difficult set up. I have used a glass bread pan, placed atop two large drinking glasses. For my background, I have placed one of my 'wild and crazy colorful shirts' underneath the bread pan. I filled the pan about 2/3rds full with water and than simply poured a number of small drops of cooking oil into the pan.

I shot the two close-up images you see with my Nikkor 200mm Macro. You don't need a macro lens to do this shot but you will need a set of extension tubes. When placed between a lens that offers up 60-100mm focal length, you too will soon be enjoying some "unbelievable" images like you see here! And if it's not clear by now, let me end by saying, THIS TECHNIQUE IS NOT DONE IN PHOTOSHOP!




Nikkor 200mm Macro lens f/11 at 1/80 second 200 ISO

Bryan Peterson

Founder/PPSOP

Orchids

It's been a really long winter here in Maine, so when I was recently invited to shoot at an orchid nursery, I jumped at the chance! Spending the morning in this tropical paradise was absolutely heavenly!

Orchids are not the easiest flowers to shoot, and a nursery provides a very busy background, so isolating a single orchid for a flower portrait was a challenge. When you are shooting a complicated flower, simplifying the background becomes essential. The owner also did not want the orchids moved, so replacing the background with something simple was not an option. Luckily, I had packed my Lensbaby Composer and the macro kit accessory, so I could easily make the background fade into soft blur. I shot many images with a straight lens too, but it was the Lensbaby that gave me the images I wanted.

The day after the shoot, we had a huge snowstorm and lost our power for a few days, so I was really appreciative of the three hours I spent in the tropics!

Here are a few samples of the images I shot, all with the Lensbaby Composer and double glass optic.

Happy shooting!

Kathleen Clemons

Instructor
The Joy of Photography
Capturing the Beauty of Flowers
Lensbaby Magic
The Art of Food Photography

A "HOT-SHOT"

Have you ever used a fish-eye lens? The fish-eye lens allows for some up close and personal views of the world we live in. It is the lens that often answers the question of "What does the world look when seen from the point of view of the..." Again, due to its really wide and sweeping vision and its close-focusing capabilities, 4", this lens can go just about anywhere and offer up any number of fresh viewpoints of the world.

If you could squeeze into the mailbox what view is offered up when the postman delivers your mail? If you could crawl inside a very large shoe, what view is offered up when the foot enters the shoe? If you could sit on the back shelf of the refrigerator, what view would you see when someone in the family shows up for their 2AM feeding? If you could sit on the end of the spoon, what view would you have when you daughter takes her cough syrup? What view would you see if you were the end of a needle about to give someone a shot of Novocain? If you could crawl inside your oven, what view would you see when someone comes along and takes out the cooked pizza?

Lots of questions here and by no means is this a complete list! What does the office garbage can see from its low point of view, when someone throw's a wad of paper into it? And on and on it can go, but for now let's tackle at least one of these questions, beginning with the pizza in the oven.

Before placing my camera and full frame fish-eye lens on the at the back of the oven, I engaged the camera's built-in flash, setting it to rear curtain sync and set the camera to Aperture Priority Mode, choosing an aperture of f/16 for maximum depth of field, along with pre-focusing the camera to its shortest focus point of 4". (Auto focus has been turned-off as usual.) In addition I had engaged the camera's self-timer to fire 5 seconds after first pressing the camera's shutter release. All that remained was to explain to the model that he needed to just stand there for a few seconds acting as if he was about to take the fresh baked pizza out of the oven. (Getting my model to do exactly as I directed was the easiest part of the shoot since the model in this case is me! The wife and kids had left earlier in the day to head out for the 'spring sales' so my choice in models was truly limited.) Holding the pizza with one hand and firing the shutter release with the other hand, I held the position you see here and five seconds later, this was the result; f/16 at 1 second. For those who don't know about rear curtain sync, here is how it works, in capsule form: Instead of the flash firing at the beginning of the exposure, it fires at the end. With the camera in Aperture Priority Mode, the initial exposure was taking into account the light outside the oven which was the available light on me and the light in our well-lit kitchen and at the end of the exposure time, the flash went off, an illuminated the interior of the oven, along with the Pizza and my hand and oven mitt. Easy stuff, really, it is!

And of course the really more pressing question: DID I ACTUALLY SET MY NIKON D-300 WITH THE FULL FRAME 14MM FISH-EYE LENS INTO A 400 DEGREE OVEN!? Of course not! The oven is actually at room temperature. So how do I explain the RED-HOT COILS overhead? I made a simple COLOR BALANCE Adjustment Layer in Photo-Shop and added RED, thus turning the normally grey oven coils to a "glowing RED!"

All My Best,

Bryan F. Peterson

Founder/PPSOP