If you watched my last video you know it was kind of a shit show. I had the wrong arrows to start with, the tech guy installed my peep sight like a stewie, the arrows I did get weren't knocked correctly for my rest, and I was shooting ten yards, not twenty, like the line on the floor suggested. This time, with cock vanes pointing straight up, I shot from what I can only presume is the twenty yard line.
You can't see shit twenty yards away. At least I can't. Maybe it's the dark arrows on a black and white target but, I had a hell of a time seeing where my arrows landed at first. Eventually I was able to spot them easier just by repetition I guess, but I have a hard time believing I'm going to know exactly where I hit a deer at that distance without the help of high speed footage and good camera work. Most of the footage I've seen shows deer reacting as or even before the arrow gets to them and it can cause the arrow to land relatively far away from where your pin was. I won't be taking any shots at deer over twenty yards this season so, if I even get a shot, the reaction time should be minimized. Who knows what will actually register in an exciting moment like that, though. I've considered self filming but, since I'm not experienced at hunting or filming hunts it's another variable in an already new endeavor I'm not sure I want to take on. Well, I want to, I'm just not sure doing two things at once is a good formula for success at either.
Speaking of success, consistency is difficult. I shot a bunch of arrows and never really saw any consistent patterns. I'm sure my form sucks, in fact, I noticed I'm not using another anchor point with my nose like a lot of people do. Hopefully working on that will help out. I'm assuming it was luck that I shot my second favorite cock vane off in the video below. At this point though, it's almost getting discouraging. Is my inconstancy because of form? Is it because my arrows aren't the right length, spine, or weight? Did I fuck something up when I adjusted the draw weight? Is my bow actually set up correctly for me? Am I doing OK for a beginner and should I just simmer down? I have no idea and I've learned that I'm not going to get any decent advice from where I go to shoot it. It looks like it's back to my good ol' buddy the internet to educate myself a little more and see where I can work out some kinks.
Thursday, March 24, 2016
Monday, February 8, 2016
Adventures in Hunting: I Got a Bow!
One of the first steps in this process was to figure out what kind of bow to get. This is a huge decision with so many choices from so many companies it can be easy to get overwhelmed. Should I get a recurve or a compound. Duel cams? Single cams? Hybrid Cams? What the hell does any of that even mean? I like simple shit so recurve was what I initially started looking at. The more I read, however, the less I thought this was a good decision for me as a compete beginner. Why? Technology. As a novice I'm going to want every advantage I can get to make an ethical shot. I believe compound bows give you that.
Firstly, the cam systems. Each bow has a draw weight associated with it. Basically, the force it takes to pull the string back. The legal minimum in Minnesota is 30 lbs. The weight was lowered in 2007 to promote youth hunting among other reasons. They say, however , you should shoot the heaviest weight you can accurately handle. Why? Well, more force means more energy in the arrow to drive it through. A more ethical shot. What cams do is hold a percentage of that full draw weight saving the hunter energy. For example a bow with a 50 lb draw weight and a 80% let off means you're holding 10 lbs at full draw. Some cams let off more than that. So this deer walks in, you draw while he's far enough away that he can't see you move. This guy gives zero effs and takes his happy ass time coming into a range for a clean shot. This could take 2 minutes or more. Can I hold 50 lbs with one arm for 2 minutes while trying to aim and maintain form? I doubt it. Not today anyway. And that's without a deer in front of me. Who knows how my body will react when one is.
Secondly, design. The recurve hasn't really gone through much design change over the years whereas the compound seems to get an update nearly every year by nearly every company. Part of this constant attempt at improvement is part if the reason the draw weight was lowered in my state. Better materials and design have improved efficiency enough to make lower draw weights lethal. This ties in to what marketing people call "forgiveness". One of the latest buzzwords in archery but it has a little substance to it. Basically, forgiveness is the bow compensating for how shitty you are at shooting a bow. I usually strive to do things properly, but without a real life person who knows what they're talking about to help me, I'm on my own. I will gladly take any advantage I can get. The best example I can think of "forgiveness" is shooting a bow with a d-loop and release. Most recurve shooters shoot with their fingers. They grab the string with their fingers and pull it back. A potential disadvantage of this method is string distortion. Grabbing the string with 3 fingers is quite a big surface area. That's a lot of opportunity to twist the string. A d-loop keeps most of the distortion in the loop and off the string making for a cleaner release. One less thing to worry about.
Lastly, adjustability. Bows come in all sorts of draw weights and draw lengths. Not knowing either of those numbers leaves me a golden opportunity to buy the wrong bow. Recurve bows aren't as picky about draw length since you have no cam system to stop you, but for the most part, you're stuck with that weight. Compound bows are typically a lot more adjustable and getting a bow that had more options along with the potential for me to grow with was important. Whatever bow I get is going to have to last me a long time.
So what bow do I pick? Lucky for me the cost of these things eliminated a solid 90% of my choices. The stand out in my price range was the Diamond Infinite Edge Pro. Adjustable through nearly the entire spectrum of human dimensions at a cost of only one arm and a small chunk of leg. It comes with a quiver, a rest, a pin sight, and a tube peep sight. The only thing to do out of the box is install the peep sight.
This video is of my first shots with the bow. I took it to my local shop to get the peep sight installed, draw weight adjusted, get some general information and use their range. I gotta say, I was disappointed. I was hoping to get some tips and pointers from them, but not being a Mom and Pop type store your typical employee doesn't care. I don't really blame them, people make it hard to care about anything. I chose to swap the tube peep sight for a fletcher style. Tube peeps are a little cylinder installed in your string similarly to a back sight on a gun. They have a tube attached from the peep to another cable so that the peep is always pointed in the right direction as cables can have a tendency to twist. My internet discoveries of people saying they can be noisy and break at the worst time lead me to choose a fletcher style. Same thing with no tube. Quieter, no tube breakage but potentially prone to twisting. I do know one real-life bow hunter and in a short conversation I was able to have with him, he said he's never had a problem with a properly installed fletcher style peep. The bow technician recommended a tube peep and in my head I wondered if that was because I'm a beginner or he sucks at installing peeps. My question was answered during my first draw. I pull back ready to shoot at this kick ass dinosaur, get set to aim and the fucking thing is twisted. So now I'm at full draw and I can't see my pin sight during the "first arrow ever" section of the video. I let it go anyway and luckily wasn't too far off. To fix it was a simple matter of twisting my d-loop so that it oriented the same as the peep sight. Is that the right way to fix it? I have no idea but it works so far. Had the tech guy actually looked at his work he might have noticed, but I guess that answers my earlier question.
This is going to be a ton of work and this is just the archery part. Work I'm looking forward to, but with the added challenge of going at it alone. Expect more videos of archery, property management, gear choices and my reasoning behind them and all sorts of stuff I'm sure I don't even know about yet. If you have any tips or suggestions, or know of a good archery shop in Minnesota I'd love to hear about it. In the meantime, enjoy the show.
Firstly, the cam systems. Each bow has a draw weight associated with it. Basically, the force it takes to pull the string back. The legal minimum in Minnesota is 30 lbs. The weight was lowered in 2007 to promote youth hunting among other reasons. They say, however , you should shoot the heaviest weight you can accurately handle. Why? Well, more force means more energy in the arrow to drive it through. A more ethical shot. What cams do is hold a percentage of that full draw weight saving the hunter energy. For example a bow with a 50 lb draw weight and a 80% let off means you're holding 10 lbs at full draw. Some cams let off more than that. So this deer walks in, you draw while he's far enough away that he can't see you move. This guy gives zero effs and takes his happy ass time coming into a range for a clean shot. This could take 2 minutes or more. Can I hold 50 lbs with one arm for 2 minutes while trying to aim and maintain form? I doubt it. Not today anyway. And that's without a deer in front of me. Who knows how my body will react when one is.
Secondly, design. The recurve hasn't really gone through much design change over the years whereas the compound seems to get an update nearly every year by nearly every company. Part of this constant attempt at improvement is part if the reason the draw weight was lowered in my state. Better materials and design have improved efficiency enough to make lower draw weights lethal. This ties in to what marketing people call "forgiveness". One of the latest buzzwords in archery but it has a little substance to it. Basically, forgiveness is the bow compensating for how shitty you are at shooting a bow. I usually strive to do things properly, but without a real life person who knows what they're talking about to help me, I'm on my own. I will gladly take any advantage I can get. The best example I can think of "forgiveness" is shooting a bow with a d-loop and release. Most recurve shooters shoot with their fingers. They grab the string with their fingers and pull it back. A potential disadvantage of this method is string distortion. Grabbing the string with 3 fingers is quite a big surface area. That's a lot of opportunity to twist the string. A d-loop keeps most of the distortion in the loop and off the string making for a cleaner release. One less thing to worry about.
Lastly, adjustability. Bows come in all sorts of draw weights and draw lengths. Not knowing either of those numbers leaves me a golden opportunity to buy the wrong bow. Recurve bows aren't as picky about draw length since you have no cam system to stop you, but for the most part, you're stuck with that weight. Compound bows are typically a lot more adjustable and getting a bow that had more options along with the potential for me to grow with was important. Whatever bow I get is going to have to last me a long time.
So what bow do I pick? Lucky for me the cost of these things eliminated a solid 90% of my choices. The stand out in my price range was the Diamond Infinite Edge Pro. Adjustable through nearly the entire spectrum of human dimensions at a cost of only one arm and a small chunk of leg. It comes with a quiver, a rest, a pin sight, and a tube peep sight. The only thing to do out of the box is install the peep sight.
This video is of my first shots with the bow. I took it to my local shop to get the peep sight installed, draw weight adjusted, get some general information and use their range. I gotta say, I was disappointed. I was hoping to get some tips and pointers from them, but not being a Mom and Pop type store your typical employee doesn't care. I don't really blame them, people make it hard to care about anything. I chose to swap the tube peep sight for a fletcher style. Tube peeps are a little cylinder installed in your string similarly to a back sight on a gun. They have a tube attached from the peep to another cable so that the peep is always pointed in the right direction as cables can have a tendency to twist. My internet discoveries of people saying they can be noisy and break at the worst time lead me to choose a fletcher style. Same thing with no tube. Quieter, no tube breakage but potentially prone to twisting. I do know one real-life bow hunter and in a short conversation I was able to have with him, he said he's never had a problem with a properly installed fletcher style peep. The bow technician recommended a tube peep and in my head I wondered if that was because I'm a beginner or he sucks at installing peeps. My question was answered during my first draw. I pull back ready to shoot at this kick ass dinosaur, get set to aim and the fucking thing is twisted. So now I'm at full draw and I can't see my pin sight during the "first arrow ever" section of the video. I let it go anyway and luckily wasn't too far off. To fix it was a simple matter of twisting my d-loop so that it oriented the same as the peep sight. Is that the right way to fix it? I have no idea but it works so far. Had the tech guy actually looked at his work he might have noticed, but I guess that answers my earlier question.
This is going to be a ton of work and this is just the archery part. Work I'm looking forward to, but with the added challenge of going at it alone. Expect more videos of archery, property management, gear choices and my reasoning behind them and all sorts of stuff I'm sure I don't even know about yet. If you have any tips or suggestions, or know of a good archery shop in Minnesota I'd love to hear about it. In the meantime, enjoy the show.
Monday, February 1, 2016
Adventures in Hunting: My First Bow Season
I used to tell people I would have just as much fun in the woods during hunting season with a camera as I would with a gun. This is still true, but that attitude, I think, may have prevented me from fully appreciating what hunting can be.
The outdoors is a great place and sometimes I think people forget we're a part of it. We can have anything we can think of shipped to our homes, co-workers literally within arm's reach would rather send you an email than actually talk to you, grocery stores afford us the luxury of taking for granted the process and often dirty work involved in getting that cut of meat or exotic fruit into the store in the first place. To live is to consume, whether it's a carrot or a cow, something died to keep you alive. People forget that.
I didn't really think that way until last year when I gutted my first fish. If you've ever watched me clean up dog barf you might know part of the reason it was kind of a big deal for me. A well told story about something gross can be enough to make me gag. Now, not only was I about to see the insides of a fish and touch them, something we're censored from in the stores, but I was going to have to end it's life. Me. It was that experience that it really dawned on me how sheltered I am. Every other piece of meat I've had my entire life went through a similar process. Those times, however, someone else did the dirty work.
Add to that the effects large scale agriculture can have on the world and I was left with a pretty convincing reason to reevaluate my approach to hunting. If I'm going to continue to eat meat, and I plan to, providing it for myself, at least once, feels like a necessity if for nothing but the experience of what it really takes to feed yourself.
So, I decided that this year I'm going to approach hunting season a little more deliberately. As is the theme with this blog, I don't know what I'm doing. Where previously not knowing what I'm doing might mean a less than flattering photo, or a no so level table, lack of knowledge and skill here could mean a wounded animal spends the last day of its life suffering. Not exactly something I want to happen.
I started this video series not only to hopefully help people learn from my mistakes, but to keep myself accountable. I have a ton of work to do and I'm excited to start! I know it's a lofty goal to get a deer on my first bow hunting season, but if you prepare for success and expect failure anything that does work is a bonus and you might just have a good time.
I would love feedback on anything and any tips or resources are greatly appreciated!
The outdoors is a great place and sometimes I think people forget we're a part of it. We can have anything we can think of shipped to our homes, co-workers literally within arm's reach would rather send you an email than actually talk to you, grocery stores afford us the luxury of taking for granted the process and often dirty work involved in getting that cut of meat or exotic fruit into the store in the first place. To live is to consume, whether it's a carrot or a cow, something died to keep you alive. People forget that.
I didn't really think that way until last year when I gutted my first fish. If you've ever watched me clean up dog barf you might know part of the reason it was kind of a big deal for me. A well told story about something gross can be enough to make me gag. Now, not only was I about to see the insides of a fish and touch them, something we're censored from in the stores, but I was going to have to end it's life. Me. It was that experience that it really dawned on me how sheltered I am. Every other piece of meat I've had my entire life went through a similar process. Those times, however, someone else did the dirty work.
Add to that the effects large scale agriculture can have on the world and I was left with a pretty convincing reason to reevaluate my approach to hunting. If I'm going to continue to eat meat, and I plan to, providing it for myself, at least once, feels like a necessity if for nothing but the experience of what it really takes to feed yourself.
So, I decided that this year I'm going to approach hunting season a little more deliberately. As is the theme with this blog, I don't know what I'm doing. Where previously not knowing what I'm doing might mean a less than flattering photo, or a no so level table, lack of knowledge and skill here could mean a wounded animal spends the last day of its life suffering. Not exactly something I want to happen.
I started this video series not only to hopefully help people learn from my mistakes, but to keep myself accountable. I have a ton of work to do and I'm excited to start! I know it's a lofty goal to get a deer on my first bow hunting season, but if you prepare for success and expect failure anything that does work is a bonus and you might just have a good time.
I would love feedback on anything and any tips or resources are greatly appreciated!
Tuesday, January 19, 2016
Adventures in Woodworking: Wine Crate Table
Pinterest is a nasty place. You can browse millions of complex projects summarized in a few images and think, "I could do that." Or even worse, "That probably wouldn't even take that long." I recently fell victim to such a project. The Wine Crate Table. It seems simple enough. Find four wine crates and attach them together. Done. Until you find a wine crate, decide it's too small for a table and decide to make your own custom crates.
Now you get to make all kinds of decisions. Not only dimensions, but what kind of wood, what kind of stain, oil or water based varnish, oh and let's put in on wheels! This of course requires some sort of support structure for everything to sit on which of course wasn't on Pinterest so we gotta figure that out too. We chose oak, Dark Walnut, and oil based, by the way.
I wanted each box to have support on all sides but didn't want to use a huge piece of wood so we came up with this contraption. Each box will have a beam to sit on and I only have to cut 800 pieces of wood or so.
Cutting the holes for the handles was where I really started questioning my resolve for the project. I'm no jigsaw or scroll saw master so punching holes in an expensive piece of wood wasn't something I was particularly excited for. Luckily we had a bit left over to practice on.
Then after 8 dozen countersink holes we were ready to assemble the boxes. Would it all line up or would this end up in a Pinterest fail collection I relate to so much.
This was a pretty fun project. It took us way too long but we're pretty happy with it. Hopefully someday we can get heat in the garage so we can stain for more than 4 months out of the year.
Anyway, let me know what you think!
I wanted each box to have support on all sides but didn't want to use a huge piece of wood so we came up with this contraption. Each box will have a beam to sit on and I only have to cut 800 pieces of wood or so.
 |
| Support Structure |
 |
| Everything cut up |
 |
| Support structure layout |
 |
| 1-1/4 inch holes |
 |
| Jigsaw the middle |
 |
| Round over the edges with 1/4" roundover bit |
Then we get to stain!
 |
| and stain..... |
 |
| and stain....... |
 |
| and stain! |
 |
| Cardboard spacers |
 |
| pretty close! |
 |
| Support structure with 5" wheels |
 |
 |
| Frame for center hole. |
 |
| Done! |
This was a pretty fun project. It took us way too long but we're pretty happy with it. Hopefully someday we can get heat in the garage so we can stain for more than 4 months out of the year.
Anyway, let me know what you think!
Adventures in Photography: First Time Senior Portraits
Well, it happened.
I had my first senior portrait session. I learned a poop ton and I think I did alright. Some things I wanted didn't turn out, some things I wasn't expecting to work did.
Firstly, I was under prepared. Not with the equipment but, with the shoot itself. I practiced a lot with the equipment, but almost no practice went into an actual shoot. It was a free shoot and I had all day so time and cost to the client weren't issues. However, I only went into the shoot with two exact locations in mind and one look that I would have to find a location for. With that kind of time and resources I should have had closer to 5 - 8 locations picked out. If it were for a paying client, perhaps that's all we would have had time for, but It's probably a good idea to have more locations in mind than you think you'll use.
Secondly, I didn't prioritize. One look I was specifically going for was a sunset against a field or sky. Since it was a priority, I should have had an exact location picked out. I didn't, so when sunset time came we were scrambling to find a place that would work. Valuable time I could have used to get camera settings dialed in. I ended up getting lucky and we found a field just off the road that worked pretty well. When we got there though, it was already late and the Sun moves fast as hell when you don't want it to. I should have had this shot more well though out.
Thirdly, I needed help. I was prepared to do everything myself. I got sandbags to hold stands down, stands for my lights, stands for reflectors, and stands for my stands. Lucky for me "Mom" was extremely willing to help. Not only hold anything I asked and push any button I requested, but had loads of suggestions and input. She had locations to try, wardrobe input, and had an extra pair of eyes to spot anything in frame I might miss while focusing on getting the exposure right. I would have gotten less than half of what I did if I didn't have any help.
Lastly, this is so much work. I took almost 800 photos and the work started with weeding out the bad ones. I was probably over attached to a lot as I was only able to weed it down to around 70 photos. Unfortunately for me, The clients eliminated 5 of those 70. Now, if this were a paid gig, depending on price, 70 is way too many photos. A more realistic number would have been 20. Let me tell you, without the benefit of this being my full time job, I don't have the time to edit 70 photos, especially as a novice to the task. I need to let more go and focus on only the strongest work.
Overall though, I'm pretty happy with how things turned out. I was able to use pretty much everything I had learned leading up to this, techniques to blur the background, off camera flash, balancing ambient exposure with my flashes and composition. Editing was a whole new ballpark we can get into next time. 'Till then, here are some of my edited favorites. Feel free to leave me a comment and let me know what you think! If your're interested in more about the approach I took you can start from the beginning here.
I had my first senior portrait session. I learned a poop ton and I think I did alright. Some things I wanted didn't turn out, some things I wasn't expecting to work did.
Firstly, I was under prepared. Not with the equipment but, with the shoot itself. I practiced a lot with the equipment, but almost no practice went into an actual shoot. It was a free shoot and I had all day so time and cost to the client weren't issues. However, I only went into the shoot with two exact locations in mind and one look that I would have to find a location for. With that kind of time and resources I should have had closer to 5 - 8 locations picked out. If it were for a paying client, perhaps that's all we would have had time for, but It's probably a good idea to have more locations in mind than you think you'll use.
Secondly, I didn't prioritize. One look I was specifically going for was a sunset against a field or sky. Since it was a priority, I should have had an exact location picked out. I didn't, so when sunset time came we were scrambling to find a place that would work. Valuable time I could have used to get camera settings dialed in. I ended up getting lucky and we found a field just off the road that worked pretty well. When we got there though, it was already late and the Sun moves fast as hell when you don't want it to. I should have had this shot more well though out.
Thirdly, I needed help. I was prepared to do everything myself. I got sandbags to hold stands down, stands for my lights, stands for reflectors, and stands for my stands. Lucky for me "Mom" was extremely willing to help. Not only hold anything I asked and push any button I requested, but had loads of suggestions and input. She had locations to try, wardrobe input, and had an extra pair of eyes to spot anything in frame I might miss while focusing on getting the exposure right. I would have gotten less than half of what I did if I didn't have any help.
Lastly, this is so much work. I took almost 800 photos and the work started with weeding out the bad ones. I was probably over attached to a lot as I was only able to weed it down to around 70 photos. Unfortunately for me, The clients eliminated 5 of those 70. Now, if this were a paid gig, depending on price, 70 is way too many photos. A more realistic number would have been 20. Let me tell you, without the benefit of this being my full time job, I don't have the time to edit 70 photos, especially as a novice to the task. I need to let more go and focus on only the strongest work.
Overall though, I'm pretty happy with how things turned out. I was able to use pretty much everything I had learned leading up to this, techniques to blur the background, off camera flash, balancing ambient exposure with my flashes and composition. Editing was a whole new ballpark we can get into next time. 'Till then, here are some of my edited favorites. Feel free to leave me a comment and let me know what you think! If your're interested in more about the approach I took you can start from the beginning here.
Friday, May 29, 2015
Adventures in Photography: Shutter Speed, Aperture, ISO, and Flash
Taking portraits outdoors is easily the most challenging task I've tried thus far. With a little understanding of how our camera works it was possible and for my first attempt, focusing solely on exposure, I think I got some decent results.
Before we move on it's important to know how our camera takes pictures and what changing settings will do. They say if you want something done right you should do it yourself. Getting your camera into manual mode will give you that level of control instead of letting your camera guess and probably fail at what you want. Mark Wallace does a great job explaining the exposure triangle in the first video of this series on exposure, so make sure you watch that. In the meantime here's my gross over simplification.
There are three ways to make our pictures brighter and darker. ISO, shutter speed, and aperture. Adjusting each of them will have an additional effect on your photo other than just the picture's brightness.
ISO is our camera's overall sensitivity to light. The higher the number, the brighter your picture will be. The thing to keep in mind with ISO is noise. Some cameras can handle this better than others but essentially, the higher your ISO, the more noise you get. It's a lot like distortion on a stereo. If you crank it up too loud, even when nothing is playing, you'll hear a hum. Ideally you want to keep ISO as low as possible, but in our stereo example, if it's too low you won't be able to "hear" anything at all. Cameras are getting good at shooting with high ISO and editing in post can help too, don't be afraid to crank it up to get your shot. Of course, the better you do in camera, the less you'll have to fix later. Our boy Mark explains further here.
Aperture is a hole in your lens that can be adjusted to let more or less light in. The other thing this effects is depth of field. The smaller the number, the larger the hole and the less range of things that will be in focus. Depending on a few factors your depth of field could be so shallow that your subject's nose will be in focus but their eye won't. Mark explains better here.
Shutter speed is how long your camera lets light affect the exposure. The longer it's open the brighter the picture. The effect of shutter speed, for the most part, is blur. If your shutter is open long enough it will record anything that moves, even your hand movement. A fast shutter speed will freeze motion. Get it fast enough and you can stop a helicopter blade. When you bring a flash into the equation you have another thing to consider. Flash sync speed. Depending on your camera this could range quite a bit but most newer cameras are around 200th of a second. My t3i is 200th of a second. A good way to think of this is that your camera's shutter is starting to close while the flash is still on. That isn't exactly how it works but it's the easiest way to explain it without a bunch of technical diagrams of shutter mechanics. Mark talks about shutter speed here.
This is what happens when you go over a camera's sync speed
The flash is still putting out light by the time the shutter starts to close resulting in a big black bar in our photo. There are flashes that have what's called High Speed Sync. When a camera's shutter speed is at or lower than the flash sync speed, there is a moment where the sensor is completely uncovered. When it goes above it's flash sync speed, the hole in the shutter is narrow and it scans across the sensor meaning that only part of the sensor is able to receive light at any given moment. With my flashes, they only have the ability to output one light burst. High speed sync flashes will put out several bursts of light when in that mode so there is flash for every part of the sensor when it's uncovered. This becomes important in really bright situations like the one I was in with my model.
Mark helps out on high speed sync here.
Lets say we want an extremely shallow depth of field. We want our subject in focus but everything behind her as blurry as we can get it because it's some ugly parking lot or something. So, we'll crank our aperture to the lowest number it can go which gives us a big hole and a lot of room for light to come through. There will be situations where even at your camera's lowest ISO it's still going to be too bright. We know from the exposure triangle to get shallow depth of field at these settings we're going to need to have a short shutter speed to limit the amount of light that comes in. It might be so bright that the only way to get a proper exposure based on these settings is to go over the flash sync speed. You might be thinking, if it's that bright, why the hell am I using flash? We'll get to that in a moment. Now your options are compromise on your aperture, make it smaller and bring back some focus into your ugly background, buy a flash that can do High Speed Sync, or the method I have chosen, use an ND filter. Basically, sunglasses for your camera.
Now we can get into why we're using a flash when it's this bright.
In this photo I'm not using any flash. The Sun is bright as shit and her face is still dark. You can see in the upper left corner that my sky is already blown out. I could adjust my settings to make her face brighter but I'll probably start to lose detail in her hair and that sky is definitely done for. Now if we want detail in the sky we have to adjust our camera to make it darker, but our subject's face is already dark. In comes our flash!
Here is a photo with the same settings but I added a flash. We still have the nice hair light from the Sun and now there's some light on her face. If I had the sky in this photo, however, it would be way blown out. This article by Neil van Niekerk does a great job of explaining what I'm talking about.
In it he talks about how the ambient exposure and flash exposure are two separate things and that gives us the opportunity to do some cool stuff.
In this situation, to get detail in the sky I had to put the ND filter on to eat up enough light to keep my shutter speed down. Adding the the flash added light back on my subject and bang! We have a pretty cool exposure and that's all I was worried about on this shoot.
These photos have plenty of room for improvement, but the point of them was to learn and learn I did. Next time I try this I can get to where I want much faster which leaves more time to make them better. Maybe next time I'll be able to prevent houses growing out of her head and keep my softbox out of the frame.
If this isn't making sense, don't worry. Go read and watch as much as you can, go practice, and come back and read and watch everything again. I'm no expert, but I probably had a question you have right now and might be able to help. Leave me a comment! Next time is the big day!
Before we move on it's important to know how our camera takes pictures and what changing settings will do. They say if you want something done right you should do it yourself. Getting your camera into manual mode will give you that level of control instead of letting your camera guess and probably fail at what you want. Mark Wallace does a great job explaining the exposure triangle in the first video of this series on exposure, so make sure you watch that. In the meantime here's my gross over simplification.
There are three ways to make our pictures brighter and darker. ISO, shutter speed, and aperture. Adjusting each of them will have an additional effect on your photo other than just the picture's brightness.
ISO is our camera's overall sensitivity to light. The higher the number, the brighter your picture will be. The thing to keep in mind with ISO is noise. Some cameras can handle this better than others but essentially, the higher your ISO, the more noise you get. It's a lot like distortion on a stereo. If you crank it up too loud, even when nothing is playing, you'll hear a hum. Ideally you want to keep ISO as low as possible, but in our stereo example, if it's too low you won't be able to "hear" anything at all. Cameras are getting good at shooting with high ISO and editing in post can help too, don't be afraid to crank it up to get your shot. Of course, the better you do in camera, the less you'll have to fix later. Our boy Mark explains further here.
Aperture is a hole in your lens that can be adjusted to let more or less light in. The other thing this effects is depth of field. The smaller the number, the larger the hole and the less range of things that will be in focus. Depending on a few factors your depth of field could be so shallow that your subject's nose will be in focus but their eye won't. Mark explains better here.
Shutter speed is how long your camera lets light affect the exposure. The longer it's open the brighter the picture. The effect of shutter speed, for the most part, is blur. If your shutter is open long enough it will record anything that moves, even your hand movement. A fast shutter speed will freeze motion. Get it fast enough and you can stop a helicopter blade. When you bring a flash into the equation you have another thing to consider. Flash sync speed. Depending on your camera this could range quite a bit but most newer cameras are around 200th of a second. My t3i is 200th of a second. A good way to think of this is that your camera's shutter is starting to close while the flash is still on. That isn't exactly how it works but it's the easiest way to explain it without a bunch of technical diagrams of shutter mechanics. Mark talks about shutter speed here.
This is what happens when you go over a camera's sync speed
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| 1/400th sec |
Mark helps out on high speed sync here.
Lets say we want an extremely shallow depth of field. We want our subject in focus but everything behind her as blurry as we can get it because it's some ugly parking lot or something. So, we'll crank our aperture to the lowest number it can go which gives us a big hole and a lot of room for light to come through. There will be situations where even at your camera's lowest ISO it's still going to be too bright. We know from the exposure triangle to get shallow depth of field at these settings we're going to need to have a short shutter speed to limit the amount of light that comes in. It might be so bright that the only way to get a proper exposure based on these settings is to go over the flash sync speed. You might be thinking, if it's that bright, why the hell am I using flash? We'll get to that in a moment. Now your options are compromise on your aperture, make it smaller and bring back some focus into your ugly background, buy a flash that can do High Speed Sync, or the method I have chosen, use an ND filter. Basically, sunglasses for your camera.
Now we can get into why we're using a flash when it's this bright.
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| f/8 1/200 iso 100 |
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| f/8 1/200 iso 100 |
In it he talks about how the ambient exposure and flash exposure are two separate things and that gives us the opportunity to do some cool stuff.
In this situation, to get detail in the sky I had to put the ND filter on to eat up enough light to keep my shutter speed down. Adding the the flash added light back on my subject and bang! We have a pretty cool exposure and that's all I was worried about on this shoot.
These photos have plenty of room for improvement, but the point of them was to learn and learn I did. Next time I try this I can get to where I want much faster which leaves more time to make them better. Maybe next time I'll be able to prevent houses growing out of her head and keep my softbox out of the frame.
If this isn't making sense, don't worry. Go read and watch as much as you can, go practice, and come back and read and watch everything again. I'm no expert, but I probably had a question you have right now and might be able to help. Leave me a comment! Next time is the big day!
Thursday, May 28, 2015
Adventures in Photography: Lighting Setups
We have a light off camera and the ability to control the quality of light, so now what? Where do we put it? Lucky for us a lot of extremely smart and talented people have done a crap ton of work for us. While learning, I'm a huge proponent of copying people. When you learn an instrument you learn songs other people wrote. No reason we can't do the same thing for photography. Portraiture started way before the camera came along and the artists behind the brushes had the same things to worry about as people with cameras. Another advantage we have is electricity so we can make our own light almost whenever and wherever we want. There are a few traditional lighting setups for portraiture that I'll let someone who knows what they're talking about explain here. Using these setups you'll probably get a nice picture of someone. This lecture from B&H goes through a lot more looks you can get with one speedlight. He has some more equipment including a reflector but the point is you can do quite a lot with very little. So, read the articles, watch the videos and go try stuff!
I was able to steal an hour of my girlfriend's time recently to pose as my model. I spent half the time indoors and half outdoors. I'll talk about the outdoor stuff next time since that is a mildly overwhelming subject in itself. It was important for me to focus on one thing at a time. I have almost impossibly high standards for myself and if I try to do everything at once I'll fail at all of them and get discouraged. Not exactly the attitude I want to exude when I actually start taking pictures of someone on the cusp of one of the biggest transitions in their life. So I chose to focus on exposure. I ignored posing, backgrounds, composition, wardrobe, hair and everything else. At this point it's more than enough to try and figure out what camera settings to use since I'll be in full manual mode on my camera nearly always. Once I get comfortable with shutter speed, iso, aperture, and how they relate to one another, I'll be able to focus on all the other stuff that makes a good photo. So, I picked out a few lighting setups I wanted to try and went at it. Don't judge too harshly.
One quick note, I did get a softbox for some of this shoot. If you've been digging around on your own (I hope you aren't only listening to me) you might have heard a few reasons and situations why you might want one. I got one almost exclusively for this shot.
Rick Sammon had a video where he did this and I thought it was killer! This was shot in my living room and the camera settings gave me a completely black frame without flash. This way I know that the only light in my photo is the light I put there. It's a little under exposed in my opinion and I forget what power my flash was at ( probaly 1/16 or 1/8). I also don't have a black background so I was fighting light spilling on the wall behind her. Shooting in RAW will give you a bit more leeway when it comes to editing which I'll get to, but this is straight out of the camera, unedited.
Here is another photo with nearly identical settings and light position using the umbrella.
Umbrellas shoot light everywhere! It's all over the wall ten feet behind me. Sure a background would help out but then I need another two stands, a crossbar, and some black cloth or paper. The softbox kept the light where I wanted it.
This one they call clam shell lighting. It's used a lot in fashion photography and it looks awesome on women.
Pretty apparent I wasn't worried about backgrounds in this one. You can see in the window behind her the reflection of the umbrella which is about 2 feet in front and above her pointed down. You can see another reflection in the bottom of her eyes. That's the reflector. It's sitting in her lap angled up and resting on the light stand (I'll try and get photos of setups next time I shoot.) The umbrella and the reflector make a sort of "clam shell" shape and there's just enough room at the "hinge" of the clam to put my lens in.
Here's what it looks like without the reflector. Nothing else is different.
The reflector fills in the shadows under her chin, nose, and eyes giving a more even flattering light. Man, I like clam shell lighting.
In this photo, the flash is in the umbrella to help get a little light on the background. It's up and to camera left. I followed the "45 degree rule" here. Imagine that if you look down on the scene your subject is at the center of a clock and you are at the 6 o'clock position. The light is at about 7:30. The light is also about 45 degrees up. Using our clock example again, this time looking at the scene from the side, the subject is again at the center and you the photographer are at 9 o'clock this time. The light is pushed up to about the 10:30 position. All the experts say this is a good place to start and encourage adjusting to taste from there. I added the reflector at a 45 degree position on the camera's right side and used another light stand (yes more stuff) to hold it up propping it on her leg to get more light under her chin.
This next photo is the same setup as the above photo but I added another flash. Yup, bought another one. Remember, for the price of one Canon or Nikon flash you could get 5 of these Yongnuo flashes.
The additional flash is acting as a hair, or kicker light to separate her from the background. The flashes come with a tiny stand that has tripod threads in the bottom. I'm sure if you're into photography whatsoever you have a tripod. If we go back to our first, top down clock example, this light would be at about 1:30. It's bare bulb, or no umbrella or other modifier in front of it. I adjusted the power so it was brighter than my main light, but not so bright that her hair was blown out.
Pro tip: Don't tell you model to look at the light no matter how dim it is! I told her to look at the light which wasn't a bad picture but it resulted in a sneeze and her seeing spots. The sneeze is the culprit of the messier hair, but remember, we're focused on getting a good exposure and nothing more. Here's the eye damaging pic. If you're ever wondering what kind of light was used in a photo, look at the eyes. The reflections in them should give you a good hint as to where the lights are.
In the next post I'll take this show outside and get into all the fun stuff you need to consider when using a flash outdoors. That's right, camera settings!
I was able to steal an hour of my girlfriend's time recently to pose as my model. I spent half the time indoors and half outdoors. I'll talk about the outdoor stuff next time since that is a mildly overwhelming subject in itself. It was important for me to focus on one thing at a time. I have almost impossibly high standards for myself and if I try to do everything at once I'll fail at all of them and get discouraged. Not exactly the attitude I want to exude when I actually start taking pictures of someone on the cusp of one of the biggest transitions in their life. So I chose to focus on exposure. I ignored posing, backgrounds, composition, wardrobe, hair and everything else. At this point it's more than enough to try and figure out what camera settings to use since I'll be in full manual mode on my camera nearly always. Once I get comfortable with shutter speed, iso, aperture, and how they relate to one another, I'll be able to focus on all the other stuff that makes a good photo. So, I picked out a few lighting setups I wanted to try and went at it. Don't judge too harshly.
One quick note, I did get a softbox for some of this shoot. If you've been digging around on your own (I hope you aren't only listening to me) you might have heard a few reasons and situations why you might want one. I got one almost exclusively for this shot.
 |
| f/16 1/250 sec. iso 100 55mm |
Here is another photo with nearly identical settings and light position using the umbrella.
This one they call clam shell lighting. It's used a lot in fashion photography and it looks awesome on women.
Here's what it looks like without the reflector. Nothing else is different.
In this photo, the flash is in the umbrella to help get a little light on the background. It's up and to camera left. I followed the "45 degree rule" here. Imagine that if you look down on the scene your subject is at the center of a clock and you are at the 6 o'clock position. The light is at about 7:30. The light is also about 45 degrees up. Using our clock example again, this time looking at the scene from the side, the subject is again at the center and you the photographer are at 9 o'clock this time. The light is pushed up to about the 10:30 position. All the experts say this is a good place to start and encourage adjusting to taste from there. I added the reflector at a 45 degree position on the camera's right side and used another light stand (yes more stuff) to hold it up propping it on her leg to get more light under her chin.
This next photo is the same setup as the above photo but I added another flash. Yup, bought another one. Remember, for the price of one Canon or Nikon flash you could get 5 of these Yongnuo flashes.
The additional flash is acting as a hair, or kicker light to separate her from the background. The flashes come with a tiny stand that has tripod threads in the bottom. I'm sure if you're into photography whatsoever you have a tripod. If we go back to our first, top down clock example, this light would be at about 1:30. It's bare bulb, or no umbrella or other modifier in front of it. I adjusted the power so it was brighter than my main light, but not so bright that her hair was blown out.
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