Wedding Photographer Steve Wilson - Tampa, FL

Hope everyone had a great long weekend.  Took the kids fishing with some friends this weekend and I had the camera along as always.  You always have to be prepared to get really great reactions.  In this instance, Norah’s reaction to her first slimy fish!

Norah's first fish

The photography tips section of my blog exists to answer questions I get from customers and friends.  Rather than answer in individual emails, I have started to publish the answers here to “share the love”.  I usually cover the more basic concepts of photography and photo editing, but there are a lot of good resources on the web for more advanced photography subjects.

Adorama has a lot of great advanced tips in their “100 Photography Tips in 100 Days Series“.  Part 3 started this week, so check back each day for more advanced tips.  This week’s theme is “Darkroom Special Effects in Photoshop Elements”.  So far they are talking about some pretty cool stuff and providing great step-by-step directions.  Elements is the cheaper product in the Photoshop line and comes with a lot of newer printers and cameras, so these tips are not limited to the people that spent the big money for Photoshop.  Check them out and have fun!

Liv-Enlarge

One of my photography instructors used to say, “if your photo sucks, blow it up bigger and put it in a nice frame”. That’s probably why they serve wine at most art shows…

Have you ordered enlargements and they looked terrible? Didn’t you just want to slap the 18 year old punk behind the counter at Walget when he mumbled “pixelation” and you had no idea what he called you? Let’s take a look at why this happens and better yet, how you can prevent it the next time…

What the heck is a pixel?
Here is a little useless knowledge for you. The word “pixel” somehow came from “picture element”, so hold onto that one for your next trivial pursuit jam…Anyways, to create an image, film cameras exposed frames of (duh) film to light. Digital cameras replaced the film medium with a sensor that records light in the same way, but collects that information into tiny blocks called pixels. Megapixel (MP) is the unit of measure to express how much of that data (how many blocks or pixels) can be recorded by a camera’s sensor. So a 6 megapixel camera’s highest quality image measures 3000 x 2000 pixels (actually, it’s 3008 x 2000, the dimensions are rounded). Higher megapixel cameras produce images that contain more blocks of information (pixels) in their image than those from a lower megapixel camera…..

What does this have to do with enlargements?
Plain and simple, the higher the number of pixels in an image, the smaller each pixel will be in that image since you are cramming more data into the same size image! When you blow up an image, you are stretching the size of each pixel. The smaller each pixel is to begin with, the more you can blow up or stretch that image before you start to see the pixels (the dreaded pixelation!).

So does that mean my camera sucks?
Maybe, but don’t throw it against the wall just yet . You see, all digital cameras have settings that affect the size of the actual image recorded. So you may not even be using all of your megapixels! Lower quality /size settings allow you to fit more images on each memory card. Just remember though, once you take the picture you can’t add more data. So quit being cheap, buy a bigger or additional memory card and use the highest quality settings for your camera!

Where do I find this quality setting?
In your user’s manual! Sort of kidding. It’s impossible to cover every camera here, so you should keep your manual handy. The setting you are looking for will be called quality, or size and will be expressed in pixels (3702 x 2304 for example). As an example, let’s look at the settings on a Canon SD750, which is a 7MP camera. For this particular model, the size settings can be found under Function Menu/Compression/Recording Pixels:

• Large (3072 x 2304 pixels) = full 7MP
• Medium 1 (2592 x 1944 pixels) = down to 5MP
• Medium 2 (2048 x 1536 pixels) = should have saved some money and bought a 3MP camera
• Medium 3 (1600 x 1200 pixels!) = 2MP??? Just use your camera phone!
• Small (640 x 480 pixels!!) = seriously? Why did you even buy a digital camera???

As you can see, you spent a lot of money for a 7MP camera in this case, but you may only be using a fraction of those pixels!

Side note…we are NOT talking about the JPEG settings for compression yet, we will talk about those in another class, but for now set that to the highest quality as well.

What the crop?

Here’s a term you never thought you would need to understand, “aspect ratio”. What the heck is aspect ratio? It’s the reason your kid’s heads were chopped off when you got your prints back. Today I’ll show you how to deal with this problem without any additional software.

Quick Explanation…

Aspect ratio is basically the relationship of an image’s width to height. The most common aspect ratio produced by today’s digital cameras is the same aspect ratio of a 4 x 6 print, an aspect ratio of 3:2. This means that the only sizes of prints you can print without losing portions of the image are of that aspect ratio, 8 x 12 for instance. Most of the common enlargement sizes are of a different aspect ratio, or proportion, so you will have to sacrifice parts of the image. So for an 8 x 10, you will need to crop out 2 inches in the photo. The key is to make that decision yourself, so your printer won’t cut off limbs…

Well, Help Me Fix It…

So the bad news is that you have to give up some of your photo. The good news is that you can do this without any software. All you REALLY need to know is that the most important page on any photo ordering website is the “Preview/Crop” page that is usually presented right before you complete your order. Obviously, you can do this with desktop photo editing software, but who wants to crop and save images of each size when you can do it in one place right before ordering? Here is a clip of how to do this on Costco’s photo site, which is the same as Snapfish. The option is available on the last page before ordering as a link right under your photo called “preview/crop”.

Click To Play

It is important that you choose “apply crop” before leaving the Preview/Crop page. Note that you can also resize the crop boundaries by clicking and dragging the corners.

Preparing for the Crop When You Take a Photo….

So now that you know you are going to have to give up some image, make sure you leave some room when you are framing your next photo. When you crop an image, you are also “zooming in” on the image. This means you can take more of the picture and eliminate unwanted edges of the photo later on when ordering your prints. So bottom line is “Zoom out when in doubt!” It’s cheesy, but I bet you will remember it next time…

Here are some great guidelines on what not to wear to a wedding.  You know who you are, no need to admit it out loud, let’s just forget about the past and fix it in the future!

Here’s how you get away with inappropriate attire at a wedding.  Say you are, I don’t know, a Minister that is officiating a wedding for two die-hard Gator fans.  Your first instinct is to shout “GO DAWGS!” right before “you may now kiss the bride”, but instead you contain yourself until the reception.  Once everyone relaxes, you can go ahead and let your true feelings out.  Here’s said Minister from one of our weddings this year showing how it’s done with style:

Go Dawgs!

Anyone who knows me knows I am a technology geek.  I love (and need) to keep up with trends in technology.  If I won the lottery, I’d probably do something really stupid like arrange a shopping spree at Apple and Best Buy…

But I digress…Lenovo threw down the guantlet this month on laptop computing for photography.  They announced the release on this bad boy.  In the past, laptops just didn’t cut it for SERIOUS photo editing.  Their display colors weren’t accurate enough, there wasn’t enough power, etc.  As a result, most people stuck with desktop machines for real photo editing and used laptops to show client slide shows, answer email, etc.  This new Lenovo has a built-in color management system (which you will have to calibrate a lot, since laptops get moved around, but that’s another story…), a built-in graphics tablet (seriously cool) and enough horsepower to edit every photo you ever took of your pet with a hat on at once.

I’m not saying I am going to go out and buy this thing, it starts at $3000 for one thing, I just think it’s an interesting play by Lenovo to target such a niche that has a loyal following of Apple folks on the laptop side.  Gaming and photography are two hobbies that have arguably powered the desktop market for the last few years.  Maybe one day we will run out of excuses to stay glued to our desks.  I can see myself now, sitting on the boat out in the Bay editing your wedding photos….

You never know when a good photo opportunity is going to present itself.  If I can choose one lens to carry with me at all times, it would be my 12 - 24mm.  The unique perspective this lens gives me allows me to stretch my creativity.  Here’s a photo of an old truck sitting in a marina in Virginia.  When I told me father to pull the rental car over, they thought I was nuts.  Ah, the misunderstood artist….

"Tow Mater"...named by my son...

One of those “looks” that is just hard to achieve with a point and shoot camera is depth of field. That “look” we are referring to is what you see in most professional portraits, where the person is in focus and everything else is blurry. That’s not magic or an expensive camera, that’s depth of field. Depth of field is the “depth” of focus in an image. Here, let’s just look at some examples, both taken from the exact same spot on a tripod:

Real shallow (f1.8):

Not so shallow (f8):

The first photo was taken at f1.8 and the depth of field is very shallow, with only a few centimeters in focus. The second photo was taken at f8 and much of the scene is in focus (and cluttered!).

How to control depth of field with Aperture Priority.

Depth of field comes in handy to control clutter in a photo. If we just wanted a picture of a flower, the first photo is a lot more appealing since the shallow depth of field blurs out the rest of the photo. So as you can see, one of the factors that controls depth of field is the aperture. The larger the aperture (smaller the f#), the shallower the depth of field.

The easiest way to control the aperture is to use one of my favorite shooting modes, aperture priority. Aperture priority allows you to select your aperture and the camera will decide on the right shutter speed to produce the right exposure. To set your camera to aperture mode, rotate the shooting mode dial to “A“. Now use the scroll dial (usually right in front of the shutter button) to select your smallest f number and shoot like normal.

So the next time you want to take a portrait, use the smallest aperture you can to remove the clutter and “focus” on your subject. Don’t forget to set your metering to spot metering or center-weighted metering if you have a bright background…

My buddy Cory and his wife Daydre stopped by the other day.  Their son Brody is starting to sit up now and he’s a happy and cute little fella.  We did a few quick photos in the yard and my son had a good time making him laugh. Backgrounds, outfits, lighting, none of that is as important as catching a smile like this!

Brody Lanier