Photography Tutorial: Light 101

Natural Light

A great way to improve your photography is to learn how to harness the power of the most important and powerful (yet cost effective) light source available to us - the sun. The conditions natural light provides varies with where you are, the weather, and the time of day. Once you can observe which types of light create which types of moods and atmospheres, you can begin to plan when and where you take your photos in order create a more meaningful photograph.

Hard Light:

Hard light comes from direct sun on a clear day. This light is strong and direct and casts deep shadows with hard edges. Typically this isn't a good time to be shooting outdoor portraits, as hard light can emphasize imperfections and make for an unflattering head shot. Mid day light is ideal for shooting architecture and bringing out colours. You may have heard of the "golden hour": this is hard light at the beginning of the day shortly after the sun has risen, or the end just before it sets. While the light is still hard, it is significantly softer than at mid day and comes at your subject from a lower angle, bringing out form and texture. 

Soft Light:

As you may have guessed, this type of light arises from the opposite situation: light from a cloudy day, or in the shade. This gives shadows a soft edge and provides very little contrast. Use an overcast day for shooting portraits or nature still lifes (such as leaves or flowers). Just keep in mind that if you include the sky in your composition, it will most likely turn out a bright white - something to avoid if that isn't the look you're going for.

Dramatic Light:

The opportunity to make use of natural dramatic light is much more rare than hard or soft, so be sure to take advantage of it. Dramatic weather such as thunderstorms create dramatic light. Some things to look out for are right before the storm, or afterwards when the sun breaks through the clouds. Dramatic lighting makes great landscape and architecture photos. Just keep in mind: if you're shooting before the storm, make sure you give yourself time to get your equipment somewhere dry to avoid the unthinkable.

Sunrise and Sunset: 

The nature of a sunrise or sunset will depend on the weather: it could be hard, soft, or dramatic. This differs from the golden hour since the sun has already risen or hasn't yet set in those cases. Sunrises and sets usually feature the sun still visible in the sky. The light is full of colour to give photos an almost painted look. Pretty much anything looks good at sunrise or sunset, so it's worth taking the time to get up early or staying out to catch the sunset to get a guaranteed shot. You'll see this a lot in travel photography. A photographer can't ride on sunrise and sunset photos for an entire portfolio, but practicing a few never hurt anyone.

Naturally Lit Interiors:

LIght from the sun influences photos taken indoors as well, streaming in through doors and windows. Even when you don't have your camera with you, try to pay attention to where light comes from indoors. Typically the weather will have less impact as the light filtering in is usually more on the hard side, but this will depend on the size of the windows available. This can create a very dramatic and moody effect, especially in old or abandoned buildings. Some photographers use HDR (tutorial at link) to show all detail in a naturally lit interior. Try experimenting with both HDR and shadowy corners and see what you prefer.

The beginning and the end of the day are textbook examples of "good" natural light, but there's no reason to limit yourself. Be creative and try some portraits on a sunny afternoon to learn why they don't work, or think of a scenerio where they could work. The great thing about natural light is that it allows you to constantly improve your photography by observing the light around you and thinking about what subject would go well with it and what story that photograph would tell.

Photography Tutorial: Sharpening

Photography Tutorial: Sharpening

What is Sharpening

The unfortunate truth about all digital recording/capturing technologies is that they convert analog signals into samples of the original. The frequency of how often the signal is sampled determines how well the original analog signal will be when digitally reproduced. While modern devices have high sampling rates of 12 bits for each of the RGB (red, green, blue) spectrum colors, this number is actually quite coarse, or crude compared to reality. 

The real world is comprised of infinite numbers of colours and shades, to observe this one has to only look around them, at the sky, forest, water. You will see enumerable shades and tints of the same color; so while capturing a large enough portion of this information to create a (in our eyes) high resolution photograph, the digital recreation pails in comparison to the real thing. 

This creates the problem of an inherent fuzziness or noise in any digital recording or abstraction, due to it being only a fragment of information of the original. So in order to combat this, we employ a technique called sharpening. This enhances the photograph and makes it look "sharp", "in focus", and gives a higher clarity to the photograph. This is also one of the major differences between a professional photographer's photographs and a amateur or beginner's.

So with that lets show you how to sharpen like a pro!

How to Sharpen

While there are enumerable ways to sharpen your photos, and different schools of thought for each one,  a good way to sharpen that works for many different photograph types, is the High Pass filter. The High Pass Filter works by sharpening edges only, leaving non-edges unsharpened. This is the goal of sharpening and what all the various other sharpening filters aim to help you do.

Now on to it!

Step 1: Open Photoshop

Step 2: Open your image

Step 3: Duplicate the original or background layer

Duplicate the original layer (also known as the Background layer in photoshop)

To duplicate the background layer, select it from the layers panel and press the keys CTRL & J at the same time, if you are on a mac press Command & J. This will create a duplicate of the layer. 

Another option is to right click on the background layer and select "Duplicate Layer"

Step 4: Change the blending mode of the new layer to Overlay

The High Pass filter, when ran, turns all non-edge surfaces into a neutral grey colour, this may seem off-putting at first however we made a duplicate layer for this very reason. Go back to the layers panel and where you see a drop-down menu with "Normal" in it. Change this to "Overlay". Switching the panel to "Overlay" causes photoshop to only apply the non-neutral grey areas from the selected layer to the layer below. This means we will only see the edges of our original photograph sharpened.

One side effect right now is that your photograph will appear to have a large amount of contrast, this is to be expected and will only be temporary.

Step 5: Apply the High Pass filter

Now that you've accomplished the previous steps, go to the "Filter" menu at the top of the screen and choose "Other" and then "High Pass".

The High Pass filter is fairly simple to use, there is only one slider to increase or decrease the amount of the filter applied. Checking the "Preview" option on the side will show you your changes on your photo as your move the slider. 

To sharpen with the High Pass filter, start with a low radius value around 1-2 pixels and drag the filter to the right or to the left. If you begin to see halos or glowing around the edges, you have sharpened too much, decrease the radius slider. We used <--> as our value, yours will differ, play with it to find what works for you. How much you sharpen will very from photo to photo, so do not expect your values to always be the same. 

(Optional) Step 6: Fine tune the sharpening.

You can fine tune your sharpening even more so by changing the blending modes, changing the blend to Hard Light or to Soft Light will adjust the intensity of the sharpened layer. Hard Light will increase the sharpening and Soft Light will decrease it. This is at your discretion, try both to see the effects.

So thats it folks! We hope you enjoyed this tutorial and found it helpful. We look forward to starting on next weeks tutorial and creating something useful as always.

Happy Shooting!

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Creating the Lomography look

Creating the Lomography look 

aka. How to create your own Instagram photos

In recent years with the advent of consumer smartphones, certain apps on the app market has made it possible to take photos that look like they were taken in a Lomographic camera. These photographs usually feature odd and/or unique colouring, strong vignettes, light streaks, blur and high contrast. These apps and modern lomographic film cameras take their cues from a photographic movement that began in the 1990's when the creators where inspired by cheap russian toy cameras, such as the LOMO LC-A. 

This tutorial was created to let you create the lomographic look in a more controlled environment than Instagram or a cheap camera and with your digital camera. So dig up or take a few photos you'd like to experiment with and lets begin!

Below is a photo of James Gray, musician extraordinaire, at a wedding he played. This will be the subject for Shutter Science's tutorial.

Step 1: Open your image

Step 2: Create your selection

Select the Lasso tool and then change the feather to 70-90. Then draw a loose circle around the subject of your photo.

Step 3: Invert the selection

Now that you've slected the subject, we need to invert that selection and select everything but your selection

In the menu bar go to Select and then to Inverse, which will then invert our selections.

Step 4: Create the vignette shadow

With your selection inverted, create a levels adjustment level and tone down the mid tones and highlights of the selected rim of the subject, this will create the illusion of a vignette. After you have done this flatten your image.

Step 4: Creating the right colours

Lomographic photographs have very rich and unique colour tones, the next stop is to replicate that in our photo.

Add a curves adjustment layer now, and individually select the colour curves to play with them. You will see we went with an 'S' curve for ours, experiment to find what works best for you.

Step 4: Blurring

Lomographic cameras are notorious for having lens blur. The fourth and final stage in our tutorial will be replicating this soft focus look in our image. Duplicate your background layer and create a clipping mask on this layer.

Then select the brush tool and set it to be black. While having the clipping mask layer selected.

Create a brush the size of your subject by manually increasing brush size or pressing the '[' and ']' keys respectively to lower and raise the size. Click once to make a black spot the size of your focal area around your subject, you will not directly notice this, look in the layers panel to see the silhouette of the brushes work.

Next, after selecting the duplicated image layer, go to filter and then to gaussian blur to add your blur, the filter is quite powerful so experiment to find the right strength. After that your done! Congratulations!

Completed! 

Here's our finished photograph! Ready for sharing!

Thanks to our model James, make sure to check out his music at: 

http://www.facebook.com/jamesgraymusic1990

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeRWfnK5TV41F0utOJXHVLw

http://music.cbc.ca/#/artists/James-Gray

Back to the Basics Part III: ISO

Back to the Basics Part III: ISO

What is ISO?

ISO in the photographic world applies to both digital and film photography. For film cameras and photographers, film refers to the sensitivity of the chosen film medium when exposed to light. It is measured in numbers in a stepped sequence, like this: 100, 200, 400, 800. This was also an indication of how much grain would be in an image, the higher the sensitivity, the higher the film grain. When you use a lower ISO film the film grain becomes much finer.

In the digital world ISO applies again to sensitivity, but this time to the sensitivity of the imaging sensor. The same principles for choosing film ISO, applies to the digital world. A change to the ISO system exist though; the grain in your images is known noise.

How to use ISO

If the scene or you wish to photograph is well lit then it is a good rule of thumb to try to shoot as low an ISO as possible, on most modern digital cameras this will be 100, 50 on some higher end models. If it is dark and you do not have a tripod or want a fast shutter speed, a higher ISO speed can be used to capture more information in the chosen shutter speed. This however comes at a price, that prices is your image will have more grain (film) or noise (digital). This will soften your photographs and add seemingly random coloured pixels to your image. I have illustrated this below with two different pictures.
The bus drivers seat, was taken at a high ISO, 640 to be exact, you can see in the shadows the noise. Click on the image to expand.

Now for companion's sake look at this photo of a downtown street. It was taken at 100 ISO, if you click and expand you can see the low appearance of noise.

Back to the Basics Part II: White Balance

Back to the Basics Part II: White Balance

How it works

White balance is a setting contained within your photographs that determines the adjustment of colours within a photograph needed to match the colour of light shown by the light source. The object of this matching process is so that white objects appear white under varying lighting conditions. While most light sources appear white to the naked eye, the truth is there is a wide range of colours cast by traditional light sources. For example, light from the sun is a very cold blue and a traditional tungsten light bulb gives a very warm orange to red colour. The imaging sensor in modern digital cameras reproduce the colours cast by these lights exactly, and without processing and white balancing, the colours in the photograph would seem to change from light source to light source. Normally auto white-balance would correct any issues, however it is not perfect and for greater control and artistic leverage, the manual function for white balance can be used to derive very different results. These differences are illustrated in the photos below.

 

In this photo you can see that it has a blue colour cast over the photograph, while the background is a orange/ red. this is because there is three different light sources in the photograph, each with its own band of light.

In this corrected version, you can see we've adjusted for the blue in the photograph, however the background is still very orange due to it being a separate colour cast to balance for. It is recommended that you try and minimize the number of differing light sources as it becomes a nightmare to edit more than one at a time.

Back to the Basics Part I: Exposure

Back to the Basics Part I Exposure

Hey! Shutter Science has been writing a Camera Basics tutorial series which will start this week! We will cover the topic of exposure and how it relates to modern digital cameras. Alot of cameras come with auto functions that take care of exposure for you, while it works it does not provide you with the highest quality pictures. Understanding how exposure and how to manually control it, will provide you with a new skill set to bring to the table when you are shooting.

What you will need:

• A DSLR or point-and-shoot digital camera with Manual function.
• Thats it this time!

How it works

When you use your camera to take a photograph, you are exposing a digital imaging sensor to light. Before the light hits the center, there are two ways of controlling how much light is picked up by the sensor. These controls are called the Aperture and the Shutter. The latter of which this blog is named for. In order to manipulate these controls you must have a camera with manual mode.

Aperture

The aperture in your camera is a mechanical opening that changes in size to admit more or less light into the lens/camera body. The sizes it can open and shrink to are setup in measured increments and are known as F-Stops. The numbers step up from F1.4 to F5.6, F8, and F11. As the F-stops number increase in value, the smaller the opening of the aperture, and consequently the less light allowed into the camera. It is important to note that with each increase in F-stops means half as much light will be let in.

Shutter 

The shutter is a mechanical blind for the imaging sensor. It opens and closes at an again incremented and predetermined speed allowing only light to reach the sensor for so long. Shutter speeds are measured by fractions of a second, 50 means 1/50 or one fiftieth of a second, and 125 means 1/125. There are also speeds longer than a second or less, which we will touch on later.

How long you leave the shutter open for can vary depending on the situation or the scene and how bright it is. A sunny day may require a shutter speed of 1/200 and an aperture of F8, while a overcast, or cloudy day could be 1/60 with a F-stop of F4

Leaving your shutter open for different lengths of time when properly exposed by balancing out the apertures setting (ie if it is really slow such as if you are shooting a long exposure), can produce different effects in your photographs, especially where motion is concerned. A few photographs will follow to detail this.

Fast shutter speeds will freeze motion in a very clear way as opposed to the blurred effect that a long exposure creates. As you can see in this photo the high shutter speed freezes the water cascading off the rocks into individual rivulets of water. It is worth noting that any shutter speeds under 1/60 or even 1/80 for that matter are too slow to be taken while holding your camera, this will add a type of motion blur called shake to your photo. Camera shake comes from your body's inability to hold the camera perfectly still for that time period, this is okay though, thats why we have tripods.

Slow shutter speeds capture motion very differently, and any object or scene in motion on a long exposure will leave trails of motion blur as the objects travel across the scene. As you can see in the photo above, the water is smoothed out in this scene as it runs off the rocks and takes on a gassy smokey look.