Photography.ca » Photography lighting

135 — Photographers — Get Thee To a Museum

Marko Kulik — Fri, 26 Jun 2015 02:33:11 +0000

Photography podcast #135 discusses how going to museums to study painters and paintings can improve your photography. After all, both painting and photography are 2D media trying to represent a 3D world. When photographers study the compositional and lighting techniques used by painting masters, their own photographs often improve.

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Click the player at the end of this post to listen to (or download) this 15 minute podcast.

Caravaggio — The Conversion on the way to Damascus — 1601
Look how the scene and the subjects’ faces are lit, look at the gestures of the subjects and the overall composition. Photographers can learn a lot from the master painters that lived long ago.

When it comes to lighting portraits in photography, painters have been thinking about the lighting for their own subjects many hundreds of years before photography was invented. Photographers can learn so much about lighting by studying the great portrait painters.

Rembrandt — Self-Portrait — 1630 — Rembrandt is well known for his portrait lighting style. The triangle of light on the darker side of the face is one of Rembrandt’s signatures. Photographers love this lighting technique and it has become a basic portrait lighting style in photography.

Rembrandt — Jacob Blessing the Children of Joseph 1656 — Lovely lighting, great gestures and interesting compositions work well in photography as well as in painting.

When it comes to photographing mountains and other landscapes, photographers often zoom right into them as their first instinct and of course that’s a good thing to do for a shot or two, but then what? By studying the compositional techniques of landscape painters, we see that they often include lots of elements that compliment the main focal point in their images.

A.Y. Jackson — Winter Charlevoix County — 1932–33 - We can see that this painting has a mountain in the background. But it’s the way that Jackson ties in the foreground and midground with their visually interesting elements that help make this landscape painting interesting.

Links /resources mentioned in this podcast:
Outline of painting history
Caravaggio
Rembrandt
A. Y. Jackson
Group of Seven (artists)

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You can download this photography podcast directly by clicking the preceding link or listen to it almost immediately with the embedded player.

Thanks for listening and keep on shooting!

114 — 360 degree light painting — Interview with Patrick Rochon

Marko Kulik — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 16:36:11 +0000

Photography podcast #114 features an interview with light painter Patrick Rochon who discusses his new experimental 360 degree light painting technique. In a nutshell, Patrick light paints a model who stands in the middle of a ring as 24 DSLR cameras around the ring expose the scene at the same time. The frames are then strung together with software to give the illusion of circular movement. Patrick and I talk about his new work, his older work, and we talk about Patrick’s light painting process as well.

Scroll to the BOTTOM of this post to find the player to immediately listen to the audio podcast.

360 Degree light painting by Patrick Rochon

This is a Gif animation that Patrick created from one of the 360 degree light painting sessions

Light painting by Patrick Rochon — Animated Gif

This is the ‘ring’ where Patrick lit the models:

While I was at Patrick’s place recording this interview, I noticed a gallery of new light painted (non 360) photographs on his wall that were gorgeous. This image below was one that I really liked — Thx for sending it Patrick!

Light painting by Patrick Rochon ©Patrick Rochon

Links /resources mentioned in this podcast:

patrickrochon.com
24x360.com — Timecode Lab — Eric Paré
Podcast #82 — Light painting portraits
LPWA – Light Painting World Alliance
Light painting photography
Animated gif photography (AKA Cinemagraphs)
Aurora Crowley Light Painter
– Beginnings — New — is our regular forum assignment for January
– Light painting — light drawing is our level 2 forum assignment for January
Photo tours of Montreal

If you liked this podcast and want to review it on Itunes, this link gets you to the main page

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Please join the Photography.ca fan page on Facebook

If you are still lurking on our forum,
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Thanks to Photo Studios who posted a blog comment about our last podcast. Thanks as well to everyone that sent comments by email about our last podcast. Although ALL comments are appreciated, commenting directly in this blog is preferred. Thanks as well to all the new members of the bulletin board. Most of the links to actual the products are affiliate links that help support this site. Thanks in advance if you purchase through those links.

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You can download this photography podcast directly by clicking the preceding link or listen to it almost immediately with the embedded player below.

Thanks for listening and keep on shooting!

Essential and Advanced Filters for Creative and Outdoor Photography — E-book Review

Marko Kulik — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 22:05:55 +0000

A few months ago Darwin Wiggett and Samantha Crysanthou Published an e-book called Essential and Advanced Filters for Creative and Outdoor Photography. You may think that with digital photography the need for filters is over and you would be mistaken in thinking this.

Certain filters like the polarizing filter are essential and at the time of this writing, the effect of this filter (which stays on my lens 95% of the time that I shoot outdoors in the day) is best achieved with an actual filter on the lens. Although I have seen digital-effect polarizing filters that you apply when post-processing an image, they suck when compared to the real thing. Darwin and Samantha provide awesomely clear images and explanations as to why this filter is essential, how and when to use it creatively and when not to use it. This filter is so important that a good 20% of the book is devoted to it. This section alone is worth the 10 dollars that they are charging for the e-book.

Two other kinds of essential filters that Darwin and Samantha talk about a great deal are graduated neutral density filters and neutral density filters. The purpose of graduated neutral density filters is to reduce the contrast in a scene (like a clipped sky) because when a scene is too contrasty the camera can not record all the tones even though our eye may see them. The filters are normally made of glass or plastic and are usually shaded at one end and clear at the other end. Neutral density filters are solid coloured and are mainly used to make shutter speeds longer to achieve creative blurring effects. This section of the book also has awesome (filtered and non-filtered for comparison) images and crystal clear explanations on how to use these filters.

The final section of the book is dedicated to additional filters that can add pop to your images as well as talking about technical considerations like colour casts and noise reduction.

This e-book is fab and well worth the ten dollars. The only thing I might debate in this book is calling the neutral grad filters essential. I feel they are essential only in certain very important cases. They are essential if you want to spend less time in front of your computer post-processing your images, because your images will already have the contrast control built into the exposure. If you are already excellent at the HDR technique, (taking multiple frames of the identical image with different exposures and then blending them in software) then these filters are not essential because you can achieve a similar goal using HDR. That said, even if you know the HDR technique well, graduated neutral density filters are still useful (perhaps even essential) when the scene is contrasty and involves movement.

It may come as no surprise that I highly recommend this 65 page e-book. Darwin and Samantha are veteran photographers and teachers, write super-clearly and their pics really illustrate the creative effect these filters have. This is an easy read with an easy on the eyes design. It’s a great e-book to have with you on your smartphone or tablet for creative inspiration while in the field. It’s also a fab resource when you are thinking about which of these filters to buy.

This book can be purchased directly from Darwin and Sam’s site.

109 — Flash photography tips — Interview with Joe McNally

Marko Kulik — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 16:29:11 +0000

Photography podcast #109 features an Interview about flash photography with well known photographer Joe McNally. Joe has been shooting for decades for well known magazines life Life, Sports Illustrated and National Geographic. He was in town giving a seminar on the variety of lighting techniques you can achieve by using just one or two flashes. After the seminar I sat down with Joe for this quick interview to talk about flash tips. In this podcast we talk about diffusing your flash, triggering your flash and Joe talks about personal projects.

Links /resources mentioned in this podcast:

Joe McNally’s blog — Joe McNally’s Dance Portfolio
– Cold Beverages is our regular forum assignment for July
– Opposites is our level 2 forum assignment for July

If you liked this podcast and want to review it on Itunes, this link gets you to the main page

If you are interested in writing for our blog please contact me photography.ca ( A T ) G m ail Dot co m (using standard email formatting)

Please join the Photography.ca fan page on Facebook

If you are still lurking on our forum,
feel free to join our friendly Photography forum

Thanks to Lucille B and Julian who posted blog comments about our last podcast. Thanks as always to everyone that sent comments by email about our last podcast. Although ALL comments are appreciated, commenting directly in this blog is preferred. Thanks as well to all the new members of the bulletin board. Most of the links to actual the products are affiliate links that help support this site. Thanks in advance if you purchase through those links.

Thanks for listening and keep on shooting!

106 — White balance and why snow is blue

Marko Kulik — Thu, 03 May 2012 20:01:11 +0000

Photography podcast #106 discusses the often confusing topic of white balance and why sometimes the camera screws up our images like giving us blue snow. Correcting this is really easy and it just requires a bit of understanding of what is going on in the background. In a very tight oversimplified nutshell, when we see something that has colour, it has that colour due to the colour temperature of the light source illuminating it.

Light a candle in a dark room and look at a white baseball; it will look orange. The same thing happens with white snow that looks bluish under cloudy overcast conditions because cloudy light is bluish. Our eyes might not notice the blue because our brain compensates for the cast because it “knows” that snow is white, but the camera often gets it wrong. In this podcast we talk about white balance, automatic white balance, the white balance presets that your camera comes with and setting a custom white balance. If you’ve ever wanted to improve the colour accuracy of your images, this photo podcast offers up some fast tips.

Left image — When we see an object that has colour, it has that colour due to the color temperature of the light source illuminating it. This is why if we take a white baseball into a room lit only by a candle, the baseball looks orange. The same thing happens when we take a picture of white snow on a cloudy overcast day and it looks blue. Right image — White light (the kind we see at noon on a sunny cloudless day) is actually made up of equal parts of Red, Blue and Green light. These are the primary colours in photography.

Left Image — The camera’s AWB (automatic white balance) didn’t render this scene properly and the snow looks bluish because the day was cloudy and cloudy light is bluish. Right Image — I corrected this in post processing and the snow looks more natural to the eye.

: If your image has a colour cast, to neutralize it, you add the OPPOSITE colour of the cast.

This image was lit with 2 light sources; the light coming from the stove AND overcast light coming in through the windows. AWB does a very good job here but is a hint too warm. The cloudy preset adds yellow to compensate for cloudy light which is blue. In this case it reproduces too warm. The Incandescent preset adds blue to compensate for incandescent light which is warm. Here it added way too much blue. The custom setting, where you take a quick reading from a grey card or use a tool like an Expodisc was the most accurate and best reproduced the scene.

Links /resources mentioned in this podcast:

Spinrite - To recover crashed hard drives
Allan Levene is running for congress!
Grey cards at B&H — Expodisc at B&H — Color meters at B&H
Photography tours in Montreal — One to one photography instruction by yours truly

- Wide open aperture is our regular forum assignment for May
– Texture is our level 2 forum assignment for May

If you liked this podcast and want to review it on Itunes, this link gets you to the main page

If you are interested in writing for our blog please contact me photography.ca ( A T ) G m ail Dot co m (using standard email formatting)

Please join the Photography.ca fan page on Facebook

If you are still lurking on our forum,
feel free to join our friendly Photography forum

Thanks to Rob vE, Yisehaq and Robertv in Edinburgh who posted blog comments about our last podcast. Thanks as always to everyone that sent comments by email about our last podcast. Although ALL comments are appreciated, commenting directly in this blog is preferred. Thanks as well to all the new members of the bulletin board. Most of the links to actual the products are affiliate links that help support this site. Thanks in advance if you purchase through those links.

Thanks for listening and keep on shooting!

105 — Four tips to improve your bounced flash photography

Marko Kulik — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 20:48:19 +0000

Photography podcast #105 offers up tips on how to improve your bounced flash photography. Bouncing your flash off of walls and ceilings is easy and really softens the light which is often desirable especially in portraits. You can also achieve a much more interesting lighting pattern versus direct on-camera flash. You can often achieve great results with minimal effort and minimal help; I often use bounced flash when I am shooting alone and need a quick lighting setup.

The images below of my wife Carmy were shot in about 5 minutes against a slightly green wall in my livingroom. The tones in the face and background wall are similar but not identical in all images and I deliberately chose not to match them to see the subtle differences. These differences are due to the different ways that the light bounced around the room. There were windows in the room but the day was cloudy and no direct light was shining through the windows. Images are unretouched.

The image on the left shows direct flash. Note the harsh shadow on the wall and the relatively even lighting on the face. The shot on the right, bounced the flash off the ceiling. The shadow is still on the wall but it is softer. The lighting pattern on the face is less even but more interesting to the eye.

The image on the left used flash that was bounced off of the wall about 12 feet behind me. The image on the right used flash that was bounced off the side wall about 6 feet from me. Note the absence of any shadow on the back wall compared to the left image in the first set. When you try this for yourself make note of how far the bounced walls are from your flash. The farther the walls are from the flash, the harder the flash has to work and you may need to increase the flash’s output.

Links /resources mentioned in this podcast:
Spinrite - To recover crashed hard drives
Photo podcast #4 — Fill flash
Photo podcast #47 — Flash sync speeds
Photo podcast #71 Portable flash

- Bright Colour is our regular forum assignment for March
– Silhouettes is our level 2 forum assignment for March

If you liked this podcast and want to review it on Itunes, this link gets you to the main page

If you are interested in writing for our blog please contact me photography.ca ( A T ) G m ail Dot co m (using standard email formatting)

Please join the Photography.ca fan page on Facebook

If you are still lurking on our forum,
feel free to join our friendly Photography forum

Thanks to Neil Speers, Stephen Kennedy, Ken Wolter, Jonathan Ramsdell and Allan Levene who posted blog comments about our last podcast. Thanks as always to everyone that sent comments by email about our last podcast. Although ALL comments are appreciated, commenting directly in this blog is preferred. Thanks as well to all the new members of the bulletin board. Most of the links to actual the products are affiliate links that help support this site. Thanks in advance if you purchase through those links.

Thanks for listening and keep on shooting!