I’ve posted about this before, but there is something so romantic about being able to do professional-looking product photography right in your kitchen and sharing the images with the Internet at large and watching them fumble all over themselves to figure out which studio you hired.

This is essentially the culmination of the progressively tumbling costs of photography equipment and exploding mindshare of innovators on the Internet. There are now low-cost solutions to problems that were insurmountable to the layman until only a few years ago and we have not only the actual photographic technology to thank for that, but also sites like handmade spark, who provide marketing advice to Etsy sellers.

I won’t delve too deeply into what Etsy is for anyone who may not know because it’s a bit beyond the reach of my topic here, but it is a marketplace of sorts, and thus it benefits greatly from well-executed product photography.

In any case, handmade spark posted an article about how to set up a really simple aluminum foil reflector setup that uses natural light to illuminate your (small) product subject and when I saw it I immediately thought (I’m really not kidding), This is exactly the kind of stuff my SSP audience would love to see.

This is miles beyond the whole Strobist crowd with their SB800s and their watt-seconds and their multiple white balances. There is a time and a place for off-camera flash, but check this out… We are lighting a product on our kitchen tables with aluminum foil-wrapped cardboard and we are getting sweet results.

Alright, I feel as though I’ve gushed about this enough. Read it for yourself: Studio Quality Product Photography with a $12 Set Up

This is a compilation of images made throughout an entire day (more than a day, actually), including the full path of the sun in 15-minute steps and one magnificent 11-hour star trail opposite the Temple of Poseidon (Chris lives and photographs in Athens, Greece).

Now, peel your eyes off of this beauty for a second and keep reading. Not only did Chris sit out in the winter cold for 30 hours to capture all of these images, he also spent another 12 hours compiling it all together using a combination of Panotools (PTGui actually) and Photoshop, and then, as though this wasn’t enough, he explained it step-by-step on his forum!

Take one more good look at that fabulous panorama up there and then head over to the Greek Sky forum and learn how it was done.

Edit: Photojojo reported on this image as well!

camera dial by Lee Reynolds

Being an excellent photographer is 50% vision and 50% technical prowess. Seeing the art all around you is only useful for the photographer who can capture it, and perfectly executing that capture means wrangling the piece of hardware you love so much, the camera.

These days, most photographers are shooting digital. Digital photography is freeing in a lot of ways, but it is also more complicated. Camera manufacturers have sought to close the gap between the pro and the semi-pro by providing all of these different shooting modes, and even though I still believe you only need three, it’s not unusual to see mode dials with 11 or 12 settings on them! You don’t need all those settings to get full control! Haje Jan Kamps helps me explain after the break.

I’ve written about this before in Be a Control Freak, but the subject came up again today when I saw Haje Jan Kamps’ really cool article, Translating the mode wheel on pixiq. My article explains in some amount of gory detail what each mode does, Haje takes it a step further with example images and a plea to leave those silly program modes behind.

Haje says:

This little dial is called your mode wheel, and it’s your mortal enemy, the destroyer of creativity, and the root of all evil in the world including, but not limited to, wars, swine flu, and stepping in chewing gum with a new pair of shoes.

Definitely hop over to pixiq and read Haje’s article, check out my previous article if you haven’t read it before, and if you are hankering for even more information…

Learn Tips and Tricks for Real-Life Shooting

These three books are among the most straightforward guides to the real-life application of camera settings in a broad variety of situations that I’ve come across. They’re written by Scott Kelby, the publisher and editor of Photoshop User and Layers magazines, president and co-founder of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals, and founder of the eponymous training website (kelbytraining.com).

He’s written over 40 books. I haven’t read them all, but I’ve read these, and they’re awesome. They’re short, not too expensive, presented in plain language, and useful to photographers at nearly any skill level. The three books don’t progress in skill level or detail, they are simply three chapters of the same overall plot, so you can snag the one with the prettiest cover, flip a coin, or just buy all three.

Here are the three individual books, they’re each about 25 bucks or less, I think the second volume is the cheapest:

• The Digital Photography Book, Vol. 1
• The Digital Photography Book, Vol. 2
• The Digital Photography Book, Vol. 3

Or get them all together in this B&H kit. I think you save about $1.50, so I guess the kit is offered for convenience, but hey, convenience has gotta be worth something, right?

• The Digital Photography Book, Vols. 1-3 B&H Kit

They’re really swell books, and I don’t usually jump on the bandwagon when it comes to these sort of corporate “training mill” publishers but Scott knows what he’s talking about and presents it in a very clear way so I’d be doing you all a disservice not to recommend them to you.

Moreover, if you click through these links here, you get the same books for the same prices you would pay if you went straight to B&H’s website yourself, but I also get a tiny little commission that helps me keep this site online, so if you are even remotely thinking about picking up a book or two, please use these links and help me out.

Remember when I told you about that crazy remote-controlled robot carting a DSLR that these two British brothers would drive around Africa, taking up-close-and-personal photos of wild animals? It was called the BeetleCam, and it was the brainchild of William and Matthew Burrard-Lucas, two swiftly burgeoning wildlife photographers from the UK.

Well, they’re at it again, only this time they’re not using a remote-controlled dune buggy and they’re not photographing lions or elephants. They’re using an ingenious tabletop lighting setup and capturing the births of mosquito larvae.

See all of the amazing macro photos and read about the brothers’ technical process on their guest post on Digital Photography School!

Via Digital Photography School, via Burrard-Lucas.com

Why? Because there is more data in the brightest few stops of sensor attenuation than in the rest of the entire range, which is to say that there will be more detail, less banding, less noise, and so forth, within the brightest areas than there will be in the darkest ones. But you’ve observed that before, right? You’ve seen how terrible shadow areas can look when you try to brighten them up.

“It’s better to overexpose a photo than to underexpose it.“—Will Greenwald

Then there’s this guy Will Greenwald. He just posted a whole article about this in which he says “it’s better to overexpose a photo than to underexpose it.” Awesome, I agree. But neither of us are saying you should “blow out” any of your image; definitely don’t do that.

Strangely, most of the people who commented on Will’s article disagreed with him. Those people are amateurs.

Why would I say that? I don’t even know them, and I am not prone to hyperbole or dirt-kicking. I’m really not. I’m also sure that all of those people are well-versed, smart individuals. It’s just that… I guess they don’t “get around” much in digital photography circles.

You see, I know something they don’t, and I learned it from an article by Michael Reichmann written some time back around 2003. I don’t need to tell you who Michael Reichmann is, do I? This information is not bleeding edge, it’s not new news. When Chris Blake and I teach our photography workshops, which I plug on this blog shamelessly and regularly, one of the first things we talk about is “exposing to the right,” and we’ve been doing that for three years.

Michael’s article is titled, with tongue pressed firmly into cheek, Expose Right. He means “to the right of the histogram” as much as he means “correctly.” Read that article if you want all of the technical “nitty gritty” involved in digital sensor attenuation and so forth.

You’ll read about how Michael was chatting with Thomas Knoll. You know, the guy who wrote Photoshop. You’ll learn about how they came to agree upon the fact that more detail lives in the brightest areas of an image than in the darkest ones. That’s all you need to know. You don’t need to get any deeper into the technology in order to use this rule.

Okay, so…

How do you use this rule?

I’m glad you asked. This is all you need to remember.

If possible, increase your image’s overall exposure until the histogram touches the right edge.

There are plenty of reasons that you may not be able to do that including subject motion, lack of light, and so on. Do the best you can. Tend toward the right of the histogram.

The image shouldn’t be clipped, which means that if your camera shows little blinking spots where things are overexposed, that’s still bad, but get that graph to move over to the right as far as you can without compromising the image.

If, like me, you operate in aperture-priority or aperture-value mode (Canon Av, Nikon A) all you have to do is use your “exposure value,” or EV, setting to increase the exposure of the image as far as you can up until the histogram data touches the right edge of the graph. If you can’t get it all the way over there without compromising the shot, don’t worry about it. This is a rule of thumb only.

Then what?

Then you take your photos home and import them into Lightroom and use the Develop module to adjust the overall brightness of the image using the exposure slider and curves and anything else you need to until it looks good to you. That’s really it.

Here are some things that you are going to complain about, and why you shouldn’t:

• On your camera’s LCD screen, an image exposed to the right may look very bright, and may look desaturated. It’s OK. There is just as much color data in the image as there was when it was center-exposed, and when you bring it into Lightroom you can draw that color out, but this time with more detail than ever.

Okay, so that was only one complaint. If you have other complaints, leave them down there in the comments!

Do you expose to the right already? Do you like it? Do you hate it? Leave a comment and let us all know!

To say that photographing the fireworks display in Washington, D.C. is a challenge might be hyperbole. Compared to those in Boston and New York City, which I’ve photographed two times each, getting a reasonable spot to shoot from is a cakewalk.

The National Mall opens at around 10 AM, but even at 3 PM there are still plenty of good spots by the Lincoln Memorial, so there’s no need to hurry. The real challenge, it would seem, is the complete and total lack of information about the strategy and considerations of shooting in the heart of the nation’s capital.

Have you ever searched for photographs of the D.C. fireworks? You should give it a try. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

There aren’t many. That is to say, there aren’t many great ones. It seems as though Getty and other stock agencies own most of the truly decent shots that exist. There are a few out there by random bloggers, or that you may find on Flickr, but it isn’t a landslide such as you will find when you search for New York City fireworks photos.

Where, When?

Okay, so there are enough shots to know where you want to shoot from, at least; there are a couple of decent opportunities. Many of the “classic” shots are made from the Tidal Basin near the Jefferson Memorial. From there you can frame a shot with the Potomac in the foreground and the Washington Memorial, Capitol, and Lincoln Memorial as your main subjects.

For a closer vantage, any of the areas around the front of the Lincoln Memorial should be ripe for the picking, and that’s where I shot from this year. You can almost tell where I was located when I took the photo below.

Reports of when the crowds start to accumulate around the National Mall are hard to find. Depending upon who you ask, you get entirely different answers. In order to best maximize the opportunity (for which I spent the better part of a day in a car from Connecticut), I decided to get to the National Mall as early as possible.

Things I totally didn’t have to do:

• Get to the National Mall as early as possible,
• Sit at the location I wanted to shoot from for 10 hours under the 97-degree sun,
• Forget to bring a folding chair.

So let me give all you guys and gals out there a hint. You don’t have to get to the National Mall ten hours early to snag a good location to photograph the fireworks display from. Unlike Boston and New York City, which both require a photographer’s attendance ten or more hours in advance, you can probably do very well at 3 PM in most places.

This is where the information bottleneck becomes the limiting reagent in the complex experiment of great Washington, D.C. fireworks photos. If only someone had told me, reliably, that I could get to the National Mall at 3 PM, would stand in essentially no line to go through the security checkpoint, and could still set up my tripod almost anywhere I wished… That would have been nice.

Oh, right, security checkpoints, I almost forgot.

Security Checkpoints

Before the 4th of July celebration, an enormous fence is erected around the entire National Mall. In order to get in, you will have to pass through one of the security checkpoints placed around the perimeter and be subjected to a search. At least, this was the gist of what my research turned up when looking into the logistics of this little photographic adventure.

Here’s what you actually have to know, based on my experience:

They don’t actually care what you bring in.

No knives, explosives, or personal grills. No glass bottles, thermonuclear weapons, chainsaws, etc. No alcohol, either (officially), but if you want to bring around nineteen coolers of food and drinks, a tent canopy, a load of chairs, towels, beach balls, and anything else you can reasonably carry, yeah, they’ll let you in.

Suffice it to say, a huge camera bag and a tripod isn’t going to be an issue, despite online warnings of “they won’t let you in with a bag,” etc., etc. They will need to look inside your bag, but it’s cursory and they aren’t even allowed to touch anything. They will use a wooden stick to poke around and make sure they can see everything inside.

It’s fast.

I was lined up with everyone else by 9:30 on the 4th, waiting for the security sweep of the park to complete and the checkpoints to open. That was the largest line I was ever in, and I was through within 10 minutes of when it opened up. I left the park area and came back in the early afternoon and essentially walked through without waiting at all. So don’t sweat the lines.

Crowd control. It’s an illusion.

Whenever you’re photographing fireworks, no matter what the location or occasion, you have to learn to hold your ground. Whether it’s another photographer or a particularly ambitious spectator, people will encroach on your space if you don’t make your boundaries known. Fortunately for you, the intrepid Washington D.C. fireworks photographer, you won’t have to deal with any serious crowd issues until around 5 or 6 PM. That’s when you’re going to start getting surrounded.

This is all very foreign to me, with experience only in the “Big Apple” and “Beantown.” I assumed that by the time the gates opened, a sea of tripods and camera bags would stretch out before me, blanketing every good vantage point imaginable… And that simply was not so.

Comparatively, photographing the fireworks show in Washington, D.C. was one of the easiest fireworks shows I have ever photographed.

Little did I know of the abilities of so-called “tethering,” for I had never tried it myself.

In the photography realm, tethering is a term generally used to describe shooting while the camera is directly connected to a computer. Most often, it is used to instantly push the photos onto the computer so that they can be previewed or, in some extreme cases, immediately edited by someone else for review by an on-site art director and so forth.

So really, “wireless tethering” is a super oxymoron, but that’s what they call it when you control your camera wirelessly or retrieve the photos in realtime wirelessly. Canon makes a device for this, and it retails for $800. I think you’d really have to need it to spend that much.

At least, that’s what Jamie Carl thought, so he made his own. Basically, tethering nowadays is just a standard USB connection, the same connection that you use to download photos directly from the camera (if you ever do that). They actually make wireless USB extenders now, which basically just separate one end of a USB cable from the other using wireless technology. It works just like USB, for just about anything that talks through USB.

I’m not sure what the bandwidth is like, but for controlling your camera, you don’t need much.

Jamie wanted to have wireless control of his camera because he was going to be riding in a car at highway speed, with his Nikon dangling outside on a mounting bracket! It seems like it worked out pretty well!

Check it out on Jamie Carl’s blog.

Yes, you heard me. Free as in “no charge.”

Over the course of two years, BBC-produced Wildlife Magazine published a 12-part series on photographing the locations and creatures of nature written by talented photographers and including spectacular images. Until now, you would’ve had to find the 12 specific issues of Wildlife in order to read these tips, and for the effort it probably wouldn’t have been worth it. I, for one, am a lazy person, having grown up in the age of the Internet where any and all useful information is a click away, so rummaging through magazine back-issues is right out.

Fortunately for people like me, Wildlife has released all 12 “Photo Masterclass” articles in PDF format on their website for free download. Regrettably, the PDF files are print-restricted, so you can only view them on a computer. If you have GoodReader on your iPhone or iPod Touch, however, you can take these lessons with you wherever you go. (GoodReader is how I take every single Canon and Nikon DSLR manual with me on my workshops I’ll write more about that later on).

To view and download all of the Photo Masterclass articles, visit the Photo Masterclass page on BBC Wildlife.

[Edit: It appears that they have taken down articles 11 and 12; they no longer appear on the site. Unfortunately I don’t have local copies of the articles to share with everyone, so they may be lost forever.]

Have you heard of the fabled “neutral density” filter before? Whether or not you know what one is, I’m about to blow the lid off this mysterious piece of kit, totally demystify the nineteen (well, four…) ways their strengths are measured, and give you some awesome tips for using them effectively in the field.

Starting from the top, what exactly is an ND filter, anyway?

What Exactly Is an ND Filter, Anyway?

ND stands for “neutral density.” “Density” refers to optical density or absorbance. The absorbance of a substance is basically the amount of light it will absorb as opposed to the amount that will pass through it. By “neutral” we mean that the absorbance of the filter is the same across all wavelengths of light.

To put it in simpler terms, ND filters only transmit some fraction of the light that hits them, and when the light comes out the other side the colors should be completely unaffected. Okay, so that’s great, but why do we care?

As you may recall from reading Mastering the Only Five Camera Settings, there is only so much you can do to change the characteristics of the scene you’re capturing.

When I wrote that article, I wasn’t making stuff up; those five settings are really the only ones. By adding an ND filter into the mix, however, you add another variable you can control. We love control, don’t we?

In effect, adding an ND filter is most similar to reducing your ISO sensitivity, which may be the only way to get slower shutter speeds in situations where light is ample and your ISO is already as low as it can go. So then the next question is, why do you want slower shutter speeds?

Why Do You Want Slower Shutter Speeds?

The most often cited reason is to get the “veiling effect” that water produces during a longer exposure. Normally, you might have to go out just after dawn or wait until dusk before the conditions would be right to make a several-second exposure of a natural waterfall.

Check out the awesome photo on the right from skycaptaintwo. Without an ND filter it could be challenging to get the low-light situation that would make that photo possible. Now, I don’t know for sure that this photographer used an ND filter, but the image is a great example of where having one might definitely come in handy.

There are three main reasons for using an ND filter that I know of (but I’m sure you can think of more):

1. To get a “veiling effect” when photographing water (this works for waterfalls as well as the water’s moving surface, e.g. the ocean, lakes)
2. To capture a sense of movement by adding motion blur (e.g. when people are walking around, cars driving by, and so on)
3. To get an increased depth of field (more background blur, or “bokeh”) when light is ample

The first two require slower shutter speeds, the last requires a larger aperture opening. All three necessarily require that more light enter the camera, which is why you may need to use an ND filter to reduce the amount of light that enters in order to keep your exposure correct.

Swell. Now we know all about what ND filters are for. But how do you size them up? ND filter specifications can be pretty confusing. That’s why I will explain ND filter specifications to you now.

ND Filter Specifications, Explained

There are four measures that can be used to describe how much light an ND filter blocks and/or transmits, and they are:

1. Attenuation factor (or “filter factor”)
2. Optical density (or “grade”)
3. F-stop equivalence
4. Percent transmittance

Only two of the above are regularly used to describe filters when you’re buying them (grade and density), but it can be helpful to know the others to get a better idea of what it all means. Some sites, like B&H, may also list the remaining stats in the “specifications” tab for each product, though the product title itself will only contain one of the four measurements.

The filter factor or attenuation factor is used often when labeling a filter product. Generally it’s written as “ND8” or “ND64.” The optical density or grade is also commonly used, and will always appear as a decimal number, “0.3” or “3.0” and so on. Just to be completely clear, a filter labeled ND1000 is equivalent to a filter labeled ND 3.0. They are exactly the same.

Now, technically, filters above a 1,000 grade exist. You aren’t going to see them around too often, and I’ll tell you one reason why. With an ND1000, or ND 3.0 filter, you’re blocking out 10 stops of light, which means you’re only receiving 0.1% of the total light in the scene. The ND1000 filter looks like a disk of black glass; you can barely see through it with your naked eyes. When using an ND1000 filter, you have to compose and focus your scene on a tripod and then screw on the filter, because once it’s on you won’t be able to see anything at all, unless you’re pointing directly at the sun… And why would you do that?

Let’s Talk Brands

Filters made by B+W are among the best quality you can buy; the the materials used and the fit and finish are top notch. An ND1000 filter from B+W can run $100 or more.

If you are a Canon “L” or Nikon “Nikkor” shooter, you require a 77mm diameter filter. Here are some nice ones made by B+W from my favorite store, B&H:

• B+W ND 0.3, $49 (same as ND2, 1 f-stop)
• B+W ND 0.6, $49 (same as ND4, 2 f-stops)
• B+W ND 0.9, $94 (same as ND8, 4 f-stops)
• B+W ND 3.0, $97 (same as ND1000, 10 f-stops)

You will find the biggest selection of filters from B+W and Tiffen. Tiffen makes reasonably priced and solidly performing glass filters. You may also want to look at Cokin or Heliopan.

One thing to note when shopping for filters is that a brand like B+W offers each of their ND filters with a variety of options such as a multi-coated surface to reduce flares and ghosting, or in a slim form factor for better performance on wide-angle lenses. Prices vary depending upon the options.

Let’s Talk… Brands… Again

An important thing to think about when you’re looking at adding filters to your kit is the combination of different brands of threaded filters. Although filter threading is standardized, you can sometimes run into trouble when you screw a B+W ND filter onto the front of a Canon UV filter, and so on. Mixing and matching brands is somewhat discouraged.

If you don’t use UV filters (a subject for another post entirely), or if you don’t intend to stack effect filters, then buy whatever brands fit your needs and budget.

Happy filtering!

All of that information is still very important, but I wanted to mention that a good fellow by the name of Adam Parker posted a comment there with a useful link to an article of his where he demonstrates the major shooting modes using… Gasp… Pictures!

You can read his article, Canon Shooting Modes – What Are the Differences? at that link. Bear in mind that it is a very Canon-centric article, and therefore I fully support it!

If you have a Nikon or one of those… Other cameras… This information may still apply, though the names of the modes will probably be different, or you may have more or fewer of them.