Dennis Calvert shares a really neat light painting technique on his blog that he calls “Man on Fire.” It basically involves creating a darkened silhouette by firing a remote flash behind a subject to overexpose the background behind them, and then “painting” in the silhouetted area with some neat little light wands.

I’m sure you could do this with subjects other than people and with light wands other than the ones Dennis uses. The result, I think, is pretty spectacular. Because the background is blown out, bits of light trail that go outside of the silhouette area become wispy and look very cool.

Believe it or not, the image is straight out of the camera, no post-processing or alterations at all.

Go check out the whole article on Dennis’s blog where you will also find a time-lapse video of the making of the image, which is pretty neat in its own right.

Even with the best equipment that money can buy, ICC profiles, spectrophotometers, an iron-clad color management workflow, and a high-end monitor, your eyes are the ultimate judges of your work. But eyes, they don’t work alone; you can’t see anything without light, and the quality of the light will have as much an effect on what you see as the color of the print itself.

I got onto this topic after reading Michael Johnston’s overview of his Viewing Station. All these years I’ve been experimenting with lights in my studio space, let’s call it Single-Serving Photo HQ—or, as my friends call it, my bedroom—and I never once thought to write about it.

After the jump I’ll tell you how to dramatically increase your viewing conditions for about $15.

Michael says he uses one of those clip-on Verilux full-spectrum fluorescent setups. When I started down this path, I hadn’t heard of Verilux specifically, but I was sure I wanted to go fluorescent after being turned off by these so-called “daylight” incandescent bulbs that were nothing more than regular bulbs with bluish glass designed to offset the orange light they actually generate. Michael’s entire lamp, which includes the bulb, cost him around $80. We can do better than that.

Get a Bulb

I wound up sampling several compact fluorescent bulbs from 1000bulbs.com and eventually decided upon a 100 watt equivalent 5100k model. Here’s a picture of what it looks like, sort of:

There are perhaps four important considerations when looking at bulbs for your viewing environment.

1. Wattage (or equivalent wattage, when talking about fluorescent)—I like my viewing conditions to be fairly bright, so I went with 100 watt equivalent, but you may prefer to go higher or lower.
2. Spectrum—Get a bulb that is classified as “full-spectrum,” meaning that it doesn’t purposefully exclude certain wavelengths.
3. Color temperature—Anything from 5,000K and up should do fine. I prefer 5,100K, you might go as high as 5,400K.
4. Color Rendering Index (CRI)—This method of measuring the color accuracy of a light source has its flaws, but it’s better than guessing; a higher number is better, 100 is perfect.

A Note About CRI

The Color Rendering Index (CRI) is a measure of a light source’s ability to reproduce color. Those of you mathematically inclined or simply curious can read about it on Wikipedia. This particular system has its detractors, but it’s the system most widely used at the moment, and 1000bulbs.com lists the CRI value for most of its bulbs, especially the ones billed as “full-spectrum.”

The Verilux bulbs that you find in systems such as Michael’s rate around 86 and up on the CRI scale. The bulb I chose scores an 82, which by all accounts should be good enough for any normal person. Some halogen bulbs are rated 100, which is as accurate as a light source can be on that scale, but halogen is expensive, hot, and may be too bright for some people.

23 Watt, full-spectrum, 5100K CFL from 1000bulbs.com: $5.71

Get a Lamp

What good is a bulb without a lamp to screw it into? Perhaps you have a spare lamp somewhere in your house that you can use, but if you don’t, do not despair. I went down to the home improvement store and picked up a simple work light (sometimes also called a painter’s light or a clip light). Here is a pretty basic one offered at Lowe’s; I don’t remember where I got mine.

Simple clip-on work light: $7.48

Clip it onto something, such as your apartment’s fashionably painted structural beams, and away you go!

I actually bought three bulbs, three work lights, and plugged them all into a single power strip so I can turn them on and off with one switch and light my whole computer area. It’s very helpful to be able to lay prints out on top of the printer or on my desk and have the same quality of light everywhere.

You will definitely see a difference in the appearance of your prints as you move them from one light source to another. Nearly every print will have some variation in the way it reacts to light. Some inkjet inks are known to be rather more prone to this change in appearance (which is called metamerism), such as Epson K2 (the inks I use). It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but as an artist you need to be aware of the possible ways in which your work will be viewed and whether you are satisfied with the work’s performance.

So there you go. A full-spectrum viewing solution for less than $15.

In my instruction I get asked a lot about how the five most fundamentally important settings of the camera work together to achieve the effects you desire. It can be hard to penetrate the curtain of photographic jargon, some of which can seem counterintuitive, so I decided to take a minute to explain all of this stuff at a very high level. If you have specific questions of your own, please leave a comment below and I promise that I will answer them.

The only five settings that you need to know are:

• Shooting mode
• Aperture (or f-stop)
• Shutter speed
• ISO sensitivity
• Exposure value (EV)

After the jump I will explain in detail.

Each of these settings affects the others. It’s like a five-way see-saw where changing one setting will require that you change another to compensate for it. So why change the settings at all? Because each setting has a different aesthetic effect on your image.

The shooting mode refers to Av, Tv, P, M on Canon cameras, or A, S, P, M on Nikon cameras. They mean:

• Av/A = You select the aperture, the camera selects the shutter speed.
• Tv/S = You select the shutter speed, the camera selects the aperture.
• P = The camera selects both (bad camera!)
• M = You select both (you’re a pro!)

The reason you might want to select your own aperture is to control the depth of field, which is how blurry things will get (or how sharp they will remain) the farther they are from your focus point.

You may want to change your shutter speed, also, in order to freeze motion or to get the effect of a long exposure.

By altering your ISO sensitivity, you can get longer or shorter shutter speeds and larger or smaller apertures, but the higher your ISO, the more noise you will see in the image, while the lower the ISO, the less noise you will see.

The exposure value (EV) is only applicable if you’re in Av/A, Tv/S, or P modes, and allows you to override the camera’s light meter to make it overexpose or underexpose the shot by a certain amount. I’ll talk about this feature last.

Learn to talk the talk

You will hear people talk about lenses or settings being “faster” or “slower.” You would think that they’re talking about shutter speed (because it’s a speed, right?) but you’d be wrong. We say “faster” when we’re referring to a larger aperture, which, contrary to common sense, means a smaller number. Okay, let me back up for a second.

• Larger aperture = smaller number = “faster”
• Smaller aperture = larger number = “slower”

Get it? We say a larger aperture is faster because it allows you to use a faster shutter speed. A larger aperture (smaller number, right?) means more light. More light means you don’t have to expose the sensor for as long, so your shutter speed is faster.

A Balancing Act

As I mentioned earlier, changing your camera settings, put simply, is like a balancing act. Once you understand the concept of “stops” and how each setting affects light, you’re on a roll.

What’s a stop?

A “stop” is a relative measurement of light, meaning that “one stop” of light is not an absolute amount. Rather, plus one stop means twice as much light, and minus one stop means half as much light. When you work with your camera settings, be aware that modern cameras typically measure their settings in 1/3 stops rather than full stops.

Shutter speed

The faster the shutter speed, the less light will make it to the sensor in total. The slower the shutter speed (i.e. the longer it remains open), the more light will make it in.

For each full stop longer that you leave the shutter open, twice as much light will enter the camera.

Aperture!

The aperture, as you probably know, is the opening through which light passes on its journey through the lens. What is confusing about aperture is that it’s measured by the “f-stop,” which is a number that gets smaller as the aperture gets bigger. As long as you can remember this odd, inverse relationship, you’re fine.

For each full stop that the aperture number increases, half as much light will be let into the camera. For each full stop that the aperture number decreases, twice as much light will be let into the camera.

ISO sensitivity

ISO is on a different scale, but it’s much easier to understand. As the ISO number doubles, so does the light, thus ISO 200 is twice as sensitive to light as ISO 100. That difference is… Yes, one full stop. Cameras these days frequently let the photographer select among half-stop or third-stop ISO increments as well, but it’s pretty easy to tell that the full stops are 50, 100, 200, 400, 800, etc., because the numbers double.

Metering

This is a tough subject. Metering is the process of evaluating how much light is in a scene, something that we generally let our cameras do because they’re much more accurate than our eyes. Nevertheless, sometimes what you want out of a scene, as an artist, is different from what the camera “sees.” There are a couple different common metering “modes,” which have different names based on your type of camera, but in general they are:

• Spot
• Evaluative (or matrix)
• Partial
• Center-weighted average

These modes have to do with what portion or portions of the scene the camera’s meter will take into account in its calculations. Spot means that it will only look at the center point of what you see in the viewfinder, usually 3% or so of the middle of the scene.

Partial is a somewhat larger measuring area, around 10% or so (check your camera’s manual to find out the specifics). Center-weighted gives more measurement priority to the middle area of the scene, but also averages it against the rest.

Evaluative or matrix metering is sort of like black magic; the camera basically meters for the subject and then also figures in adjustments based on the surroundings. It might use the focus point or other variables to figure out what the subject is. Like I said, black magic. Usually I keep my camera in evaluative mode because it deals with diverse circumstances very well.

In very general terms, the meter wants to look at some amount of reflected light and determine the settings necessary to make that area show up in your photograph as “middle gray,” or 18% gray. If you were using spot metering and you pointed that center spot right on a bright white piece of paper and took a picture, it should look gray. Why does it do this? Because when you take the average of a large area and make that whole area average out to 18% gray, it’s usually the exposure you want. Usually.

When it’s not the exposure you want, that’s where exposure value (EV) comes in.

EV compensation

EV compensation is only used in the auto-metering shooting modes, like Av/A, Tv/S, and P. If you are in manual (M) mode, you are selecting both shutter and aperture values, so the camera’s meter is informing you of its readings but isn’t changing any settings for you. Thus, if you want the scene to be exposed lighter or darker, it’s up to you to change either the shutter speed or aperture appropriately. Anyway, here’s an example.

If you are shooting a snowy, winter scene using evaluative (matrix) metering mode, your camera is going to look at its entire view (which is predominately white) and expose it to look gray. Obviously you want the snow to look white, so you “fake out” the meter by setting your EV to, say, +1 stop. This causes the camera to change its settings to expose the scene one stop brighter than it normally would, which should make the snow look white.

You might also need to use EV if the camera overexposes a portion of the scene that you didn’t want it to. To fix that, set your EV to a negative number (“stop it down”).

Why

Why have I told you all of this? How does this information possibly make you a better photographer? I don’t know, maybe it doesn’t. My point in telling you all of this is that you need to closely control your aperture and shutter values in order to achieve the aesthetic effect that you want, but when you change any one of the values, you probably have to compensate by changing another value. By understanding how these five core settings interact, you can then focus your attention on composition, form, color, contrast, line, and the other artistic characteristics of your work.

If you want to learn more about how all of these things work, and you want to take some pretty pictures with me at the same time, sign up for one of my workshops. I’ve got a workshop coming up in Boston, and then another in Cape Cod!

In the Great Smoky Mountains this past week, I got a very personal introduction to one way our photography can greatly disturb the environment and so today I will talk about it.

This is my contribution to Blog Action Day, joining 15,000 fellow bloggers in raising awareness of environmental issues. (Yes, I know it was yesterday. Better late than never!)

National parks are truly environmental treasures. Not only does the National Park Service protect the land, geology, and flora of the parks, but it also studies and assists the indigenous creatures that live in each of its nearly 400 sites. Because these locations are more readily accessible and better documented than the untamed wilderness (of which there is very little remaining in America), and because they were preserved for their unique beauty and significance in the culture and history of this country, they are obvious destinations for outdoors photographers.

While photographing in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which straddles the line between Tennessee and North Carolina, I was made forcefully aware of some of the dangers these parks face and how important it is that we contribute to their protection.

Painting the Night

“Light painting,” or using flashlights to illuminate objects during long exposures in the dark, is one of the staples of outdoor photography, and I think it’s a fairly common practice; you’ll see it used by The Nocturnes and others who are into making images after dark. Having used the technique to to great effect in Death Valley and in Yosemite, it went without saying that my colleague Chris and I would find such opportunities in the Smokies.

Our plan was to enter Cades Cove after dark and scout out a location. Ideally, we wanted to hike down to the Primitive Baptist Church, which is 2.4 miles each way from the public parking lot. You can’t drive down the road because the gates leading into the Cades Cove loop are locked at sunset. After walking for some time, we decided to stop and set up along a barbed wire fence and get a feel for the night. The fence stood between the narrow road and a large field with a solitary tree standing a few hundred feet away. It seemed a good enough spot with a lot of visible sky, so we set up our gear.

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My composition placed the faraway tree front-and-center with the barbed wire fence in the foreground, which I thought would give a nice sense of depth to the image. After exposing for twenty minutes, occasionally yelling out “Hey bear!” to make sure any of the 1,600 black bears in the park would know we were there¹, we painted the fence with a headlamp and I decided I should paint the tree with one of our 1,000,000 candlepower lights.

We made two exposures this way when Chris saw bright lights at the top of the road by the gate. There are only two major fears photographers have in the woods at night: one is the fear of being mauled or eaten alive by hungry black bears preparing for hibernation, and two is the fear of someone spoiling your 45-minute exposure with a careless wave of their flashlight. The second fear, of course, is much more gripping. The lights proceeded toward us. Knowing that they had passed the locked gate, we could be sure it was a ranger. But what business might a ranger have in that dark place at that hour? Surely we were simply two benign photographers walking the trails and roads as any other visitors might.

Touched by a Ranger

“Step into the road where I can see you,” came the ranger’s commanding voice. The sound seemed to come from a tall, black void in the wall of pure, blinding whiteness pouring over us from the seven lights on the ranger’s car. We did as he asked. “I need you to empty your pockets. Take everything out and put it on the ground and turn your pockets out.” A strange request; perhaps they check random people to make sure they don’t have contraband or something. Yes, that’s it, and this ranger decided that the best place to look for tourist pranksters would be down this gated road in the inky black of night…

Before I knew it I was standing with my hands behind my head getting thoroughly and deeply frisked by a national park ranger. For those casual readers out there among you, I am not a man who has even once been suspected of anything by the Powers That Be, let alone deeply frisked. A minute later I’m sitting by a tree with my legs crossed watching the same fate befall my partner. What was to become of us?

“Are there any more flashlights here? Do you boys have more flashlights?”

“Yes sir, there is one there by our bags,” I replied. He fetched it. Turning now to my associate, he poised the question,

“Do you what’s going to happen if I shine this into your eyes?”

“I’ll be blinded,” my pal answered.

“That’s right. You’ll be blinded. Now how do you s’pose an animal is going to feel when you shine this at them?”

Thus the story began to unfold. The ranger explained that “spotlighting,” or shining bright lights into the woods and such, is frowned upon. Moreover, such behavior is indicative of poachers. He went on to say that using headlamps to walk and shining lights briefly into the woods if an animal might be approaching is OK, but shining one million candlepower flashlights across fields is more like what people do when they’re searching for some wild game to illegally sneak away with.

Why anyone would poach animals 500 yards from a ranger station (as we were) is beyond me, and the question of exactly how extraordinary a power trip that ranger was on still remains. Nevertheless, each national park in America is permitted to set their own rules of behavior governing the use of artificial light and the points made by the ranger that night were valid ones.

Take it from me, you do not want to be rigorously patted down by a ranger in the middle of the night, so be sure to ask the rangers at any park you’re visiting about applicable regulations. Remember also that you’re not alone out there. We all have a responsibility to remain mindful of our impact on indigenous wildlife and to respect the park as their home… Because that’s what it is.

1. Black bears don’t want trouble, but they just hate surprises.

Land of Confusion

So there I was, reading this Balance Light: Twilight post on Strobist, which is admittedly part of the second and more advanced series on lighting (Lighting 102), but nevertheless I became overwhelmed with total misunderstanding. I don’t want to be too quick to discredit David because, after all, it was Lighting 102, so maybe I missed something that was discussed earlier, but all of the examples of aperture and shutter settings raised a boat load of questions in my mind.

Questions that burned within me!

Time Is of the Essence

My first question, and the simplest one, was how flash lighting actually interacts with aperture and shutter settings. What I didn’t realize is that the exposure of an object lit entirely by your flash is not affected in any way by your shutter speed. The easiest way to explain why this is true is to discuss maximum sync speeds. All mid- to high-end Canon cameras have a maximum sync speed of 1/250th of a second, which means that you can set your shutter to anything up to 1/250th while using a synchronized flash (which is to say, any flash that is fired by the camera, either using a sync cable, wireless system, or master/slave setup). With the high-end Nikons, I believe you can get 1/500th. The maximum sync speed represents the shortest length of time during which your camera can guarantee that the flash will turn on and turn off.

By definition, if your shutter speed is set to the maximum sync speed or slower, your camera is guaranteeing that its shutter will be open for at least the entire duration of the flash’s discharge, exposing your image to all of its generated light (by “all” I mean the brightness as well as duration components).

I had never really thought about it that way before.

What About TTL?

My other big question was how this house of cards you’ve meticulously built up by manually adjusting all of your settings could possibly be thrown asunder by the TTL (or A-TTL or E-TTL) metering that the camera does. If you are using a TTL-capable flash unit on your Canon camera, the camera will be able to adjust the duration of flash discharge to get the “proper” exposure.

Any recent Canon camera and flash system is able to use what they call E-TTL, which means “evaluative through-the-lens” metering. E-TTL meters the flash by firing a “pre-flash” milliseconds before the actual flash and measuring its effect on the scene using the same through-the-lens metering system that meters non-flash photographs. Because the pre-flash is a set intensity, all of the variables are known to the camera and the result of the actual flash exposure can be calculated. It seems almost impossible, but it works.

So the short answer to my question is that the metering system will, theoretically, change the results of whatever settings you have selected. However, the E-TTL system should be “smart” enough to properly expose the scene for flash, meaning that whatever adjustments you make to the ambient light’s exposure should be virtually unaffected. E-TTL simply ensures that your flash-lit subject isn’t over-exposed by a flash burst that lasts too long.

Balancing Act

The real point of talking about all of this is to figure out how to balance ambient light with the light from your flash. The moral of the story is that the shutter speed has an effect on the ambient light only, while the aperture has an effect on both. It’s not a walk in the park to get precisely the results you want without plenty of in-the-field experience, but knowing that simple rule is a pretty good start!

A very straightforward approach would be to set your shutter speed to the slowest you feel comfortable with (if you’re shooting hand-held, that is your main limitation) and then adjust your aperture to where your subject is getting the light from the flash that you desire (by chimping on your LCD using the histogram display, of course… Right?). Then you can start to ramp up the shutter speed to see how it affects the ambient lighting (because it won’t affect the exposure of your subject if it is lit solely with the flash).

In the cases where ambient and flash light mixes on your subject, you’re going to need a lot more time to chimp the histogram.

This article on photonotes.org was invaluable to me in learning about how flash works in the Canon EOS system. If you shoot Canon, you should read this from top to bottom!