Archives For shutter speed

You’ll have to get the Black Belt on your own.

Varina Patel —  March 14, 2013

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As many of you know, my oldest son received his black belt in Jujitsu this January. I wanted to capture a few photographs of the testing process to share with family and friends, so I brought my camera along. Here are a few tips for shooting in similar conditions.

1. Capturing photos of people doing sports requires a fast shutter speed to freeze the motion. That’s easy enough on a bright sunny day – but indoors, it can be difficult to get a really fast shutter speed. I used my Canon 5D MIII, which handles noise very well, and bumped up my ISO to 5000. With an aperture of f/4.5, I could use a shutter speed of 1/400 of a second. That was enough to capture the quick martial arts moves. I cleaned up the noise a bit with the luminosity slider in Photoshop.

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2. I used AI Servo mode to ensure that my focus was spot on even as my son moved around. AI Servo is Canon’s predictive autofocusing system. I hold the shutter release halfway down, and follow my son’s face with the active focusing point through my viewfinder. The focus adjusts automatically to his movements. It’s not always perfect, but it works very well for something like this.

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3. My Canon 5D MkIII allows me to shoot 6 frames per second max. I often use the high speed continuous shooting mode when I’m photographing the kids playing sports. For action shots, I often take three or four shots in quick succession. Then, I choose the best of the set, and delete the others. I use this mode when I know it will be difficult to release the shutter at just the right moment. I don’t recommend shooting constantly. Instead, choose your moment carefully, and take just a few shots. That way, you don’t fill up your memory cards with junk shots, and your camera doesn’t get hung up trying to process a series of images. Use high speed continuous shooting mode sparingly.

Congratulation to Nick. We are incredibly proud of him and his accomplishments.

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Sandy Beach, Oahu - Hawai

Shooting the Moon at Twilight

Varina Patel —  February 7, 2013

The moon is a gorgeous subject, but it can be tough to get the shot you want. Have you ever taken a photograph of the moon at night only to discover that it is so bright in your photograph that it appears as a bright, white spot? Do you want to capture a landscape photograph with objects in the foreground and the moon in the sky as well? The trick is to capture the scene at twilight. When the light is low, you can capture the moon and the foreground with a single exposure – without blowing out the moon or leaving the foreground pitch dark.

I took this shot at Sandy Beach on Oahu early this week. Here are a few useful tips that helped me get the shot I wanted.

1. I used an Induro tripod to hold my camera steady. A 1/5 sec shutter speed let me blur my moving subjects in the foreground for a bit of motion without blurring my moon.

2. I took a couple of test shots to make sure I had the focus I wanted both in the foreground and in the sky. I zoomed in to check the photo on the back of my camera to be sure the details in the moon were sharp.

3. I stood well back from my foreground and used a long lens – 70-200mm with a 1.4x extender – which let me zoom in to show the large size of the moon as it rose. A wide angle lens will leave you with a tiny, little moon that gets lost in the frame.

Do have any more tips for shooting the moon? Please share them in the comments so that others can learn! And then, get out there and shoot the moon, everyone! It’s such a beautiful subject!

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Sleepy Beauties

Varina Patel —  July 13, 2012

We spent the first seven days of July in Nicaragua with Empowerment International and The Giving Lens. It was an incredible experience. We fell in the love with the children, their families, and the EI volunteers – who were always so generous with their smiles and their hearts.

These two little beauties were still in bed when we arrived with our cameras early one morning. They weren’t quite ready to get up, so I captured a few shots of them as they shook off their sleepiness.

Because of the dim light inside the home, I took this photo with my Canon 5D Mk III at it’s highest ISO setting of 25600, and with my lens wide open at f/2.8. I used a shutter speed of 1/50 because I could hold the camera relatively steady for the photograph, and the girls weren’t moving around. As expected, the image was very noisy, so I increased the luminance in Adobe Camera RAW to reduce the noise overall. The result is a smooth image with beautiful details. I’m thoroughly impressed with the Mk IIIs high ISO capabilites, and I’m so glad I had that camera on this morning!

For more information about Empowerment International, please visit their website at www.empowermentinternational.org. Even a small donation can make a big difference!

For more information on The Giving Lens, check out their website at www.thegivinglens.com. They have lots of trips coming up! Maybe there’s one that’s right for you! :)

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Metlako Falls, Columbia River Gorge, Oregon (OR), USA

How do we determine proper exposure?

Jay Patel —  June 18, 2012

Take a look at this photo of Metlako Falls in the Columbia River Gorge. Besides the vibrant colors, you will notice that every part of the photograph seems to be correctly exposed. A histogram can help us determine whether a photo is properly exposed, and if the photo needs to be bracketed in order to capture the entire dynamic range of the scene. Sometimes, we process a single image multiple times in order to get proper exposure in different parts of the photograph.

Lets take a look at this scene as an example. If you wanted to expose this scene for the highlights, I would look at the bright water in the falls, and adjust the shutter speed and exposure until my histogram showed that I had captured detail in the bright areas of the image. We can do the same during post-processing… as seen in the image below.

In post-processing, I kept an eye on the highlights and histogram. I adjusted the image so that I had the detail and contrast that I wanted in the highlight. Of course, this meant that the rest of the image was drastically underexposed. I can blend the image exposed for the highlights with one exposed for the shadows and mid-tone, and the result will be a natural-looking scene with nice details throughout the image.

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Break Away

Moment in Time

Jay Patel —  August 5, 2011

Photography is all about capturing a moment in time. Sometimes, we use shutter speed as long as several minutes, and sometimes we need something much faster. In order to capture this bizarre image, I used a shutter speed of just 1/2500 of a second!

What is this? It is an abstract image taken just as a bubble burst – in the boiling “mud pots” of Yellowstone National Park.

How do you create an image like this one?

  • Find the right location. In this case, the bubbles were forming in the same location over and over again – if they appear randomly, it can be difficult to capture one at just the right moment.
  • Set you focus in advance.Once you know where the bubble is most likely to appear, focus your lens at that location and disable the auto-focus. Now your lens is set correctly, and you can concentrate on getting the shot.
  • Take some test shots. You need to decide what aperture and DOF you need to use. Choose a shutter speed fast enough to completely freeze the motion – in this case, 1/2500 sec. I chose an aperture of 5.6 in order to get sufficient depth of field. Then, I adjusted my ISO until my exposure was correct.
  • Be sure to check your Histogram! Because of all that bright white mud, I had to manually overexpose the shot (~ 1.5 stops) to get the image nice and bright. But I don’t want to end up with blown highlights! A quick check of the histogram told me that my settings were just right.

On the day I took this shot, there was a light overcast sky, which helped to minimize blown highlight on the wet surfaces and – and to keep the shadows soft.

And now, all you have to do is wait… and click away. To be honest, it was a lot of fun to capture these images. Varina and I, and our students, spent a couple of hours taking 100s of shots of the bubbles…After all, even grown ups like to play with mud! (But don’t actually play IN this mud – it’s HOT!)

I processed the shot with low contrast, and cloned out a few distracting shadows in the smooth mud behind and I had my shot.

The same technique can be applied to capture other subjects in nature – such as a hummingbird that returns to the same feeder, insects visiting a pollen-rich flower, and water droplets falling in the same spot.

Here is an photography by Varina that was produced using similar technique.

Burst - Varina Patel

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