goldengod

Stages by Scott Robinson

Fall photos are a challenge for photographers and amateurs alike, but the effort can be worth it. The combinations of deep red leaves, bright green grass, and electric blue skies make autumn photos a universal favourite.

With that in mind, here are five solid ways to make your photos impress:

Get in Close to the Leaves

Trees are tricky because they overwhelm your digital camera’s sensor with detail. This can make your photo look overly busy if you’re not careful. Rather than trying to frame the whole tree, move up close and capture just a few autumn leaves.

Zoom lenses are excellent for this if you don’t want to get dirty. Wide angle lenses give a different look to fall photos, but to get up close you’ll have to climb the trees!

Shoot Autumn in Black and White

Another way to make photos of this season interesting is to eliminate the colour. Fall photos are often full of heavily saturated colours; having a photo without them can make people stand up and take notice. Get your audience to focus on the texture and shape of the leaves by converting a few of your fall photos to monochrome.

Use Leaves as a Background Element

Using trees as photo backgrounds in the fall is a no-brainer. You capture all the colour of the season and you can adjust your aperture to give a really pleasing, soft bokeh. Done right, this effect can look almost like an Impressionist painting.

Having the leaves as a prop is also fun. You can shoot portraits of people holding leaves close to their face and kids jumping into great big piles of ‘em. Unlock a host of possibilities by using such a recognizable symbol of the season as a minor element in your composition.

Take Your Fall Portraits on a Cold Day

The chill will make your model’s breath visible when they exhale. That tiny wisp of breath can communicate so much in a photo. Breath and clothes are the simplest way to communicate the coolness of the scene. Giving a photo full of warm, vibrant reds a crisp cool feeling can be difficult, but it will make your photo stand out.

Warm Things Up a Bit

Leaves that have been on the ground for a bit can look dull. Warming the photo up can make people really see the dusky oranges and deep reds of fall. Those of you with compact cameras can try adjusting your white balance or make adjustments in Photoshop later.

If you’ve got an SLR though, here’s where we get a bit technical. When you’re shooting available light, use one of the 81 series of warming filters. The filter will help pump up the oranges and reds. As an alternative, you can put a polarizer on your lens to maintain a crisp blue sky and gel your flash to warm the leaves.

I’ve become a bit obsessed with the look of the Rosco #18 Flame gel, but I’ve also been reading too much Bob Krist lately. A 1/4 or 1/2 CTO gel should be more than enough to give the leaves in your photo a bit more oomph.

Whatever skill level you’re at, taking photos of fall leaves provides a unique challenge that only comes around once a year. Get out there and shoot!

Related Posts:

• 5 Ways to Make Your Texture Photos Pop!
• How to Take Great Photos at High Noon - Part One
• How to Improve Your Photos by Ignoring Them

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Soul by Bill Selak

That’s right folks, you need to learn to use manual focus or Bad Things will happen. Fortune-teller threats of calamity aside, you need to learn how to use manual focus for low light situations. Digital cameras have a hard time focusing in dim light and you have to be able to adapt.

Compare and Contrast

As far as I know, most consumer-level compact cameras and DSLRs use contrast measurement as a method of passive autofocus. Wikipedia explains it better than I can:

Contrast measurement is achieved by measuring contrast within a sensor field, through the lens. The intensity difference between adjacent pixels of the sensor naturally increases with correct image focus

In a low light situation everything appears dim and gray to your camera, even if you can see detail without much trouble. The camera will find it more difficult to determine the contrast and thus, can’t focus. Enabling the infrared AF-assist beam can help, but it’s not foolproof.If your camera is having trouble focusing, you should take the plunge. Switch over to manual focus to get the shot.

When to Use Manual Focus

The situations where I use this technique the most are concerts and night photography. I’ll often find myself switching to manual focus when I’m shooting in someone’s house without additional lights.

Unless you’ve really practiced this, bump your aperture up a stop or two. This gives you a bigger margin for error by increasing your depth of field. When you’re shooting under pressure, you need all the extra margins you can get.

Practice Makes Perfect

Using manual focus in these situations is great practice, especially for photographers like me. I’ve become far too reliant on the automated nature of modern cameras. It’s second nature for people to take shortcuts but going the long way will help you take better photos in awkward situations.

Any photographer worth their salt should be able to work in full manual, but it’s a skillset you need to work hard to develop.

Photographers need to recalibrate their senses frequently, like most other creative professionals. Writers often take breaks between editing passes and sound engineers use ‘neutral mix’ recordings to bring their hearing back to neutral.

Recalibrating Eyes…

Photographers need to cleanse their visual palate when doing post-production. Stepping away from the computer and going for a walk or any other activity is the simplest way to do this.

Going for a walk for every photo I edit would be a hassle, though. Instead, I process photos in bursts and step away from the computer every five photos or so. This is similar to the technique of letting photos sit I wrote about yesterday, but on a smaller scale.

Please Use Eye Washing Station

You don’t need to abandon the photos for days, just give your eyes a quick ‘wash’ by looking at other things. Keeping a copy of the original photo open in another window as a reference image is also very helpful. You can use this to ensure that you’re not oversaturating things too heavily.

People who forget to do this are the ones who post red-skinned portraits (guilty) and the overdone, tacky HDR shots. Don’t become HDR Harry. Please.

Next time you’re processing photos, try this out. You’ll find it much easier to capture subtle effects in colour and tone, which people receive better than an HDR hammer to the head.

EDIT: The image previously associated with this post as it has been removed. It was brought to my attention that the person posting it on Flickr was not the rightsholder to the image. The poster listed someone else’s copyrighted work as Creative Commons and added it to the Flickr repository, where I found it. At the time, there was no indication that this was someone else’s work but the Flickr listing has been updated since. My sincerest apologies to the hardworking photographer Lew Robertson (warning: tacky flash usage).

#3478
by Wee Keat Chin

There’s not many times I’ll be able to advertise an effortless way to improve the quality of your photos, so listen up! Today we’re going to improve our photos by leaving them alone. That’s right. Go out, take your photos, come home, download them, and then forget that they exist.

Why? Because you just took the photos! You’re riding high on serotonin (or whatever; I quit biology) and aren’t making objective decisions about the quality of those shots. So as Kevin Smith would say, just “pimp away.”

Let Your Photos Steep

I make much better choices about which photos to post and which to hide when I let those few days pass between shooting and processing. This pays dividends in terms of my photo quality. It comes at the cost of a lot of time, though. This system only works for those of us without strict deadlines.

By waiting a few days, the excitement of having just taken those photos wears off. This helps you judge the quality of your photo more objectively. I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m pretty biased about judging my photos right when I get back from a shoot: Everything is awesome!

A System That Works

In the end, I’ve developed a two-pass system for selection. As soon as I download my photos, I’ll quickly go through them, to mark Picks and Rejected. I don’t spend more than five seconds thinking about any individual image, this is zippy.

Then I leave those photos alone for a couple of days; I just pimp away. When coming back to them, I re-evaluate my choices. Anything still rejected gets deleted and anything that’s still a pick goes into my development queue. Skimming the unflagged ones looking for more picks is good too, but repeat the process of letting them sit a few days.

My photos aren’t the best on Flickr yet, but making this change to my workflow improved the quality of photos I post. Amusingly enough, this is a trick I learned from writers and editors instead of other photographers. I started applying it to my blog for months before I made the connection with photo processing. Go figure!

I’m really happy with all the submissions I got for my photography tips contest and I wanted to show them off a little bit. I also try and give myself a bit of a break when writing for goldengod on the weekends. It gives me more time to go out and take photos.

Without further ado, I give you six great tips for six different digital SLR cameras, all from my kickass readers! Find your camera in the list and give that tip a try next time you’re out and about!

Josh M kicked things off with tips for the Nikon D80:

Set BOTH Upper and Lower limits on Auto ISO: Auto ISO is a huge help and is actually quite accurate on the D80. However, if you just turn it on and fail to set the limits, you can get some really noisy images.

Steve had advice on how to lock your exposure for the Nikon D50:

In the menus, change the AE-L/AF-L button to AE-L. This lets you use that button to lock the meter exposure. It’s handy if you have a backlit subject and don’t want to change from matrix metering to spot metering. The default is both AE-L and AF-L which locks in both exposure and focus.

My friend Aaron from Single Serving Photo posted the most tips, including this useful tidbit for the Canon 5D:

For you lucky 5D shooters out there, your mind probably reeled when you saw the multi-directional control stick they added alongside the classic Canon scroll wheel on the back. You can use the control stick to pan around an image when you’re zoomed in, but you can also set a Custom Function that lets you choose autofocus points with it. Once you get used to it, it really speeds up AF point selection.

I was expecting to see Canon and Nikon only, but Brian Reischl surprised me with a few gems for the Pentax K10D:

Use that rear e-dial. In the advanced setup menus you can specify what the rear wheel does in all the priority modes (Av, Tv, Sv, TAv). Usually it will set one of the other three exposure settings, letting you get not-quite-manual functionality from any of the modes.

Longtime reader Brian Larter of Aperture Studios notes that the Canon 30D can do the same trick that Aaron mentioned above:

On the Canon 30D the most forgotten control is by far one of the most useful. Just above the great and amazing wheel of control is a tiny joystick… The main thing I have begun to use it for has been controlling the focus points in my viewfinder… The joystick allows you to select point number 7 while on point number four with one click, unlike the wheel where it would easily be 3 clicks away.

and finally, our winner Renée Clory came forth with tips about her new Nikon D40x:

Remember that the D40x does not have built in body focus motor - make sure that the lenses you are getting for the camera are AF-S lenses.

Once again, thank you to everyone who participated! I haven’t figured out what or when yet, but I’m definitely going to be running more contests in the future. Subscribe to my RSS Feed and don’t miss out!

Photo by Sarah Reed

When I look at the stats for my photography blog, I’m often surprised by some of the search terms people use. One of the most common keyword groups is “photography tips” paired with a camera model number. This got me really thinking about what kind of photography tips really exist for different models of DSLR’s.

However, I can’t afford to buy one of every digital SLR camera on the market, let alone the compacts. So I’m beseeching you guys for help. Take five minutes and leave the best camera-specific photography tips you’ve got for your camera model in the comments. I’m interested in tips for all cameras: DSLR, compact digital, or even film.

Everyone who submits at least one reasonable tip before August 11th will have their name put in a hat for fabulous prizes. The winner gets their choice of a 1 Year Flickr Pro account or a $25 gift certificate for camera equipment at amazon. I’ll probably also talk about how awesome you are, but no guarantees.

For an example of what I’m looking for, here are three tips for using the Canon EOS 350D / Digital Rebel XT:

• Practice Changing ISO’s, White Balance, and Metering Modes - There’s no fancy wheel like you get on higher-end Canon cameras, so changing these settings is a step more complicated than it should be. Practice changing the settings without looking at your LCD screen, so you can do it smoothly in the field. It can be the difference between a great shot and an underexposed orange blur.
• When Walking, Hold Your Camera by the Battery Grip - Seriously, if you have the grip your hands will thank you. I don’t have large hands, but I find the side grip of the Rebel XT to be far too small and hard. Holding the camera by the battery grip means your hands will hurt less and you’ll be more comfortable. Just remember than when you bring your camera up in a hurry, you’ll be shooting in portrait instead of landscape.
• Actual Photos will be Slightly Wider Than Seen in Viewfinder - When I download my photos, I always see stuff poking in the edges of the frame that I swear I’d cropped out. After a few tests, I discovered that the frame of the viewfinder is slightly narrower than that of the sensor. The effect is more obvious when using the EF-S lenses designed for CMOS sensors with the 1.6x conversion factor.

Whatcha got for me, team?

EDIT: The contest is now closed! Renée Clory has been declared the winner. Thanks to everyone who participated! Be the first to know about any future contests; Subscribe to my RSS Feed!