[Photography] 5 Tips for Geting Sharper Images When Doing Long Exposures

Long exposure photography makes it possible to show the passage of time in a still photograph. It does this by blurring moving elements and sharpening the static parts. But there is a downside to long exposures – any camera movement blurs the static elements. Here are four simple ways you can prevent unwanted blurring.

1. Use a Good Tripod

For very short exposures there are ways to hold yourself and your camera steady, like: How to Reduce Camera Shake – 6 Techniques. However, when you’re taking an exposure of a few seconds, you need something steadier than your hands to hold your camera. You may set the camera on a table, or a rock but risk dropping the camera or accidental movement that can ruin your shoot.

The most common way is to put it on a sturdy tripod. You have to get at least a decent tripod as El Cheapo tripods are going to give you camera shake too.

2. Use a Remote Shutter Release

Even with a tripod the act of snapping the shutter can cause the camera to shake. There are a couple of ways to combat this problem.

One is to set the delay on the camera (2-sec timer) so any movement is done by the time the shutter snaps. The other is to get a remote shutter release.

Remotes can be connected to the camera by a cable or wireless – either one snaps the shutter without shaking the camera. They are also called remote cable releases. This is a small and cheap accessory which can help you get rid of camera shake.

3. Use Manual Focus

Autofocus is a wonderful thing. Most of the time it does exactly what you want, making it easier to take great photos. But there are times, especially when shooting long exposure, that it can have the opposite effect.

In low light situations autofocus has trouble finding something to focus on. Even when it seems focused it can readjust when the shutter is snapped. Using ND filters can cause the same problem.

Fortunately, there is a simple solution. When shooting in low light you can use manual focus, or use a flashlight for focusing and once the focus is set, turn autofocus off so it won’t change once the light is off.

For ND filters set the focus manually (either before or after mounting the filter) or autofocus first, turn it off and mount the filter. The shot will stay focused, the picture sharp.

4. Lock the Mirror Up

If you are using a DSLR camera – and you probably are since you are shooting long exposure – it has a mirror that reflects the image from the lens to the viewfinder. It is between the lens and the camera sensor, so it has to move before the shutter snaps.

That small movement causes vibration. When you turn on the mirror lockup it turns the shutter button into a two stage button. The first click lifts the mirror and the shutter doesn’t open until the second click. The time between the two clicks allows the vibration of the moving mirror to stop.

5. Use Your Aperture Sweet Spot

Closing down the aperture can make you shoot longer. However, when your aperture is too small, it will start to have a diffraction effect which lowers the sharpness.

In most lenses, the sweet spot of the lens aperture is between f/5.6 to f/8. In other words, you will get the sharpest images when using this range.

When you step down to f/16 or smaller, you will get images like that seem out of focus. You can learn the physics about diffraction in the below video by Steve Perry:

Conclusion

Taking long exposure photographs is a science and an art. Like any art, taking long exposure pictures with the right balance of sharpness and blur takes both skill and intuition. These five tools will help you use your skills to turn intuition into great photographs.

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[Photography] Putting You Into Your Landscape Photography

Photographing the landscape is one of the oldest forms of photography, along with others like portrait and street photography. Since the advent of digital photography the possibilities of what can be done seem almost endless. It also means that photography has become more accessible, so with more people taking it up it is becoming harder to be original, and make your images your own. There are ways of creating landscapes that have your style, but it usually means throwing away a lot of what you first learn about photography.

Perhaps the only time a photographer is really free to do whatever they please is when they first begin, before they are told what they should or shouldn’t be doing.

Learning About Photography

However, that might be true, but it isn’t long before the beginner starts to learn what we all learn. We start wanting to know how to use the camera properly, and how to get the best out of it. So they might begin by doing a course to learn about aperture, shutter speed and ISO. No one is denying how important it is to learn about those things, and learning how to correctly expose an image is not something that anyone ever regrets.

Then there is composition and what is meant to make a good or perfect image. There is the rule of thirds – placing everything in that third, or on the third lines. You learn that when you are composing the image that the horizon should be on one of those thirds, or that the lone tree in the paddock or field should also be on one. Never put things in the middle of an image.

If you really get into it then you might learn about the golden ratio or the Fibonacci Spiral. This principle is about using a curve that determines where the subject should be placed for the perfect image; the spiral placement is very similar to the intersection of the third lines.

Then there is post-processing and again, there are rules about what is appropriate for landscape photography and what isn’t. Landscape photography is steeped in history and your photos should be true to what you see.

There are theories or rules that suggest you shouldn’t do any more processing to your images other than the very basic; that your images should represent the reality of what you saw. It is okay to fix exposure, horizon line, but you shouldn’t move pixels, like removing things from the image, or replace a sky.

No one is going to deny that learning all of that is wrong, and we should all learn it all. The next stop is working out if you are happy to follow the rules and do the same images that everyone else is doing.

The first thing you will find is that other people will start to criticize you. The tree is in the middle of the photo, or you shouldn’t have the horizon line in the middle. The one I get all the time is that I over process or my images are too dark.

My answer to that is: don’t listen.

Creating Your Own Style

There is a growing movement of photographers doing work that is not traditional and pushes the concept of landscape photography a whole lot more. It is where rules are broken, and new things are done that change what is considered traditional landscape photography.

Things like the rule of thirds are often forgotten, and you might see the subject placed firmly in the middle of the image. The horizon line may be in the middle of the image, cutting the image in half, as we’ve constantly been told is wrong and we shouldn’t do it.

How often do you get told that an image needs to be in focus, that if the subject isn’t sharp then you should delete the image? There are art photographers who take out of focus images and use them for art. Perhaps you shouldn’t go around taking a heap of photos that are out of focus, but sometimes the feeling or something else is just as important.

If we consider those things, then what does it mean for landscape photography, and how does it affect us? Perhaps it means that the world is your oyster and fine art is more about your interpretation of the world around you than the reality of it, then the possibilities of what you can do are endless. You can do whatever you like.

Let’s look at what you can do, first out in the field and then back at home with post-processing.

Out in the Field

When you are out taking photos, look for odd angles. Think about how everyone else would take the image and see if you can come up with other ways to do it that are different. It isn’t always going to be possible, but it is a good practice to get into.

You could try using props in your images. I’ve heard of a couple of photographers that will place a person in their landscapes to help give it scale. You could do something like that, or start adding a prop of some sort that gives you a signature.

Photographing the same area time and time again can give you an edge too. You learn the area and discover things that people who rarely go there would find. Of course you have to also open your mind to the idea of finding new things. Try photographing the same thing over and over; see if you can find different ways of interpreting it.

It can help looking at what other photographers are doing to find styles you like. Study what they do. Work out what it is that you like about their work. I wouldn’t recommend copying them, but take some of it and use bits to help make your work your own.

An important thing to remember is that you don’t have to use photo editing to create images that are uniquely yours.

Back in the Digital Darkroom

Once you get your images onto the computer, anything goes really. How far you take your images is completely up to you, but you also have to be prepared for heavy criticism from others. You are always free to ignore that – I do – but be polite about it.

You can do so many things in post-processing, such as selective focusing. Really make the viewer look where you want them to look. You can do this in many ways, with added blur or with lighting. It can be a strong technique; one that is used by painters all the time.

Selective saturation is a style that a few landscape photographers have started employing as well. You select areas of focus and give them a little more saturation, or you can desaturate the area around it. Make that area brighter or give it more vibrancy so it will stand out and attract attention, which is what you want.

Controlling the lighting is another technique that many use, myself included, meaning you take an image then try to find a way of completely changing the lighting so that the viewer can’t work out when it was taken.

Having an idea of what you want to achieve is also good, describing what you want people to see, or how you want your audience to view your work. Telling stories with your images is a great thing to do.

Again finding other photographers whose style you like is good too. Learn from them and see what you can do; it is encouraged in art schools all the time. Do what they do, but don’t pass it off as yours, find your own style, your own voice.

Through fine art landscapes you are showing an interpretation of the landscape around you, or wherever you take photos. The rules don’t always apply, but if you want to break them then do so in a way that will help you develop your own unique style.

Good luck.

If you have any other comments or tips please share in the comments section below.

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[Photography] How to do Frequency Separation Portrait Retouching in Photoshop

The goal of portrait retouching is to bring out the most naturally pleasing image of the subject. This image is the finished result of Frequency Separation Retouching in Photoshop.

Portrait retouching may be accomplished using many different methods. Still, how often have you seen a portrait image that has been retouched to the point that the subject’s face looks unnatural? Even many of the software packages available for portrait retouching result in an airbrushed effect to skin tones.

What if the detail and color of a portrait could be separated for retouching? Frequency Separation Retouching will allow you to do just that! It will allow you to fix all the usual facial issues like removing wrinkles, bags under eyes, and blemishes. By dividing your image into two separate frequency layers, one layer being high frequency digital data, which contains the information of detail in the image, and a low frequency layer which contains the tonal and color information of the image.  However, the neat thing with Frequency Separation Retouching is that it allows you to make these corrections and retain the natural textures of the skin. By separating the colors and the details you can work on one aspect without affecting the other. Sure, some people will prefer the usual retouching methods, including airbrushing, but Frequency Separation Retouching gives you another option to use for enhancing your portraits. If you have a working knowledge of Photoshop, here’s how to get started:

Setup

#1 Make two copies of the background layer

In Photoshop, open your image, then make two copies of the background layer. Label the first layer “color” as this will be your low frequency layer, then name the second layer “detail” to become your high frequency layer.

#2 Apply a blur to the color layer

Turn off the detail layer and select the color layer. Apply a Gaussian Blur (found under the Filter menu>Blur) to a setting that blurs all the detail of the image, but leaves features intact (see sample below). This setting will vary from one image to another depending of the size of the image.

#3 Setup the detail layer

Turn the detail layer back on and select it, then go to Apply Image under the Image tab. Depending on which color depth you are working with, 8 bit or 16 bit, see settings below for Apply Image.

Set your Layer to color. For 8 bit images set the Blending to Subtract, Scale to 2 and Offset. For 16 bit images set the Blending to Add, Scale to 2, Offset to 0 and check the Invert box.

1. Change the blending mode of the detail layer to Linear Light.
2. Create a layer group, and drag the color and detail layers into the new layer group.

Once you get the hang of this setup, it’s easy to make a Photoshop action to take care of these steps with one click. Download my Photoshop action for the setup HERE (the file is zipped, just unzip and load into Photoshop)

Now you’re ready to start the fun part!

Retouch the Color layer

By retouching the color layer, you are going to even out all the color tones of your subject’s complexion and to remove dark and light areas.

Clone Tool – the Clone tool can be used to even out the color tones or experiment with different blending modes. Normal, Darken and Lighten are very good effect modes to use on the color layer. You may also need to adjust the opacity (the degree of transparency) of these blending modes.

Dodge and Burn Tools are a couple of other useful tools to even out dark and light tones of the skin tones.

As with almost any Photoshop function, there are various ways to get the results you desire. The tools mentioned above are good starting points for working on the color layer, but the possibilities are endless! Don’t be afraid to experiment.

Retouch the Detail layer

Click on the Detail layer, which contains every detail of your portrait image. There are a wide variety of tools you can use to fix skin imperfections, ranging from wrinkles to acne.

Clone Tool – Use the Clone tool with mode set to normal and just clone out imperfections, sampling (ALT/OPT key click) from a desirable area to paint over an imperfection in another area.

Healing Brush Tool –  The Healing Brush tool works similarly to the Clone tool and will sample textures from nearby areas to make a seamless patch.

Spot Healing Brush –  Spot Healing Brush works similarly to the Clone tool and Healing brush, but does not require you to sample a source area. It will automatically sample from another area to repair the target imperfection. Use the adjustable brush sizes to paint over spots and remove them.

Patch Tool – Like the Healing tool, the Patch tool will match the texture of the near-by area for a seamless repair. Make a selection over the area to be repaired and drag the selection over a good area. For best results work on small areas at a time.

Content-Aware Patch –  Similar to the Patch Tool, but with the Content-Aware Patch you select a good area and drag it over area to be repaired, and the tool will match the texture.

After image

Once you have finished retouching the color and detail layers of your image, you can simply turn off the layer group to see the before and after of your work. (This is also a handy review tactic as you are working, to see how your adjustments are affecting the image.) Because all the retouching you have done are applied to the two new layers, it is completely non-destructive to the original image.  So, if you are unhappy with your first results, you can simply delete the retouched group and start over.

A – Original image B – Air-Brushed look retouching C – Frequency Separation retouching

 

Conclusion

Portrait retouching can be accomplished by using many different methods, and various software and plugins designed especially for that purpose. This article is meant to give you a Photoshop option for retouching and enhancing your portrait photography. The great feature of this method is the ability to separate the detail from the color and tones before retouching. Do you have any tips for portrait retouching?

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[Photography] Why You Should Make Dark Images

Street scene

One of the most unexplored aspects in digital photography is the dark image.

With digital, we have built-in light meters, histograms, incredible ISO capabilities, and processing programs, which make it much easier to expose our images brightly in all different lighting situations. This can have the effect of making photographers feel that they need to expose all of their images with a neutral histogram, where you can see the image perfectly well, with some information in the highlights, mid-tones, and shadows.

This is often what you want to do, but not always.

When you are using Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority, or the Automatic modes, your camera’s light meter has the aim of making whatever it is focusing on a neutral grey. Thus, it has the tendency to overly darken scenes with a lot of bright highlights or to overly brighten scenes with lots of dark tones.

The Lake, Central Park – NYC

Because of this, when you photograph in dark situations your exposures can end up being bright as if they were taken during the day. It’s easy to think that this is okay, and often it is, but it also makes it easy to forget that sometimes a dark image is a good thing too. There is nothing wrong with making an image look like it was taken at night. There is nothing wrong with making the image tougher to see, like the scene was to your eye as you captured it.

For me, it was an experience when I started to look at older photography books and came across images that I couldn’t quite make out. ‘They should have been brighter”, I immediately thought, but then I realized that I liked them. I realized how natural and moody it made the images feel. I had to put in more effort to make out what was going on, and I liked that. It felt moody and real.

This image could have been made brighter and still worked.

Technically, to achieve this on Aperture or Shutter Priority, you need to lower your exposure compensation (+/-) setting when you are photographing subjects or areas with a lot of darker tones. I usually default to -2/3 or -1 stop, then tweak from there depending on the situation. You can even take it further by going into full Manual mode to override the camera’s light meter. Since the lighting is fairly consistent in many dark situations, this is often a great way to shoot.  I do this when shooting at night, in train stations, alleyways and many indoor situations. You can even shoot like this during the day by strongly underexposing your image.

If you notice, in the images in the article, the highlights are represented as middle grey tones. This is called exposing for the highlights and that is a key for making a dark image. Get used to seeing lots of deep blacks and mid greys. It can help to take a file into Lightroom and play around with the exposure to get a feel for how an image can look at different exposures. When shooting in dark situations, which means you will probably be using a very high ISO, you will want to make sure to get the image as close as possible to the prime exposure in the camera. But when you are learning it can only help to experiment in Lightroom to find the exposure that you like the best.

Nightlife Street Scene, East Village, NYC.

But what is the purpose of making an image dark? There are a few reasons. The first is that in many situations it can feel more realistic. Night images that look dark feel more like the viewer is actually there. They feel accurate and that can go along way for the viewer. Dark images can feel moody, eerie, dangerous, quiet, romantic, scary, weird, or contemplative. Many backgrounds look more beautiful with the dark shadows and moody lighting at night.

In addition, dark images draw the viewer in. Often with photography, the devil is in the details and sometimes it can be hard to draw viewers in to really look around an image. Dark images do that. As the viewer tries to make out the details, they inadvertently start exploring the image in more depth.

So next time you are shooting at night or in a dark area, think about making that image a bit darker.

Nightlife Street Scene, NYC.

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[Photography] 9 Tips for Photographing Mountain Lake Reflections

There’s something ultimately alluring about lake and river reflections in landscape photography, especially when surrounded by majestic snow capped mountains that glow hot from the light of the setting sun.

Here’s a little time-lapse video I put together using some of my recent lake reflection still shots in Alberta, Canada. Each frame is from a still image shot with a small mirrorless digital camera. Read on to learn the methods I use when trying to capture stunning lake and river reflections in my photography.

1 – Don’t shoot super wide

Regardless of whether your camera is full frame, APS-C or MFT (micro four thirds), it’s important to realize that when shooting mountain reflections you might not need your widest lens to capture the most pleasing composition.

A lot of the time I shoot in the super wide realm but that doesn’t work so well when shooting mountain reflections. A super wide lens tends to reduce the epic size of the distant mountains and magnifies the foreground.

That’s great when you can get fairly close to my central subject, but when that subject is a snow capped mountain a few kilometers away, it’s time to strap on a lens that gets you closer to the action.

At my most recent visit to Banff and Jasper in Alberta I found that I rarely shot with anything wider than 35mm on full frame. In many cases I was zoomed in past 50mm, and often beyond 100mm. Here’s an example.

This first shot is at a focal length of 70mm.

This second shot is at 16mm, super wide. There are a few minutes of light change in between the shots but otherwise it’s the exact same scene, from almost exactly the same position. I don’t know about you, but I much prefer the simpler, cleaner composition of the first, zoomed image.

2 – Fill your frame with what’s cool

This is good advice for any kind of photography but with mountain lake reflections it’s easy to get wowed by the colourful clouds that are reflecting in the mirror surface lake. If they really are doing something impressive then by all means, devote some frame space to the clouds.

You’ll find however, that when you zoom closer to fill your frame with your most impressive mountain range and reflection, your image may have much more impact. At times this isn’t too obvious when you look through the viewfinder or LCD but when you view that zoomed image back on a large computer screen it often has more wow factor than your wider, cloud filled image.

3 – Waiting for the wind to stop

If you’re out on a gale force windy day, don’t expect any lake reflections. You need that water to be perfectly still for good reflections. A mild, occasional wind is fine, just stick around and wait for it to periodically die down. You only need a few minutes. Bring a camp chair and thermos, then chill out while you wait for the perfect moment. It’ll come.

4 – Shoot two versions – adjust the polarizer

If you shoot lake scenes without a polarizer you’ll get a lovely mirror-like reflection, but you might be missing out on some interesting details under the water in the foreground. I like to take at least two shots with my polarizer in different positions. One shot will give me the maximum reflection while the other shot will reduce that reflection to reveal the details under the water.

I can then easily blend these two exposures in Photoshop to get the best mixture of reflection and water detail.

5 – Interrupt the reflection

I have a thing for the interrupted reflection. I find it more interesting to have my mountain reflection interrupted by ice formations, river bends, rocks and branches as apposed to a completely whole and perfect reflection. Try and avoid that obvious BAM reflection. Be a bit clever and put some thought into how you can make the reflection more interesting.

6 – Get down low

I like to pick the most interesting point of my mountain range then find a spot in my foreground that reflects that interesting point. I often need to get the camera down lower to achieve this, sometimes adjusting the tripod to its lowest point. At times you might not need to get so low and maybe just step back a few feet to place your reflection where you need it to be.

You can’t change where the mountain is, but you can change your position relative to it to capture the most interesting foreground and reflection.

7 – Look for framing elements in the foreground

If possible, try to incorporate elements in your foreground than frame the scene. It creates a window into your scene that we humans find very appealing.

8 – Look for leading lines in your foreground

Try and find foreground elements that suck the eye in to the centre of your image. Use rocks, logs and branches to blatantly point at the mountain scene in your image. Obviously you’ve got to work with what you have but there’s almost always something there.

9 – Star reflections are gold

If you’ve got a calm, clear night that is the perfect chance to capture the Milky Way or star trails in your lake reflection. Place a colossal mountain range in the centre of that and you’ve got yourself a killer shot. For tips on how to shoot star trails like this, view my tutorial How to Shoot a Star Trails Selfie.

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