Today we are joined by guest blogger, Photography expert Barb Gordon. She will be joining us on a regular basis, providing insightful tips on beginning photography as part of our Photo-Video 101 series.

Beginner’s tip: Distortion

One way distortion happens is if you are too close to your subject using a wide angle lens. You will find the facial features warped and distorted. I see many amateur images that have this problem, and they generally do not notice it.

In the example on the left, for which my model volunteered, I have used a 200mm lens on the left image and a wide angle set at 28mm on the right one. Anything focal length greater than 50mm would look fine for a portrait. For the wide angle, however, I was only three feet from her face, and it is not a flattering image at all.

If someone sits facing you and has their feet or hands extended out towards you, their feet or hands are going to look too big and out of proportion. Unless you are shooting a shoe catalog, or going for an unusual technique, this perspective may not be an attractive look. Keeping the body parts on a more similar plane of focus will look nicer.

Notice her hands look as big as her head. The poor thing.

Want an awesome candid photo? Simplify to capture the essence of the scene. Simplify the subjects and background.

Why are you taking the candid in the first place? It’s to capture a true memory of the scene. Although the photo above does document what was occurring at a particular moment in time, I have no desire to actually look at the photo. Why? It’s that intangible lack of emotion.

Simplify the subject

Candid photos have the most impact when there is only one or two subjects. This is not to say you can’t take a photo with more than one person. But you have to crop the photo later in Photoshop.

Simplify the background

Have a bunch of extraneous people or clutter in your background? Either zoom in before you press the shutter, or crop them out later.

Cute fan, but seems a bit crowded

Let’s punch this scene up a bit by cropping out some of the other Tigers fans.

Go Team!

Now we can see who is the subject of our photo.

Another way to simplify your background is blur it.

Now we're talking!

To give you a feel for the shot, I took the original, cropped it, cut out the subject, and blurred the background. Easy in Photoshop. But it would be easier still if I had composed the shot correctly before pressing the shutter.

Candid shots can really stand out when both the background and number of subjects is simplified.

With Home Movie Day coming up on Saturday, we decided to post some quick tips on getting the perfect home movie. Make sure your scene meets three quick criterion: action, sound, and lighting.

Action

Without action, you might as well take a photo. Ever see movies of a baby’s first feeding? Twenty seconds or so is ok, ten minutes is complete overkill. Even better, the action could be captured in one messy-faced photo.

Sound

I’m sorry, did we timewarp back 90 years? Without sound, we’re in the realm of silent films. If you have a lot of action (think football game) this could be ok. If it’s your kid’s play, you absolutely need the dialogue, so tap into their mike system or skip the shot.

This one is especially tricky on a point-and-shoot camera. Many cameras capture the sound of the file writing to the flash card. If the movie you are shooting is not louder than the camera mechanism, you’ll notice the background noise more than the dialogue.

Lighting

Most consumer camcorders and point-and-shoot cameras can not take decent video in low light situations. Even if you use the low-light preset, they still get grainy. DSLR’s with video function are the exception to this rule.

Ever try to watch 10 minutes of video shot in near darkness? It’s almost as painful as watching 10 minutes of video with bad sound. Don’t waste your time.

If your scene has enough action, sound and lighting, go ahead and shoot video, otherwise capture your memory with a photo. Everyone you invite to re-live the event will thank you for it.

Point and shoot cameras offer pretty limited options for video settings. The decision is based on the trade-off between storage space and video quality. Always, always, always go for higher quality.

You are generally given a choice between 640×480 (VGA) and 320×240 (QVGA). Some cameras will give you the option of 848×480 (WVGA). This gives you a 16:9 aspect ratio, as opposed to 4:3. Sometimes you can choose frame rates. 30fps (frames per second) or 15.

A frame rate of 15fps will look a little jerky, kind of like stop-action animation. We have all become a little used to this from the early days of YouTube. This doesn’t mean that it actually looks good.

Here’s an example of a low-resolution movie:

This video was encoded at 320×240, then uploaded to the web. YouTube then enlarged the video to fit their player. Looks a little pixelated, don’t you think?

Here’s the same movie at full resolution.

In today’s world of 2 GB and larger flash memory cards, storage isn’t generally a problem. However, if you are using your camera to film your epic reenactment of the latest episode of Star Wars the Clone Wars you could run into storage issues.

Especially if you accidentally leave the camera on while getting into your Bane costume. Why is this an issue? Because when your camera runs out of room on your card it will write to the internal memory of the camera and that can sometimes be a pain to get off of the camera.

Usually your camera will tell you that it is going to start writing to the internal memory. If your cameraman happens to be proficient at cinematography but not at reading, he may accidentally ignore this warning.

The smaller video size will take up less space on your card but will also be of lower quality. If you plan on burning this video to a DVD, showing on AppleTV, or ever watching it on your flat screen, you want the highest resolution possible.

When you download and edit the video on your computer, you can always have your editing program optimize the size for sharing.

Your camera will tell you how much space is left on the memory card. If you are recording video, it will indicate how many seconds are left. When you start getting low on storage space you have two options. Either swap out your card or download the video, erase the card, and record more video.

So remember to always set your camera at the highest possible video resolution.

Ok, I blew it on this one. I probably should have told you this first.

The first rule of reviewing your video on your camera is never ever do it!!! That’s right. You just shot a cool video of you and your friends reenacting the crucial scene from Star Wars Episode IV. You know the one? “Luke, I am your father.” By the way, Darth Vader never actually said that. You can win some good bets with that piece of info.

Anyway, you have this cool scene and you want to make sure you got the whole 5 minute scene correct. So, you play it back on the camera? Don’t do it! You’ll run down your batteries in the process, leaving you with no way to shoot another scene if necessary.

Also, on many cameras you won’t hear the audio on a video that you play back. Doesn’t do much good, does it?

If you want to review your video, the best idea would be to download it to your computer directly into your photo (or video editing software). We download it into iPhoto. It looks like a photo in the software program, but has a little icon of a video camera on it. When you double click, it automatically opens in Quicktime. From there, you can edit it, email it, upload it to YouTube, whatever you want.

For photos, it’s a totally different story. Go ahead and review them on your camera. Just realize that what you see on your teeny tiny LCD screen may be a bit different than what you’ll see when it’s shown on your 52″ HDTV.

Yes, I know you can zoom in, that’s great. But, you’d have to zoom in a whole lot to tell if it was truly in focus. And, on a group shot, you be zooming all around the photo to tell if everyone had their eyes open. And, of course, to make sure no one was making bunny ears behind anyone else’s head.

When you take photos, a good idea is to review them using either the play button (shown above) or review button, whatever it’s called on your camera. You needn’t bother deleting bad photos on your camera. It uses up the battery.

Reviewing photos on the camera will give you an idea as to whether you were using the correct settings or if you framed the shot correctly.

Remember those photos of the camp fire from a few weeks ago? First I took one with the auto setting and reviewed it on the camera’s LCD. Hated it. So I experimented with a few other settings to find one I really liked.

Now this is where it truly got tricky. Some of the camera modes take very similar photos. Looking at the LCD screen, it was hard to tell the difference. This is when you need to download them to the computer.

When I looked at the photos again on the computer, I could see that sunset scene mode took way better photos than fireworks mode. Aah, but the trick question is – how did I know which photos were sunset mode and which were fireworks?

This is why I always tell people to read the manual. By reading the manual, I found out that the fireworks scene mode would slow down the shutter speed to a really long time.

I looked at the photo metadata in iPhoto (or whatever photo software you use) and it told me the shutter speeds. Whichever photos had the longest shutter speed, were using fireworks scene mode.

Ok, you ask – why would I ever want to go through all that????? Because, knowing which modes take the best photos in certain situations can help you take better photos in every situation.

Back in the old days of print film, we had to take a log, a what? A log – like a notebook – of every photo we took. The log contained the photo “number”, shutter speed, aperture, film ISO, etc. We couldn’t review any photos until we got the whole roll back from the lab.

We then had to painstakingly match up our log to the photos. How many times did I bother to do that, out of the hundreds of rolls I took? Exactly twice. That’s why my photography didn’t improve for years.

With digital photography, you have the opportunity to improve with every shot you take! Just look a the photos you already took, note the settings, and try to change things up next time.

Today’s lesson was a big challenge for me. I’ve never been able to figure out how to use the timer on my camera. So how the heck was I going to teach anyone else how to use it?

I thought, “well, great. I’d better get our intrepid photographer Gus to help me with this one.”

The first rule of using the timer is that you have to have someplace to put the camera. Even I know that one.

Ideally you’d use a tripod. Here’s what Gus used:

lego tripod

We found this Lego table for free in the alley. It makes a pretty cool tripod don’t you think?

Next step – take a photo of where you’ll be sitting. This way, you can be sure you’re in the right spot.

our portrait throne

Next step – figure out the timer on the camera. The Kodak camera has a 10 second interval between when you press the shutter and when the photo is taken. Here’s Gus’s first photo:

oops

Guess tying your shoes takes more than 10 seconds. Let’s try that again:

Ok, so we’ve got the timer somewhat figured out.

I think we've got it!

Now let’s get creative. We found that the Nikon camera had a super cool feature. You could set the timer to release the shutter one second after you give an audio signal, like yell, “Cheese”.

Gus decided to do things a little different. He decided to yell, “Roar!” to make the camera take the photo.

ROAR!

This one is ok, but he wanted to get truly adventurous. So he got rid of the chair.

now I'm scared

Well, he did make the shutter release, but he almost got his head cut off. It’s certainly safer to sit in the chair we placed for our photo. But this is still a cool shot.

Unfortunately, his face is hidden in shadows. The exposure seems a bit off. We used auto setting just to make things easy. Gus seems a little dark. That is easily corrected in Photoshop.

A real roar!

We simply selectively boosted the exposure in this one to bring his face out of the shadows.

One hidden benefit to using the timer – you never get camera shake! You aren’t actually touching the camera while it’s taking the photo, so this isn’t a concern. Unless, your little brother wants to use the Lego table.

Today let’s look at the black art of night photography – pun intended. We’ll explore the fireworks and sunset scene modes.

Fireworks scene mode is pretty self explanatory. You take photos of fireworks. Your camera will automatically set the focus at infinity because the fireworks are far away. It will also use a super slow shutter speed to let in the most light. This means you should use a tripod if at all possible.

Sunset scene mode will boost the color saturation. Both modes will turn off the flash as well.

So you went on your Labor Day camping trip. You wanted to take a photo of the beautiful camp fire in the fire pit.

You grabbed your camera on auto mode, snapped the shutter, and here’s what you got:

auto mode makes for a boring camp fire

Well, you captured a photo of the camp fire, but that’s a boring photo if I ever saw one. The camera used a super quick shutter speed of 10/80 seconds. Quick enough to be in focus, but boring.

Let’s try that again using fireworks scene mode.

cool effects

That looks pretty cool. The shutter speed was so slow that the sparks look almost like silly string coming out of the fire. But, I don’t remember the hottest part of the fire being pink!

It’s a bit out of focus because the shutter speed was slowed down to 10/20 seconds. For all you math whizzes, that is exactly equal to 1/2 second.

The one thing I do like about the photo is that it looks like a fire pit just floating in a sea of darkness, which is pretty much what it actually looked like.

Let’s try that again with sunset scene mode.

now there's a fire!

Can you feel the warmth? Can you see the smoldering embers? Everything is in focus using the sunset scene mode. That’s because the shutter speed was sped up to 10/34 seconds. Not fast, but fast enough to be in focus.

The color still seems a bit pink, but better. That can always be fixed with some tweaks in Photoshop if desired.

These scene modes are really getting to be a lot of fun. What other creative uses can you find for fireworks and sunset scene modes?

Ever try taking photos at dusk? If your camera was in auto mode, your flash probably kicked on. You had this beautiful evening light, but in the photo all you see is the harsh glare of the flash.

This is why dawn-dusk scene mode was created. It automatically adjusts the exposure on your camera for photography during the low light of early morning and late evening.

Depending on your camera, it will make adjustments such as turning off the flash and auto-focus, boost color saturation and lower the shutter speed.

The camera will automatically focus at infinity, meaning it will try to keep everything far and near in focus. On my camera, it also turned off the macro-focus setting.

Lowering the shutter speed meant the camera was more likely to shake while taking the photo.

I decided that I wanted a close up photo of these flowers. Here’s what I got when I put the camera in auto mode:

the color is way off in this photo

How do you like the ambience in this photo? What ambience? Could you tell at what time of day the photo was taken? I bet you couldn’t even tell that it was taken outside!

The one nice thing with auto mode, is that the camera still let me use macro focus. This means that, even though I was quite close to the flowers, the camera was able to focus on them.

To give us a frame of reference, the camera used a quick shutter speed of 10/601 for this photo on auto setting.

Let’s try this again using the fill flash.

nice ambience when fill flash used

The colors look great in this one. We were able to use fill flash. BUT, the camera automatically uses a slow shutter speed when fill flash is enabled.

Our shutter speed this time was 10/117 seconds. That’s approximately 5 times as long as it was open on the auto setting! Meaning, we have some nice camera shake. Nothing is really in focus. This could have been prevented by using a tripod or something equivalent.

Let’s try that again using dawn/dusk scene mode.

Using dusk scene mode we can tell the time of day

Now this photo really gives us a feel for the time of day. The one with fill flash could have been in midday. This one with dusk scene mode makes it obvious that we were in a low light situation.

The shutter speed in this photo was 10/225 seconds, about twice as fast as the one with fill flash.

The colors have a rich warm hue. If you want to be picky, the rocks look a little off. Let’s see what it looks like with a warming photo filter.

warming filter applied

The difference between the photos is subtle but noticeable.  The leaves are more of a green than cyan hue.

side by side comparison of photo using warming filter

The warming filter is an option in many photo software programs. It is somewhat equivalent to adding an optical filter to your camera lens.

All of this is really a matter of taste and convenience. We can probably all agree, though, that auto mode produces the photo least representative of what the scene actually looked like.

If we were not trying to use macro focus, the photos most likely would all have been in focus. It’s all a matter of playing with your settings to find the photo you like best.

We took a trip to the local Art museum yesterday. Prior to a trip to any museum, make certain to check their photo/video requirements.

Our museum prohibits the use of flash photography, video, and – tripods! Hmm, what are we going to do in a low light situation with no flash and no tripod? Museum scene mode of course!

This mode automatically bumps your camera into high ISO mode. See the lesson from last week, for a description and examples of high ISO. It will also automatically turn off the flash. Depending on your camera, it may also enable multiple photos to be taken as long as the shutter button is held down.

Our museum, like most, prohibits the use of photos from their exhibits on the web. So today, we will use photos of other items taken in the museum with available light.

Our subject was created by a budding artist in the children’s area of the museum, where we were allowed to use flash. I used auto mode (with flash) to capture his masterpiece in this first photo.

Wooden architecture captured with auto setting

Well, I captured a photo of the building. You can also see why the flash is not always your friend. Could you tell that the rug was orange? The blocks look scarily washed out.

For the next photo, I wanted to use museum scene mode. I knew that the camera was in high ISO mode, so a tripod would be ideal, although not allowed. First we tried a child’s chair, but the surface was too uneven.

I tried stacking some books, but that left the camera aimed only at the lower blocks. How was I to capture the whole building?

I tried resting the camera on the rug to steady it, tilting the camera back until the entire building was in view on the LCD. Lying on the floor with the camera braced and tilted, I pressed the shutter.

Museum scene mode was used, but we have camera shake

Alas, the whole thing is out of focus. As I pressed the shutter, the camera moved slightly.

For the next attempt, I made certain that I carefully pressed only the shutter button, not any other part of the camera. I was still fully bracing the camera, with my elbows resting on the rug.

This photo using museum scene mode is in focus

This time the photo was in focus. Using the rug to brace the camera has the added benefit of making the building look quite tall.

Another benefit to museum scene mode: not using the flash means you will not see a glare from the museum displays in your photos. However, your auto-focus may have trouble focusing through the glass at close distance.

If you are taking a photo of something through glass, your best bet is to use the edge of the display (if allowed) to brace yourself for the photo. This will prevent camera shake.

You’ll notice, however, that you may be too close for the camera to focus. This is when you’ll want to keep the camera in museum scene mode, but also enable macro focus.

Your camera will know to focus on an item at close distance, and still capture the scene.

Ever see those beautiful photos which capture the natural light? The ones where someone is sitting near a window and light gently dapples over their face?

Hey, now we’re entering the realm of the DSLR camera, aren’t we? Well, it doesn’t have to be so. This is possible, albeit, not quite as good, with your point-and-shoot camera.

Depending on your camera, the scene mode about which we’re going to learn will be called low-light scene mode, high ISO, indoor scene mode, etc.

Again, depending on your camera, this scene mode may behave a little differently. On all of them it will raise the ISO (film speed). On most it will automatically fire the red-eye reduction flash. And on some it will auto-focus on whatever is closest to the camera (which may not be what you want).

We’re about to get technical. If you’re not interested in the technical side, skip ahead to the actual photos and ignore all the math looking stuff.

High ISO or low-light scene mode tells your camera to set the ISO (film speed on a traditional camera) higher. On traditional film, a higher ISO number meant the film itself had more receptors with which to capture the light.

This means that you could use a faster shutter speed to capture the photo, so you wouldn’t have to worry about camera shake, moving subjects, etc.

The photo above was taken of our beautiful redhead using auto mode on a point-and-shoot camera. It looks ok. But you can’t tell if the photo was taken during the day or at night. In fact, she was sitting in front of a sunny window.

So you have a point of reference, in auto mode, the camera used an ISO 200, shutter speed of 10/601 seconds (very quick), aperture of f/4.8, and a full flash.

Here’s our first attempt at low-light scene mode:

camera was handheld on low-light scene mode

Hmmm. You can now tell that she is in front of a sunny window. That’s about the only good thing I can say about this photo.

The camera kept the ISO at 200, shutter speed of 152/100 (about 1.5 seconds), same aperture, and red-eye reduction flash.

Now that we know the shutter is going to be open a really, really long time, let’s try it with a tripod. Well, who has easy access to a tripod? Let’s stack up a bunch of books and try that.

anyone seen a ghost lately?

Cool! What happened there? Well, our subject apparently got a little bored during this shot, and the camera made her a little invisible.

The natural light had changed a bit and the ISO scene mode told the camera to leave the shutter open for almost 2 whole seconds! Between the time the shutter opened and closed, our busy subject decided to skedaddle.

The camera somehow turned her into a ghost in the shot. It’s a neat effect, although I’m not sure I could repeat it if I tried.

Let’s try this again with a stationary subject.

photo taken using stack of books as a tripod

Now this is what I’m talking about. This time our shutter speed was 10/13 second, almost a full second. The red-eye reduction flash was used; all other settings remained the same.

She has some beautiful natural light and is in focus. Yay, the stack of books worked like a charm.

But, if we’re going to be a bit picky, the colors look a little washed out.

this version was corrected in Photoshop

Not perfect, but pretty good.

First I toned down the brightness quite a bit, so that the highlights weren’t so bright and her pink outfit wasn’t blinding.

Next I did a levels adjustment so that it wouldn’t look so faded.

Then I picked the pink in her outfit (using color range selection in Photoshop) and desaturated it quite a bit.

Lastly, I used a spot healing brush to remove the beautiful tattoo from her cheek and boo-boo from her nose.

The photo correction steps in Photoshop are not totally necessary. If you are happy with the photo taken using auto settings go ahead and use it.

But, if you are planning on printing it out to frame or as a headshot in a portfolio, I suggest learning how to do a little enhancement.

So, how can we sum up high ISO mode? It takes great photos inside in low light, but only if you use a tripod, or a makeshift one.