Category: Articles

A few weeks back I wrote a blog post about exposure compensation. If you missed it it’s well worth checking out before continuing with this post. It’s very easy to confuse exposure compensation with flash exposure compensation and although they both work on the principle of overriding exposure, flash exposure compensation (or FEC for short) is a little more tricky to master.

If you’re lucky you’ll have a flash exposure compensation button on your camera. Look for the lightning bolt symbol which differentiates this button from the standard exposure compensation. If there’s no button then you’ll need to dive into the cameras menu to make the adjustment. If you’re using a speedlight then you can make the adjustment directly on it’s LCD panel and you’ll often get a wider range of compensation settings that way too.

It’s all about flash
As the name suggests, flash exposure compensation only affects the flash where as regular exposure compensation effects the ambient light. 

Flash photography, also known as strobist photography, has become much simpler recently thanks to the TTL technology built into speedlights. Of course any TTL system is prone to errors from time to time and that’s where flash exposure compensation kicks in. Basically flash exposure compensation tweaks the flash power and produces more or less light to suit your requirements.

Take a close look at this photo. Left to it’s own devices (photo on the right) the flash produces a little too much light and detail in the metal is lost. By dialling in minus one stop of flash exposure compensation (photo on the left) I retain the all important highlight details.

Compensation in action
If you move the flash exposure compensation to the left (minus numbers) you’re lowering the flash output and your photo will be darker. This is great when you want to do some fill flash photography or when the flash part of the photo is simply too bright.

Moving exposure compensation to the right (plus numbers) makes your flash brighter, perfect for when the flash lit parts of the photo are a little dark, although it should be noted that if your flash was already firing at maximum power adding positive flash exposure compensation will not make it any brighter.

Click to enlarge

The photos above used off camera flash to light the white lantern from the side, the background was lit by the ambient light in the room. It’s worth noting that changes to the flash exposure compensation made a difference to the lantern but no difference to the background. Look closely and you’ll spot a slight lightening of the background at the +2 stops which is caused by the super bright flash bouncing around in the room and contaminating the background a little.

If you shoot TTL flash, learning how and when to use flash exposure compensation is vital. Once mastered you can get perfect fill flash when shooting outside or use it to get correct exposure when shooting in a studio. Of course you could set your flash to manual only, that way you can avoid the need for flash exposure compensation but you’d have to figure out the correct flash power for each and every shot.

The theme for the August photo competition was “Beach and Sea”. If you’re a regular blog reader, you’ll be aware that it’s been some time since I ran one of these and this time I only gave you just under two weeks instead of the usual month.

None the less you lot really pulled out the stops with a whopping 134 photos being entered and I’d like to thank everyone that got into the spirit of the competition. You can view all the entries by going to the Flickr group page.

As always I looked at all 134 entries very carefully and over the course of a few days I whittled down the number. Usually the first photos I reject are those which are several years old as the idea is to encourage you to go out and take a photo for the competition, not upload an old favourite. However due to the short time scale I gave you I didn’t do that this time round.

There were so many amazing photos it all came down to personal taste (mine in this case), so I selected my favourite photos and the best of those made it into the top 10 as seen below.

To be honest there were several photos which could have easily taken the top spot as I think they’re outstanding. However there can only be one winner and this month the winner is…Untitled By PhotoPcola

David will be getting a copy of his print made by my good friends over at Print Yours.

Near Misses…
The runners up in no particular order are below (keep scrolling down to the find the photos). This time I’ve made a short video looking at why the top 10 are where they are, I hope it helps and remember all the opinions are mine so I don’t expect everyone to agree, especially if you took the photo

Click on an image to view it large on Flickr. If you didn’t win this time there will be a new challenge. Details are coming soon.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting some tips on how to squeeze more speed from your computer to make Photoshop run faster. Of course you may not be aware that your computer could run faster or even what the benefits are. In which case let me put it this way… The faster Photoshop runs the more enjoyable it is to use.

I use two PC’s on a regular basis. Now I wrote about upgrading my main PC a while back and its speed is unbelievable. My second computer however, is a small laptop that I use on locations and at talks. Recently I’ve had to use it quite a bit but compared to my regular PC it was painfully, frustratingly, annoyingly slow. Working with even medium sized images showed up its lack of power making using Photoshop a bit of a chore.

The Speed Test
Of course that was just my perception of speed so what I wanted was hard facts. Is Photoshop on my laptop really slow or am I impatient? So to put Photoshop through its paces I’ve created an action that will push it hard.

If you fancy testing you’re Photoshop then you can download my Speed Test action, grab a stopwatch close any images and run the action.

You can get an idea of what the Speed Test Action does by looking at the screen grab. Basically it creates an image, up samples, applies a few transformations, creates layers and fills Photoshop with data to really make it work hard. It will stretch the system RAM and scratch disc before tidying everything up and saying STOP! The faster your computer the quicker the action will play through.

The Results
I ran the speed test a few times and then averaged out the results. Adobe claim Photoshop CS6 is faster then CS5 so I also wanted to put that to the test, so I ran the same speed test in both versions.

Laptop:   CS5 = 157.5 Sec           CS6 = 139.5 Sec
Intel i5 with 8GB Ram

Desktop: CS5 = 36.5 Sec             CS6 = 27 Sec
Intel i7 with 24GB Ram and SSD scratch disk

OK so Adobe were right, Photoshop CS6 is faster then Photoshop CS5 but I was also right, my laptop is much slower then my main PC. So I’m left with three choices…

1. Accept that’s the way it is and get on with life
2. Upgrade the hardware where possible
3. Retire my laptop and buy a new one.

Option 1 isn’t my style and option 3 is tempting but expensive. Stay tuned to see how well I get on with option 2.

If you’ve run the speed test on your computer add your results to the comments below. I’d love to know PC or Mac i3 i5 i7, how much ram and of course the time.

In my book there are two fundamentals to what makes a photo good or bad and they are proper focus and a perfect exposure. Get either of these things wrong and you’re fighting an up hill battle from the off.

In this post I’ll look at exposure compensation which allows you to override the camera’s suggested exposure and make your image lighter or darker as you require. Although the name may vary a bit, almost all cameras have this function. You’re looking for a button that has a half white, half black square and has the plus minus symbols… Basically something like the image on the right.

Why compensate?
In this modern age of digital everything you may be wondering why the cameras exposure wouldn’t be right all the time. By now some boffin must have figured out a way to get the perfect exposure, right? Well that’s nearly right and every new camera that comes out gets better and better at nailing the exposure but there are two problems. Firstly all metering systems start with the theory that the world (on average) is a mid grey, That’s great most of the time except for the times when it’s not, like when photographing snow or someone wearing black.

  
The white shell in the centre of the frame has caused a small amount of under exposure.
Dial in +1 stop of exposure compensation and the exposure is correct.

The second problem is exposure is often open to interpretation. A scene where the exposure is biased to highlights will look very different to one where it’s biased to the shadows.

Compensation in action
If you move the exposure compensation to the left you’re adding negative exposure and your photo will be darker. This is great when photographing dark subjects or when you want to capture highlight detail.

Moving exposure compensation to the right makes your photo’s brighter, perfect for photographing light things like snow, sandy beaches and backlit scenes.

Click on an image to enlarge

When in doubt try taking the photo at a couple of different exposures but always remember once you’re done with exposure compensation reset it to zero.

Fix it in Photoshop
I love Photoshop but fixing exposure in Photoshop isn’t a long term plan you should stick with. Yes I know the RAW format gives you latitude of exposure you don’t get in JPG but adjusting exposure AFTER you’re taken the image will slow your workflow down and degrade the image. Both of these things may be slight but they add up. More over getting the image right in camera helps you to see the photographs not just take them.

The other day whilst I was running a lighting training session one of my students filled up his memory card. Fortunately he’d packed an older spare card so we swapped to that and carried on shooting.

So what’s so unusual about that you may ask. Well, nothing. But what happened next got me thinking.

He was shooting in RAW+JPG and when we inserted his memory card into my card reader the JPG’s opened fine but every RAW file was corrupted. How could this be? Put simply the memory card couldn’t keep up with the RAW data and the images corrupted.

The need for speed
So how fast a memory card do you need? Well if you’ve using a modern DSLR camera and shooting RAW then there’s a lot data to move. Although pretty much any card from a respectable brand will work just fine, using a faster card means less buffering time and quicker file transfers to your computer.

As a very rough guide a RAW image is a bit over 1MB per million pixels, so something like my Canon 5D Mk2, which has 22 million pixels, will produce a 25MB file for each RAW image.

X-Speed vs MB/S 
When buying memory cards you’ll find their speed is listed in one of two ways. It’ll be either Megabytes Per Second (e.g. 30 MB/S) or X speed ratings (e.g. 100X). This throws up a bit of confusion, which is faster.

Fortunately there is a formula for converting X speeds to MB/S.

One speed is 150 Kilobytes per second (KB/S), so a 100x speed memory card is 15000KB/S or the same speed as a 15MB/S memory card.

So if maths isn’t your strong point you may find this table helpful when comparing cards.

It’s worth noting that memory card speeds relate to their write speed not their read speed. Read speeds are often different and usually faster then the write speeds.

Faster isn’t always better
It’s worth noting that simply having a faster card doesn’t mean it will work faster. Camera’s, card readers and computers will all play their part when it comes to speed. If your device isn’t able to work at the fastest speed your card offers, you won’t see the benefit. A prime example of that is using a high speed card in a USB2 card reader.

I know, I know! It’s far too long since the last photo challenge and my inbox has been filling up with question like, “What’s the topic for the next photo challenge?” and “When will the next photo challenge be starting?” Well the good news is it starts right now, the bad news is you have less then two weeks to get your entry in.

For the August photo challenge your theme is…

Beach or Sea

How you decide to interpret that theme is entirely up to you. Perhaps you’ll want to take it literally and enter a photo of a some pebbles, a sand castle or people enjoying being at the coast. Maybe you’ll try something a little more abstract like looking for sand patterns or a long exposure to smooth out the waves.

Once you’ve made your photo you’ll then need to do three things…

1. Check your entry meets with the rules at the bottom of this post.
2. Upload your image to the Flickr Group page at http://www.flickr.com/groups/2025164@N25/

I’m very happy to report that the Photo Challenge is once again being sponsored by Print Yours. They are an independent print lab who specialise in creating small run, high quality prints. Check out their web site for more information http://www.printyours.co.uk/

So what will the winner receive? Well, Print Yours have generously offered to print the winning entry on their 270gsm Photo Satin paper up to a whopping 24”x16”. That’s an £18 print for FREE! If you’re the lucky winner then all you need to do is send a high res version to Print Yours (via email) and they’ll do the rest.

RULES
One entry per person
Entries must be uploaded to the correct Flickr group by 3rd September 2012
Entrants agree to the use of their image on the Gavtrain webpage / facebook page solely for the purpose of announcing the results
The image (including any manipulation or added elements) must be the sole work of the entrant
The winner will be selected by Gavin Hoey and his decision will be final
No alternative prizes are available
Only the winning picture will be printed
The winner will be notified by Flickr direct message.
The winner will be required to email a high res (printable) version of the winning image to Print Yours by
30th September 2012
The winner will be announced on the Gavtrain Facebook Page during September 2012

Good Luck

The Olympic and Para Olympic games of 2012 have finally begun in London this week and I’ve been lucky enough to be part of it, all be it in a very small way. I’ve been working in the Pro Photo Centre answering questions and offering advice on post processing.

I met many pro sports photographers and got to see some amazing photo gear go past but sadly I’m not one of the 1500 officially accredited photographers who’ll be attending the Olympics over the next few weeks. However although I couldn’t get access to any of the venues, the practice events or the opening ceremony rehearsal, I was able to wonder around the Olympic Park photographing whatever I liked.

Being the Olympics I decided to shoot giant sized panoramic images of the venues. Here’s three of my favourites.

I think this might well become the iconic view point of the London Olympic Park. The red structure on the left is an art work called Orbit which is also a viewing platform.

This is the Coca Cola beat box building. When I went past the staff were hard at work rehearsing their song and dance routines.

This is the widest pano I shot. At almost 180 degrees the full resolution file is a whopper and crammed with detail. Usually I avoid getting the sun in my panoramic photos but this time there was no choice. Good job I’m RAW to the core!

If it’s not the most asked photography question I get, it’s pretty close to the top. So when I was drawing up the initial list of videos I wanted to shoot for Adorama, “How to shoot a decent panorama” was a must.

In this video I get to visit one of my favourite locations. Balcombe Viaduct (also know as the Ouse Valley viaduct) is a stunning landmark that spans the Sussex countryside. I’ve lost count how many times I’ve been there over the years and no doubt I’ll go back again before too long.

With 10 day left before the Olympics kicks off here in the UK, the news is full of stories about the games, both positive and negative. So far I’ve not really got into the whole Olympic hype thing but today I had a small taste of how much excitement can be generated when people really do get into the Olympic spirit.

For the past few weeks the Olympic flame has been winding it’s way through the UK and today it passed through my little village. Obviously there was no way I was going miss the chance to be part of the event but I wasn’t sure if it was going to be a photographic opportunity. After a bit of indecision about the merits of taking my big serious camera gear or going light and taking snaps, I decided to take my 5D and 70-200 f/2.8 IS. It was a great decision. Not only did I get some great shots but it’s amazing how waving a big white lens around gets you to the front of crowds.

The crowds staring arriving long before the torch arrived and lots of people were ready with their Union Jack flags.

Just before the torch passed by there were a couple of busses. This one almost ran me over!

Out of nowhere Amy Ambrose-Zillwood, the first torch bearer, appeared. I grabbed a couple of shots of her running towards the hand over point with one of the officials giving her a “motivational speech”

This is my favourite photo. It’s the moment when the flame is handed on to the next torch bearer, which was Ben Marshall in this case.

Just time for one last snap as the flame moved on down the road.

 

It all happened in a flash. In fact you can watch the hand over by following this link.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/torchrelay/day60#pid=p00t6995&t=9h42m12s 

Look out for me, the guy in blue with the big white lens (No, not the one who’s blocking the road and getting moved on by security)